from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante the pandemic not only accelerated the shift to digital but also highlighted a rush of cyber criminal sophistication collaboration and chaotic responses by virtually every major company in the planet the solar winds hack exposed supply chain weaknesses and so-called island hopping techniques that are exceedingly difficult to detect moreover the will and aggressiveness of well-organized cyber criminals has elevated to the point where incident responses are now met with counterattacks designed to both punish and extract money from victims via ransomware and other criminal activities the only upshot is the cyber security market remains one of the most enduring and attractive investment sectors for those that can figure out where the market is headed and which firms are best positioned to capitalize hello everyone and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we'll provide our quarterly update of the security industry and share new survey data from etr and thecube community that will help you navigate through the maze of corporate cyber warfare we'll also share our thoughts on the game of 3d chest that octa ceo todd mckinnon is playing against the market now we all know this market is complicated fragmented and fast moving and this next chart says it all it's an interactive graphic from optiv a denver colorado based si that's focused on cyber security they've done some really excellent research and put together this awesome taxonomy and mapped vendor names therein and this helps users navigate the complex security landscape and there are over a dozen major sectors high-level sectors within the security taxonomy in nearly 60 sub-sectors from monitoring vulnerability assessment identity asset management firewalls automation cloud data center sim threat detection and intelligent endpoint network and so on and so on and so on but this is a terrific resource and can help you understand where players fit and help you connect the dots in the space now let's talk about what's going on in the market the dynamics in this crazy mess of a landscape are really confusing sometimes now since the beginning of cyber time we've talked about the increasing sophistication of the adversary and the back and forth escalation between good and evil and unfortunately this trend is unlikely to stop here's some data from carbon black's annual modern bank heist report this is the fourth and of course now vmware's brand highlights the carbon black study since the acquisition and it catalyzed the creation of vmware's cloud security division destructive malware attacks according to the recent study are up 118 percent from last year now one major takeaway from the report is that hackers aren't just conducting wire fraud they are 57 of the bank surveyed saw an increase in wire fraud but the cyber criminals are also targeting non-public information such as future trading strategies this allows the bad guys to front run large block trades and profit it's become very lucrative practice now the prevalence of so-called island hopping is up 38 from already elevated levels this is where a virus enters a company's supply chain via a partner and then often connects with other stealthy malware downstream these techniques are more common where the malware will actually self-form with other infected parts of the supply chain and create actions with different signatures designed to identify and exfiltrate valuable information it's a really complex problem of major concern is that 63 of banking respondents in the study reported that responses to incidents were then met with retaliation designed to intimidate or initiate ransomware attacks to extract a final pound of flesh from the victim notably the study found that 75 percent of csos reported to the cio which many feel is not the right regime the study called for a rethinking of the right cyber regime where the cso has increased responsibility in a direct reporting line to the ceo or perhaps the co with greater exposure to boards of directors so many thanks to vmware and tom kellerman specifically for sharing this information with us this past week great work by your team now some of the themes that we've been talking about for several quarters are shown in the lower half of the chart cloud of course is the big driver thanks to work from home and the pandemic to pandemic and the interesting corollary of course is we see a rapid rethinking of endpoint and identity access management and the concept of zero trust in a recent esg survey two-thirds of respondents said that their use of cloud computing necessitated a change in how they approach identity access management now as shown in the chart from optiv the market remains highly fragmented and m a is of course way up now based on our research it looks like transaction volume has increased more than 40 percent just in the last five months so let's dig into the m a the merger and acquisition trends for just a moment we took a five month snapshot and we were able to count about 80 deals that were completed in that time frame those transactions represented more than 20 billion dollars in value some of the larger ones are highlighted here the biggest of course being the toma bravo taking proof point private for a 12 plus billion dollar price tag the stock went from the low 130s and is trading in the low 170s based on 176 dollar per share offer so there's your arbitrage folks go for it perhaps the more interesting acquisition was auth 0 by octa for 6.5 billion which we're going to talk about more in a moment there's more private equity action we saw as insight bought armis and iot security play and cisco shelled out 730 million dollars for imi mobile which is more of an adjacency to cyber but it's going to go under cisco's security and applications business run by g2 patel but these are just the tip of the iceberg some of the themes that we see connecting the dots of these acquisitions are first sis like accenture atos and wipro are making moves in cyber to go local they're buying secops expertise as i say locally in places like france germany netherlands canada and australia that last mile that belly-to-belly intimate service israel israeli-based startups chalked up five acquired companies in the space over the last five months also financial services firms are getting into the act with goldman and mastercard making moves to own its own part of the stack themselves to combat things like fraud and identity theft and then finally numerous moves to expand markets octa with zero crowdstrike buying a log management company palo alto picking up devops expertise rapid seven shoring up its kubernetes chops tenable expanding beyond insights and going after identity interesting fortinet filling gaps in a multi-cloud offering sale point extending to governance risk and compliance grc zscaler picked up an israeli firm to fill gaps in access control and then vmware buying mesh 7 to secure modern app development and distribution services so tons and tons of activity here okay so let's look at some of the etr data to put the cyber market in context etr uses the concept of market share it's one of the key metrics which is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set so for each sector it calculates the number of respondents for that sector divided by the total to get a sense for how prominent the sector is within the cio and i.t buyer communities okay this chart shows the full etr sector taxonomy with security highlighted across three survey periods april last year january this year in april this year now you wouldn't expect big moves in market share over time so it's relatively stable by sector but the big takeaway comes from observing which sectors are most prominent so you see that red line that dotted line imposed at the sixty percent level you can see there are only six sectors above that line and cyber security is one of them okay so we know that security is important in a large market but this puts it in the context of the other sectors however we know from previous breaking analysis episodes that despite the importance of cyber and the urgency catalyzed by the pandemic budgets unfortunately are not unlimited and spending is bounded it's not an open checkbook for csos as shown in this chart this is a two-dimensional graphic showing market share in the horizontal axis or pervasiveness and net score in the vertical axis net score is etr's measurement of spending velocity and we've superimposed a red line at 40 percent because anything over 40 percent we consider extremely elevated we've filtered and limited the number of sectors to simplify the graphic and you can see in the sectors that we've highlighted only the big four four are above that forty percent line ai containers rpa and cloud they exceed that sort of forty percent magic water line information security you can see that is highlighted and it's respectable but it competes for budget with other important sectors so this of course creates challenges for organization because not only are they strapped for talent as we've reported they like everyone else in it face ongoing budget pressures research firm cybersecurity ventures estimates that in 2021 6 trillion dollars worldwide will be lost on cyber crime conversely research firm canalis pegs security spending somewhere around 60 billion dollars annually idc has it higher around 100 billion so either way we're talking about spending between one to one point six percent annually of how much the bad guys are taking out that's peanuts really when you consider the consequences so let's double click into the cyber landscape a bit and further look at some of the companies here's that same x y graphic with the company's etr captures from respondents in the cyber security sector that's what's shown on the chart here now the usefulness of the red lines is 20 percent on the horizontal indicates the largest presence in the survey and the magic 40 percent line that we talked about earlier shows those firms with the most elevated momentum only microsoft and palo alto exceed both high water marks of course splunk and cisco are prominent horizontally and there are numerous companies to the left of the 20 percent line and many above that 40 percent high water mark on the vertical axis now in the bottom left quadrant that includes many of the legacy names that have been around for a long time and there are dozens of companies that show spending momentum on their platforms i.e above single digits so that picture is like the first one we showed you very very crowded space but so let's filter it a bit and only include companies in the etr survey that had at least a hundred responses so an n of a hundred or greater so it's a little easy to read but still it's kind of crowded when you think about it okay so same graphic and we've superimposed the data that determined the plot position over in the bottom right there so it's net score and shared n including only companies with more than 100 n so what does this data tell us about the market well microsoft is dominant as always it seems in all dimensions but let's focus on that red line for a moment some of the names that we've highlighted over the past two years show very well here first i want to talk about palo alto networks pre-covet as you might recall we highlighted the valuation divergence between palo alto and fortinet and we said fortinet was executing better on its cloud strategy and palo alto was at the time struggling with the transition especially with its go to market and its sales force compensation and really refreshing its portfolio but we told you that we were bullish on palo alto networks at the time because of its track record and the fact that cios consistently told us that they saw palo alto as a thought leader in the space that they wanted to work with they said that palo alto was the gold standard the best especially larger company cisos so that gave us confidence that palo alto a very well-run company was going to get its act together and perform better and palo alto has just done just that as we expected they've done very well and they've been rapidly moving customers to the next generation of platforms and we're very impressed by the company's execution and the stock has generally reflected that now some other names that hit our radar and the etr data a couple of years ago continue to perform well crowdstrike z-scaler sales sail point and cloudflare a cloudflare just reported and beat earnings but was off the stock fell on headwinds for tech overall the big rotation but the company is doing very well and they're growing rapidly and they have momentum as you can see from the etr data and we put that double star around proof point to highlight that it was worthy of fetching 12 and a half billion dollars from private equity firm so nice exit there supporting the continued control consolidation trend that we've predicted in cyber security now let's turn our attention to octa and auth zero this is where it gets interesting and is a clever play for octa we think and we want to drill into it a bit octa is acquiring auth zero for big money why well we think todd mckinnon octa ceo wants to run the table on identity and then continue to expand his tam he has to do that to justify his lofty valuation so octa's ascendancy around identity and single sign sign-on is notable the fragmented pictures that we've shown you they scream out for simplification and trust and that's what octa brings but it competes with some major players most notably microsoft with active directory so look of course microsoft is going to dominate in its massive customer base but the rest of the market that's like jump ball it's wide open and we think mckinnon saw the opportunity to go dominate that sector now octa comes at this from an enterprise perspective bringing top-down trust to the equation and throwing a big blanket over all the discrete sas platforms and unifying employee access octa's timing was perfect it was founded in 2009 just as the massive sasification trend was happening around crm and hr and service management and cloud etc but the one thing that octa didn't have that auth 0 does is serious developer chops while octa was crushing it with its enterprise sales strategy auth 0 was laser focused on developers and building a bottoms up approach to identity by acquiring auth0 octa can dominate both sides of the barbell and then capture the fat middle so yes it's a pricey acquisition but in our view it's a great move by mckinnon now i don't know mckinnon personally but last week i spoke to arun shrestha who's the ceo of security specialist beyond id they're a platinum services partner of octa and there a zero trust expert he worked for octa for a number of years and shared with me a bit about mckinnon's style and think big approach arun said something that caught my attention he said firewalls used to be the perimeter now people are and while that's self-serving to octa and probably beyond id it's true people apps and data are the new perimeter and they're not in one location and that's the point now unfortunately i had lined up an interview with dia jolly who was the chief product officer at octa in a cube alum for this past week knowing that we were running this segment in this episode but she unfortunately fell ill the day of our interview and had to cancel but i want to follow up with her and understand how she's thinking about connecting the dots with auth 0 with devs and enterprises and really test our thesis there this is a really interesting chess match that's going on let's look a little deeper into that identity space this chart here shows some of the major identity players it has some of the leaders in the identity market and there's a breakdown of etr's net score now net score comprises five elements the lime green is we're adding the platform new the forest green is we're spending six percent or more relative to last year the gray is flat send plus or minus flat spend plus or minus five percent the pinkish is spending less and the bright red is where exiting the platform retiring now you subtract the red from the green and that gets you the result for net score which you can see superimposed on the right hand chart at the bottom that first column there the far column is shared in which informs and indicates the number of responses and is a proxy for presence in the market oh look at the top two players in terms of spending momentum now sales sale point is right there but auth 0 combined with octa's distribution channel will extend octa's lead significantly in our view and then there's microsoft now just a caveat this includes all of microsoft's security offerings not just identity but it's there for context and cyber arc as well includes its acquisition of adaptive but also other parts of cyberarks portfolio so you can see some of the other names that are there many of which you'll find in the gartner magic quadrant for identity and as we said we really like this move by octa it combines positive market forces with lead offerings from very well-run companies that have winning dna and passionate people now to further emphasize emphasize what what's happening here take a look at this this chart shows etr data for octa within sale point and cyber arc accounts out of the 230 cyber and sale point customers in the data set there are 81 octa accounts that's a 35 overlap and the good news for octa is that within that base of sale point in cyber arc accounts octa is shown by the net score line that green line has a very elevated spending and momentum and the kicker is if you read the fine print in the right hand column etr correctly points out that while sailpoint and cyberarc have long been partners with octa at the recent octane 21 event octa's big customer event the company announced that it was expanding into privileged access management pam and identity governance hello and welcome to coopetition in the 2020s now our current thinking is that this bodes very well for octa and cyberark and sailpoint well they're going to have to make some counter moves to fend off the onslaught that is coming now let's wrap up with what has become a tradition in our quarterly security updates looking at those two dimensions of net score and market share we're going to see which companies crack the top 10 for both measures within the etr data set we do this every quarter so here on the left we have the top 20 sorted by net score or spending momentum and on the right we sort by shared n so again top 20 which informs shared end and forms the market share metric or presence in the data set that red horizontal lines those two lines on each separate the top 10 from the remaining 10 within those top 20. in our method what we do is we assign four stars to those companies that crack the top ten for both metrics so again you see microsoft palo alto networks octa crowdstrike and fortinet fortinet by the way didn't make it last quarter they've kind of been in and out and on the bubble but you know this company is very strong and doing quite well only the other four did last quarter there was same four last quarter and we give two stars to those companies that make it in both categories within the top 20 but didn't make the top 10. so cisco splunk which has been steadily decelerating from a spending momentum standpoint and z-scaler which is just on the cusp you know we really like z-scaler and the company has great momentum but that's the methodology it is what it is now you can see we kept carbon black on the rightmost chart it's like kind of cut off it's number 21 only because they're just outside looking in on netscore you see them there they're just below on on netscore number 11. and vmware's presence in the market we think that carbon black is really worth paying attention to okay so we're going to close with some summary and final thoughts last quarter we did a deeper dive on the solar winds hack and we think the ramifications are significant it has set the stage for a new era of escalation and adversary sophistication now major change we see is a heightened awareness that when you find intruders you'd better think very carefully about your next moves when someone breaks into your house if the dog barks or if you come down with a baseball bat or other weapon you might think the intruder is going to flee but if the criminal badly wants what you have in your house and it's valuable enough you might find yourself in a bloody knife fight or worse what's happening is intruders come to your company via island hopping or inside or subterfuge or whatever method and they'll live off the land stealthily using your own tools against you so they can you can't find them so easily so instead of injecting new tools in that send off an alert they just use what you already have there that's what's called living off the land they'll steal sensitive data for example positive covid test results when that was really really sensitive obviously still is or other medical data and when you retaliate they will double extort you they'll encrypt your data and hold it for ransom and at the same time threaten to release the sensitive information to crushing your brand in the process so your response must be as stealthy as their intrusion as you marshal your resources and devise an attack plan you face serious headwinds not only is this a complicated situation there's your ongoing and acute talent shortage that you tell us about all the time many companies are mired in technical debt that's an additional challenge and then you've got to balance the running of the business while actually affecting a digital transformation that's very very difficult and it's risky because the more digital you become the more exposed you are so this idea of zero trust people used to call it a buzzword it's now a mandate along with automation because you just can't throw labor at the problem this is all good news for investors as cyber remains a market that's ripe for valuation increases and m a activity especially if you know where to look hopefully we've helped you squint through the maze a little bit okay that's it for now thanks to the community for your comments and insights remember i publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com these episodes they're all available as podcasts all you do is search breaking analysis podcast put in the headphones listen when you're in your car out for your walk or run and you can always connect on twitter at divalante or email me at david.valante at siliconangle.com i appreciate the comments on linkedin and in clubhouse please follow me so you're notified when we start a room and riff on these topics and others and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr be well and we'll see you next time [Music] you

>> From The Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from The Cube in ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante >> The pandemic not only accelerated the shift to digital but it also highlighted a rush of cyber criminal sophistication, collaboration, and chaotic responses by virtually every major company in the planet. The SolarWinds hack exposed supply chain weaknesses and so-called island hopping techniques that are exceedingly difficult to detect. Moreover, the will and aggressiveness of well-organized cybercriminals has elevated to the point where incident responses are now met with counter attacks, designed to both punish and extract money from victims via ransomware and other criminal activities. The only upshot is the cybersecurity market remains one of the most enduring and attractive investment sectors for those that can figure out where the market is headed and which firms are best positioned to capitalize. Hello, everyone. And welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis" we'll provide our quarterly update of the security industry, and share new survey data from ETR and the Cube community that will help you navigate through the maze of corporate cyber warfare. We'll also share our thoughts on the game of 3D chess that Okta CEO, Todd McKinnon, is playing against the market. Now, we all know this market is complicated, fragmented and fast moving. And this next chart says it all. It's an interactive graphic from Optiv, a Denver, Colorado-based SI that's focused on cybersecurity. They've done some really excellent research and put together this awesome taxonomy, and it mapped vendor names therein. And this helps users navigate the complex security landscape. And there are over a dozen major sectors, high-level sectors within the security taxonomy and nearly 60 subsectors. From monitoring, vulnerability assessment, identity, asset management, firewalls, automation, cloud, data center, sim, threat detection and intelligent endpoint network, and so on and so on and so on. But this is a terrific resource, and going to help you understand where players fit and help you connect the dots in the space. Now let's talk about what's going on in the market. The dynamics in this crazy mess of a landscape are really confusing sometimes. Now, since the beginning of cyber time, we've talked about the increasing sophistication of the adversary, and the back and forth escalation between good and evil. And unfortunately, this trend is unlikely to stop. Here's some data from Carbon Black's annual modern bank heist report. This is the fourth, and of course now, VMware's brand, highlights the Carbon Black study since the acquisition, and to catalyze the creation of VMware's cloud security division. Destructive malware attacks, according to the recent study are up 118% from last year. Now, one major takeaway from the report is that hackers aren't just conducting wire fraud, they are. 57% of the banks surveyed, saw an increase in wire fraud, but the cybercriminals are also targeting non-public information such as future trading strategies. This allows the bad guys to front-run large block trades and profit. It's become a very lucrative practice. Now the prevalence of so-called island hopping is up 38% from already elevated levels. This is where a virus enters a company supply chain via a partner, and then often connects with other stealthy malware downstream. These techniques are more common where the malware will actually self-form with other infected parts of the supply chain and create actions with different signatures, designed to identify and exfiltrate valuable information. It's a really complex problem. Of major concern is that 63% of banking respondents in the study reported that responses to incidents were then met with retaliation designed to intimidate, or initiate ransomware tax to extract a final pound of flesh from the victim. Notably, the study found that 75% of CISOs reported to the CIO, which many feel is not the right regime. The study called for a rethinking of the right cyber regime where the CISO has increased responsibility and a direct reporting line to the CEO, or perhaps the COO, with greater exposure to boards of directors. So, many thanks to VMware and Tom Kellerman specifically for sharing this information with us this past week. Great work by your team. Now, some of the themes that we've been talking about for several quarters are shown in the lower half of the chart. Cloud, of course is the big driver thanks to work-from-home and to the pandemic. And the interesting corollary of course, is we see a rapid rethinking of end point and identity access management, and the concept of zero trust. In a recent ESG survey, two thirds of respondents said that their use of cloud computing necessitated a change in how they approach identity access management. Now, as shown in the chart from Optiv, the market remains highly fragmented, and M&A is of course, way up. Now, based on our research, it looks like transaction volume has increased more than 40% just in the last five months. So let's dig into the M&A, the merger and acquisition trends for just a moment. We took a five-month snapshot and we were able to count about 80 deals that were completed in that timeframe. Those transactions represented more than $20 billion in value. Some of the larger ones are highlighted here. The biggest of course, being the Thoma Bravo, taking Proofpoint private for a $12 plus billion price tag. The stock went from the low 130s and is trading in the low 170s based on the $176 per share offer. So there's your arbitrage, folks. Go for it. Perhaps the more interesting acquisition was Auth0 by Optiv for 6.5 billion, which we're going to talk about more in a moment. There was more private equity action we saw as Insight bought Armis, an IOT security play, and Cisco shelled out $730 million for IMImobile, which is more of an adjacency to cyber, but it's going to go under Cisco security and applications business run by Jeetu Patel. But these are just the tip of the iceberg. Some of the themes that we see connecting the dots of these acquisitions are first, SIs like Accenture, Atos and Wipro are making moves in cyber to go local. They're buying SecOps expertise, as I say, locally in places like France, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, and Australia, that last mile, that belly to belly intimate service. Israeli-based startups chocked up five acquired companies in the space over the last five months. Also financial services firms are getting into the act with Goldman and MasterCard making moves to own its own part of the stack themselves to combat things like fraud and identity theft. And then finally, numerous moves to expand markets. Okta with Auth0, CrowdStrike buying a log management company, Palo Alto, picking up dev ops expertise, Rapid7 shoring up it's Coobernetti's chops, Tenable expanding beyond Insights and going after identity, interesting. Fortinet filling gaps in a multi-cloud offering. SailPoint extending to governance risk and compliance, GRC. Zscaler picked up an Israeli firm to fill gaps in access control. And then VMware buying Mesh7 to secure modern app development and distribution service. So tons and tons of activity here. Okay, so let's look at some of the ETR data to put the cyber market in context. ETR uses the concept of market share, it's one of the key metrics which is a measure of pervasiveness in the dataset. So for each sector, it calculates the number of respondents for that sector divided by the total to get a sense for how prominent the sector is within the CIO and IT buyer communities. Okay, this chart shows the full ETR sector taxonomy with security highlighted across three survey periods; April last year, January this year, and April this year. Now you wouldn't expect big moves in market share over time. So it's relatively stable by sector, but the big takeaway comes from observing which sectors are most prominent. So you see that red line, that dotted line imposed at the 60% level? You can see there are only six sectors above that line and cyber security is one of them. Okay, so we know that security is important in a large market. But this puts it in the context of the other sectors. However, we know from previous breaking analysis episodes that despite the importance of cyber, and the urgency catalyzed by the pandemic, budgets unfortunately are not unlimited, and spending is bounded. It's not an open checkbook for CSOs as shown in this chart. This is a two-dimensional graphic showing market share in the horizontal axis, or pervasiveness in net score in the vertical axis. Net score is ETR's measurement of spending velocity. And we've superimposed a red line at 40% because anything over 40%, we consider extremely elevated. We've filtered and limited the number of sectors to simplify the graphic. And you can see, in the sectors that we've highlighted, only the big four are above that 40% line; AI, containers, RPA, and cloud. They exceed that sort of 40% magic waterline. Information security, you can see that as highlighted and it's respectable, but it competes for budget with other important sectors. So this is of course creates challenges for organization, because not only are they strapped for talent as we've reported, they like everyone else in IT face ongoing budget pressures. Research firm, Cybersecurity Ventures estimates that in 2021, $6 trillion worldwide will be lost on cyber crime. Conversely, research firm, Cannolis peg security spending somewhere around $60 billion annually. IDC has at higher, around $100 billion. So either way, we're talking about spending between 1 to 1.6% annually of how much the bad guys are taking out. That's peanuts really when you consider the consequences. So let's double-click into the cyber landscape a bit and further look at some of the companies. Here's that same X/Y graphic with the companies ETR captures from respondents in the cybersecurity sector. That's what's shown on the chart here. Now, the usefulness of the red lines is 20% on the horizontal indicates the largest presence in the survey, and the magic 40% line that we talked about earlier shows those firms with the most elevated momentum. Only Microsoft and Palo Alto exceed both high watermarks. Of course, Splunk and Cisco are prominent horizontally. And there are numerous companies to the left of the 20% line and many above that 40% high watermark on the vertical axis. Now in the bottom left quadrant, that includes many of the legacy names that have been around for a long time. And there are dozens of companies that show spending momentum on their platforms, i.e above single digits. So that picture is like the first one we showed you, very, very crowded space. But so let's filter it a bit and only include companies in the ETR survey that had at least 100 responses. So an N of 100 or greater. So it was a little easier to read but still it's kind of crowded when you think about it. Okay, so same graphic, and we've superimposed the data that determined the plot position over in the bottom right there. So there's net score and shared in, including only companies with more than 100 N. So what does this data tell us about the market? Well, Microsoft is dominant as always, it seems in all dimensions but let's focus on that red line for a moment. Some of the names that we've highlighted over the past two years show very well here. First, I want to talk about Palo Alto Networks. Pre-COVID as you might recall, we highlighted the valuation divergence between Palo Alto and Fortinet. And we said Fortinet was executing better on its cloud strategy, and Palo Alto was at the time struggling with the transition especially with its go-to-market and its Salesforce compensation, and really refreshing its portfolio. But we told you that we were bullish on Palo Alto Networks at the time because of its track record, and the fact that CIOs consistently told us that they saw Palo Alto as a thought leader in the space that they wanted to work with. They said that Palo Alto was the gold standard, the best, especially larger company CISOs. So that gave us confidence that Palo Alto, a very well-run company was going to get its act together and perform better. And Palo Alto has just done just that. As we expected, they've done very well and rapidly moving customers to the next generation of platforms. And we're very impressed by the company's execution. And the stock has generally reflected that. Now, some other names that hit our radar in the ETR data a couple of years ago, continue to perform well. CrowdStrike, Zscaler, SailPoint, and CloudFlare. Now, CloudFlare just reported and beat earnings but was off, the stock fell on headwinds for tech overall, the big rotation. But the company is doing very well and they're growing rapidly and they have momentum as you can see from the ETR data. Now, we put that double star around Proofpoint to highlight that it was worthy of fetching $12.5 billion from private equity firm. So nice exit there, supporting the continued consolidation trend that we've predicted in cybersecurity. Now let's turn our attention to Okta and Auth0. This is where it gets interesting, and is a clever play for Okta we think, and we want to drill into it a bit. Okta is acquiring Auth0 for big money. Why? Well, we think Todd McKinnon, Okta CEO, wants to run the table on identity and then continue to expand as TAM has to do that, to justify his lofty valuation. So Okta's ascendancy around identity and single sign-on is notable. The fragmented pictures that we've shown you, they scream out for simplification and trust, and that's what Okta brings. But it competes with some major players, most notably Microsoft with active directory. So look, of course, Microsoft is going to dominate in its massive customer base, but the rest of the market, that's like (indistinct) wide open. And we think McKinnon saw the opportunity to go dominate that sector. Now Okta comes at this from an enterprise perspective bringing top-down trust to the equation, and throwing a big blanket over all the discreet SaaS platforms and unifying employee access. Okta's timing was perfect. It was founded in 2009, just as the massive SaaSifiation trend was happening around CRM and HR, and service management and cloud, et cetera. But the one thing that Okta didn't have that Auth0 does is serious developer chops. While Okta was crushing it with its enterprise sales strategy, Auth0 was laser-focused on developers and building a bottoms up approach to identity. By acquiring Auth0, Okta can dominate both sides of the barbell and then capture the fat middle. So yes, it's a pricey acquisition, but in our view, it's a great move by McKinnon. Now, I don't know McKinnon personally, but last week I spoke to Arun Shrestha, who's the CEO of security specialist, BeyondID, they're a platinum services partner of Okta. And they're a zero trust expert. He worked for Okta for a number of years and shared with me a bit about McKinnon's style, and think big approach. Arun said something that caught my attention. He said, firewalls used to be the perimeter, now people are. And while that's self-serving to Okta and probably BeyondID, it's true. People, apps and data are the new perimeter, and they're not in one location. And that's the point. Now, unfortunately, I had lined up an interview with Diya Jolly, who was the chief product officer at Okta and a Cube alum for this past week, knowing that we were running this segment in this episode but she unfortunately fell ill the day of our interview and had to cancel. But I want to follow up with her, and understand how she's thinking about connecting the dots with Auth0 with devs and enterprises and really test our thesis there. This is a really interesting chess match that's going on. Let's look a little deeper into that identity space. This chart here shows some of the major identity players. It has some of the leaders in the identity market, and is a breakdown at ETR's net score. Now net score comprises five elements. The lime green is, we're adding the platform new. The forest green is we're spending 6% or more relative to last year. The gray is flat send plus or minus flat spend, plus or minus 5%. The pinkish is spending less. And the bright red is we're exiting the platform, retiring. Now you subtract the red from the green, and that gets you the result for net score which you can see super-imposed on the right hand chart at the bottom, that first column there. The far column is shared in which informs and indicates the number of responses and is a proxy for presence in the market. Oh, look at the top two players in terms of spending momentum. Now SailPoint is right there, but Auth0 combined with Okta's distribution channel will extend Okta's lead significantly in our view. And then there's Microsoft. Now just a caveat, this includes all of Microsoft's security offerings, not just identity, but it's there for context. And CyberArk as well includes this acquisition of adaptive, but also other parts of CyberArk's portfolio. So you can see some of the other names that are there, many of which you'll find in the Gartner magic quadrant for identity. And as we said, we really like this move by Okta. It combines positive market forces with lead offerings from very well-run companies that have winning DNA and passionate people. Now, to further emphasize what's happening here, take a look at this. This chart shows ETR data for Okta within SailPoint and CyberArk accounts. Out of the 230 CyberArk and SailPoint customers in the dataset, there are 81 Okta accounts. That's a 35% overlap. And the good news for Okta is that within that base of SailPoint and CyberArk accounts, Okta is shown by the net score line, that green line has a very elevated spending in momentum. And the kicker is, if you read the fine print in the right hand column, ETR correctly points out that while SailPoint and CyberArk have long been partners with Okta, at the recent Octane21 event, Okta's big customer event, The company announced that it was expanding into privileged access management, PAM, and identity governance. Hello, and welcome to co-opetition in the 2020s. Now, our current thinking is that this bodes very well for Okta and CyberArk and SailPoint. Well, they're going to have to make some counter moves to fend off the onslaught that is coming. Now, let's wrap up with what has become a tradition in our quarterly security updates. Looking at those two dimensions of net score and market share, we're going to see which companies crack the top 10 for both measures within the ETR dataset. We do this every quarter. So here in the left, we have the top 20, sorted by net score spending momentum and on the right, we sort by shared N. So it's again, top 20, which informs, shared N informs the market share metric or presence in the dataset. That red horizontal lines, those two lines on each separate the top 10 from the remaining 10 within those top 20. And our method, what we do is we assign four stars to those companies that crack the top 10 for both metrics. So again, you see Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Okta, CrowdStrike, and Fortinet. Fortinet by the way, didn't make it last quarter. They've kind of been in and out and on the bubble, but company is very strong, and doing quite well. Only the other four did last quarter. They were the same for last quarter. And we give two stars to those companies that make it in both categories within the top 20 but didn't make the top 10. So Cisco, Splunk, which has been steadily decelerating from a spending momentum standpoint, and Zscaler, which is just on the cusp. We really like Zscaler and the company has great momentum, but that's the methodology. That is what it is. Now you can see, we kept Carbon Black on the right most chart, it's like kind of cut off, it's number 21. Only because they're just outside looking in on net score. You see them there, they're just below on net score, number 11. And VMware's presence in the market we think, that Carbon Black is right really worth paying attention to. Okay, so we're going to close with some summary and final thoughts. Last quarter, we did a deeper dive on the SolarWinds hack, and we think the ramifications are significant. It has set the stage for a new era of escalation and adversary sophistication. Now, major change we see is a heightened awareness that when you find intruders, you'd better think very carefully about your next moves. When someone breaks into your house, if the dog barks, or if you come down with a baseball bat or other weapon, you might think the intruder is going to flee. But if the criminal badly wants what you have in your house and it's valuable enough, you might find yourself in a bloody knife fight or worse. Well, what's happening is intruders come to your company via island hopping or insider subterfuge or whatever method. And they'll live off the land stealthily using your own tools against you so that you can't find them so easily. So instead of injecting new tools in that send off an alert, they just use what you already have there. That's what's called living off the land. They'll steal sensitive data, for example, positive COVID test results when that was really, really sensitive, obviously still is, or other medical data. And when you retaliate, they will double-extort you. They'll encrypt your data and hold it for ransom, and at the same time threaten to release the sensitive information, crushing your brand in the process. So your response must be as stealthy as their intrusion, as you marshal your resources and devise an attack plan. And you face serious headwinds. Not only is this a complicated situation, there's your ongoing and acute talent shortage that you tell us about all the time. Many companies are mired in technical debt, that's an additional challenge. And then you've got to balance the running of the business while actually effecting a digital transformation. That's very, very difficult, and it's risky because the more digital you become, the more exposed you are. So this idea of zero trust, people used to call it a buzzword, it's now a mandate along with automation. Because you just can't throw labor at the problem. This is all good news for investors as cyber remains a market that's ripe for valuation increases and M&A activity, especially if you know where to look. Hopefully we've helped you squint through the maze a little bit. Okay, that's it for now. Thanks to the community for your comments and insights. Remember I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. These episodes, they're all available as podcasts. All you got to do is search breaking analysis podcasts, put in the headphones, listen when you're in your car, or out for your walk or run, and you can always connect on Twitter @DVellante, or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. I appreciate the comments on LinkedIn and in Clubhouse, please follow me, so you're notified when we start a room and riff on these topics and others. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube Insights powered by ETR. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (light instrumental music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the BizOps Manifesto Power panel talking about, "Embracing Agility Across the Business." I'm Lisa Martin, there are three guests here with me today, to break down this topic. Pierre Viljoen, CTO at Global Head of Enterprise Technology and Governance at HTL Enterprise Studio. Hey Pierre, welcome. >> Thank you >> Lisa: Dave West is also here, the CEO of Scrum.org. Hey Dave, good to have you with us. >> Hi Lisa, hi everybody. >> Lisa: And Serge Lucio is here as well, the general manager of Broadcom's Enterprise Software Division. Hey Serge, good to have you on the program. >> Thank you, good to be here. >> So we're going to be talking about the people and the process and technology requirements that businesses need to adopt to be able to embrace agility across the business. We're going to also be talking a lot about this inaugural BizOps industry research survey, on the state of digital business. A lot of very interesting findings that we're going to go through in the next 20 minutes or so. So the first question guys is, the BizOps survey found that over 519 individuals over five countries business and technology executives. This survey found, most organizations still expect this year to be as challenging as last year. I want you to kind of walk us through why that is, and how is that going to impact digital transformation initiatives? Pierre, we'll start with you, then Dave, then Serge. >> Sure, thank you Lisa. So, I think these days, disruption is no longer an exception. It's kind of become the norm or the rule, in terms of how we operate. And as executives in companies have learned over the last year, with everything that's happened is that, you can only modernize to a point, and then you need to do a little bit more. And what really is needed is for us to understand, going forward, how we're actually going to remodel our business by harnessing the resources that we have in a much more agile way, in a more fluent way, from an organizational perspective. And I think our current midterm goal, probably, is that we're capable of remodeling how we can remove roadblocks. These kinds of roadblocks in the future, and get us in a better position where we are. I don't expect things to change dramatically over the next year. More in line with us making sure that we're more future proof in the way in which we're working. >> We still have remote workers, global uncertainty, the vaccine. Dave, what are your thoughts on the impact of this year on digital transformation initiatives? >> Yeah, it's funny. When I think of, sort of uncertainty and chaos, I think that COVID really started it rolling down a hill, but unfortunately it's literally like rolling down a hill, these chaos and complexity. It's getting faster and faster and harder and harder. We're talking about the new norm, right? What is the new normal? We just don't know. And I think the reality is that most organizations were surprised by the impact of COVID-19 and because of that, they responded very quickly. Many of them, people were working at home, they're looking at their supply chain, looking at localization, all sorts of really important things happen, but very quickly, not very strategically. I think the next few years we're going to see, hopefully, some of that realizing into strategy and actually starting to fundamentally change how the business is looking at the world. We've sort of entered the digital age, Lisa, this next age of innovation, we have moved out of mass production and the age of oil, into something very, very different. And I think those organizations, every organization out there is going to have to get a handle on that and COVID was the wake up, right? And I think the next five years are going to be very interesting. >> I agree with you that that accelerant was, I didn't think of it before as a big ball rolling downhill. And now I don't think I'm going to be able to get that out of my head. But Serge, talk to us about your thoughts, the impacts to digital transformation initiatives. >> Yeah, I think back to what Dave was describing. The big challenge is the uncertainty. Many organizations are faced with, currently, a lot of unknowns about, if and when things will go back to, quote unquote, some kind of normality. And with that kind of uncertainty, there's a lot of challenges to the planning from an investment point of view. So, Dave was talking about a short-term versus long-term Like, a lot of these organizations are basically focused on just getting by over the next 12 months and trying to figure out what needs to happen over the next 12 months. At the same time, there's a lot of challenges with respect to readiness and uncertainty. And so, in that context, you got kind of this tension between, "How much do I invest short term "on basically tactical initiatives, "How do I care about teams? "How do I enable these teams "to deliver in weeks as opposed to months? "And then at the same time, "how do I continue to invest "to fundamentally change my operating model?" And that tension is very real. Within many of the organizations we serve. >> One of the things that the survey found was that most of the respondents were very willing to embrace being more agile in order to be able to better respond to rapidly changing market conditions. But I want to get your opinion on what that actually really means, that willingness to embrace being agile. What does it really mean? And what do organize organizations have to do differently? Pierre, I'll start with you. >> Sure, I think we had a discussion a while back and Dave actually got into something interesting where he said, without quoting a famous sneaker brand, just go out and do it. I think that's probably the most important part of this. Most organizations are struggling to figure out, "How should we embrace Agile? "Should we jump in at full scale now? "Should we be looking Scrum? "Should we be doing Scrum-Falls? "Should we be falling over our own feet?" Nobody knows exactly, what might be the right sector? I think the most important part is to pick up a pair of solid principles that you're going to embrace, start executing on them, start learning as you go, and basically improve as you move forward. Over the last year, we've embraced digital product management quite a lot on our side. And it's had tremendous benefits without us, per se, aiming for those benefits at the end of the day. And these are things that you learn as you go. And if you're going to wait around, analysis paralysis is going to be the killer of Agile at the end of day >> "Just do it," I like that. Good advice. Dave, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, so, I think that what's really interesting is, Agile has been around for 20 years. The manifesto was signed 20 years ago. Scrum came into the world 25 years ago. All of these sort of Agile approaches, but they were predominantly focused on technology. And I think that one thing that I've noticed, over and over again, is that the realization by C-level executives, level sevens, or whatever they're called, they've realized that it's not about technology. (chuckles) It's great, the technologies. I guess the technology's always worked in this complex world because customers never knew what they wanted. We didn't know how are we going to do it. We'd never worked together before. We didn't know how much it was going to cost. So, because of that (chuckles) we had to work in an agile way in technology. But ultimately, I think, one of the big differences going forward, is going to be that, there I say that intersection of business and technology, that BizOps kind of model that we talked about in the manifesto, and what the survey was really trying to tease out. I think that's really, really going to be interesting. And I don't know what that actually means, in terms of the execution. I hope it means that we're going to see teams better aligned to business outcomes. I hope it means that we're going to actually allow those teams that are actually know what they're approaching to make decisions. I hope it means that planning is going to be more directional rather than task level. I hope it means that we're going to start measuring the success in terms of business outcomes, not in terms of the work that we do. I hope it means all of these things. But we will wait and see, because experience would indicate that after a big disaster, lots of people tend to go back to exactly how they worked before, with that sort of emus kind of mentality or ostrich or whatever things sticks its head in the ground. I don't know. >> Sometimes we just want to go back to when things were safe and normal. But in terms of kind of following on, Dave, what you said, 94%, in this survey, 94% of respondents said we should adopt BizOps to increase competitiveness. So, that willingness is there in a vast majority of the respondents. So, I'd like to get your thoughts on what that willingness actually means and what they need to do differently. >> Yes. The problem is that, I think everybody understand that you have to be agile, right? You need to be able to respond quickly to your customer needs. You need to put the customer at the center of everything you do, right? So, conceptually, everybody understands that. The problem is really the operating model that many of these large organizations are dealing with to this day, right? So, you have these sort of Berkeley, kind of organized organization, with functional roles, specialized roles. And when you think about kind of generally, well, one of the big challenges is that you need to start to think horizontally, right? You need to start to start to think about what kind of value streams and what part of the cross functional teams that need to be organized and integrated to deliver on specific business outcomes. You need to start shifting from the traditional contract-based model that(indistinct) to a model which is much more based on trust, right? And we need to move away from vanity measurements and KPIs that many of the organizations typically lead by, to really focus on one thing and one thing only, which is that business value has been delivered. So, fundamentally, I think it requires a bit of a redesign of the operating model in these organizations. And one where, especially when you have a risk adversed kind of organizations, you need to start to be more accepting of risk, fundamentally. >> More accepting of risk. You brought something up there starts that I want to tackle in the next question with respect to culture. But one of the things that the survey uncovered was an interesting kind of seeming contradiction. The majority of respondents said, "We agreed, digital transformation "is about business outcomes "more than it is about technology." But 62% said, "We're still adopting technology for technology's sake." What does that actually mean? And what's the kind of cultural impact there for organizations to really get that more aligned on the digital transformation and the technology and the business outcomes? Pierre, we'll start with you. >> Sure. So, I think there were a number of reports this year talking about what's happened, what's not happened, and the majority of them focused on the fact that, as tech leaders, for years we've been praying to the gods to get budget approved to do all kinds of modernization activities to our infrastructure, our IT, tools, et cetera. And, lo and behold, the ball comes rolling down the hill, smashes a few things and we basically get some blank checks. So, we run around and we buy a whole bunch of stuff to modernize and to embrace this ability to do things differently. And in that whole process, what we basically did was buy more tools and buy more technology. And in that whole process, we didn't really embrace what it is that we're trying to achieve. So, basically aligning the technology to the actual business requirements getting closer to the customer, being able to understand where our market's moving, how we're capable of reducing the journey, if I can put it that way, and make sure that we're more aligned to where we need to be. So, although a lot of CIOs and CTOs got away with doing a lot of great stuff over the last year and users like me are like, "Ooh! I don't have to worry "about stupid VPNs and things anymore." That all went away. But in the same instance, I didn't really get anything that changed the organizational dynamic, which is a challenge. We still have the fundamental problems we have because the business leaders are not yet embracing the deep monitor of the processes that are supported by the technology. And then driving that in such a way that we can gain more business value which is important. To Serge's previous point, we're doing all these great things but we're not focusing on the incremental value that we're supposed to be getting. >> Dave, did it surprise you that there was this seemingly contradictory response? Yes, it's more about business outcomes and technology, but we're still adopting technology for technology's sake. What are your thoughts on that? And how can organizations actually start to move the needle on that? >> E-comm by cultural change, right? But you do know that your board and your leadership want you to do something, and the easiest thing you can do is buy something. I'm a sort of now an American, so, that's kind of my mantra in life, right? "When in doubt go shopping." Which is fantastic, just for the record. (Lisa laughs) But so, you've got to be seen to be doing something, whether it's replacing a VPN, which is always a fun thing to do, or whether it's getting on Slack. Everyone's going to be on Slack. that's going to help. But actually the core is that, exactly what Serge and Pierre have been saying all along, it's that, "Okay. So what is our business all about? "What are our customers? "what did they actually need? "What do our employees need? "How do we build a better value stream "from customer to the organization? "How do we align our teams to that? "How do we incentivize correctly "both the employees that are working "and our partners that are providing things "in this supply chain. How do we do all of those things?" Ultimately though, that means that we have to take a step back which is a very frustrating thing at the moment. And actually look at what is our business all about? What is the mission of it? Who are the customers? Take a moment to find what those are. And then, soon as we have that, and we don't have to do it. As Pierre said, we don't have to do it completely. We can do it incrementally. Organizations are very inward looking. That is the industrial mindset. That is that paradigm. It's looking, as Serge talked about, silos, "optimizing my department," "optimizing my budget, optimizing my kingdom." And what we're talking about is something that cross cuts all of that. So, the decision making is going to change around where the investments go and that's going to be really, really challenging. So, I'm not surprised, I'm not at all surprised that everybody says we should be doing this. And it's like classic. Everybody says we need to be fitter, but we're still all not fit. (Serge laughs) It's sort of, that's just the reality of the world that we live in, right? But we have to start making a stand. And the place we begin is customers. That's the place. And as soon as we start doing that, then everything else just becomes quite easy, actually. >> I like that. Focus on customers and it becomes easy. Serve, I'm kidding. What are your thoughts on this? >> Yeah, I think Dave summarized it well. It's very easy to just buy a tool or buy something, right? Fundamentally changing kind of an operating model is very difficult, but you need to fundamentally rethink for instance, all the responding initiatives. So, something as mundane as, You know, as a leader in my organization I have a budget, right? What's my incentive of collaborating with my peers in terms of delivering credible analysis form. And so, that to me kind of a fundamental shift that we need to operate, and that's probably one of the reasons why many of our largest organizations that we're serving are starting to introduce some new roles like a Chief Digital Officer, as kind of a way to kind of bring kind of a slightly different organization design. The challenge, though, is that, well, all of these teams are still kind of integrated with this fabric of these large systems which exist. So when we look at these value streams, in fact they're not independent from one another. You have a bunch of interdependencies. You are looking at kind of networks of these value streams. But the fundamental shift that we need to see is what we want these organizations to think about, ultimately with the part of the products or services that need to be focused on, all of these become kind of the primary things that we measure from point of view, and how do we align teams and projects and funding along these kinds of outcomes? >> So being customer focused, also being more broadly focused you mentioned the Chief Digital Officer role, which has an interesting role. It's supposed to look more, holistically, internally and externally. And we know that these organizations know we need to be better at this. like Dave's joke about we know we need to be more fit. But what's it going to take to actually create that collaboration, so that IT and business leaders are really working in lockstep and doing so in a timely fashion, so, that they're able to stay competitive. I do want to know from each of you, are you seeing examples of this already in progress? Pierre, let's start with you. >> I can only give you another example and say, one of the interesting things that we did was we try to embrace the delivery of services at HR in kind of a different frame this year, and kind of productize the services that we deliver. Now, if you're most people, you're trying to think about, "How do I set up things like communities "of practice and collaboration between people so "that they can work together on developing new services "new features, new products, et cetera." And we set out with creating this agile way of working. What we didn't anticipate, which was a very nice side effect, is that, because of COVID, because of the catalyst that it provided us, the remote working, people sense of ownership is inherently there. Meaning that self-organization of teams started happening. Nobody needed to crack a whip to get a bunch of guys to talk together with one another to figure out how to get stuff done. It's not like you could walk over to the water cooler and have a chat to Bob. Bob is a thousand miles away, or Bobby's sitting in another State. So, all of a sudden, all dynamic changed. And I have to say, people are a lot more resilient than what they're being given credit for. And if, as organizations, we embrace the culture in such a way and harness it in a positive way, we can actually get this movement to happen. And we actually can make the sum of the parts to be more than the whole. And this year we've seen that happen. And by no means, are we done 'cause we still have a lot of work to do, like Serge said, we have budgets, and budgets give you finite amount of movement left or right. Then you have to do what's best and possible within the frame that you're given. But I think embracing the cultural change and helping people to really excel at that and empowering them makes a huge difference in the way that you can get stuff done. >> Absolutely. Dave, what are your thoughts on this? >> I'm going to say something a little bit controversial, I think. I'm not a big fan of Chief Digital Officers. It just seems like we've got a problem. And some would argue that, "Well, if you've got a problem with somebody "you should get a coach" and all this stuff "and you get it sorted." And that's probably a good thing. But most digital officers, they're going to build a long-term career and create yet another stove pipe and that stove pipe's responsible for bringing all the other stove pipes together. It sounds a bit odd. If a digital officer is really there as a short term enabler, 'cause you asked IT and business leaders, trying to get them to work together better. The best business leaders (bell dings) know about IT, right? The best business leaders are IT sanctuary. Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos are great business leaders, but they know about technology, right? That's what brings them together. Technology is an asset and they may not be the most biggest expert in it, but they care deeply about learning about that stuff. So, I think the next few years we're going to see a lot of C-level and leaders in organizations become a lot more tech savvy, and maybe hire coaches to help them navigate. And the Chief Digital Officer will become more of a coach rather than a person that rolls out Slack or something, you know? (Pierre laughs) So, I think that is going to be the next big jump, really, when we realize that you don't get an additional thing. It's just part of what you do. >> Serge, agree, disagree? >> I agree. The reality is that it is happening, right? Don't get me wrong. We see that every day that so many States are highly integrated, organizations and teams are measuring business value, business outcomes. The problem is that it's oftentimes a very small subset of what these organizations are doing. And so, it's almost like the CEO is coming as kind of these new kind of, as Dave described. And it's got this new style organization which is really there to kind of scale what has been working with these organizations, but we're kind of creating this kind of almost shadow organization, as opposed to fundamentally rethinking and redesigning the organization and redesigning kind of the operating model. And so, we're kind of layering new stuff as opposed to fundamentally transforming. So, as long as it is just kind of just a step towards kind of a true transformation, I think that's fine. The challenge is to, again, create kind of a new set of silos, which are now called value streams, as opposed to young functional silos that we have today. >> So a lot of opportunities identified in this survey but there are still a lot of challenges there. So, I'd love to get you guys and our final question here in this panel to help us understand, from the BizOps coalition's perspective, how are you helping organizations to navigate these challenges, so, they can become successful, transform and actually become agile to respond to rapidly changing market conditions? Pierre, kick us off. >> Sure, from a coalition perspective, we're just trying to make sure that there's a set of sensible principles. That people can look at, can adopt that I think Dave mentioned it in another discussion, that give you that clarity of thought and mind in terms of what should you be thinking? How should you be thinking about it? What are the various aspects you need to consider? And then from that perspective, how do you implement these things in a sensible way for your organization? By no means is this this like, "Here are the 10 steps, you do them, and you're done." You'll be rich beyond your wildest dreams. It's not how it work. You're still going to have to work at it. You're still going to have to figure some stuff out. You're going to have to deep in yourself in your organizational policies, procedures, understand how the organization is actually working. You can't strap a V8 to Mini Cooper and expect to break the land speed record, without the wheels falling off, or something going wrong. So, you really need to harness that in a more sensible manner to move forward. And I think the coalition is on the right path to help organizations realize, "what is the sensible way to go?" "What are principles we can adopt "that we can abide by that will help us drive business "in a different way and close this chasm of disparity "between business and IT?" >> And Dave, your perspective on the BizOps coalition, helping organizations to sort through these challenges. >> Yeah. I'm going to share a little bit of a personal story. So, I must admit that I wasn't keen on the whole idea, and Serge sent me some stuff and he's like, "Could you just provide some feedback." And I did, and then there was a press release with my name on it. I saw, I was like, "Oh my God! "I better get involved because I don't want to "have my name associated "with something that doesn't make sense" But I've actually been surprisingly, I've actually found it a lot more positive than I thought because of exactly what Pierre's saying. So, basically, the coalition is a group of vendors, a bucolic of consultants, some pseudo thought leaders that think they are very thoughtful and maybe they're not, people like me. (Pierre laughs) And what we're doing though, is actually trying to get some clarity of terminology, get some clarity of, what are the principles? What are those key principles? How do they relate to each other? Get some, some synergy to allow, 'cause there's so much noise out there. And hopefully, this is going to say, "Okay, this is what BizOps is. "This is why it's important. "These are some simple things." And then hopefully, because of the breadth that Serge and others have managed to get in terms of membership, we're going to get all of those organizations to be consistently talking about these things, which will then create pressure on the market to actually start adopting these things in the way that we're proposing, or challenge those ideas and then make them better. So, I'm kind of excited about it, surprisingly, 'cause the last thing we need is yet another manifesto and group of people that spend their whole time talking about things and never getting anything done. But actually I think there might be some valuable stuff that comes out here and we're going to inspect and adapt to make sure it is valuable. And if it isn't, we will stop. (chuckles) (Lisa laughs) >> And Serge, strap us up with your thoughts and extending that value. >> Look, we started the BizOps manifesto really with kind of a very simple observation. Everybody's talking about the same stuff, right? But you have a value stream management church, the digital product management's church, the DevOps church, with Scrum church, the safe church. Right? But we're all saying the same thing. But we create so much confusion with our large enterprise customers, but it's just not a grain on a set of principles. And just saying like, look, fundamentally, we're all talking about the same thing. And there are process aspects, there are cultural aspects. There is what you measure. But fundamentally we agree on the same core set of principles. And so for me, the BizOps manifesto, first and foremost is to get the stakeholders from these different communities together, and recognize that, at the end of the day, we share the same values and create some clarity to the market as to how these pieces fit to one another. The second aspect, which is more from our point of view, as one of the vendors of tools, right? There's tons of tools out there. We talk a lot about kind of measuring business outcomes as a primary way to actually align to everybody in our organization. Well, today if you look at any of these organizations, on average, they use about 40 different tools on one of these value streams. None of that stuff integrates with one another. It's extremely difficult for an organization to be able to trace from an investment, all the way to stuff that delivers value and production to a customer. And so, one of my hopes for the coalition is that we start to actually provide some platform, data models, ontologies, to start to integrate those different tools to facilitate that kind of integration. So, those are kind of the two things which I think we can really help kind of develop and and improve on. >> Well, we know that there's a tremendous amount of folks out there that are wanting to embrace agility across the business, identifying areas where they need to do work. So, great advice from the three of you. Thank you so much for joining me on this power panel today and sharing what organizations can do to really embrace that agility across the organization. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Pierre Viljoen, Dave West and Serge Lucio. I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this BizOps Manifesto Power Panel, Data Lake or Data Landfill. We're going to be talking about that today. I've got three guests joining me. We're going to dive through that. Kieran Taylor is here the CMO of Broadcom's Enterprise Software Division. Kieran, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Kevin Surace is here as well. Chairman and CTO of Appvance, hey Kevin. >> Hey Lisa. >> And Isaac Sacolick Author and CEO of StarCIO. Isaac, welcome. >> Hi Lisa, thanks for having me. >> So we're going to spend the next 25 to 30 minutes talking about the challenges and the opportunities that data brings to organizations. You guys are going to share some of your best practices for how organizations can actually sort through all this data to make data-driven decisions. We're also going to be citing some statistics from the Inaugural BizOps Industry Survey of the State of Digital Business in which 519 business and technology folks were surveyed across five nations. Let's go ahead and jump right in and the first one in that server that I just mentioned 97% of organizations say we've got data related challenges, limiting the amount of information that we actually have available to the business. Big conundrum there. How do organizations get out of that conundrum? Kieran, we're going to start with you. >> Thanks Lisa. You know, I think, I don't know if it's so much limiting information as it is limiting answers. There's no real shortage of data I don't think being captured, recently met with a unnamed auto manufacturer Who's collecting petabytes of data from their connected cars and they're doing that because they don't really yet know what questions they have of the data. So I think you get out of this Data Landfill conundrum by first understanding what questions to ask. It's not algorithms, it's not analytics. It's not, you know, math that's going to solve this problem. It's really, really understanding your customer's issues and what questions to ask of the data >> Understanding what questions to ask of the data. Kevin, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, look, I think it gets down to what questions you want to ask and what you want out of it, right? So there's questions you want to ask but what are the business outcomes you're looking for, which is the core of BizOps anyway, right? What are the business outcomes and what business outcomes can I act upon? So there are so many business outcomes you can get from data and you go, well, I can't legally act upon that. I can't practically act upon that. I can't, whether it's lay off people or hire people or whatever it is, right? So what are the actionable items? There is plenty of data. We would argue too much data. Now we could say, is the data good? Is the data bad? Is it poorly organized? Is it, noisy? There's all other problems, right? There's plenty of data. What do I do with it? What can I do that's actionable? If I was an automaker and I had lots of sensors on the road, I had petabytes, as Kieran says and I'd probably bringing in petabytes potentially every day. Well, I could make myself driving systems better. That's an obvious place to start or that's what I would do but I could also potentially use that to change people's insurance and say, if you drive in a certain way something we've never been able to do. If you drive in a certain way, based on the sensors you get a lower insurance rate, then nobody's done that. But now there's interesting business opportunities for that data that you didn't have one minute ago and I just gave away. So, (laughs) it's all about the actionable items in the data. How do you drive something to the top line and the bottom line? 'Cause in the end, that's how we're all measured. >> And Isaac, I know you say data is the lifeblood. What are your thoughts on this conundrum? >> Well, I think, you know, they gave you the start and the end of the equation, start with a question. What are you really trying to answer? What you don't understand that you want to learn about your business connect it to an outcome that is valuable to you. And really what most organizations struggle with is a process that goes through discovery, learning what's in the data, addressing data, quality issues, loading new data sources if required and really doing that iteratively and we're all agile people here at BizOps, right? So doing it iteratively, getting some answers out and understanding what the issues are with the underlying data and then going back and revisiting and reprioritizing what you want to do next. Do you want to go look at another question? Is the answer heading down a path that you can drive outcomes? Do you got to go cleanse some data? So it's really that, how do you put it together so that you can peel the onion back and start looking at data and getting insights out of it. >> Great advice, another challenge though, that the survey identified was that nearly 70% of the respondents and again, 519 business and technology professionals from five countries said, we are struggling to create business metrics from our data with so much data, so much that we can't access. Can you guys share best practices for how organizations would sort through and identify the best data sources from which they can identify the ideal business metrics? Kieran, take it away. >> Sure thing, I guess I'll build on Isaac's statements. Every company has some gap in data, right? And so when you do that, that data gap analysis I think you really, I don't know. It's like Alice in Wonderland, begin at the beginning, right? You start with that question like Isaac said, And I think the best questions are really born from an understanding of what your customers value. And if you dig into that, you understand what the customers value, you build it off of actual customer feedback, market research then you know what questions to ask and then from that, hey, what inputs do I need to really understand how to solve that particular business issue or problem. >> Kevin, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, I'm going to add to that, completely agree but, look, let's start with sales data, right? So sales data is something, everybody watching this understands, even if they're not in sales, they go well, okay, I understand sales data. What's interesting there is we know who our customers are. We could probably figure out if we have enough data, why they buy, are they buying because of a certain sales person? Are they buying because it's a certain region? Are they buying because of some demographic that we don't understand, but AI can pull out, right? So I would like to know, who's buying and why they're buying. Because if I know that I might make more of what more of those people want whatever that is, certain fundamental sales changes or product changes or whatever it is. So if you could certainly start there, if you start nowhere else, say I sell X today. I'd like to sell X times 1.2 by next year. Okay, great. Can I learn from the last five years of sales, millions of units or million or whatever it is, how to do that better and the answer is for sure yes and yes there's problems with the data and there's holes in the data as Kieran said and there's missing data. It doesn't matter, there's a lot of data around sales. So you can just start there and probably drive some top line growth, just doing what you're already doing but doing it better and learning how to do it better. >> Learning how to do it better. Isaac, talk to us about what your thoughts are here with respect to this challenge. >> Well, when you look at that percentage 70% struggling with business metrics, you know what I see is some companies struggling when they have too few metrics and you know, their KPIs, it really doesn't translate well to people doing work for a customer for an application, responding to an issue. So when you have too few in there too disconnected from the work, people don't understand how to use them and then on the flip side I see other organizations trying to create metrics around every single part of the operation, you know, dozens of different ways of measuring user experience and so forth. And that doesn't work because now we don't know what to prioritize. So I think the art of this is management coming back and saying, what are the metrics? Do we want to see impact and changes over in a short amount of time, over the next quarter, over the next six months and to pick a couple in each category, certainly starting with the customer, certainly looking at sales but then also looking at operations and looking at quality and looking at risk and say to the organization, these are the two or three we're going to focus on in the next six months and then I think that's what simplifies it for organizations. >> Thanks, Isaac. So something that I found interesting, it's not surprising in that the survey found that too much data is one of the biggest challenges that organizations have followed by the limitations that we just talked about in terms of identifying what are the ideal business metrics, but a whopping 74% of survey respondents said we failed to have key data available in real time, which is a big inhibitor for data-driven decision-making. Can you guys offer some advice to organizations? How can they harness this data and glean insights from it faster, Kieran, take it away. >> Yeah, I think there are probably five steps to establishing business KPIs and Lisa your first two questions and these gentleman's answers laid out the first two that is define the questions that you want answers for and then identify what those data inputs would be. You know, if you've got a formula in mind, what data inputs do do you need? The remaining three steps. One is, you know, to evaluate the data you've got and then identify what's missing, you know what do you need to then fetch? And then that fetching, you need to think about the measurement method, the frequency I think Isaac mentioned, you know this concept of tools for all. We have too many tools to collect data. So, the measurement method and frequency is important standardizing on tools and automating that collection wherever possible. And then the last step, this is really the people component of the formula. You need to identify stakeholders that will own those business KPIs and even communicate them within the organization. That human element is sometimes forgotten and it's really important. >> It is important, it's one of the challenges as well. Kevin, talk to us about your thoughts here. >> Yeah, again I mean, for sure you've got in the end you've got the human element. You can give people all kinds of KPIs as Isaac said, often it's too many. You have now KPI the business to death and nobody can get out and do anything that doesn't work. Obviously you can't improve things until you measure them. So you have to measure, we get that. But this question of live data is interesting. My personal view is only certain kinds of data are interesting, absolutely live in the moment. So I think people get in their mind, oh, well if I could deploy IOT everywhere and get instantaneous access within one second to the amalgam of that data, I'm making up words too. That would be interesting. Are you sure that'd be interesting? I might rather analyze the last week of real, real data, really deep analysis, right? Build you know, a real model around that and say, okay for the next week, you ought to do the following. Now I get that if you're in the high-frequency stock trading business you know, every millisecond counts, okay? But most of our businesses do not run by the millisecond and we're not going to make a business decision especially humans involved in a millisecond anyway. We make business decisions based on a fair bit of data, days and weeks. So this is just my own personal opinion. I think people get hung up on this. I've got to have all this live data. No, you want great data analysis using AI and machine learning to evaluate as much data as you can get over whatever period of time that is a week, a month a year and start making some rational decisions off of that information. I think that is how you run a business that's going to crush your competition. >> Good advice, Isaac what are your thoughts on these comments? >> Yeah, I'm going to pair off of Kevin's comments. You know, how do you chip away at this problem at getting more real time data? And I'll share two insights first, from the top down, you know, when StarCIO works with a group of CEO and their executive group, you know how are they getting their data? Well, they're getting it in a boardroom with PowerPoints with spreadsheets behind those PowerPoints, with analysts doing a lot of number crunching and behind all that are all the systems of record around the CRM and the ERP and all the other systems that are telling them how they're performing. And I suggest to them for a month, leave the world of PowerPoint and Excel and bring your analysts in to show you the data live in the systems, ask questions and see what it's like to work with real time data. That first changes the perspective in terms of all the manual work that goes into homogenizing that data for them. But then they start getting used to looking at the tools where the data is actually living. So that's an exercise from the top down from the bottom up when we talk to the it groups, you know so much of our data technologies were built at a time when batch processing in our data centers was the only way to go. We ran these things overnight to move data from point a to point B and with the Cloud, with data streaming technologies it's really a new game in town. And so it's really time for many organizations to modernize and thinking about how they're streaming data. Doesn't necessarily have to be real time. It's not really IOT but it's really saying, I need to have my data updated on a regular basis with an SLA against it so that my teams and my businesses can make good decisions around things. >> So let's talk now about digital transformation. We've been talking about that for years. We talked a lot about in 2020, the acceleration of digital transformation for obvious reasons. But when organizations are facing this data conundrum that we talked about, this sort of data disconnect too much can't get what we need right away. Do we need it right away? How did they flip the script on that so that it doesn't become an impediment to digital transformation but it becomes an accelerant. Kieran >> You know, a lot of times you'll hear vendors talk about technology as being the answer, right? So MI, ML, my math is better than your math, et cetera. And technology is important but it's only effective to the point that which people can actually interpret understand and use the data. And so I would put forth this notion of having data at all levels throughout an organization too often. What you'll see is that I think Isaac mentioned it, you know the data is delivered to the C-suite via PowerPoint and it's been sanitized and scrubbed, et cetera. But heck, by the time it gets to the C-suite it's three weeks old. Data at all levels is making sure that throughout organization, the right people have real-time access to data and can make actionable decisions based upon that. So I think that's a real vital ingredient to successful digital transformation. >> Kevin. >> Well, I like to think of digital transformation as looking at all of your relatively manual or paper-based or other processes whatever they are throughout the organization and saying is this something that can now be done for lack of a better word by a machine, right? And that machine could be algorithms. It could be computers, it could be humans it could be Cloud, it could be AI it could be IOT doesn't really matter. (clears throat) And so there's a reason to do that and of course, the basis of that is the data. You've got to collect data to say, this is how we've been performing. This is what we've been doing. So an example, a simple example of digitalization is people doing RPA around customer support. Now you collect a lot of data on how customer support has been supporting customers. You break that into tiers and you say, here's the easiest, lowest tier. I had farmed that out to probably some other country 20 years ago or 10 years ago. Can I even with the systems in place, can I automate that with a set of processes, Robotic Process Automation that digitizes that process now, Now there still might be, you know 20 different screens that click on all different kinds of things, whatever it is, but can I do that? Can I do it with some Chatbots? Can I do it with it? No, I'm not going to do all the customer support that way but I could probably do a fair bit. Can I digitize that process? Can I digitize the process? Great example we all know is insurance companies taking claims. Okay, I have a phone. Can, I take a picture of my car that just got smashed send it in, let AI analyze it and frankly, do an ACH transfer within the hour, because if it costs them insurance company on average 300 to $500 depending on who they are to process a claim, it's cheaper to just send me the $500 then even question it. And if I did it two or three times, well then I'm trying to steal their money and I should go to jail, right? So these are just, I'm giving these as examples 'cause they're examples that everyone who is watching this would go, oh I understand you're digitizing a process. So now when we get to much more complex processes that we're digitizing in data or hiring or whatever, those are a little harder to understand but I just tried to give those as like everyone understands yes, you should digitize those. Those are obvious, right? >> Now those are great examples, you're right. They're relatable across the board here. Isaac, talk to me about what your thoughts are about. Okay, let's do the conundrum. How do we flip the script and leverage data, access to it insights to drive and facilitate digital transformation rather than impede it. >> Well remember, you know, digital transformation is really about changing the business model, changing how you're working with customers and what markets you're going after. You're being forced to do that because of the pace digital technologies are enabling competitors to outpace you. And so we really like starting digital transformations with a vision. What does this business need to do better, differently more of what markets are we going to go after? What types of technologies are important? And we're going to create that vision but we know long-term planning, doesn't work. We know multi-year planning, doesn't work. So we're going to send our teams out on an agile journey over the next sprint, over the next quarter and we're going to use data to give us information about whether we're heading in the right direction. Should we do more of something? Is this feature higher priority? Is there a certain customer segment that we need to pay attention to more? Is there a set of defects happening in our technology that we have to address? Is there a new competitor stealing market share all that kind of data is what the organization needs to be looking at on a very regular basis to say, do we need to pivot, what we're doing? Do we need to accelerate something? Are we heading in the right direction? Should we give ourselves high fives and celebrate a quick win? Because we've accomplished something 'cause so much of transformation is what we're doing today. We're going to change what we're doing over the next three years, and then guess what? There's going to be a new set of technologies. There's going to be another disruption that we can't anticipate and we want our teams sitting on their toes waiting to look at data and saying, what should we do next? >> That's a great segue Isaac into our last question, which is around culture that's always one of those elephants in the room, right? Because so much cultural transformation is necessary but it's incredibly difficult. So question for you guys, Kieran we'll start with you is, should you advise leadership, should really create a culture, a company-wide culture around data? What do you think? >> Absolutely. I mean, this reminds me of DevOps in many ways and you know, the data has to be shared at all levels and has to empower people to make decisions at their respective levels so that we're not, you know kind of siloed in our knowledge or our decision-making, it's through that collective intelligence that I think organizations can move forward more quickly but they do have to change the culture and they've got to have everyone in the room. Everyone's got a stake in driving business success from the C-suite down to the individual contributor >> Right, Kevin, your thoughts >> You know what? Kieran's right. Data silos, one of the biggest brick walls in all of our way, all the time, you know SecOps says there is no way I'm going to share that database because it's got PII. Okay, well, how about if we strip the PII? Well, then that won't be good for something else and you're getting these huge arguments and if you're not driving it from the top, certainly the CIO, maybe the CFO, maybe the CEO I would argue the CEO, drives it from the top. 'Cause the CEO drives company culture and you know, we talk BizOps and the first word of that is Biz. It's the business, right? It's Ops being driven by business goals and the CEO has to set the business goals. It's not really up to the CIO to set business goals. They're setting operational goals, it's up to the CEO. So when the CEO comes out and says our business goals are to drive up sales by this drive down cost by this drive up speed of product development, whatever it is and we're going to digitize all of our processes to do that. We're going to set in KPIs. We're going to measure everything that we do and everybody's going to work around this table. By the way just like we did with DevOps a decade ago, right? And said, Dev, you actually have to work with Ops now and they go, those dangerous guys way over in that other building, we don't even know who they are but in time people realize that we're all on the same team and that if developers develop something that operations can't host and support and keep alive, it's junk right? And we used to do that and now we're much better at it. And whether it's Dev, SecOps or Dev two-way Ops, whatever all those teams working together. Now we're going to spread that out and make it a bigger pyre on the company and it starts with the CEO. And when the CEO makes it a directive for the company I think we're all going to be successful. >> Isaac, what are your thoughts? >> I think we're really talking about a culture of transformation and a culture of collaboration. I mean, again, everything that we're doing now we're going to build, we're going to learn. We're going to use data to pivot what we're doing. We're going to release a product to customers. We're going to get feedback. We're going to continue to iterate over those things. Same thing when it comes to sales, same things that you know, the experiments that we do for marketing, what we're doing today, we're constantly learning. We're constantly challenging our assumptions. We're trying to throw out the sacred cows with status quo, 'cause we know there's going to be another Island that we have to go after and that's the transformation part. The collaboration part is really you know, what you're hearing. Multiple teams, not just Dev and Ops and not just data and Dev, but really the spectrum of business of product, of stakeholders, of marketing and sales, working with technologists and saying, look this is the things that we need to go after over these time periods and work collaboratively and iteratively around them. And again, the data is the foundation for this, right? And we talk about a learning culture as part of that, the data is a big part of that learning, learning new skills and what new skills to learn is as part of that. But when I think about culture, you know the things that slow down organizations is when they're not transforming fast enough, or they're going in five or six different directions, they're not collaborative enough and the data is the element in there that is an equalizer. It's what you show everybody to say, look what we're doing today is not going to make us survive over the next three years. >> The data equalizer, that sounds like it could be movie coming out in 2021. (laughing) Gentlemen, thank you for walking us through some of those interesting metrics coming out of the BizOps Inaugural Survey. Yes, there are challenges with data. Many of them aren't surprising but there's also a lot of tremendous opportunity and I liked how you kind of brought it around to from a cultural perspective. It's got to start from that C-suite to Kieran's point all the way down. I know we could keep talking, we're out of time, but we'll have to keep following, this as a very interesting topic. One that is certainly pervasive across industries. Thanks guys for sharing your insights. >> Than you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> For Kieran Taylor, Kevin Surace and Isaac Sacolick. I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back. Lisa Martin here talking with Laureen Knudsen, a CUBE alumni. She's the Chief Transformation Officer at Broadcom and a founding member of the BizOps Coalition. Laureen, I'm excited to talk to you about an interesting topic today. Welcome back to the program. >> Thank you so much. Glad to be here. >> So we're going to be, yeah, we're going to be talking about the pros and cons of adding a Chief Digital Officer. You say, there may be some friction there, but it's going to be temporary as the benefits will be long lasting. So let's dive right in. Talk to me about what the role of a Chief Digital Officer is. Is this something that a CIO can take on? >> In some organizations, I think the CIO is taking on this role. And it's primarily focusing on what we're calling the digitization of the organization. So it's across more than just IT though. So it's looking at what kind of digital marketing should you be doing? What are your competitors doing? How can you make the most bang for your buck essentially across your entire organization? So it also includes parts that generally haven't been included in digital transformations, like your legal team or your finance team and the interactions with them. Can your contracts be digitized? Can they be made more efficient and more automated, right? So it's looking at the entire organization both internally and externally and looking at the strategy for how do you accomplish that and how do you truly make your organization as effective as it can be. >> Is this person almost like a bridge between the different lines of business and IT to get that external, internal focus? >> Yes, yeah, many people in IT don't have that business knowledge. That's a really good point. And so this person will need to have not only business knowledge but technical knowledge so they can essentially translate, right, the verbiage that is used in the different organizations and the jargon that's used to make it, to make the understanding between the two of what's needed more smooth, you know, the communication more smooth within the organization. Also focusing on customer value and making sure that, that both sides are saying the same, you know, when they use the same words, they're saying the same things. So doing that translation in that organization, across the entire company. >> Looking at it from the holistic perspective, you know, I know that the BizOps Coalition survey also showed that something that we hear that digital transformation isn't just about the technology. It's got to be all of the factors coming together aligned on business outcomes, aligned on what's the impact and the value to the customer. How is the Chief Digital Officer role going to facilitate that, not just understanding, but putting in practice that digital transformation is not just about technology? >> Well, and again, 95% of companies are confirming that, that right now they're focusing much more on business outcomes than just on technology. And so, there really is that need to, you know, what does that mean, right? When you're focusing on business outcomes, it often includes a lot of technology, but it's, you know, there's a different path to take to make sure that you're focusing on your customer outcomes. There's a lot of organizations that are looking at their apps and realizing their customers find the most value when they never have to use them. So how do you accomplish that, right? That's not adding new features in, that's not doing something new for the customer other than making it, making sure everything runs so smoothly that they never have to access your app. You know, we're running into that with a lot of business organizations like insurance companies or banking, phone, you know, telco companies, things like that where people really don't want to use the products you're creating for them if they don't have to. >> Right, adoption is always something that we talk about that can be a KPI but also a challenge. One of the things that I noticed that information that, that Broadcom provided was that Gartner says, in the next 12 months, 67% of organizations are going to be looking at hiring a Chief Digital Officer. Let's have you talk us through what are some of the forcing functions behind that? Obviously the last year has been quite, filled with quite a bit of uncertainty but we look back a couple of decades, there wasn't talk of a Chief Digital Officer. So, why this, why is there such a big uptick in the need for this role? >> Well, it's interesting 'cause Gartner originally talked about the Chief Digital Officer in about 2010 to 2012 timeframe where they were talking about the need for it. And it was a lot of, I think fast moving companies and the companies that really have made a lot of advancements in their effectiveness and their customer centricity have really grabbed onto this concept whether they've called it a Chief Digital Officer or not, but in the last year, it's forced everyone to have a digital footprint in the market. If you'll notice even your local restaurants that are family owned now have some sort of way to order their food digitally, right? So we're digitizing the entire thing and COVID is really, required every company to look at much more how they can do things electronically, any type of, you know, digitization whether it's like I've said before the marketing, or even how do you handle all of your contracts when there's no in-person signature and no, you know, fax machines to send things back and forth, right? It's all about making sure that all of that's secure and protected. So it's going across the entire organization. And that's really creating that need for somebody to be able to look at how your company can do all of those different things. Because quite frankly, the CIO already has a day job, right? Your Chief Marketing Officer already has a day job. So trying to look at how to be really innovative in these areas creates a gap, right? And people aren't finding that extra time to be able to do that and to look at how to be really streamlining their organizations and taking that innovation in with both internal and external viewpoints. >> Well, it'd be, imagine you mentioned, you know, the CIO, the CMO, the CFO having day jobs, but also one of the things it sounds to me like is important for this CDO role is to have objectivity. To be able to rise above all the different functions, the different technology stocks and probably silos that are there and really look holistically across the organization. So talk to me about some of the skills that are really required from the Chief Digital Officer. Is this someone that needs to have both an IT background and a business background, does it matter? >> I think as long as they have the knowledge of either side, that where they came from, isn't going to matter but you're going to, the problem is going to be finding the people with those dual skill sets, right? Because you're going to need somebody that can understand your business and your technology side to marry the two together. But they're also going to need to understand all the intricacies of the legal aspects that need to go into creating your products or the financial aspects of tracking what happens with your products. So they're really going to need to be not only very well educated and have a lot of experience, but the other thing they're going to need is that emotional empathy and that ability to work with everybody in the organization. Essentially if they do their job right, they'll be coming in and working with every other Vice President or chief in your organization. So there'll be helping to influence all of those people. And that can create a lot of conflict at first because you're having somebody else come in to give the CIO insights into how they can innovate technologically or to give the Chief Marketing Officer information on new ways that they can do their jobs, that they can digitize the marketing to be more effective and the right frame of mind to be able to do that. You know, hiring is going to be another place where these people will have a large imprint because they're going to need the knowledge to be able to interview all across the board for people that can help them get these new innovations into place. For example, if marketing needs to expand into more of a digital footprint to actually get the, the imprints that they need, right? How do you interview for that, when as a marketing leader, you've never run a digital part, a digital organization before. So it's really having the ability to partner with every other department in the organization and work with them, which, you know, to your point that can cause some conflicts to start off with but in the long run, it'll, it should be well worth it. >> Well, it sounds like that friction is probably unavoidable in the beginning as this person really works to understand all of the inner machinations of the organization and really identify what's best for the overall business. You mentioned empathy. And I think that's something that we've heard a lot about in the last year as leaders really needing to adopt that. And it sounds like this role for it to be such a catalyst of IT and business alignment, as it sounds like it really can be, that empathetic gene really needs to be turned on pretty high, I think. >> A 100%, right? They need to be able to be really understanding of the organization and the other people that they're working with, that those people do have a great bit of knowledge about the company that they're joining, right, generally and that they'll understand their jobs on a day-to-day basis. But the innovation parts, right, is where the Chief Digital Officer will come in. And if the Chief Digital Officer does this well, they can actually have a really big impact on the corporate culture as well which is a huge area that people are focusing on these days especially as every employee is remote. So it's a big job and a big ask and it's going to be really important for companies to hire the person with the best fit for their organization in this new role. >> You mentioned culture and that's something that is imperative but digital transformations won't be successful without the right cultural transformation. But that's easier said than done especially for organizations that have been around a while. And they're so used to the way they've done business for decades that it's hard to change that mindset, but it sounds like the Chief Digital Officer role should be one that is an influencer of that cultural change. How do you see them being able to do that within a, you know, stodgy, legacy institution? What are some of the things that they would be able to unlock? >> They should be able to re-energize portions of the company, right? If you're bringing in innovative ideas into a company that has had some difficulty hiring, right? There's a lot of companies that before the pandemic hit, were only starting to look at agile practices and things because quite frankly they couldn't hire anyone out of college to work there and they were afraid most of their workforce would retire out. So they're trying to get those people that want to be innovative, the high, the people that graduated top of their class. You're going to need the organization to change. And this is a perfect example of somebody that can come in and be a catalyst for all of that. So if they're coming up with new innovative ideas, if your marketing department wasn't transforming into a highly digital marketing department, they can come help invigorate that, right? And come up with a plan to get people in but also to train the people that are there that do want to learn these new skills in order bring the whole organization along with them. And I think they can have a huge impact if they, and get those innovative culture cycles changing. >> I'm curious if you think that, you know, given the last year and the amount of uncertainty that the pandemic has brought to the market, to the economy, now some of the challenges that leaders say, we're still going to have similar challenges in 2021. We still have a good percentage of our workforce remote. Is the role that the Chief Digital Officer can play, is that potentially going to help companies, really, is it going to help make a difference between those companies that really, not just survive this time but thrive like the winners versus the losers of tomorrow? >> I think it can, right? And a lot of this is going to be how the people that hire in the Chief Digital Officer and how much that team is willing to work with them. One of the things that we notice is the companies that do advance their culture a lot and advance in their customer centricity, the leadership level of the organization acts as a team as much as they expect to the frontline crews to act as teams. So you've got to be working together. And that goes all the way through, right? Your HR departments can't be incenting one group to work against another. You can't incent two people to have a goal, you know, to reach a goal in a different way and incent them differently so that they end up working against each other, right? This has to start being a real collaborative effort and it'll end up impacting the entire organization. But it's those companies that start looking at their leadership organization as a team, where they're all playing to make the same goals, to make their customers the most successful they can be. That's when you really start getting those changes and you really see a Chief Digital Officer having an impact versus those organizations where, you know, they'll be on the job for two to three years and it'll just go away because they've, you know, fought against themselves and not form that team culture. >> The impact is, can be tremendous from what I'm hearing. When we think about digital transformation, you know, people, processes, technology, that culture that's so important, we're also talking about that in the context of how do organizations use all their data and make the most sense of it. As more data sources become available, data's coming in faster, how does the Chief Digital Officer align with all of the data folks within an organization so that they can all have access to the right information to make data-driven decisions that are really for internal and externally looking benefits? >> Right, they can help make sense of the data that the company is collecting. One of the main things we're hearing right now is a lot of organizations are collecting a ton of data and they're either, you know, having some organization that creates metrics out of it. And that group just doesn't know really what the business does. They're relatively new to the business as a lot of data organizations are. So they go grab standard metrics and just provide, you know, shove as many metrics out. That's their output point, right? Where they get brownie points for every metric they create. And so we're hearing from a lot of leaders that, that they're getting literally hundreds of metrics a month and they have no idea what they're supposed to be doing with them or what this data is supposed to be showing them. And that's really of no benefit to anybody, right? It's a waste of time all through the organization. So the Chief Digital Officer, again, will be looking at what are the right business metrics to be tracking for that business and be working with those data officers to get the right innovation in so that you can see how well you're transforming, how well your company is actually doing, how much your customers actually do like what you're creating and the impact of the changes that you're making. So another thing we're being asked a lot of is, you know, I'm funding things and I'm being told they'll provide my customers value but when they get released I have no idea if they are, right? And the Chief Data Officer will help, be putting all the metrics that tie that in and showing telemetry gets built in. So that they've got the metrics that you need to truly run your business well. And so again, that'll be another part of the organization that the Chief Digital Officer would be working with. Along with the CIO, they'll be working with the data organizations as well. >> Well, there's so much opportunity that the chief Digital Officer role can deliver and unlock value in an organization as you've talked about. It'll be interesting, Laureen to see what happens in the next 12 months. Do we see what Gartner's predicting, 67% of companies are going to be adopting this role. I'm curious to see what the BizOps Coalition finds in the next year or so but thank you for sharing this insight. And this definitely sounds like a role where every day will be interesting, unique and not boring. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Hi, please join the biz ops coalition on April 21st. As we discuss how to get from chaos to clarity through your digital transformation. Recently, we commissioned a survey, um, by the biz ops coalition that the pen and found that the pandemic was a forcing function for better alignment towards business goals and outcomes. In fact, 87% of survey respondents believe 2020 increased the need for companies to be more agile and 95% confirmed. Digital transformation is about doing about business outcomes, not just technology. So while there's a verse reflects of the pandemic, um, are beginning to wane. A lot of the outcomes are here to stay. So join us on the 21st at 11:00 AM Eastern. As we discuss getting through from chaos >>To clarity.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud 2, live here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. Again, all day wall-to-wall coverage, just had a great interview with Walmart, we've got a Next interview coming up, you're going to hear from Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy, two experts, both experienced entrepreneurs, executives in technology. We're here to break down what just happened with Walmart, and what's coming up with George Gilbert, former colleague, Wikibon analyst, Gartner Analyst, and now independent investor and expert. George, great to see you, I know you're following this space. Like you read about it, remember the first days when Dataverse came out, we were talking about them coming out of Berkeley? >> Dave: Snowflake. >> John: Snowflake. >> Dave: Snowflake In the early days. >> We, collectively, have been chronicling the data movement since 2010, you were part of our team, now you've got your nose to the grindstone, you're seeing the next wave. What's this all about? Walmart building their own super cloud, we got Bob Muglia talking about how these next wave of apps are coming. What are the super apps? What's the super cloud to you? >> Well, this key's off Dave's really interesting questions to Walmart, which was like, how are they building their supercloud? 'Cause it makes a concrete example. But what was most interesting about his description of the Walmart WCMP, I forgot what it stood for. >> Dave: Walmart Cloud Native Platform. >> Walmart, okay. He was describing where the logic could run in these stateless containers, and maybe eventually serverless functions. But that's just it, and that's the paradigm of microservices, where the logic is in this stateless thing, where you can shoot it, or it fails, and you can spin up another one, and you've lost nothing. >> That was their triplet model. >> Yeah, in fact, and that was what they were trying to move to, where these things move fluidly between data centers. >> But there's a but, right? Which is they're all stateless apps in the cloud. >> George: Yeah. >> And all their stateful apps are on-prem and VMs. >> Or the stateful part of the apps are in VMs. >> Okay. >> And so if they really want to lift their super cloud layer off of this different provider's infrastructure, they're going to need a much more advanced software platform that manages data. And that goes to the -- >> Muglia and Handy, that you and I did, that's coming up next. So the big takeaway there, George, was, I'll set it up and you can chime in, a new breed of data apps is emerging, and this highly decentralized infrastructure. And Tristan Handy of DBT Labs has a sort of a solution to begin the journey today, Muglia is working on something that's way out there, describe what you learned from it. >> Okay. So to talk about what the new data apps are, and then the platform to run them, I go back to the using what will probably be seen as one of the first data app examples, was Uber, where you're describing entities in the real world, riders, drivers, routes, city, like a city plan, these are all defined by data. And the data is described in a structure called a knowledge graph, for lack of a, no one's come up with a better term. But that means the tough, the stuff that Jack built, which was all stateless and sits above cloud vendors' infrastructure, it needs an entirely different type of software that's much, much harder to build. And the way Bob described it is, you're going to need an entirely new data management infrastructure to handle this. But where, you know, we had this really colorful interview where it was like Rock 'Em Sock 'Em, but they weren't really that much in opposition to each other, because Tristan is going to define this layer, starting with like business intelligence metrics, where you're defining things like bookings, billings, and revenue, in business terms, not in SQL terms -- >> Well, business terms, if I can interrupt, he said the one thing we haven't figured out how to APIify is KPIs that sit inside of a data warehouse, and that's essentially what he's doing. >> George: That's what he's doing, yes. >> Right. And so then you can now expose those APIs, those KPIs, that sit inside of a data warehouse, or a data lake, a data store, whatever, through APIs. >> George: And the difference -- >> So what does that do for you? >> Okay, so all of a sudden, instead of working at technical data terms, where you're dealing with tables and columns and rows, you're dealing instead with business entities, using the Uber example of drivers, riders, routes, you know, ETA prices. But you can define, DBT will be able to define those progressively in richer terms, today they're just doing things like bookings, billings, and revenue. But Bob's point was, today, the data warehouse that actually runs that stuff, whereas DBT defines it, the data warehouse that runs it, you can't do it with relational technology >> Dave: Relational totality, cashing architecture. >> SQL, you can't -- >> SQL caching architectures in memory, you can't do it, you've got to rethink down to the way the data lake is laid out on the disk or cache. Which by the way, Thomas Hazel, who's speaking later, he's the chief scientist and founder at Chaos Search, he says, "I've actually done this," basically leave it in an S3 bucket, and I'm going to query it, you know, with no caching. >> All right, so what I hear you saying then, tell me if I got this right, there are some some things that are inadequate in today's world, that's not compatible with the Supercloud wave. >> Yeah. >> Specifically how you're using storage, and data, and stateful. >> Yes. >> And then the software that makes it run, is that what you're saying? >> George: Yeah. >> There's one other thing you mentioned to me, it's like, when you're using a CRM system, a human is inputting data. >> George: Nothing happens till the human does something. >> Right, nothing happens until that data entry occurs. What you're talking about is a world that self forms, polling data from the transaction system, or the ERP system, and then builds a plan without human intervention. >> Yeah. Something in the real world happens, where the user says, "I want a ride." And then the software goes out and says, "Okay, we got to match a driver to the rider, we got to calculate how long it takes to get there, how long to deliver 'em." That's not driven by a form, other than the first person hitting a button and saying, "I want a ride." All the other stuff happens autonomously, driven by data and analytics. >> But my question was different, Dave, so I want to get specific, because this is where the startups are going to come in, this is the disruption. Snowflake is a data warehouse that's in the cloud, they call it a data cloud, they refactored it, they did it differently, the success, we all know it looks like. These areas where it's inadequate for the future are areas that'll probably be either disrupted, or refactored. What is that? >> That's what Muglia's contention is, that the DBT can start adding that layer where you define these business entities, they're like mini digital twins, you can define them, but the data warehouse isn't strong enough to actually manage and run them. And Muglia is behind a company that is rethinking the database, really in a fundamental way that hasn't been done in 40 or 50 years. It's the first, in his contention, the first real rethink of database technology in a fundamental way since the rise of the relational database 50 years ago. >> And I think you admit it's a real Hail Mary, I mean it's quite a long shot right? >> George: Yes. >> Huge potential. >> But they're pretty far along. >> Well, we've been talking on theCUBE for 12 years, and what, 10 years going to AWS Reinvent, Dave, that no one database will rule the world, Amazon kind of showed that with them. What's different, is it databases are changing, or you can have multiple databases, or? >> It's a good question. And the reason we've had multiple different types of databases, each one specialized for a different type of workload, but actually what Muglia is behind is a new engine that would essentially, you'll never get rid of the data warehouse, or the equivalent engine in like a Databricks datalake house, but it's a new engine that manages the thing that describes all the data and holds it together, and that's the new application platform. >> George, we have one minute left, I want to get real quick thought, you're an investor, and we know your history, and the folks watching, George's got a deep pedigree in investment data, and we can testify against that. If you're going to invest in a company right now, if you're a customer, I got to make a bet, what does success look like for me, what do I want walking through my door, and what do I want to send out? What companies do I want to look at? What's the kind of of vendor do I want to evaluate? Which ones do I want to send home? >> Well, the first thing a customer really has to do when they're thinking about next gen applications, all the people have told you guys, "we got to get our data in order," getting that data in order means building an integrated view of all your data landscape, which is data coming out of all your applications. It starts with the data model, so, today, you basically extract data from all your operational systems, put it in this one giant, central place, like a warehouse or lake house, but eventually you want this, whether you call it a fabric or a mesh, it's all the data that describes how everything hangs together as in one big knowledge graph. There's different ways to implement that. And that's the most critical thing, 'cause that describes your Uber landscape, your Uber platform. >> That's going to power the digital transformation, which will power the business transformation, which powers the business model, which allows the builders to build -- >> Yes. >> Coders to code. That's Supercloud application. >> Yeah. >> George, great stuff. Next interview you're going to see right here is Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy, they're going to unpack this new wave. Great segment, really worth unpacking and reading between the lines with George, and Dave Vellante, and those two great guests. And then we'll come back here for the studio for more of the live coverage of Supercloud 2. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to Supercloud 2, live here in Palo Alto, our studio, where we're doing a live stage performance and virtually syndicating out around the world. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, my co-host with the The Cube here. We've got Kit Colbert, the CTO of VM. We're doing a keynote on Cloud Chaos, the evolution of SuperCloud Architecture Kit. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me back. It's great to be here for Supercloud 2. >> And so we're going to dig into it. We're going to do a Q&A. We're going to let you present. You got some slides. I really want to get this out there, it's really compelling story. Do the presentation and then we'll come back and discuss. Take it away. >> Yeah, well thank you. So, we had a great time at the original Supercloud event, since then, been talking to a lot of customers, and started to better formulate some of the thinking that we talked about last time So, let's jump into it. Just a few quick slides to sort of set the tone here. So, if we go to the the next slide, what that shows is the journey that we see customers on today, going from what we call Cloud First into this phase that many customers are stuck in, called Cloud Chaos, and where they want to get to, and this is the term customers actually use, we didn't make this up, we heard it from customers. This notion of Cloud Smart, right? How do they use cloud more effectively, more intelligently? Now, if you walk through this journey, customers start with Cloud First. They usually select a single cloud that they're going to standardize on, and when they do that, they have to build out a whole bunch of functionality around that cloud. Things you can see there on the screen, disaster recovery, security, how do they monitor it or govern it? Like, these are things that are non-negotiable, you've got to figure it out, and typically what they do is, they leverage solutions that are specific for that cloud, and that's fine when you have just one cloud. But if we build out here, what we see is that most customers are using more than just one, they're actually using multiple, not necessarily 10 or however many on the screen, but this is just as an example. And so what happens is, they have to essentially duplicate or replicate that stack they've built for each different cloud, and they do so in a kind of a siloed manner. This results in the Cloud Chaos term that that we talked about before. And this is where most businesses out there are, they're using two, maybe three public clouds. They've got some stuff on-prem and they've also got some stuff out at the edge. This is apps, data, et cetera. So, this is the situation, this is sort of that Cloud Chaos. So, the question is, how do we move from this phase to Cloud Smart? And this is where the architecture comes in. This is why architecture, I think, is so important. It's really about moving away from these single cloud services that just solve a problem for one cloud, to something we call a Cross-Cloud service. Something that can support a set of functionality across all clouds, and that means not just public clouds, but also private clouds, edge, et cetera, and when you evolve that across the board, what you get is this sort of Supercloud. This notion that we're talking about here, where you combine these cross-cloud services in many different categories. You can see some examples there on the screen. This is not meant to be a complete set of things, but just examples of what can be done. So, this is sort of the transition and transformation that we're talking about here, and I think the architecture piece comes in both for the individual cloud services as well as that Supercloud concept of how all those services come together. >> Great presentation., thanks for sharing. If you could pop back to that slide, on the Cloud Chaos one. I just want to get your thoughts on something there. This is like the layout of the stack. So, this slide here that I'm showing on the screen, that you presented, okay, take us through that complexity. This is the one where I wanted though, that looks like a spaghetti code mix. >> Yes. >> So, do you turn this into a Supercloud stack, right? Is that? >> well, I think it's, it's an evolving state that like, let's take one of these examples, like security. So, instead of implementing security individually in different ways, using different technologies, different tooling for each cloud, what you would do is say, "Hey, I want a single security solution that works across all clouds", right? A concrete example of this would be secure software supply chain. This is probably one of the top ones that I hear when I talk to customers. How do I know that the software I'm building is truly what I expect it to be, and not something that some hacker has gotten into, and polluted with malicious code? And what they do is that, typically today, their teams have gone off and created individual secure software supply chain solutions for each cloud. So, now they could say, "Hey, I can take a single implementation and just have different endpoints." It could go to Google, or AWS, or on-prem, or wherever have you, right? So, that's the sort of architectural evolution that we're talking about. >> You know, one of the things we hear, Dave, you've been on theCUBE all the time, and we, when we talk privately with customers who are asking us like, what's, what's going on? They have the same complaint, "I don't want to build a team, a dev team, for that stack." So, if you go back to that slide again, you'll see that, that illustrates the tech stack for the clouds and the clouds at the bottom. So, the number one complaint we hear, and I want to get your reaction to that, "I don't want to have a team to have to work on that. So, I'm going to pick one and then have a hedge secondary one, as a backup." Here, that's one, that's four, five, eight, ten, ten environments. >> Yeah, I got a lot. >> That's going to be the reality, so, what's the technical answer to that? >> Yeah, well first of all, let me just say, this picture is again not totally representative of reality oftentimes, because while that picture shows a solution for every cloud, oftentimes that's not the case. Oftentimes it's a line of business going off, starting to use a new cloud. They might solve one or two things, but usually not security, usually not some of these other things, right? So, I think from a technical standpoint, where you want to get to is, yes, that sort of common service, with a common operational team behind it, that is trained on that, that can work across clouds. And that's really I think the important evolution here, is that you don't need to replicate these operational teams, one for each cloud. You can actually have them more focused across all those clouds. >> Yeah, in fact, we were commenting on the opening today. Dave and I were talking about the benefits of the cloud. It's heterogeneous, which is a good thing, but it's complex. There's skill gaps and skill required, but at the end of the day, self-service of the cloud, and the elastic nature of it makes it the benefit. So, if you try to create too many common services, you lose the value of the cloud. So, what's the trade off, in your mind right now as customers start to look at okay, identity, maybe I'll have one single sign on, that's an obvious one. Other ones? What are the areas people are looking at from a combination, common set of services? Where do they start? What's the choices? What are some of the trade offs? 'Cause you can't do it everything. >> No, it's a great question. So, that's actually a really good point and as I answer your question, before I answer your question, the important point about that, as you saw here, you know, across cloud services or these set of Cross-Cloud services, the things that comprise the Supercloud, at least in my view, the point is not necessarily to completely abstract the underlying cloud. The point is to give a business optionality and choice, in terms of what it wants to abstract, and I think that gets to your question, is how much do you actually want to abstract from the underlying cloud? Now, what I find, is that typically speaking, cloud choice is driven at least from a developer or app team perspective, by the best of breed services. What higher level application type services do you need? A database or AI, you know, ML systems, for your application, and that's going to drive your choice of the cloud. So oftentimes, businesses I talk to, want to allow those services to shine through, but for other things that are not necessarily highly differentiated and yet are absolutely critical to creating a successful application, those are things that you want to standardize. Again, like things like security, the supply chain piece, cost management, like these things you need to, and you know, things like cogs become really, really important when you start operating at scale. So, those are the things in it that I see people wanting to focus on. >> So, there's a majority model. >> Yes. >> All right, and we heard of earlier from Walmart, who's fairly, you know, advanced, but at the same time their supercloud is pretty immature. So, what are you seeing in terms of supercloud momentum, crosscloud momentum? What's the starting point for customers? >> Yeah, so it's interesting, right, on that that three-tiered journey that I talked about, this Cloud Smart notion is, that is adoption of what you might call a supercloud or architecture, and most folks aren't there yet. Even the really advanced ones, even the really large ones, and I think it's because of the fact that, we as an industry are still figuring this out. We as an industry did not realize this sort of Cloud Chaos state could happen, right? We didn't, I think most folks thought they could standardize on one cloud and that'd be it, but as time has shown, that's simply not the case. As much as one might try to do that, that's not where you end up. So, I think there's two, there's two things here. Number one, for folks that are early in to the cloud, and are in this Cloud Chaos phase, we see the path out through standardization of these cross-cloud services through adoption of this sort of supercloud architecture, but the other thing I think is particularly exciting, 'cause I talked to a number of of businesses who are not yet in the Cloud Chaos phase. They're earlier on in the cloud journey, and I think the opportunity there is that they don't have to go through Cloud Chaos. They can actually skip that whole phase if they adopt this supercloud architecture from the beginning, and I think being thoughtful around that is really the key here. >> It's interesting, 'cause we're going to hear from Ionis Pharmaceuticals later, and they, yes there are multiple clouds, but the multiple clouds are largely separate, and so it's a business unit using that. So, they're not in Cloud Chaos, but they're not tapping the advantages that you could get for best of breed across those business units. So, to your point, they have an opportunity to actually build that architecture or take advantage of those cross-cloud services, prior to reaching cloud chaos. >> Well, I, actually, you know, I'd love to hear from them if, 'cause you say they're not in Cloud Chaos, but are they, I mean oftentimes I find that each BU, each line of business may feel like they're fine, in of themselves. >> Yes, exactly right, yes. >> But when you look at it from an overall company perspective, they're like, okay, things are pretty chaotic here. We don't have standardization, I don't, you know, like, again, security compliance, these things, especially in many regulated industries, become huge problems when you're trying to run applications across multiple clouds, but you don't have any of those company-wide standardizations. >> Well, this is a point. So, they have a big deal with AstraZeneca, who's got this huge ecosystem, they want to start sharing data across those ecosystem, and that's when they will, you know, that Cloud Chaos will, you know, come, come to fore, you would think. I want to get your take on something that Bob Muglia said earlier, which is, he kind of said, "Hey Dave, you guys got to tighten up your definition a little bit." So, he said a supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So, you know, thank you, that was nice and simple. However others in the community, we're going to hear from Dr. Nelu Mihai later, says, no, no, wait a minute, it's got to be an architecture, not a platform. Where do you land on this architecture v. platform thing? >> I look at it as, I dunno if it's, you call it maturity or just kind of a time horizon thing, but for me when I hear the word platform, I typically think of a single vendor. A single vendor provides this platform. That's kind of the beauty of a platform, is that there is a simplicity usually consistency to it. >> They did the architecture. (laughing) >> Yeah, exactly but I mean, well, there's obviously architecture behind it, has to be, but you as a customer don't necessarily need to deal with that. Now, I think one of the opportunities with Supercloud is that it's not going to be, or there is no single vendor that can solve all these problems. It's got to be the industry coming together as a community, inter-operating, working together, and so, that's why, for me, I think about it as an architecture, that there's got to be these sort of, well-defined categories of functionality. There's got to be well-defined interfaces between those categories of functionality to enable modularity, to enable businesses to be able to pick and choose the right sorts of services, and then weave those together into an overall supercloud. >> Okay, so you're not pitching, necessarily the platform, you're saying, hey, we have an architecture that's open. I go back to something that Vittorio said on August 9th, with the first Supercloud, because as well, remember we talked about abstracting, but at the same time giving developers access to those primitives. So he said, and this, I think your answer sort of confirms this. "I want to have my cake eat it too and not gain weight." >> (laughing) Right. Well and I think that's where the platform aspect can eventually come, after we've gotten aligned architecture, you're going to start to naturally see some vendors step up to take on some of the remaining complexity there. So, I do see platforms eventually emerging here, but I think where we have to start as an industry is around aligning, okay, what does this definition mean? What does that architecture look like? How do we enable interoperability? And then we can take the next step. >> Because it depends too, 'cause I would say Snowflake has a platform, and they've just defined the architecture, but we're not talking about infrastructure here, obviously, we're talking about something else. >> Well, I think that the Snowflake talks about, what he talks about, security and data, you're going to start to see the early movement around areas that are very spanning oriented, and I think that's the beginning of the trend and I think there's going to be a lot more, I think on the infrastructure side. And to your point about the platform architecture, that's actually a really good thought exercise because it actually makes you think about what you're designing in the first place, and that's why I want to get your reaction. >> Quote from- >> Well I just have to interrupt since, later on, you're going to hear from near Nir Zuk of Palo Alto Network. He says architecture and security historically, they don't go hand in hand, 'cause it's a big mess. >> It depends if you're whacking the mole or you actually proactively building something. Well Kit, I want to get your reaction from a quote from someone in our community who said about Supercloud, you know, "The Supercloud's great, there are issues around computer science rigors, and customer requirements." So, there's some issues around the science itself as well as not just listen to the customer, 'cause if that's the case, we'd have a better database, a better Oracle, right, so, but there's other, this tech involved, new tech. We need an open architecture with universal data modeling interconnecting among them, connectivity is a part of security, and then, once we get through that gate, figuring out the technical, the data, and the customer requirements, they say "Supercloud should be a loosely coupled platform with open architecture, plug and play, specialized services, ready for optimization, automation that can stand the test of time." What's your reaction to that sentiment? You like it, is that, does that sound good? >> Yeah, no, broadly aligns with my thinking, I think, and what I see from talking with customers as well. I mean, I like the, again, the, you know, listening to customer needs, prioritizing those things, focusing on some of the connective tissue networking, and data and some of these aspects talking about the open architecture, the interoperability, those are all things I think are absolutely critical. And then, yeah, like I think at the end. >> On the computer science side, do you see some science and engineering things that need to be engineered differently? We heard databases are radically going to change and that are inadequate for the new architecture. What are some of the things like that, from a science standpoint? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of the more academic research type things. >> More tech, or more better tech or is it? >> Yeah, look, absolutely. I mean I think that there's a bunch around, certainly around the data piece, around, you know, there's issues of data gravity, data mobility. How do you want to do that in a way that's performant? There's definitely issues around security as well. Like how do you enable like trust in these environments, there's got to be some sort of hardware rooted trusts, and you know, a whole bunch of various types of aspects there. >> So, a lot of work still be done. >> Yes, I think so. And that's why I look at this as, this is not a one year thing, or you know, it's going to be multi-years, and I think again, it's about all of us in the industry working together to come to an aligned picture of what that looks like. >> So, as the world's moved from private cloud to public cloud and now Cross-cloud services, supercloud, metacloud, whatever you want to call it, how have you sort of changed the way engineering's organized, developers sort of approached the problem? Has it changed and how? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it's funny, we at VMware, going through the same challenges as our customers and you know, any business, right? We use multiple clouds, we got a big, of course, on-prem footprint. You know, what we're doing is similar to what I see in many other customers, which, you see the evolution of a platform team, and so the platform team is really in charge of trying to develop a lot of these underlying services to allow our lines of business, our product teams, to be able to move as quickly as possible, to focus on the building, while we help with a lot of the operational overheads, right? We maintain security, compliance, all these other things. We also deal with, yeah, just making the developer's life as simple as possible. So, they do need to know some stuff about, you know, each public cloud they're using, those public cloud services, but at the same, time we can abstract a lot of the details they don't need to be in. So, I think this sort of delineation or separation, I should say, between the underlying platform team and the product teams is a very, very common pattern. >> You know, I noticed the four layers you talked about were observability, infrastructure, security and developers, on that slide, the last slide you had at the top, that was kind of the abstraction key areas that you guys at VMware are working? >> Those were just some groupings that we've come up with, but we like to debate them. >> I noticed data's in every one of them. >> Yeah, yep, data is key. >> It's not like, so, back to the data questions that security is called out as a pillar. Observability is just kind of watching everything, but it's all pretty much data driven. Of the four layers that you see, I take that as areas that you can. >> Standardize. >> Consistently rely on to have standard services. >> Yes. >> Which one do you start with? What's the, is there order of operations? >> Well, that's, I mean. >> 'Cause I think infrastructure's number one, but you had observability, you need to know what's going on. >> Yeah, well it really, it's highly dependent. Again, it depends on the business that we talk to and what, I mean, it really goes back to, what are your business priorities, right? And we have some customers who may want to get out of a data center, they want to evacuate the data center, and so what they want is then, consistent infrastructure, so they can just move those applications up to the cloud. They don't want to have to refactor them and we'll do it later, but there's an immediate and sort of urgent problem that they have. Other customers I talk to, you know, security becomes top of mind, or maybe compliance, because they're in a regulated industry. So, those are the sort of services they want to prioritize. So, I would say there is no single right answer, no one size fits all. The point about this architecture is really around the optionality of it, as it allows you as a business to decide what's most important and where you want to prioritize. >> How about the deployment models kit? Do, does a customer have that flexibility from a deployment model standpoint or do I have to, you know, approach it a specific way? Can you address that? >> Yeah, I mean deployment models, you're talking about how they how they consume? >> So, for instance, yeah, running a control plane in the cloud. >> Got it, got it. >> And communicating elsewhere or having a single global instance or instantiating that instance, and? >> So, that's a good point actually, and you know, the white paper that we released back in August, around this sort of concept, the Cross-cloud service. This is some of the stuff we need to figure out as an industry. So, you know when we talk about a Cross-cloud service, we can mean actually any of the things you just talked about. It could be a single instance that runs, let's say in one public cloud, but it supports all of 'em. Or it could be one that's multi-instance and that runs in each of the clouds, and that customers can take dependencies on whichever one, depending on what their use cases are or the, even going further than that, there's a type of Cross-cloud service that could actually be instantiated even in an air gapped or offline environment, and we have many, many businesses, especially heavily regulated ones that have that requirement, so I think, you know. >> Global don't forget global, regions, locales. >> Yeah, there's all sorts of performance latency issues that can be concerned about. So, most services today are the former, there are single sort of instance or set of instances within a single cloud that support multiple clouds, but I think what we're doing and where we're going with, you know, things like what we see with Kubernetes and service meshes and all these things, will better enable folks to hit these different types of cross-cloud service architectures. So, today, you as a customer probably wouldn't have too much choice, but where we're going, you'll see a lot more choice in the future. >> If you had to summarize for folks watching the importance of Supercloud movement, multi-cloud, cross-cloud services, as an industry in flexible, 'cause I'm always riffing on the whole old school network protocol stacks that got disrupted by TCP/IP, that's a little bit dated, we got people on the chat that are like, you know, 20 years old that weren't even born then. So, but this is a, one of those inflection points that's once in a generation inflection point, I'm sure you agree. What scoped the order of magnitude of the change and the opportunity around the marketplace, the business models, the technology, and ultimately benefits the society. >> Yeah. Wow. Getting bigger. >> You have 10 seconds, go. >> I know. Yeah. (laughing) No, look, so I think it is what we're seeing is really the next phase of what you might call cloud, right? This notion of delivering services, the way they've been packaged together, traditionally by the hyperscalers is now being challenged. and what we're seeing is really opening that up to new levels of innovation, and I think that will be huge for businesses because it'll help meet them where they are. Instead of needing to contort the businesses to, you know, make it work with the technology, the technology will support the business and where it's going. Give people more optionality, more flexibility in order to get there, and I think in the end, for us as individuals, it will just make for better experiences, right? You can get better performance, better interactivity, given that devices are so much of what we do, and so much of what we interact with all the time. This sort of flexibility and optionality will fundamentally better for us as individuals in our experiences. >> And we're seeing that with ChatGPT, everyone's talking about, just early days. There'll be more and more of things like that, that are next gen, like obviously like, wow, that's a fall out of your chair moment. >> It'll be the next wave of innovation that's unleashed. >> All right, Kit Colbert, thanks for coming on and sharing and exploring the Supercloud architecture, Cloud Chaos, the Cloud Smart, there's a transition progression happening and it's happening fast. This is the supercloud wave. If you're not on this wave, you'll be driftwood. That's a Pat Gelsinger quote on theCUBE. This is theCUBE Be right back with more Supercloud coverage, here in Palo Alto after this break. (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante >> Enterprise tech practitioners, like most of us they want to make their lives easier so they can focus on delivering more value to their businesses. And to do so, they want to tap best of breed services in the public cloud, but at the same time connect their on-prem intellectual property to emerging applications which drive top line revenue and bottom line profits. But creating a consistent experience across clouds and on-prem estates has been an elusive capability for most organizations, forcing trade-offs and injecting friction into the system. The need to create seamless experiences is clear and the technology industry is starting to respond with platforms, architectures, and visions of what we've called the Supercloud. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we give you a preview of Supercloud 2, the second event of its kind that we've had on the topic. Yes, folks that's right Supercloud 2 is here. As of this recording, it's just about four days away 33 guests, 21 sessions, combining live discussions and fireside chats from theCUBE's Palo Alto Studio with prerecorded conversations on the future of cloud and data. You can register for free at supercloud.world. And we are super excited about the Supercloud 2 lineup of guests whereas Supercloud 22 in August, was all about refining the definition of Supercloud testing its technical feasibility and understanding various deployment models. Supercloud 2 features practitioners, technologists and analysts discussing what customers need with real-world examples of Supercloud and will expose thinking around a new breed of cross-cloud apps, data apps, if you will that change the way machines and humans interact with each other. Now the example we'd use if you think about applications today, say a CRM system, sales reps, what are they doing? They're entering data into opportunities they're choosing products they're importing contacts, et cetera. And sure the machine can then take all that data and spit out a forecast by rep, by region, by product, et cetera. But today's applications are largely about filling in forms and or codifying processes. In the future, the Supercloud community sees a new breed of applications emerging where data resides on different clouds, in different data storages, databases, Lakehouse, et cetera. And the machine uses AI to inspect the e-commerce system the inventory data, supply chain information and other systems, and puts together a plan without any human intervention whatsoever. Think about a system that orchestrates people, places and things like an Uber for business. So at Supercloud 2, you'll hear about this vision along with some of today's challenges facing practitioners. Zhamak Dehghani, the founder of Data Mesh is a headliner. Kit Colbert also is headlining. He laid out at the first Supercloud an initial architecture for what that's going to look like. That was last August. And he's going to present his most current thinking on the topic. Veronika Durgin of Sachs will be featured and talk about data sharing across clouds and you know what she needs in the future. One of the main highlights of Supercloud 2 is a dive into Walmart's Supercloud. Other featured practitioners include Western Union Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Warner Media. We've got deep, deep technology dives with folks like Bob Muglia, David Flynn Tristan Handy of DBT Labs, Nir Zuk, the founder of Palo Alto Networks focused on security. Thomas Hazel, who's going to talk about a new type of database for Supercloud. It's several analysts including Keith Townsend Maribel Lopez, George Gilbert, Sanjeev Mohan and so many more guests, we don't have time to list them all. They're all up on supercloud.world with a full agenda, so you can check that out. Now let's take a look at some of the things that we're exploring in more detail starting with the Walmart Cloud native platform, they call it WCNP. We definitely see this as a Supercloud and we dig into it with Jack Greenfield. He's the head of architecture at Walmart. Here's a quote from Jack. "WCNP is an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. We've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source." By the way, they do the same thing with OpenStack. "And we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything." And so what Walmart chose to do, they took a do-it-yourself approach to build a Supercloud for a variety of reasons that Jack will explain, along with Walmart's so-called triplet architecture connecting on-prem, Azure and GCP. No surprise, there's no Amazon at Walmart for obvious reasons. And what they do is they create a common experience for devs across clouds. Jack is going to talk about how Walmart is evolving its Supercloud in the future. You don't want to miss that. Now, next, let's take a look at how Veronica Durgin of SAKS thinks about data sharing across clouds. Data sharing we think is a potential killer use case for Supercloud. In fact, let's hear it in Veronica's own words. Please play the clip. >> How do we talk to each other? And more importantly, how do we data share? You know, I work with data, you know this is what I do. So if you know I want to get data from a company that's using, say Google, how do we share it in a smooth way where it doesn't have to be this crazy I don't know, SFTP file moving? So that's where I think Supercloud comes to me in my mind, is like practical applications. How do we create that mesh, that network that we can easily share data with each other? >> Now data mesh is a possible architectural approach that will enable more facile data sharing and the monetization of data products. You'll hear Zhamak Dehghani live in studio talking about what standards are missing to make this vision a reality across the Supercloud. Now one of the other things that we're really excited about is digging deeper into the right approach for Supercloud adoption. And we're going to share a preview of a debate that's going on right now in the community. Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake and Microsoft Exec was kind enough to spend some time looking at the community's supercloud definition and he felt that it needed to be simplified. So in near real time he came up with the following definition that we're showing here. I'll read it. "A Supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." So not only did Bob simplify the initial definition he's stressed that the Supercloud is a platform versus an architecture implying that the platform provider eg Snowflake, VMware, Databricks, Cohesity, et cetera is responsible for determining the architecture. Now interestingly in the shared Google doc that the working group uses to collaborate on the supercloud de definition, Dr. Nelu Mihai who is actually building a Supercloud responded as follows to Bob's assertion "We need to avoid creating many Supercloud platforms with their own architectures. If we do that, then we create other proprietary clouds on top of existing ones. We need to define an architecture of how Supercloud interfaces with all other clouds. What is the information model? What is the execution model and how users will interact with Supercloud?" What does this seemingly nuanced point tell us and why does it matter? Well, history suggests that de facto standards will emerge more quickly to resolve real world practitioner problems and catch on more quickly than consensus-based architectures and standards-based architectures. But in the long run, the ladder may serve customers better. So we'll be exploring this topic in more detail in Supercloud 2, and of course we'd love to hear what you think platform, architecture, both? Now one of the real technical gurus that we'll have in studio at Supercloud two is David Flynn. He's one of the people behind the the movement that enabled enterprise flash adoption, that craze. And he did that with Fusion IO and he is now working on a system to enable read write data access to any user in any application in any data center or on any cloud anywhere. So think of this company as a Supercloud enabler. Allow me to share an excerpt from a conversation David Flore and I had with David Flynn last year. He as well gave a lot of thought to the Supercloud definition and was really helpful with an opinionated point of view. He said something to us that was, we thought relevant. "What is the operating system for a decentralized cloud? The main two functions of an operating system or an operating environment are one the process scheduler and two, the file system. The strongest argument for supercloud is made when you go down to the platform layer and talk about it as an operating environment on which you can run all forms of applications." So a couple of implications here that will be exploring with David Flynn in studio. First we're inferring from his comment that he's in the platform camp where the platform owner is responsible for the architecture and there are obviously trade-offs there and benefits but we'll have to clarify that with him. And second, he's basically saying, you kill the concept the further you move up the stack. So the weak, the further you move the stack the weaker the supercloud argument becomes because it's just becoming SaaS. Now this is something we're going to explore to better understand is thinking on this, but also whether the existing notion of SaaS is changing and whether or not a new breed of Supercloud apps will emerge. Which brings us to this really interesting fellow that George Gilbert and I RIFed with ahead of Supercloud two. Tristan Handy, he's the founder and CEO of DBT Labs and he has a highly opinionated and technical mind. Here's what he said, "One of the things that we still don't know how to API-ify is concepts that live inside of your data warehouse inside of your data lake. These are core concepts that the business should be able to create applications around very easily. In fact, that's not the case because it involves a lot of data engineering pipeline and other work to make these available. So if you really want to make it easy to create these data experiences for users you need to have an ability to describe these metrics and then to turn them into APIs to make them accessible to application developers who have literally no idea how they're calculated behind the scenes and they don't need to." A lot of implications to this statement that will explore at Supercloud two versus Jamma Dani's data mesh comes into play here with her critique of hyper specialized data pipeline experts with little or no domain knowledge. Also the need for simplified self-service infrastructure which Kit Colbert is likely going to touch upon. Veronica Durgin of SAKS and her ideal state for data shearing along with Harveer Singh of Western Union. They got to deal with 200 locations around the world in data privacy issues, data sovereignty how do you share data safely? Same with Nick Taylor of Ionis Pharmaceutical. And not to blow your mind but Thomas Hazel and Bob Muglia deposit that to make data apps a reality across the Supercloud you have to rethink everything. You can't just let in memory databases and caching architectures take care of everything in a brute force manner. Rather you have to get down to really detailed levels even things like how data is laid out on disk, ie flash and think about rewriting applications for the Supercloud and the MLAI era. All of this and more at Supercloud two which wouldn't be complete without some data. So we pinged our friends from ETR Eric Bradley and Darren Bramberm to see if they had any data on Supercloud that we could tap. And so we're going to be analyzing a number of the players as well at Supercloud two. Now, many of you are familiar with this graphic here we show some of the players involved in delivering or enabling Supercloud-like capabilities. On the Y axis is spending momentum and on the horizontal accesses market presence or pervasiveness in the data. So netscore versus what they call overlap or end in the data. And the table insert shows how the dots are plotted now not to steal ETR's thunder but the first point is you really can't have supercloud without the hyperscale cloud platforms which is shown on this graphic. But the exciting aspect of Supercloud is the opportunity to build value on top of that hyperscale infrastructure. Snowflake here continues to show strong spending velocity as those Databricks, Hashi, Rubrik. VMware Tanzu, which we all put under the magnifying glass after the Broadcom announcements, is also showing momentum. Unfortunately due to a scheduling conflict we weren't able to get Red Hat on the program but they're clearly a player here. And we've put Cohesity and Veeam on the chart as well because backup is a likely use case across clouds and on-premises. And now one other call out that we drill down on at Supercloud two is CloudFlare, which actually uses the term supercloud maybe in a different way. They look at Supercloud really as you know, serverless on steroids. And so the data brains at ETR will have more to say on this topic at Supercloud two along with many others. Okay, so why should you attend Supercloud two? What's in it for me kind of thing? So first of all, if you're a practitioner and you want to understand what the possibilities are for doing cross-cloud services for monetizing data how your peers are doing data sharing, how some of your peers are actually building out a Supercloud you're going to get real world input from practitioners. If you're a technologist, you're trying to figure out various ways to solve problems around data, data sharing, cross-cloud service deployment there's going to be a number of deep technology experts that are going to share how they're doing it. We're also going to drill down with Walmart into a practical example of Supercloud with some other examples of how practitioners are dealing with cross-cloud complexity. Some of them, by the way, are kind of thrown up their hands and saying, Hey, we're going mono cloud. And we'll talk about the potential implications and dangers and risks of doing that. And also some of the benefits. You know, there's a question, right? Is Supercloud the same wine new bottle or is it truly something different that can drive substantive business value? So look, go to Supercloud.world it's January 17th at 9:00 AM Pacific. You can register for free and participate directly in the program. Okay, that's a wrap. I want to give a shout out to the Supercloud supporters. VMware has been a great partner as our anchor sponsor Chaos Search Proximo, and Alura as well. For contributing to the effort I want to thank Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman is his supporting cast as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight to help get the word out on social media and at our newsletters. And Rob Ho is our editor-in-chief over at Silicon Angle. Thank you all. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcast. Wherever you listen we really appreciate the support that you've given. We just saw some stats from from Buzz Sprout, we hit the top 25% we're almost at 400,000 downloads last year. So really appreciate your participation. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast and you'll find those I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or if you want to get ahold of me you can email me directly at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com or dm me DVellante or comment on our LinkedIn post. I want you to check out etr.ai. They've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at Supercloud two or next time on breaking analysis. (light music)

foreign greetings from San Francisco thecube is live this is our second day of wall-to-wall coverage of VMware Explorer 2022. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here we're going to be talking with some ladies from Rackspace next please welcome Adriana Bustamante VP of strategic alliances and Hannah Deuce director of strategic alliances from Rackspace it's great to have you on the program thank you so much for having us good afternoon good morning is it lunchtime already almost almost yes and it's great to be back in person we were just talking about the keynote yesterday that we were in and it was standing room only people are ready to be back they're ready to be hearing from VMware it's ecosystem its Partners it's Community yes talk to us Adriana about what Rackspace is doing with Dell and VMware particularly in the healthcare space sure no so for us Partnerships are a big foundation to how we operate as a company and um and I have the privilege of doing it for over over 16 years so we've been looking after the dell and VMware part partnership ourselves personally for the last three years but they've been long-standing partners for for us and and how do we go and drive more meaningful joint Solutions together so Rackspace you know been around since since 98 we've seen such an evolution of coming becoming more of this multi-cloud transformation agile Global partner and we have a lot of customers that fall in lots of different verticals from retail to public sector into Healthcare but we started noticing and what we're trying trying to drive as a company is how do we drive more specialized Solutions and because of the pandemic and because of post-pandemic and everyone really trying to to figure out what the new normal is addressing different clients we saw that need increasing and we wanted to Rally together with our most strategic alliances to do more Hannah talk about obviously the the pandemic created such problems for every industry but but Healthcare being front and center it still is talk about some of the challenges that Healthcare organizations are coming to Rackspace going help yeah common theme that we've heard from some of our large providers Healthcare Providers has been helped me do more with less which we're all trying to do as we navigate The New Normal but in that space we found the opportunity to really leverage some of our expertise long-term expertise and that the talent and the resource pool that we had to really help in a some of the challenges that are being faced at a resource shortage Talent shortage and so Rackspace is able to Leverage What what we've done for many many years and really tailor it to the outcomes that Health Care Providers are needing nowadays that more with less Mantra runs across the gamut but a lot of it's been helped me modernize helped me get to that next phase I can't I can't I don't have the resources to DIY it myself anymore I need to figure out a more robust business continuity program and so helping with business continuity Dr you know third copies of just all all this data that's growing so it's not just covered pandemic driven but it's that's definitely driving the the need and the requirement to modernize so much quicker it's interesting that you mentioned rackspace's history and expertise in doing things and moving that forward and leveraging that pivoting focusing on specific environments to create something net new we've seen a lot of that here if you go back 10 years I don't know if that's the perfect date to go back to but if you go back 10 years ago you think about VMware where would we have expected VMware to be in this era of cloud we may have thought of things very very differently differently Rackspace a Pioneer in creating off-premises hey we will do this for you didn't even really call it Cloud at the time right but it was Cloud yeah and so the ability for entities like Rackspace like VMware we had a NetApp talking to us about stuff they're doing in the cloud 10 years ago if you I would say no they'd be they'll be gone they'll be gone so it's really really cool to see Rackspace making this transition and uh you know being aware of everything that's going on and focusing on the best value proposition moving forward I mean am I am I you know do I sound like somebody who would who would fit into the Rackspace culture right now or do I not get it yes you sound like a rocker we'll make you an honorary record that's what we call a Rackspace employees yes you know what we've noticed too and is budgets are moving those decision makers are moving so again 10 years ago just like you said you would be talking to sometimes a completely different Persona than we do than we do today and we've seen a shift more towards that business value we have a really unique ability to bring business and Technical conversations together I did a lot of work in the past of working with a lot of CMO and and digital transformation companies and so helping bring it and business seeing the same and how healthcare because budgets are living in different places and even across the board with Rackspace people are trying to drive more business outcomes business driven Solutions so the technical becomes the back end and really the ingredients to make all of that all of that happen and that's what we're helping to solve and it's a lot it's very fast paced everyone wants to be agile now and so they're leaning on us more and more to drive more services so if you've seen Rackspace evolve we're driving more of that advisement and those transformation service type discussions where where our original history was DNA was very much always embedded in driving a great experience now they're just wanting more from us more services help us how help us figure out the how Adriana comment on the outcomes that you're helping Healthcare organizations achieve as as we as we it's such a relatable tangible topic Healthcare is Right everybody's everybody's got somebody who's sick or you've been sick or whatnot what are some of those outcomes that we can ex that customers can expect to achieve with Rackspace and VMware oh great great question so very much I can't mentioned earlier it's how do I modernize how do I optimize how do I take the biggest advantage of the budgets and the landscape that I have I want to get to the Cloud we need to help our patients and get access to that data is this ready to go into the cloud is this not ready to go into the cloud you know how do we how do we help make sure we're taking care of our patients we're keeping things secure and accessible you know what else do you think is coming up yeah and one specific one uh sequencing genetic sequencing and so we've had this come up from a few different types of providers whether it's medical devices that they may provide to their end clients and an outcome that they're looking for is how do we get how do we leverage um here's rip here's what we do but now we have so many more people we need to give this access to we need them to be able to have access to the sequencing that all of this is doing all of these different entities are doing and the outcome that they're trying to get to to is more collaboration so so that way we can speed up in the face of a pandemic we can speed up those resolutions we could speed up to you know whether it's a vaccine needed or something that's going to address the next thing that might be coming you know um so that's a specific one I've heard that from a handful of different different um clients that that we work with and so trying to give them a Consolidated not trying to we are able to deliver them a Consolidated place that their application and tooling can run in and then all of these other entities can safely and securely access this data to do what they're going to do in their own spaces and then hopefully it helps the betterment of of of us globally like as humans in the healthcare space we all benefit from this so leveraging the technology to really drive a valuable outcome helps us all so so and by the way I like trying to because it conveys the proper level of humility that we all need to bring to this because it's complicated and anybody who looks you in the eye it pretends like they know exactly how to do it you need to run from those people no it is and and look that's where our partners become so significant we we know we're Best in Class for specific things but we rely on our Partnerships with Dell and VMware to bring their expertise to bring their tried and true technology to help us all together collectively deliver something good technology for good technology for good it is inherently good and it's nice when it's used for goodness it's nice when it's yeah yeah talk about security for a second you know we've seen the threat landscape change dramatically obviously nobody wants to be the next breach ransomware becoming a household term it's now a matter of when we get a head not F where has security gone in terms of conversations with customers going help us ensure that what we're doing is delivering data access to the right folks that need it at the right time in real time in a secure fashion no uh that's another good question in hot and burning so you know I think if we think about past conversations it was that nice Insurance offering that seemed like it came at a high cost if you really need it I've never been breached before um I'll get it when I when I need it but exactly to your point it's the win and not the if so what we're finding and also working with a nice ecosystem of Partners as well from anywhere from Akamai to cloudflare to BT it's how do we help ensure that there is the security as Hannah mentioned that we're delivering the right data access to the right people and permissions you know we're able to help meet multitude of compliance and regulations obviously health care and other regulated space as well we look to make sure that from our side of the house from the infrastructure that we have the right building blocks to help them Reach those compliance needs obviously it's a mutual partnership in maintaining that compliance and that we're able to provide guidance and best practices on to make sure that the data is living in a secure place that the people that need access to it get it when they when they need it and monitor those permissions and back to your complexity comment so more and more complex as we are a global global provider so when you start to talk to our teams in the UK and our our you know clients there specializing um kind of that Sovereign Cloud mentality of hey we need to have um we need to have a cloud that is built for the specific needs that reside within Healthcare by region so it's not just even I mean you know we're we're homegrown out of San Antonio Texas so like we know the U.S and have spent time here but we've been Global for many years so we just get down into the into the nitty-gritty to customize what's needed within each region well Hannah is that part of the Rackspace value proposition at large moving forward because frankly look if I if I want if I want something generic I can I can swipe credit card and and fire up some Services sure um moving forward this is something that is going to more characterize the Rackspace experience and I and I understand that the hesitancy to say hey it's complicated it's like I don't want to hear that I want to hear that it's easy it's like well okay we'll make it easy for you yes but it's still complicated is that okay that's the honest that's that's the honest yeah that's why you need help right that's why we need to talk about that because people people have a legitimate question why Rackspace yep and we don't I don't want to put you on the spot but no yeah but why why Rackspace you've talked a little bit about it already but kind of encapsulate it oh gosh so good good question why Rackspace it's because you can stand up [Laughter] well you can you do it there's many different options out there um and if I had a PowerPoint slide I'd show you this like lovely web of options of directions that you could go and what is Rackspace value it's that we come in and simplify it because we've had experience with this this same use case whatever somebody is bringing forward to us is typically something we've dealt with at numerous times and so we're repeating and speeding up the ability to simplify the complex and to deliver something more simplified well it may be complex within us and we're like working to get it done the outcome that we're delivering is is faster it's less expensive than dedicating all the resources yourself to do it and go invest in all of that that we've already built up and then we're able to deliver it in a more simplified manner it's like the duck analogy the feet below the water yes exactly and a lot of expertise as well yes a lot talk a little bit about the solution that that Dell VMware Rackspace are delivering to customers sure so when we think about um Healthcare clouds or Cloud specific to the healthcare industry you know there's some major players within that space that you think epic we'll just use them as an example this can play out with others but we are building out a custom or we have a custom clouds able to host epic and then provide services up through the Epic help application through partnership so that is broadening the the market for us in the sense that we can tailor what the what that end and with that healthcare provider needs uh do they do they have the expertise to manage the application okay you do that and then we will build out a custom fit Cloud for that application oh and you need all the adjacent things that come with it too so then we have reference architecture you know built out already to to tailor to whatever all those other 40 80 90 hundreds of applications that need to come with that and then and then you start to think about Imaging platforms so we have Imaging platforms available for those specific needs whether it's MRIs and things like that and then the long-term retention that's needed with that so all of these pieces that build out a healthcare ecosystem and those needs we've built those we've built those out and provide those two to our clients yesterday VMware was talking about Cloud chaos yes and and it's true you talk about the complexity and Dave talks about it too like acknowledging yes this is a very complex thing to do yeah there's just so many moving parts so many Dynamics so many people involved or lack thereof people they they then talked about kind of this this the goal of getting customers from cloud chaos to Cloud smart how does that message resonate with Rackspace and how are you helping customers get from simplifying the chaos to eventually get to that cloud smart goal so a lot of it I I believe is with the power of our alliances and I was talking about this earlier we really believe in creating those powerful ecosystems and Jay McBain former for Forester analyst talks about you know the people are going to come ahead really are serve as that orchestration layer of bringing everybody together so if you look at all of that cloud chaos and all of the different logos and the webs and which decisions to make you know the ones that can help simplify that bring it all together like we're going to need a little bit of this like baking a cake in some ways we're going to need a little bit of sugar we'll need this technology this technology and whoever is able to put it together in a clean and seamless way and as Hannah said you know we have specific use cases in different verticals Healthcare specifically and talking from the Imaging and the Epic helping them get hospitals and different you know smaller clinics get to the edge so we have all of the building blocks to get them what they need and we can't do that without Partners but we help simplify those outcomes for those customers yep so there's where they're Cloud smart so then they're like I want I want to be agile I want to work on my cost I want to be able to leverage a multi-cloud fashion because some things may may inherently need to be on Azure some things we inherently need to be on VMware how do we make them feel like they still have that modernized platform and Technology but still give the secure and access that they need right yeah we like to think of it as are you multi-cloud by accident or multi-cloud by Design and help you get to that multi-cloud by Design and leveraging the right yeah the right tools the right places and Dell was talking about that just that at Dell Technologies world just a couple months ago that most most organizations are multi-cloud by default not designed are you seeing any customers that are are able or how are you able to help customers go from that we're here by default for whatever reason acquisition growth.oit line of business and go from that default to a more strategic multi-cloud approach yes it takes planning and commitment you know you really need the business leaders and the technical leaders bought in and saying this is what I'm gonna do because it is a journey because exactly right M A is like inherited four different tools you have databases that kind of look similar but they're a little bit different but they serve four different things so at Rackspace we're able to help assess and we sit down with their teams we have very amazing rock star expertise that will come in and sit with the customers and say what are we trying to drive for it let's get a good assessment of the landscape and let's figure out what are you trying to get towards in your journey and looking at what's the best fit for that application from where it is now to where it is where it wants to be because we saw a lot of customers move to the cloud very quickly you know they went Cloud native very fast some of it made sense retailers who had the spikiness that completely made sense we had some customers though that we've seen move certain workloads they've been in the public Cloud now for a couple years but it was a static website it doesn't make as much sense anymore for certain things so we're able to help navigate all of those choices for them so it's interesting you just you just said something sort of offhand about having experts having them come in so if I am a customer and I have some outcome I want to achieve yes the people that I'm going to be talking to from Rackspace or from Rackspace and the people from Rackspace who are going to be working with the actual people who are deploying infrastructure are also Rackspace people so the interesting contrast there between other circumstances oftentimes is you may have a Global Systems integrator with smart people representing what a cloud provider is doing the perception if they try to make people perceive that okay everybody is working in lockstep but often there are disconnects between what the real capabilities are and what's being advertised so is that I mean I I know it's like a leading question it's like softball get your bats out but I mean isn't that an advantage you've got a single you know the saying used to be uh one throat to show now it's one back to pack because it's kind of Contour friendly yeah yeah but talk about that is that a real Advantage it does it really helps us because again this is our our this is our expertise this is where we where we live we're really close to the infrastructure we're great at the advisement on it we can help with those ongoing and day two management and Opera in operations and what it feels like to grow and scale so we lay this out cleanly and and clearly as possible if this is where we're really good we can we can help you in these areas but we do work with system integrators as well and part of our partner Community because they're working on sometimes the bigger overall Transformations and then we're staying look we understand this multi-cloud but it helps us because in the end we're doing that end to end for for them customer knows this is Rackspace and on hand and we we really strive to be very transparent in what it is that we want to drive and outcomes so sometimes at the time where it's like we're gonna talk about a certain new technology Dell might bring some of their Architects to the table we will say here is Dell with us we're doing that actively in the healthcare space today and it's all coming together but you know at the end of the day this is what Rackspace is going to drive and deliver from an end to end and we tap those people when needed so you don't have to worry about picking up the phone to call Dell or VMware so if I had worded the hard-hitting journalist question the right way it would have elicited the same responses that yeah yeah it drives accountability at the end of the day because what we advised on what we said now we got to go deliver yeah and it's it's all the same the same organization driving accountability so from a customer perspective they're engaging Rackspace who will then bring in dell and VMware as needed as we find the solution exactly we have all of the certification I mean the team the team is great on getting all of the certs because we're getting to handling all of the level one level two level three business they know who to call they have their dedicated account teams they have engagement managers that help them Drive what those bigger conversations are and they don't have to worry about the experts because we either have it on hand or we'll pull them in as needed if it's the bat phone we need to call awesome ladies thank you so much for joining Dave and me today talking about what Rackspace is up to in the partner ecosystem space and specifically what you're doing to help Healthcare organizations transform and modernize we appreciate your insights and your thoughts yeah thank you for having us thank you pleasure for our guests and Dave Nicholson I'm Lisa Martin you're watching thecube live from VMware Explorer 2022 we'll be back after a short break foreign [Music]

[Thomas Hazel] - Hello, this is Thomas Hazel, founder CTO here at ChaosSearch. And tonight I'm going to demonstrate a new feature we are offering this quarter called JSON Flex. If you're familiar with JSON datasets, they're wonderful ways to represent information. You know, they're multidimensional, they have ability to set up arrays as attributes but those arrays are really problematic when you need to expand them or flatten them to do any type of elastic search or relational access, particularly when you're trying to do aggregations. And so the common process is to exclude those arrays or pick and choose that information. But with this new Chaos Flex capability, our system uniquely can index that data horizontally in a very small and efficient representation. And then with our Chaos Refinery, expand each attribute as you wish vertically, so you can do all the basic and natural constructs you would have done if you had, you know, a more straightforward, two dimensional, three dimensional type representation. So without further ado, I'mma get into this presentation of JSON Flex. Now, in this case, I've already set up the service to point to a particular S3 account that has CloudTrail data, one that is pretty problematic when it comes down to flattening data. And again, if you know CloudTrail, one row can become 10,000 as data gets flattened. So without further ado, let me jump right in. When you first log into the ChaosSearch service, you'll see a tab called 'Storage'. This is the S3 account, and I have variety of buckets. I have the refinery, it's a data refinery. This is where we create views or lenses into these index streams that you can do analysis that publishes it in elastic API as an index pattern or relational table in SQL Now a particular bucket I have here is a whole bunch of demonstration datasets that we have to show off our capabilities and our offering. In this bucket, I have CloudTrail data and I'm going to create what we call a 'object group'. An object group is a entry point, a filter of which files I want to index that data. Now, it can be statically there or a live streaming. These object groups had the ability to say, what type of data do you want to index on? Now through our wizard, you can type in, you know, prefix in this case, I want to type in CloudTrail, and you see here, I have a whole bunch of CloudTrail. I'mma choose one file to make it quick and easy. But this particular CloudTrail data will expand and we can show the capability of this horizontal to vertical expansion. So I walked through the wizard, as you can see here, we discovered JSON, it's a gzip file. Leave flattening unlimited 'cause we want to be able to expand infinitely. But this case, instead of doing default virtual, I'm going to horizontally represent this information. And this uniquely compresses the data in a way that can be stored efficiently on disc but then expanded in our data refinery on Pond Query or search requests. So I'mma create this object group. Now I'm going to call this, you know, 'JSON Flex test' and I could set up live indexing, SQS pops up but I'mma skip that and skip Retention and just create it. Once this object group is created, you kind of think of it as a virtual bucket, 'cause it does filter the data as you can see here. When I look at the view, I just see CloudTrail, but within the console, I can say start indexing. Now this is static data there could be a live stream and we set up workers to index this data. Whether it's one file, a million files or one terabyte, or one petabyte, we index the data. We discover all the schema, and as you see here, we discovered 104 columns. Now what's interesting is that we represent this expansion in a horizontal way. You know, if you know CloudTrail records zero, record one, record two. This can expand pretty dramatically if you fully flatten it but this case we horizontally representing it as the index. So when I go into the data refinery, I can create a view. Now, if you know the data refinery of ChaosSearch, you can bring multiple data streams together. You can do transformations virtually, you can do correlations, but in this case, I'm just going to take this one particular index stream, we call 'JSON Flex' and walk through a wizard, we try to simplify everything and select a particular attribute to expand. Now, again, we represent this in one row but if you had arrays and do all the permutations, it could go one to 100 to 10,000. We had one JSON audit that went from one row to 1 million rows. Now, clearly you don't want to create all those permutations, when you're tryna put into a database. With our unique index technology, you can do it virtually and sort horizontally. So let me just select 'Virtual' and walk through the wizard. Now, as I mentioned, we do all these different transformations changed schema, we're going to skip all that and select the order time, records event and say, 'create this'. I'm going to say, you know, 'JSON Flex View', I can set up caching, do a variety of things, I'm going to skip that. And once I create this, it's now available in the elastic API as an index pattern, as well as SQL via our Presto API dialect. And you can use Looker, Tableau, et cetera. But in this case, we go to this 'Analytics tab' and we built in the Kibana, open search tooling that is Apache Tonetto. And I click on discovery here and I'm going to select that particular view. Again, it looks like, oops, it looks like an index pattern, and I'mma choose, let's see here, let's choose 15 years from past and present and make sure I find where actually was timed. And what you'll see here is, you know, sure. It's just one particular data set has a variety of columns, but you see here is unlike that record zero, records one, now it's expanded. And so it has been expanded like a vertical flattening that you would traditionally do if you wanted to do anything that was an elastic or a relational construct, you know, that fit into a table format. Now the 'vantage of JSON Flex, you don't have that stored as a blob and use these proprietary JSON API's. You can use your native elastic API or your native SQL tooling to get access to it naturally without that expense of that explosion or without the complexity of ETLing it, and picking and choosing before you actually put into the database. That completes the demonstration of ChaosSearch new JSON Flex capability. If you're interested, come to ChaosSearch.io and set up a free trial. Thank you.

(gentle music) >> Okay, we're back with Mark Hill who's the director of IT operations at Digital River. Mark, Welcome to "The Cube." Good to see you. >> Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. >> Hey, tell us a little bit more about Digital River, people know you as a payment platform. >> You've got marketing expertise. >> Yeah. >> How do you differentiate from other e-commerce platforms? >> Well, I don't think people realize it, but Digital River was founded about 27 years ago primarily as a one-stop shop for e-commerce, right? And so we offered site development, hosting, order management, fraud, expert controls, tax, physical and digital fulfillment as well as multilingual customer service, advanced reporting and email marketing campaigns, right? So it was really just kind of a broad base for e-commerce. People could just go there. Didn't have to worry about anything. What we found over time as e-commerce has matured, we've really pivoted to a more focused API offering specializing in just a global seller services. And to us that means payment, fraud, tax and compliance management. So our global footprint allows companies to outsource that risk management and expand their markets internationally very quickly and with the low cost of entry. >> Yeah, it's an awesome business. And, you know, to your point, you were founded way before there was such a thing as the modern cloud, and yet you're a cloud native business. >> Yeah. >> Which I think talks to the fact that incumbents can evolve, they can reinvent themselves from a technology perspective. I wonder if you could first paint a picture of how you use the cloud, you use AWS, you know, I'm sure you got S3 in there. Maybe we could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, exactly. So when I think of a cloud native business, you kind of go back to the history. Well, 27 years ago, there wasn't a cloud, right? There wasn't any public infrastructure. We basically started our own data center up in a warehouse. And so over our history, we've managed our own infrastructure and co-located data centers over time through acquisitions and just how things works, you know, those are over 10 data centers globally for us. For us it was expensive, well from a software, hardware perspective, as well as, you know, getting the operational teams and expertise up to speed too. And it was really difficult to maintain and ultimately not core to our business, right? Nowhere in our mission statement does it say that our goal is to manage data centers. (laughing) So, about five years ago we started the journey from our host into AWS. It was a hundred percent lift and shift plan and we were able to complete that migration a little over two years, right? Amazon really just fit for us, it was a natural, a natural place for us to land in and they made it really easy here for us to, not to say it wasn't difficult, but once in the public cloud, we really adopted a cloud first vision, meaning that we'll not only consume their infrastructure as the service, but we'll also purposely evaluate and migrate to software as a service. So, I come from a database background. So an example would be migrating from self deployed and manage relational databases over to AWS RDS, relational database service. You know, you're able to utilize the backups, the standby and the patching tools auto magically, you know, with a click of a button. And that's pretty cool. And so we moved away from the time consuming operational task and really put our resources into revenue and generating the products, you know, like pivoting to an API offering. I always like to say that we stopped being busy and started being productive. (laughing) >> I love that. >> And that's really what the cloud has done for us. >> Is that what you mean by cloud native? I mean, being able to take advantage of those primitives and native API. So what does that mean for your business? >> Yeah, exactly. I think, well, the first step for us was just to consume the infrastructure, right? But now we're looking at targeted services that they have in there too. So, you know, we have our data stream of services. So log analytics, for example, we used to put it locally on the machine. Now we're just dumping into an S3 bucket the way you're using Kinesis to consume that data and put it in elastic and go from there. And none of the services are managed by Digital River. We're just realizing the capabilities that AWS has there too. >> And as an e-commerce player, retail company, were you ever concerned about moving to AWS as a possible competitor, or did you look at other clouds? What can you tell us about that? >> Yeah, and so, I think e-commerce is really mature, right? And so we got squeezed out by the Amazons of the world. It's just not something that we were doing, but we had really a good area of expertise with our global seller services. So we evaluated Microsoft, we evaluated AWS as well as Google and, you know, back when we did that, Microsoft was Windows-based. Google was just coming into the picture, really didn't fit for what we're doing, but Amazon was just a natural fit. So, we made a business decision, right? It was financially really the best decision for us. And so we didn't really put our feelings into it, right? We just had to move forward and it's better than where we're at and we've been delighted actually. >> Yeah, makes sense, best cloud, the best tech. >> Yeah. >> You know, I want to talk about Chaos Search. A lot of people describe it as a data lake for log analytics. Do you agree with that? You know, what does that even mean? >> Yeah, well, from our perspective because the self-managed solutions are costly and difficult to maintain. You know, we had older versions of self deployed using Splunk, other things like that too. So over time, we made a conscious decision to limit our data retention in generally seven days. But in a lot of cases, it was zero. We just couldn't consume that log data because of the cost, intimidating in itself, because of this limit, you know, we've lost important data points, use for incident triage problem management, trending and other things too. So, Chaos Search has offered us a manageable and cost-effective opportunity to store months or even years of data that we can use for operations as well as trending automation. And really the big thing that we're pushing into is in the event of an architecture so that we can proactively manage our services. >> Yeah, you mentioned elastic. So I know I've talked to people who use the Elk Stack. They say, yes, this is exponential growth in the amount of data. So you have to cut it off at whatever. I think you said seven days, >> Yeah. >> Or less, you're saying you're not finding that with Chaos Search? >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that was one of the huge benefits here too. So, you know, we we're losing out if there was, you know, a lower priority incident for example and people didn't get to it until eight, nine days later. Well, all the bread crumbs are gone. So it was really just kind of a best guess or the incident really wasn't resolved. We didn't find a root cause. >> Yeah, like my video camera's down you know, by your other house, is that when somebody breaks in, I don't find out for two weeks and then the video's gone, kind of like same thing. >> Yeah. >> So, how do you, can you give us some more detail on how you use your data lake and Chaos Search specifically? >> Yeah, yeah. Yep and so there's many different areas, but what we found is we were able to easily consolidate data from multiple regions into a single pane of glass to our customers. So internal and externally, you know, it really does serve that operational support for the data extract transformation load process, right? It offered us also a seamless transition for the users who were familiar with elastic search, right? It wasn't difficult to move over. And so all these are a lot of selling points benefits. And so now that we have all this data that we're able to capture and utilize, it gives us an opportunity to use machine learning, predictive analysis. And like I said, you know, driving to an event driven architecture. >> Okay. >> So that's really what is offered and it's been a huge benefit. >> So you're saying you can speak the language of elastic. You don't have to move the data out of an S3 bucket and you can scale more easily. Is that right? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it is so for us just because running in multiple regions to drive more high availability, having that data available from multiple regions in a single pane of glass or a single way to utilize it is a huge benefit as well, just to, you know, not to mention actually having the data. >> What was the initial catalyst to sort of rethink what you were doing with log analytics? Was it cost, was it flexibility scale? >> There was, I think all of those went into it. One of the main drivers, so last year we had a huge project, so we have our Elk Stack and it's probably from a decade ago, right? And, you know, a version point or two or something, you know, anyways, it's very old and we went through a whole project to get that upgraded and migrated over. And it was just, we found it impossible internally to do, right? And so this was a method for us to get out of that business, to get rid of the security risks and support risk and have a way for people to easily migrate over. And it was just a nightmare here consolidating the data across regions. And so that was a huge thing. But yeah, it has also been the cost, right? We're finding that cheaper to use Chaos Search and have more data available versus what we were doing currently in AWS. >> Got it, I wonder if you could share maybe any stories that you have or examples that underscore the impact that this approach to analytics, >> Yeah >> Is having on your business, maybe your team's everyday activities, any metrics you can provide, >> Yeah. >> Or even just anecdotal information? >> Yeah, yeah. And and I think, you know, one, coming from an Oracle background here, so Digital River historically has been an Oracle shop, right? And we've been developing a reporting and analytics environment on Oracle and that's complicated and expensive, right? We had to use advanced features in Oracle like partitioning materialized views and bringing other supporting software like Informatic, Hyperion, Essbase, right? And all of these require a large team with a wide set of expertise into the separate focus areas, right? And the amount of data that we were pushing at the KF search would simply have overwhelmed this legacy method for data analysis than a relational database, right? In that dimension, the human toll of the stress of supporting that Oracle environment than a 24 by seven by 365 environment, you know, which requires literal or no downtime. So just that alone, it was a huge thing. So, it's allowed us to break away from Oracle, it's allowed us to use new technologies that make sense to solve business solutions. >> You know, Chaos Search is just a really interesting company to me, I'm sure like me, you see a lot of startups. I'm sure they're knocking on your door every day. And I always like to say, "Okay, where are they going after? "Are they going after a big market? "How are they getting product market fit?" And it seems like Chaos Search has really looked that hard at log analytics and sort of maybe disrupting the Elk Stack. But I see, you know, other potential use cases, you know, beyond analyzing logs. I wonder if you agree, are there other use cases that you see in your future? >> Yeah, exactly. So, I think there's one area would be Splunk for example. We have that here too. So we use Splunk versus, you know, flat file analysis or other ways to capture that data just because from a PCI perspective, it needs to be secured for our compliance and certification, right? So Chaos Search allows us to do that. There's different types of authentication, really a hodgepodge of authentication that we used in our old environment, but Chaos Search has a more easily usable one, one that we could set up, one that can really segregate the data and allows to satisfy our PCR requirements too. But Splunk, I think really, deprecating all of our elastic search environments are homegrown ones, but then also taking a hard look at what we're doing with relational databases, right? 27 years ago, there was only relational databases, Oracle and SQL server. So we've been logging into those types of databases and that's not cost-effective, it's not supportable. And so really getting away from that and putting the data where it belongs and that is easily accessible in a secure environment and allowing us to push our business forward. >> And when you say where the data belongs, it sounds like you're putting it in the bit bucket S3, leaving it there, >> Yeah. >> And this is the most cost-effective way to do it and then sort of adding value on top of it. That's what's interesting about Chaos Search to me. >> Yeah, exactly, yup, yup versus the high price storage, you know, that you have to use for a relational database, you know, and not to mention the standbys, the backups. So, you know, you're duplicating, triplicating all this data in here too in expensive manner. So yeah. >> Yeah, copy creating, moving data around and it gets expensive. It's funny when you say about databases, it's true. But database used to be such a boring market now it's exploded. Then you had the whole no SQL movement and SQL became the killer app, you know, it's like full circle. (laughing) >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. >> Well, anyway, good stuff Mark, really, I really appreciate you coming on "The Cube" and sharing your perspectives. We'd love to have you back in the future. >> Oh yeah, yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. >> Yeah, our pleasure. Okay, in a moment, I'll have some closing thoughts on getting more value out of your growing data lakes. You're watching "The Cube," you're leader in high-tech coverage. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, I'm John Furrier with The Cube, we're here in Palo Alto, California for a remote interview and session for The Cube presents AWS startup showcase, the next big thing in AI security in life sciences. I'm John Furrier. We're here with a great segment on cloud. Next big thing in Cloud with Chaos Search, Thomas Hazel, Chief Technology and Science Officer of Chaos Search joined by Jeremy Foran, the head of data analytics, the bad boy of data analyst as they say, but BAI communications, Jeremy Thomas, great to have you on. >> Great to be here. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So we're going to be talking about applying large scale log analytics to building the future of the transit industry. Obviously Telco's a big part of that, smart cities, you name the use case self-driving trucks, cars, you name it, everything's now edge. That the edge is super valuable, it's a new kind of last mile if you will, it's moving fast, it's mobile. This is a huge deal. Let's get into it, Thomas. What's this big story around this, this session? >> Well, we provide unique ability to take all that edge data and drive it into a data lake offering that we provide data analytics, both in logs, BI and coming out with ML there this year into next. So our unique play is transforming customers' cloud outer storage into an analytical platform. And really, I think with BIA is a log analytics specifically where, you know there's a lot of data streams from all those devices going into a lake that we transform their lake into analytics for driving, I guess, operational analysis. >> You know, Jeremy, I remember back in the day, I'm old enough to remember when the edge was the remote switch or campus hub or something. And then even on the Telco side, there was no wifi back in 2000 and you know, someone was driving in a car and you got any signal, you're lucky. Now you got, you know, no perimeter you have unlimited connectivity everywhere. This has opened up more of an Omni channel data problem. How do you see that world? Because you still got more devices pushing out at this edge and it's getting super local, right? Even on the body, even on people in the car. So certainly a lot of change on the infrastructure side. What does that pose for data challenge? >> Yeah, I, I would say that, you know users always want more, more bandwidth, more performance and that requires us to create more systems that require more complexity to deliver that user experience that we're, we're very proud of. And with that complexity means, you know exponentially more data. And so one of the wifi networks we offer in the Toronto subway system, T-connect, you know we see a 100-200,000 unique users a day and you can imagine just the amount of infrastructure to support that so that everyone has a seamless experience and can get their news and emails and even stream media while they're waiting for the subway. >> So you guys provide state of the art infrastructure for cell, wifi, broadcast, radio, IP networks, basically I mean, I call it the smart city kind of go-to. But that's basically anything involving kind of that edge piece. This is a huge thing. So as smart cities are on the table, which and you seeing 5G being called more of an enterprise app where there's feeding large dense areas of people this is now a new modern version of what I would call the, the smart city blueprint. What's changed in your mind on this whole modernization of this smart city infrastructure concept? What's new? What's cutting edge? >> Yeah. I would say that, you know there was an explosion of data and a lot of our insights aren't coming from one system anymore. It's coming from collecting data from all of the different pieces, the different infrastructure whether that's your fiber infrastructure or your wireless infrastructure, and then to solve problems you need to correlate data across those systems. So we're seeing more and more technologies that allow you to do that correlation. And that's really where we're finding tons of value, right? >> Thomas, take us through what you guys do as a, as a, as a product, a value proposition, the secret sauce, and and why I'm here with Jeremy? Why is this conversation important for the folks watching? What's the connection between Chaos Search and BAI communication? >> Well, it's data, right? And lots of it. So our unique platform allows people like Jeremy to stream all this data, right? In you know, today's world terabytes go to petabytes really easily, billions go to trillion really easily, and so providing the analysis of that data for their operations is challenging particularly based on technology and architectures that have been around for a long time. So what we do here at Chaos Search is the ability for BIA to stream all these devices, all these services into one centralized data lake on their cloud outer storage, where we connect to that cloud outer storage and transform it into an analytical database to do, in this case log analytics and do it seamlessly, easily where a new workload a new stream just streams into that lake. And we, as a service take over, we discover we index it and publish well-known open API and visualization so that they can focus on their business, not all the operational data pipeline, database and data engineering type work that again, at these types of scales is is frankly a nightmare. >> You know, one of the things that we've always observed on The Cube when you see new things come out that are really cool groundbreaking products like you guys are doing it's always a challenge to manage the cost and complexity of bringing in the new. So Jeremy, take us through this tech stack here because you know, it's, sometimes it might be unwieldy just in from a tech stack perspective, nevermind the business logic or the business processes that got to be either unwound or changed. Can you take us through the IT stack that's critical to support your, your area? >> Yeah, absolutely. So with all the various different equipment you know, to provide our public wifi and and our desks, carrier agnostic, LT and 5G networks, you know, we need to be able to adhere to PCI compliance and ISO 27,000, so that, you know, requires us to keep a tremendous amount of our data. And the challenge we were facing is how do we do that cost effectively, and not have to make any sort of compromises on how we do that? A lot of times you'll find you don't know the value of your data today until tomorrow. An example would be COVID. You know, we, when we were storing data two years ago we weren't planning for a pandemic, but now that we were able to retain that data and look back we can see a tremendous amount of value with trying to forecast how our systems will recover when things get back to normal. And so when I met Thomas and we were sort of talking about how we were going to solve some of these data retention problems, he started explaining to me their compression in some of the performance metrics of their profession. And, you know, I said, oh, middle out compression. And it was a bit, it's been a bit of a running joke between me and him and I'm sure others, but it's incredibly impressive the amount of data we're able to store at the kind of cost, right? >> What, what problem does, did he solve for you? Because I mean, these guys, honestly, you know the startups have a lot and the Cloud's enabling more value now, we're seeing this, but when you look at this what was your, what was your core problem that you had? >> Yeah, so we, when you we want to be able to, I mean, primarily this is for our CIS log server. And CIS long servers today aren't what they were 10, 15 years ago where you just sort of had a machine and if something broke you went and looked, right? Now, they're very complex, that data is feeding to various systems and third-party software. So, you know, we're actively looking for changes in patterns and we have our, you know security teams auditing these from, for penetration testing and such. And then the getting that data to S3 so that we could have it in case, you know, for two, three years of storage. Well, the problem we were facing is all of that all of these different systems we needed to feed and retain data, we couldn't do that on site. We wanted to do use S3 but when we were doing some projections, it's like, we, we don't really have the budget for all of these places. Meeting Thomas and, and working with Chaos Search, you know, using their compression brought those costs down drastically. And then as we've been working with them the really exciting thing is they we're bringing more and more features to that surface or offering. So, you know, first it was just storing that data away. And now we're starting to build solutions off of that sitting in storage. So that's where it gets really exciting because you know, there, it's nothing to start getting anomaly detection off those logs, which, you know originally it was just, we need to store them in case somebody needs them two, three years from now. >> So Thomas Thomas, if I get this right then what I'm hearing is obviously I've put aside the complexity and the governing side the regulations for a minute just generally. Data retention as, as a key value proposition and having data available when you need it and then to do that and doing it in a very cost-effective simple way. It sounds like what you guys are offering. Is that right? >> Yeah, I mean, one key aspect of our solution is retention, right? Those are a lot of the challenges, but at the same time we provide real time notification like a classic log analytic type platform, alerting, monitoring. The key thing is to bringing both those worlds together and solving that problem. And so this, you know, middle in middle out, well, to be frank, we created a new technology called what we call Chaos Index that is a database index that is wonderfully small as as we're indicating, but also provides all the features that makes Cloud object storage, high performance. And so the idea is that use this lake offering to store all your data in a cost effective way but our service allows you to analyze it both in a long retention perspective as well as real-time perspective and bringing those two worlds together is so key because typically you have Silo Solutions and whether it's real-time at scale or retention scale the cost complexity and time to build out those solutions I know Jeremy knows also, well, a lot of folks come to us to solve those problems because you know when you're dealing with, you know terabytes and up, you know these things get complicated and to be frank, fall over quite often. >> Yeah. Let me, let me just ask you the question that's probably on everyone's mind who's watching and you guys probably have both heard this many times, because a lot of people just throw the data lake solution around like it's, you know why they whitewash their kind of old legacy solutions with data lake, store it on data lake. It's been called a data swamp. So people are fearful that, okay. I love this idea of a data lake, who doesn't like throwing data into a repository, having it available at will with notifications, all this secret magic beans that just magically create value. But I doubt that, I don't want to turn into a data swamp. So Thomas and Jeremy, talk about that, that concern. How do you mitigate that? How do you talk to that? Because if done properly, there's huge value in having a control plane or some sort of data system that is going to be tied in with signals and just storage retention. So I see the value. How do you manage the concern that people might say, Hey, I don't want to date a swamp? >> Yeah, I'll jump into that. So, you know, let's just be frank, Hadoop was a great tool for a very narrow scenario. I think that data swamp came out because people were using the tooling in an incorrect way. I've always had the belief that data lakes are the future. You just have the right to have the right service the right philosophy to leverage it. So what we do here at Chaos Search is we allow you to organize it, discover it, automatically index that data so that swamp doesn't get swampy. You know, when you stream data into your lake how do you organize it, such that it's has a nice stream? How do you transform that data into a value? So with our service we actually start where the storage begins, not a end point, not an archive. So we have tooling and services that keep your lake from being swampy to be, to be clear. And, but the key value is the benefits of the lake, the cost effectiveness, the reliability, security, the scale, those are all the benefits. The problem was that no one really made cloud offer storage a first-class citizen and we've done that. We've dressed the swamp nature but provided all the value of analysis. And that cost metrics, that scale. No one can touch cloud outer storage, it just, you can't. But what we've done is cracked the code of how you make it analytical. >> Jeremy, I want to get your thoughts on this too, on your side I mean, as a practitioner and customer of, of of these solutions, you know, the concern is am I missing anything? And I've been a big proponent of data retention for many, many years. You know, Dave Alondra in our Cube knows all know that I bang on the table all the time, store your data, be a data hoarder, because it's going to come back and be valuable. Costs are going down so I'm a big fan of data retention. But the fear might be on, what am I missing? Because machine learning starts to come in down the road you got AI, the more data you have that's accessible in real time, the more machine learning is effective. Do you, do you worry about missing anything or do you just store everything? >> We, we store everything. Sometimes it's, it's interesting where the value and insights come from your data. Something that see, might seem trivial today down the road offers tremendous, tremendous value. So one of the things we do is provide because we have wifi in the subway infrastructure, you know taking that wifi data, we can start to understand the flow of people in and out of the subway network. And we can take that and provide insights to the rail operators, which get them from A to B quicker. You know, when we built the wifi it wasn't with the intention of getting Torontonians across the city faster. But that was one of the values that we were able to get from the data in terms of, you know, Thomas's solution, I think one of the reasons we we engaged him in the first place is because I didn't believe his compression. It sounded a little too good to be true. And so when it was time to try them out, you know all we had to do was ship data to an S3 bucket. You know, there's tons of, of solutions to do that. And, and data shippers right out of the box. It took a few, you know, a few minutes and then to start exploring the data was in Cabana, which is or their dashboard, which is, you know, an interface that's easy to use. So we were, you know, within a two days getting the value out of that data that we were looking for which is, you know, phenomenal. We've been very happy. >> Thomas, sounds like you've got a great, great testimonial here and it's not like an easy problem that he's living in there. I mean, I think, you know, I was mentioning this earlier and we're going to get into it now. There's regulations and there's certain compliance issues. First of all, everyone has this now problem now, it's not just within that space. But just the technical complexities of packets moving around I got on my wifi and the stop here, I'm jumping over here, and there's a ton of data it's all over the place, it's totally unstructured. So it's a tough, tough test for you guys, Chaos Search. So yeah, it's almost like the Mount Everest of customer testimonials. You've got to, it's a big, it's a big use case here. How does this translate to other clients? And talk about this governance and security controls because I know this highly regulated and you got there's penalties involved on his side of the world and Telco, the providers that have these edge devices there's actually penalties and, and whatnot so, not just commercial, it's maybe a, you know risk management, but here there's actually penalties. >> Absolutely. So, you know centralizing your data has a real benefit of of not getting in trouble, right? So you have one place, you store one place that's a good thing, but what we've done and this was a key aspect to our offering is we as Chaos, Chaos Search folks, we don't own the customer's data. We don't own BIA's data. They own the data. They give us access rights, very standard way with Cloud App storage roll on policies from Amazon, read only access rights to their data. And so not owning a customer's data is a big selling point not only for them, but for us for compliance regulatory perspective. So, you know, unlike a lot of solutions where you move the data into them and now they are responsible, actually BIA owns everything. We, they provide access so that we could provide an analysis that they could turn off at any point in time. We're also SOC 2 type 1 and type 2 compliant you got to do it, you know, in this, this world, you know when we were young we ran at this because of all of these compliance scenarios that we will be in, but, you know, the long as short of it is, we're transient service. The storage, cloud storage is the source of truth where all data resides and, you know, think about it, it's architecturally smart, it's cost effective, it's secure, it's reliable, it's durable. But from a security perspective, having the customer own their own data is a big differentiation in the market, a big differentiation. >> Jeremy, talk about on your end the security controls surrounding the log management environments that span across countries with different regulations. Now you've got all kinds of policy dimensions and technical dimensions and topology dimensions. >> Yeah, absolutely. So how we approach it is we look at where we have offerings across the globe and we figure out what the sort of highest watermark level of adherence we need to hit. And then we standardize across that. And by shipping to S3, it allows us to enforce that governance really easily and right to Tom's point you know, we manage the data, which is very important to us and we don't have to be worried about a third party or if we want to change providers years down the road. Although I don't think anyone's coming out with 81% compression anytime soon (laughs). But yeah, so that's, for us, it's about meeting those high standards and having the technologies that enable us to do it. And Chaos Search is a very big part of that right now. >> All right let me ask you a question, for the folks watching that are like really interested in this topic, what would you say to them when evaluating Chaos Search obviously, your use case is complex, but so are others as enterprises start to have an edge, obviously the security posture shifts, everything shifts. There's no more perimeter and the data problem becomes acute to them. So the enterprises are going to start seeing what you've been living for in your world. What's your advice to people watching? >> My advice would be to give them a try. You know, it's it's has been really quite impressive. The customer service has been hands-on and we've been getting, you know, they've been under-promising and over-delivering, which when you have the kind of requirements to manage solutions in these very complex environment, cloud local, you know various data centers and such, you know that kind of customer service is very important, right? It enables us to continue to deliver those high quality solutions. >> So Thomas give us the, the overview of the secret sauce. You've got a great testimonial here. You got people watching, what's different now in the world that you're going after, what wave are you on? Talk to the people who are watching this and saying, okay why Chaos Search? Why are you relevant? Obviously there's some cool things you're doing. I love that. What's cool, and what's relevant and why what's in it for them if they work with you? >> Yeah. So you know, that that whole Silicon Valley reference actually got that from my patent attorney when we were talking. But yeah, no, we, we, you know, focus on if we can crack this code of making data, one a face small, store small, moves small, process small. But then make it multimodal access make it virtual transformation. If we could do that, and we could transform cloud outer storage into a high-performance medical database all these heavy, heavy problems, all that complexity that scaffolding that you build to do these type of scales would be solved. Now what we had to focus on and this has been my, I guess you say life passion is working on a new data representation. And that's our secret sauce that enables a new architecture a new service that where the customer folks on their tooling, their APIs, their visualizations that they know and love, what we focus is on taking that data lake, and again, to transform it into an analytical database, both for log analytics think of like elastic search replacement, as well as a BI replacement for your SQL warehousing database. And coming out later this year into 2022, ML support on one representation. You don't have the silo your information you don't have to re index your data, both. So elastic search CQL and actually ML TensorFlow actions on the exact same representation. So think about the data retention, doing some post analysis on all those logs of data, months, years, and then maybe set up some triggers if you see some anomaly that's happening within your service. So you think about it, the hunt with BI reporting, with predictive analysis on one platform. Again, it sounds a little unicorn, I agree with Jeremy, maybe it didn't sound true but it's been a life's work. So it didn't happen overnight. And you know, it's eight years, at least in the in the making, but I guess the life journey in the end. >> Well, you know, the timing is great. You know, all the database geeks out there who have been following the data industry know that, you know there's a good point for structured data but when you start getting into mechanisms and they become a bottleneck or a blocker to innovation, you know you starting to see this idea of a data lake being let the data kind of form, let it be. You know, I hate the word control plane but more of a, a connective tissue between systems is become an interesting thing. So now you can store everything so you know, no worries there, no blind spots and then let the magic of machine learning in the future, come around. So Jeremy, with that, I got to ask you since you're the bad boy of data analytics at BAI communications head of data analytics, what does that, what do you look for in the future as you start to set this up because I can almost imagine and connecting the dots here in the interview, you got the data lake you're storing everything, which is good. Now you have to create more insights and get ahead of the curve and provide some prescriptive and automated ways to do things better. What's your vision? >> First I would just like to say that, you know when astrophysicists talk about, you know, dark dark energy, dark matter, I'm convinced that's where Thomas is hiding the ones and zeros to get that compression, right? I don't don't know that to be fact but I know it to be true. And then in terms of machine learning and these sort of future technologies, which are becoming available you know, starting from scratch and trying to build out you know, models that have value, you know that takes a fair amount of work. And that landscape keeps changing, right? Being able to push our data into an S3 bucket and then you know, retain that data and then get anomaly detection on top of it. That's, I mean, that's something special and that unlocks a lot of ability for you know, our teams to very easily deliver anomaly detection, machine learning to our customers, without having to take on a lot of work to understand the latest and greatest in machine learning. So, I mean, it's really empowering to our team, right? And, and a tool that we're going to. >> Yeah, I love and I love the name, Chaos Search, Thomas. I got to say, you know it brings up the inside baseball around chaos monkey which everyone knows was a DevOps tool to create kind of day two simulate day two operations and disruptions in DevOps. But what you're really getting at is your whole new architecture that's beyond DevOps movement, it's like next gen architecture. Talk about that to the people watching who have a lot of legacy and want to transform over to a more enabling platform that's going to give them some headroom for their data. What, what do you say to them? How do they get started? What, how should they, how what's their mindset? What they, what are some first principles you can share? >> Well, you know, I always start with first principles but you know, I like to say we're the next next gen. The key thing with the Chaos Search offering is you can start today with B, without even Chaos Search. Stream your data to S3. We're going to make hip and cool data lakes again. And actually it's a, Google it now, data lakes are hip and cool. So start streaming now, start managing your data in a well-formed centralized viewpoint with security governance and cost effectiveness. Then call Chaos Search shop, and we'll make access to it easily, simply to ultimately solve your problems. The bug whether your security issue, the bug, whether it's more performance issues at scale, right? And so when workloads can be added instantaneously in your data lake it's, it's game changing it's mind changing. So from the DevOps folks where, you know, you're up all night trying to say, how am I going to scale from terabyte, you know one today to 50 terabytes, don't. Stream it to S3. We'll take over, we'll worry about that scale pain. You worry about your job of security, performance, operations, integrity. >> That really highlights the cloud scale the value proposition as, as apps start to be using data as an input, not just as a a part of a repo repo, so great stuff. Thomas, thanks for sharing your life's work and your technology magic. Jeremy, thanks for coming on and sharing your use cases with us and how you are making it all work. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> My pleasure. >> Okay. This is The Cubes, coverage and presenting AWS this time showcase the next big thing here with Chaos Search. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by Silicon angle. The cube on cloud continues. We're here with Anna Pinza, who is the chief development officer and Anna Plan. We've been unpacking the future of Cloud. We've heard from a number of CEOs how they're thinking about Cloud in the coming decade. And first of all, Anna, welcome back to the Cube. Thanks for participating. It's great to see you again. >>It's great to see you, Dave. And I'm so excited to be here with you again, so hopefully we'll be doing this soon. >>I hope in 2021 will be able to be face to face everybody. Oh, no. A lot of respect. You think about the CEO role, something that you're intimately familiar with its unique because she or he has a very wide observation space across the company. You know, where is the GM or a business line manager there, You know, most concerned with their respective business, the CEO, they're gonna worry about the whole enchilada. And we've heard a lot in this program about digital transformation. We've heard a lot, of course, in the past couple of years, a lot of it was lip service, but but digital transformation, it's no longer optional. What's changed, in your view, in the way that businesses air going about it? >>You know, Dave, I mean, from my perspective, it's interesting. And this year in particular has been really telling for us, right? So I think before many companies were thinking about Hey, I wanna be online, I wanna grow my revenues, you know, with with digital I wanna have a presence. But what's happened actually this year with covert in particular, is that it's gone from being kind of a good to have, you know, to really ah, fundamental necessity. We must have it. And so when I talked to CEOs today, they're really thinking about different kinds of things than before, not just going digital, but how do I enable um, my people toe work remotely right? I've got to enable that how doe I bring the agility and the flexibility that I need in our business, especially with these new ways of working right? How do I look at business resiliency? You know, not just from a you know, something happens, and then how do I recover from it? But also how do I help our, You know, our company and our people then actually spring forward and grow from where we are. So it's gone from a a topic that was happening at the CEO, maybe at the business level. But now it's really also a fundamental CEO and board conversation. And so now we're seeing the CEO is having to present two boards. You know, what is our digital transformation? Are our digital strategy. So I wonder what >>you've seen in that regard. I'm interested in what role cloud plays and supporting those digital initiatives. But more specifically, you know, cloud migration came, you know, off the charts in terms of interest because of co vid. But you had those that that were, you know, deep into cloud had a lot of experience of those maybe not as much. Are you seeing any kind of schism in the marketplace where there's maybe a great advantage to those who really had years of experience on may be a disadvantage to those who didn't or is there kind of an equilibrium you're seeing in the market place? How do you see that playing out? >>Yeah. I mean, you know, What I'm seeing is that I think there used to be a spectrum of CEOs and effect, you know, the ones that were kind of a little bit, you know, you know, forward, ahead on the cloud, both on cloud infrastructure as well, Assassin. Right. And what are the services that we have? And then there were some that were really, um, you know, trying to think about what's the security, you know, implications of the cloud. And, you know, is it more expensive? And you know, So there was this spectrum of CEOs and I think now what's happened is there's such a business imperative that I think CEO s air saying, Look, I'm either gonna survive, you know, in this new world with the agility and the flexibility that I need And so cloud, you know, I'm seeing a lot of CEO is really saying Okay, Cloud is not just fashionable, but it z in and a necessity, right? And we must on we must do it. And I think frankly, the c e. O. S that don't embrace the cloud and that level of agility are going to struggle, right? It's a it's really a personal imperative. for a CEO in addition to sort of for the company. So >>a lot of times we talk about, you know, the three dimensions of people, process and technology, and I'm interested in your thoughts on how cloud has affected those traditional structures and the value chains. I mean, you've got some people are really good a text. Some people are really good at people. Some people are really good at process. Has the cloud affected that is, it upended? It changed it in any way. >>Yeah. I mean, let's let's, like, unpack that a little bit. You know, Dave, because if you think about process, I mean, one of the interesting things about the cloud is that And if you think about the cloud as going all the way from, like I as their sort of infrastructure all the way up the stack toe, actually providing business processes embedded, you know, in in a fast service, then from a process perspective and for CEOs, it's really upended how they think about business process reengineering in their companies. Um, if I think even, you know, five years ago, where you would have ah whole organization, that's, you know, focused on business process reengineering You do that? It takes a long time. You know, you get a consultant, maybe to help you, and then you work through that process. If you look at a SAS service like Anna plan today, where we our goal is, for example, toe orchestrate business performance. We were assassin business planning platform. We've incorporated into our platform that business process. Right. So the role of the CEO relative to business process and effect changes Right now, it's about how the leverage, ah, cloud infrastructure, and then how do you enable the customization is on top of that. But generally speaking, that's a lot easier than having to think about re engineering the whole company. Um, if you think about the technology stock, obviously the cloud, uh, embeds a lot of technology, you know, in the cloud. Right. So you have a lot of native services that are available to you. Um, that is awesome from a talent perspective, you know, because before, maybe you need to have, you know, needed to have database experts or, you know, kubernetes experts. And not that we don't need those today. But many of those capabilities come native in the cloud today. So, in effect, how it helps the CEO is to provide sort of this ecosystem of talent kind of embedded in what the cloud provider does. Right? So >>I wondered. So stay on that for a minute. So remember, before Amazon announced a W s and whether 2006 it was CEO said to me, >>Yeah, I'm thinking >>about maybe I don't need to run my own email, right? So because you have to have seen the SAS ification of of of businesses, which to your point, you know, makes things, uh, simpler and that I can focus on other areas and not to worry about, you know, managing infrastructure to support APS. At the same time you've had this proliferation of cloud you mentioned, of course, that you're with Anna Plan. You see, you got work day, you got Salesforce. You've got service now Oracle, APS and and people struggle. Okay, how do I get these things Talking to whether there's that worried about that data layer. So there's this new level of complexity. How do you see that playing out in the next decade? >>Yeah. You know, we used to say that, you know, we sort of, um, shift. What we do at a certain level and now is an organization we start to look at kind of higher value outcomes, right. And so I see that happening. And you're absolutely right. The conversations that I have with customers now are Hey, um, you know, there's things that are enabled by the cloud, and then on top of that, you need a set of a P i s or connectors or ways to get data in and out, you know, in and out of a particular system or ways to link. In our case, we're linking with Salesforce toe, Anna plan, toe workday or other tools, right? And so you start to think more about the business outcome that you want. The CEO needs to be focused on that, um, instead of maybe, uh, sort of the fundamentals of the technology. Those come, you know, those come for you, and then it's really more about the partnership with the business side. Right to say Okay, what is it that you're trying to do and can I enable that through my you know, cloud architectures, the work days, you know, the adobes or or the sales forces of the world. So I think the conversation is changing. And from my perspective, what's really cool about that is, um it brings the CEO Thio, you know, really makes the CEO of business and thought leader a strategic leader, right, Because, uh, the I t shop is not just talking tech, you know, the top shop has toe talk a lot more about the outcome that they're trying to deliver. >>So I mean, in the early days of cloud, I just wanna pick up on what you just said. I mean, a lot of people in I t's saw the cloud is a threat to their livelihood. And e think I'm inferring from your statements that were largely through that dynamic. And the CEO is now really trying to make the cloud platform for transformation and monetization or whatever other organizational goal might be saving lives or better government. Is >>that sort >>of how you see it, that the role has changed to that? >>I know. I mean, I talked to so many companies, and it's still we're still going through that transition, so I don't think we're completely over the hump of, you know, cloud all day everywhere but a same time. Um, I think what the CEO so really focused on these days is really around business, agility and business outcomes for their partners. By the way, that's one of the things. The second thing, especially these days, is around people, you know, collaboration, communication. How do we, you know, facilitate interaction of people, whether inside or outside of the company on DSO? You know, that's, um that's a very different conversation for the CEO. It doesn't mean that we're not still having the basic conversation of how safe is the cloud. What security do you have built into the cloud, Right, Andi? But I think, frankly, Dave, that we've across the chasm where before it used to be. Hey, I'm a lot more secure on Prem and, you know, given the tremendous focus of the cloud providers and says companies have put on security, um, I see many more companies, you know, feeling very at ease and in fact, telling their organizations right, we actually need to switch to the cloud, including large. Um, you know, large companies that have compliance issues, you know, or like large financial companies. Many of those are making that switch as well. Well, >>it's interesting talk about security, but I think it's kind of a two edged sword, right? Because I think a lot of frankly, I think a lot of executives early days used security as a way to sort of kick the can >>down the road. But >>the reality was cloud, you know better. Worse you could make that argument is different. And so, you know, different concerns people. But it's still a the end of the day. Bad security practices Trump, >>you >>know, good security. And so that's what we've seen so many times that shared responsibility model on DSO. People are still >>learning there, so >>so security is almost this beast in and of itself. I'm interested in your thoughts on on the priorities. I mean, >>our >>customers are they streamlining their their tech investments? I mean, the major focus, as you pointed out on Cloud, has been it's a driver of agility and shifting. Resource is as we talked about. But there's this constant cost pressure, you know, the procurement. Looking at the Amazon Bill, Uh, do you see ah lot of the same going forward? Or do you think the value equation is shifting such that there'll be Maybe, you know, I t is less cost pressure is always gonna be cost pressure. I know, but But more value producer, >>I think I think you're right. I mean, I see it and I see it. Over the last six months, I've seen it really accelerate where CEOs are thinking about three things and one is business resiliency. When I talk about business resiliency, I talk about the ability to recover from crap that happens. You know, where you know, whether it's pandemics or, you know, global events and shifts that companies have to accommodate. Right? So that's one thing that I see them thinking about. The second one that we talked about a little bit is just agility. You know, I see them really focused on that. And the cloud enables that. And, you know, the third one in conversations is really speed innovation, because, um, you know, when companies air talking to cloud providers and particularly SAS cos what I see them talking about is Look, I've got this particular need and it would take me, you know, two years to do it with a legacy player because of, you know, I've got to do this on Prem. But you have the fundamentals built in. And I think I could do it with you in three months. So I think, you know, business Resiliency both to grow and toe recover from stuff. Um, agility and innovation are really three fundamental levers that I see for movement, uh, movement to the cloud. Right? Andi, any one of those that these days I mean, it's funny, uh, depending on who you talk Thio. Any one of those can propel a CEO to make a choice to make that choice. And when they have all of that together, um, they have a lot more, um, lift in effect As a CEO, they have a lot more leverage, right in terms of what they could do for their companies. Well, >>let's stay on innovation. I mean innovation. I've said many times in tech, >>you >>know, for decades it came, came from Moore's Law, it seems, seems so nineties to even say that it's true. So what's going to drive innovation in the in the coming years? I'm interested in your perspective on how machine intelligence and a I n m l on cloud, of course, play into that innovation agenda. >>Yeah. I mean, it's it's interesting, You know, I see it a lot in our business with Anna plan. Um, innovation comes from the ability to bring instead of what you do internally and match it with what's available in the external world. Right? And you mentioned it earlier. Data, You know, data is like the new currency. That's that's, like software, you know, eats the world. Now we talk about data, right? And, um and I think what's really going to drive innovation is being able to have access to the world's data once the company builds this digital DNA, You know, this digital foundation and puts, you know and is able to have access to that data, Then you start to make decisions. You know, you start Thio offer services. Um, you start thio, bring intelligence. Um, that wasn't available before, right? And, um, that's a really powerful thing for any company, whether you're doing, you know, forecasting. And you need to sort of bring the world's data. Whether you're a agricultural company, we talking. And in these days, um, innovation comes in the form of speed, you know, being able to just deliver something new to an audience faster. So to me, the cloud enables, You know, all of that the ability Thio bring in data. And then on top of that, I mean, think about all the A i m l innovation that's happening around the world. We we just launched an offer, actually, um, to be able to dio forecasting intelligent forecasting on top of the cloud we partner with with a W s forecast for that, Um, if we didn't have a cloud platform, you know, to do that and instead of a p i s you know, being digital that way really enables us, uh, the opportunity Thio toe match. You know, one plus one equals one, you know, 100. Really? And bringing the power of that to get to companies together to be ableto enable that type of innovation. >>Well, that that that's interesting. It reminds me of my friends. Ed Walsh is the CEO of a startup called Chaos Search. And you use the statement. He said, where we're standing on the shoulders of the giants, you know what you know, trying not trying to recreate it. And I think you know, you got what you just said is the same thing. You're sort of relying on others to build out cloud infrastructure. So there's a totally left field question. When you hear all the talks about breaking up big tech I >>want Is that a >>relevant to you? Because you figured okay, the clouds gonna be there. It's maybe more about search or it's about, you know, Facebook or, you know, Amazon's dominance. Interestingly, Microsoft's really not in those discussions anymore. They were the center of it >>back. No, no. >>But as a head of development for a company, does that even factor into the equation? And you're kind of not worry about that? >>No. I mean, I'll be honest for me personally. What I do is I compartmentalize my world, right. In a sense, I view I view the partnerships and we have partnerships with Google and AWS and Microsoft and others, Right? So, um, I view those as part of a non opportunity to really provide on ecosystem set of solutions right to customers and those air very powerful. I think those partnerships enable companies like ours, like Sasse companies, to innovate faster, right? And so I compartmentalize and I say those things are are wonderful. I don't know why you would want to break up those companies at the same time. Um, you know, part of what you're referring Thio, you know, has to do with, um more the social and the consumer elements of what's going on. But as a business leader, um, I really I really focused on what the power is, particularly in the enterprise. What is it that we can do for global enterprise companies? And at least in my mind, those two things tend to be separate. >>Couple of things, you said they're triggered my mind. One was ecosystems. We've been talking about data. One of our guests on this program, Alan Nance, has been talking about ecosystems and the power of ecosystems. And I definitely see Cloud is a platform to allow data sharing across those those clouds and then to form ecosystems and share data in ways that we really couldn't have, you know, half a decade or even you no longer ago. And that seems to be where ah lot of the innovation is going to occur. Some of the people talk about the flywheel effect, but it's the power of many versus the resource is of, you know, a few. >>And I'm such a big believer in the ecosystem play. And part of that is because, um, frankly, even over the last 20 years, that the skills that are required and the knowledge that required that is required is so specialized. Dave, you know, if you think about, you know, a I m l and all the algorithms that we need to know when the innovation that's happening there. And so I really don't think that there's any one company that can serve a customer alone, right? And if you think about it from a customer perspective, you know they're made up of their business is made up of needs from a lot of different parties that they're putting together, you know, to accommodate their business outcome. And so the only way to play right now in tech is is in a collaborative way in an ecosystem way. I think the mawr that companies like ours worked with other companies on these partnerships. And frankly, by the way, I think in the past, many companies that have made bold announcements and they would say, Oh, you know, I'm partnering with so and so and I've got this great partner, you know, partnership. And then nothing would happen. You know, like it was just a lot of, you know, talk. But I think what's actually happening now and it's enabled by the cloud, is, um, we have much more of a show me culture, right? We can we can actually say. Okay, well, let's say, uh, Anna plan is partnering with Google. Show me. You know, show me what you're actually doing. And I see our customers, um, asking for references of how these ecosystem partnerships air playing. Um, and, uh, because these stories air out there mawr, I think partnerships are actually much more feasible and and really and pragmatic. Yeah. >>Anna, we call those Barney deals, you know, I love you. You love me, would do a press release, and then nothing ever happens. >>That's right. That's right. And I think that Z that's not gonna work. Going forward day, right? People are asking for a lot more transparency. And so when we think about ecosystems, they really want the meat on the bone, right? They don't want just, uh, announcements that don't really help their business move forward. Yeah, >>And you know the other thing to the come back to data. It's always comes back to data, right? Every conversation. But the data that's created out of that ecosystem is gonna throw off, you know, new capabilities and new data products, data services. And that, to me, is a really exciting, you know, new chapter, I think of cloud. >>Yeah, and it's interesting. You know, the conversations I'm having now are are about data and believe it or not, also about metadata, right? Because people are trying to analyze what's happening with the cloud. You know, among cloud providers what our customers doing with the data, right? How are they using data? How often are they accessing data? Um, security. You know, from that perspective, looking at who's accessing? Accessing what? So, um, the data conversation in the metadata conversation are truly enabled by the cloud and their their key. And they weren't that easy to do in a prior, you know, legacy sort of environment. There's >>a great point. I'm glad you brought that up, because legacy, environment, all the all that metadata that data about the data is locked inside of these systems. And if you're gonna go across clouds and you're gonna have it secure and govern. You've gotta have that metadata visibility and a point of control that actually can see that and and can manage it. So thank you for that at that point. And thank you for coming on the on the Cuban participating. The Cuban cloud has been great having you. >>Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. >>Alright, Keep it right there. Everybody mawr from the Cuban cloud right after this short break.

>>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. >>Hello, and welcome back to the cube live coverage of reinvent 2020 virtual. We're not there this year. It's the cube virtual. We are the cube virtual. I'm your host, John fro with Dave Alante and analyzing our take on the partner day. Um, keynotes and leadership sessions today was AWS APN, which is Amazon partner network global partner network day, where all the content being featured today is all about the partners and what Amazon is doing to create an ecosystem, build the ecosystem, nurture the ecosystem and reinvent what it means to be a partner. Dave, thanks for joining me today on the analysis of Amazon's ecosystem and partner network and a great stuff today. Thanks for coming on. >>Yeah, you're welcome. I mean, watch the keynote this morning. I mean, partners are critical to AWS. Look, the fact is that when, when AWS was launched, it was the developers ate it up. You know, if you're a developer, you dive right in infrastructure is code beautiful. You know, if you're mainstream it, this thing's just got more complex with the cloud. And so there's, there's a big gap right between how I, where I am today and where I want to be. And partners are critical to help helping people get there. And we'll talk about the details of specifically what Amazon did, but I mean, especially when John, when you look at things like smaller outposts, you know, going hybrid, Andy Jassy redefining hybrid, you need partners to really help you plan design, implement, manage at scale. >>Yeah. You know, one of the things I'm always, um, you know, saying nice things about Amazon, but one of the things that they're vulnerable on in my opinion is how they balanced their own SAS offerings and with what they develop in the ecosystem. This has been a constant, um, challenge and, and they've balanced it very well. Um, so other vendors, they are very clear. They make their own software, right. And they have a channel and it's kind of the old playbook. Amazon's got to reinvent the playbook here. And I think that's, what's key today on stage Doug Yom. He's the, uh, the leader you had, um, also Dave McCann who heads up marketplace and Sandy Carter who heads up worldwide public sector partners. So Dave interesting combination of three different teams, you had the classic ISV partners in the ecosystem, the cohesiveness of the world, the EMCs and so on, you had the marketplace with Dave McCann. That's where the future of procurement is. That's where people are buying product and you had public sector, huge tsunami of innovation happening because of the pandemic and Sandy is highlighting their partners. So it's partner day it's partner ecosystem, but multiple elements. They're moving marketplace where you buy programs and competencies with public sector and then ISV, all of those three areas are changing. Um, I want to get your take because you've been following ecosystems years and you've been close to the enterprise and how they buy your, >>And I think, I think John, Oh, a couple of things. One is, you know, Dave McCann was talking a lot about how CIO is one of modernize applications and they have to rationalize, and it will save some of that talk for later on, you know, Tim prophet on. But there's no question that Amazon's out to reinvent, as you said, uh, the whole experience from procurement all the way through, and, you know, normally you had to, to acquire services outside of the marketplace. And now what they're doing is bundling the services and software together. You know, it's straightforward services, implementation services, but those are well understood. The processes are known. You can pretty much size them and price them. So I think that's a huge opportunity for partners and customers to reduce friction. I think the other thing I would say is ecosystems are, are critical. >>Uh, one of the themes that we've been talking about in the cube as we've gone from a product centric world in the old days of it to a platform centric world, which has really been the last decade has been about SAS platforms and cloud platforms. And I think ecosystems are going to be a really power, the new innovation in the coming decade. And what I mean by that is look, if you're just building a service and Amazon is going to do that same service, you know, you got to keep innovating. And one of the ways you can innovate is you can build on ecosystems. There's all this data within industries, across industries, and you can through the partner network and through customer networks within industry start building new innovation around ecosystems and partners or that glue, Amazon's not going to go in. And like Jandy Jesse even said in the, uh, in his fireside chat, you know, customers will ask us for our advice and we're happy to give it to them, but frankly partners are better at that nitty gritty hardcore stuff. They have closer relationships with the customers. And so that's a really important gap that Amazon has been closing for the last, you know, frankly 10 years. And I think that to your point, they've still got a long way to go, but that's a huge opportunity in that. >>A good call out on any Jess, I've got to mention that one of the highlights of today's keynote was on a scheduled, um, Andy Jassy fireside chat. Uh, normally Andy does his keynote and then he kind of talks to customers and does his thing normally at a normal re-invent this time he came out on stage. And I think what I found interesting was he was talking about this builder. You always use the word builder customer, um, solutions. And I think one of the things that's interesting about this partner network is, is that I think there's a huge opportunity for companies to be customer centric and build on top of Amazon. And what I mean by that is, is that Amazon is pretty cool with you doing things on top of their platform that does two things serves the customer's needs better than they do, and they can make more money on and other services look at snowflake as an example, um, that's a company built on AWS. I know they've got other clouds going on, but mainly Amazon Zoom's the same way. They're doing a great solution. They've got Redshift, Amazon, Amazon's got Redshift, Dave, but also they're a customer and a partner. So this is the dynamic. If you can be successful on Amazon serving customers better than Amazon does, that's the growth hack. That's the hack on Amazon's partner network. If you could. >>I think, I think Snowflake's a really good example. You snowflake you use new Relic as an example, I've heard Andy Jess in the past use cloud air as an example, I like snowflake better because they're, they're sort of thriving. And so, but, but I will say this there's a, they're a great example of that ecosystem that we just talked about because yes, not only are they building on AWS, they're connecting to other clouds and that is an ecosystem that they're building out. And Amazon's got a lot of snowflake, I guess, unless you're the Redshift team, but, but generally speaking, Snowflake's driving a lot of business for Amazon and Andy Jesse addressed that in that, uh, in that fireside chat, he's asked that question a lot. And he said, look, we, we, we have our primary services. And at the same time we want to enable our partners to be successful. And snowflake is a really good example of that. >>Yeah. I want to call out also, uh, yesterday. Um, I had our Monday, I should say Tuesday, December 1st, uh, Jesse's keynote. I did an interview with Jerry chin with gray lock. He's investing in startups and one of the things he observed and he pointed out Dave, is that with Amazon, if you're, if you're a full all-in in the cloud, you're going to take advantage of things that are just not available on say on premises that is data patterns, other integrations. And I think one of the things that Doug pointed out was with interoperability and integration with say things like the SAS factor that they put out there there's advantages for being in the cloud specifically with Amazon, that you can get on integrations. And I think Dave McCann teases that out with the marketplace when they talk about integrations. But the idea of being in the cloud with all these other partners makes integration and interoperability different and unique and better potentially a differentiator. This is going to become a huge deal. >>I didn't pick up on that because yesterday I thought I wasn't in the keynote. I think it was in the analyst one-on-one with, with Jesse, he talked about, you know, this notion that people, I think he was addressing multi-cloud he didn't use that term, but this notion of an abstraction layer and how it does simplify things in, in his basic, he basically said, look, our philosophy is we want to have, you know, the, the ability to go deep with the primitives and have that fine grain access, because that will give us control. A lot of times when you put in this abstraction layer, which people are trying to do across clouds, you know, it limits your ability to really move fast. And then of course it's big theme is, is this year, at the same time, if you look at a company who was called out today, like, like Octa, you know, when you do an identity management and single sign-on, you're, you're touching a lot of pieces, there's a lot of integration to your point. >>So you need partners to come in and be that glue that does a lot of that heavy lifting that needs to needs to be done. Amazon. What Jessie was essentially saying, I think to the partner network is, look, we're not going to put in that abstraction layer. You're going to you, you got to do that. We're going to do stuff maybe between our own own services like they did with the, you know, the glue between databases, but generally speaking, that's a giant white space for partner organizations. He mentioned Okta. He been talked about in for apt Aptio. This was Dave McCann, actually Cohesity came up a confluent doing fully managed Kafka. So that to me was a signal to the partners. Look, here's where you guys should be playing. This is what customers need. And this is where we're not going to, you know, eat your lunch. >>Yeah. And the other thing McCann pointed out was 200 new Dave McCann pointed out who leads these leader of the, of the marketplace. He pointed out 200 new ISP. ISV is out there, huge news, and they're going to turn already. He went, he talked with his manage entitlements, which got my attention. And this is kind of an, um, kind of one of those advantage points that it's kind of not sexy and mainstream to talk about, but it's really one of those details. That's the heavy lifting. That's a pain in the butt to deal with licensing and tracking all this compliance stuff that goes on under the covers and distribution of software. I think that's where the cloud could be really advantaged. And also the app service catalog registry that he talked about and the professional services. So these are areas that Amazon is going to kind of create automation around. >>And as Jassy always talks about that undifferentiated heavy lifting, they're going to take care of some of these plumbing issues. And I think you're right about this differentiation because if I'm a partner and I could build on top of Amazon and have my own cloud, I mean, let's face it. Snowflake is a born in the cloud, in the cloud only solution on Amazon. So they're essentially Amazon's cloud. So I think the thing that's not being talked about this year, that is probably my come up in future reinvents is that whoever can build their own cloud on top of Amazon's cloud will be a winner. And I, I talked about this years ago, data around this tier two, I call it tier two clouds. This new layer of cloud service provider is going to be kind of the, on the power law, the, the second wave of cloud. >>In other words, you're on top of Amazon differentiating with a modern application at scale inside the cloud with all the other people in there, a whole new ecosystem is going to emerge. And to me, I think this is something that is not yet baked out, but if I was a partner, I would be out there planning like hell right now to say, I'm going to build a cloud business on Amazon. I'm going to take advantage of the relationships and the heavy lifting and compete and win that way. I think that's a re redefining moment. And I think whoever does that will win >>And a big theme around reinventing everything, reinvent the industry. And one of the areas that's being reinvented as is the, you know, the VAR channel really well, consultancies, you know, smaller size for years, these companies made a ton of dough selling boxes, right? All the, all the Dell and the IBM and the EMC resellers, you know, they get big boats and big houses, but that business changed dramatically. They had to shift toward value, value, value add. So what did they do? They became VMware specialists. They came became SAP specialists. There's a couple of examples, maybe, you know, adding into security. The cloud was freaking them out, but the cloud is really an opportunity for them. And I'll give you an example. We've talked a lot about snowflake. The other is AWS glue elastic views. That's what the AWS announced to connect all their databases together. Think about a consultancy that is able to come in and totally rearchitect your big data life cycle and pipeline with the people, the processes, the skillsets, you know, Amazon's not going to do that work, but the upside value for the organizations is tremendous. So you're seeing consultancies becoming managed service providers and adding all kinds of value throughout the stack. That's really reinvention of the partnership. >>Yeah. I think it's a complete, um, channel strategy. That's different. It doesn't, it looks like other channels, but it's not, it's, it's, it's driven by value. And I think this idea of competing on value versus just being kind of a commodity play is shifting. I think the ISV and the VARs, those traditional markets, David, as you pointed out, are going to definitely go value oriented. And you can just own a specialty area because as data comes in and when, and this is interesting. And one of the key things that Andy Jassy said in his fireside chat want to ask directly, how do partners benefit when asked about his keynote, how that would translate to partners. He really kind of went in and he was kind of rambling, but he, he, he hit the chips. He said, well, we've got our own chips, which means compute. Then he went into purpose-built data store and data Lake data, elastic views SageMaker Q and QuickSight. He kind of went down the road of, we have the horsepower, we have the data Lake data, data, data. So he was kind of hinting at innovate on the data and you'll do okay. >>Well, and this is again, we kind of, I'm like a snowflake fan boy, you know, in the way you, you like AWS. But look, if you look at AWS glue elastic views, that to me is like snowflakes data cloud is different, a lot of pushing and moving a date, a lot of copying data. But, but this is a great example of where like, remember last year at reinvent, they said, Hey, we're separating compute from storage. Well, you know, of course, snowflake popularized that. So this is great example of two companies thriving that are both competitors and partners. >>Well, I've got to ask you, you know, you, you and I always say we kind of his stories, we've been around the block on the enterprise for years. Um, where do you Mark the, um, evolution of their partner? Because again, Amazon has been so explosive in their growth. The numbers have been off the charts and they've done it well with and pass. And now you have the pandemic which kind of puts on full display, digital transformation. And then Jassy telegraphing that the digital global it spend is their next kind of conquering ground, um, to take, and they got the edge exploding with 5g. So you have this kind of range and they doing all kinds of stuff with IOT, and they're doing stuff in you on earth and in space. So you have this huge growth and they still don't have their own fully oriented business model. They rely on people to build on top of Amazon. So how do you see that evolving in your opinion? Because they're trying to add their own Amazon only, we've got Redshift that competes with others. How do you see that playing out? >>So I think it's going to be specialized and, and something that, uh, that I've talked about is Amazon, you know, AWS in the old day, old days being last decade, they really weren't that solution focused. It was really, you know, serving the builders with tooling, with you, look at something like what they're doing in the call center and what they're doing at the edge and IOT there. I think they're, so I think their move up the stack is going to be very solution oriented, but not necessarily, you know, horizontal going after CRM or going after, you know, uh, supply chain management or ERP. I don't think that's going to be their play. I think their play is going to be to really focus on hard problems that they can automate through their tooling and bring special advantage. And that's what they'll SAS. And at the same time, they'll obviously allow SAS players. >>It's just reminds me of the early days when you and I first met, uh, VMware. Everybody had to work with VMware because they had a such big ecosystem. Well, the SAS players will run on top. Like Workday does like Salesforce does Infour et cetera. And then I think you and I, and Jerry Chen talked about this years ago, I think they're going to give tools to builders, to disrupt the service now is in the sales forces who are out buying companies like crazy to try to get a, you know, half, half a billion dollar, half a trillion dollar market caps. And that is a really interesting dynamic. And I think right now, they're, they're not even having to walk a fine line. I think the lines are reasonably clear. We're going up to database, we're going to do specialized solutions. We're going to enable SAS. We're going to compete where we compete, come on, partner ecosystem. And >>Yeah, I, I, I think that, you know, the Slack being bought by Salesforce is just going to be one of those. I think it's a web van moment, you know, um, you know, where it's like, okay, Slack is going to go die on Salesforce. Okay. I get that. Um, but it's, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just old school thinking. And I think if you're an entrepreneur and if you're a developer or a partner, you could really reinvent the business model because if you're, dis-aggregating all these other services like you can compete with Salesforce, Slack has now taken out of the game with Salesforce, but what Amazon is doing with say connect, which they're promoting heavily at this conference. I mean, you hear it, you heard it on Andy Jessie's keynote, Sandy Carter. They've had huge success with AWS connect. It's a call center mindset, but it's not calling just on phones. >>It's contact that is descent, intermediating, the Salesforce model. And I think when you start getting into specialists and specialism in channels, you have customer opportunity to be valuable. And I think call center, these kinds of stories that you can stand up pretty quickly and then integrate into a business model is going to be game changing. And I think that's going to going to a lot of threat on these big incumbents, like Salesforce, like Slack, because let's face it. Bots is just the chat bot is just a call center front end. You can innovate on the audio, the transcriptions there's so much Amazon goodness there, that connect. Isn't just a call center that could level the playing field and every vertical >>Well, and SAS is getting disrupted, you know, to your, to your point. I mean, you think about what happened with, with Oracle and SAP. You had, you know, these new emerging players come up like, like Salesforce, like Workday, like service now, but their pricing model, it was all the same. We lock you in for a one-year two-year three-year term. A lot of times you have to pay up front. Now you look at guys like Datadog. Uh, you, you look at a snowflake, you look at elastic, they're disrupting the Splunks of the world. And that model, I think that SAS model is right for disruption with a consumption pricing, a true cloud pricing model. You combine that with new innovation that developers are going to attack. I mean, you know, people right now, they complain about service now pricing, they complain about Splunk pricing. They, you know, they talk about, Oh, elastic. We can get that for half the price Datadog. And so I'm not predicting that those companies service now Workday, the great companies, but they are going to have to respond much in the same way that Oracle and SAP had to respond to the disruption that they saw. >>Yeah. It's interesting. During the keynote, they'll talk about going out to the mainframes today, too. So you have Amazon going into Oracle and Microsoft, and now the mainframes. So you have Oracle database and SQL server and windows server all going to being old school technologies. And now mainframe very interesting. And I think the, this whole idea of this SAS factory, um, got my attention to Cohesity, which we've been covering Dave on the storage front, uh, Mo with the founder was on stage. I'm a data management as a service they're part of this new SAS factory thing that Amazon has. And what they talk about here is they're trying to turn ISV and VARs into full-on SAS providers. And I think if they get that right with the SAS factory, um, then that's going to be potentially game changing. And I'm gonna look at to see if what the successes are there, because if Amazon can create more SAS applications, then their Tam and the global it market is there is going to, it can be mopped up pretty quickly, but they got to enable it. They got to enable that quickly. Yeah. >>Enabling to me means not just, and I think, you know, when Jesse answered your question, I saw it in the article that you wrote about, you know, you asked them about multi-cloud and it, to me, it's not about running on AWS and being compatible with Azure and being compatible with Google. No, it's about that frankly abstraction layer that he talked about, and that's what Cohesity is trying to do. You see others trying to do it as well? Snowflake for sure. It's about abstracting that complexity away and adding value on top of the cloud. In other words, you're using the cloud for scale being really expert at taking advantage of the native cloud services, which requires is that Jessie was saying different API APIs, different control, plane, different data plane, but taking that complexity away and then adding new value on top that's white space for a lot of players there. And, and, and I'll tell you, it's not trivial. It takes a lot of R and D and it takes really smart people. And that's, what's going to be really interesting to see, shake out is, you know, can the Dell and HPE, can they go fast enough to compete with the, the Cohesity's you've got guys like CLU Mayo coming in that are, that are brand new. Obviously we talked about snowflake a lot and many others. >>I think there's going to be a huge change in expectations, experience, huge opportunity for people to come in with unique solutions. We're going to have specialty programming on the cube all day today. So if you're watching us here on the Amazon channel, you know that we're going to have an all of a sudden demand. There's a little link on our page. On the, on the, um, the Amazon reinvent virtual event platform, click here, the bottom, it's going to be a landing page, check out all the interviews as we roll them out all day. We got a great lineup, Dave, we got Nutanix pure storage, big ID, BMC, Amazon leaders, all coming in to talk today. Uh, chaos search ed Walsh, Rachel Rose, uh, Medicar Kumar, um, Mike Gill, flux, tons of great, great, uh, partners coming in and they're going to share their story and what's working for them and their new strategies. And all throughout the day, you're going to hear specific examples of how people are changing and reinventing their business development, their partnership strategies on the product, and go to market with Amazon. So really interesting learnings. We're going to have great conversations all throughout the day. So check it out. And again, everything's going to be on demand. And when in doubt, go to the cube.net, we have everything there and Silicon angle.com, uh, for all the great coverage. So >>I don't think John is, we're going to have a conversation with him. David McCann touched on this. You talked about the need for modernization and rationalization, Tim Crawford on, on later. And th this is, this is sort of the, the, uh, the call-out that Andy Jassy made in his keynote. He gave the story of that one. CIO is a good friend of his who said, Hey, I love what you're doing, but it's not going to happen on my watch. And, and so, you know, Jessie's sort of poking at that, that, uh, complacency saying, guys, you have to reinvent, you have to go fast, you have to keep moving. And so we're gonna talk a little bit about what, what does that mean to modernize applications, why the CIO is want to rationalize what is the role of AWS and its ecosystem and providing that, that, that level of innovation, and really try to understand what the next five to seven years are gonna look like in that regard. >>Funny, you mentioned, uh, Andy Jesuit that story. When I had my one-on-one conversation with them, uh, he was kind of talking about that anonymous CIO and I, if people don't know Andy, he's a big movie buff, too, right? He loves it goes to Sundance every year. Um, so I said to him, I said, this error of digital transformation, uh, is kind of like that scene in the godfather, Dave, where, um, Michael Corleone goes to Tom Hagen, Tom, you're not a wartime conciliary. And what he meant by that was is that, you know, they were going to war with the other five families. I think now I think this is what chassis pointed out is that, that this is such an interesting, important time in history. And he pointed this out. If you don't have the leadership chops to lean into this, you're going to get swept away. >>And that story about the CIO being complacent. Yeah. He didn't want to shift. And the new guy came in or gal and they, and they, and they lost three years, three years of innovation. And the time loss, you can't get that back. And during this time, I think you have to have the stomach for the digital transformation. You have to have the fortitude to go forward and face the truth. And the truth is you got to learn new stuff. So the old way of doing things, and he pointed that out very aggressively. And I think for the partners, that same thing is true. You got to look in the mirror and say, where are we? What's the opportunity. And you gotta gotta go there. If not, you can wait, be swept away, be driftwood as Pat Gelsinger would say, or lean in and pick up a, pick up a shovel and start digging the new solution. >>You know what the other interesting thing, I mean, every year when you listen to Jassy and his keynotes and you sort of experienced re-invent culture comes through and John you're live in Silicon Valley, you talked to leaders of Silicon Valley, you know, well, what's the secret of success though? Nine times out of 10, they'll talk about culture, maybe 10 times out of 10. And, and, and so that's, that comes through in Jesse's keynotes. But one of the things that was interesting this year, and it's been thematic, you know, Andy, you know, repetition is important, uh, to, to him because he wants to educate people and make sure it sticks. One of the things that's really been he's been focused on is you actually can change your culture. And there's a lot of inertia. People say, well, not on my watch. Well, it doesn't work that way around here. >>And then he'll share stories about how AWS encourages people to write papers. Anybody in the organization say we should do it differently. And, and you know, they have to follow their protocol and work backwards and all of those stuff. But I believe him when he says that they're open to what you have a great example today. He said, look, if somebody says, well, it's 10 feet and somebody else says, well, it's, it's five feet. He said, okay, let's compromise and say it's seven and a half feet. Well, we know it's not seven and a half feet. We don't want to compromise. We either want to be a 10, Oh, we want to be at five, which is the right answer. And they push that. And that that's, he gives examples like that for the AWS culture, the working backwards, the frequently asked questions, documents, and he's always pushing. And that to me is very, very important and fundamental to understanding AWS. >>It's no doubt that Andy Jassy is the best CEO in the business. These days. If you look at him compared to everyone else, he's hands down, more humble as keynote who does three hour keynotes, the way he does with no notes with no, he memorize it all. So he's competitive and he's open. And he's a good leader. I think he's a great CEO. And I think it will be written and then looked back at his story this time in history. The next, I think post COVID Dave is going to be an error. We're going to look back and say the digital transformation was accelerated. Yes, all that good stuff, people process technology. But I think we're gonna look at this time, this year and saying, this was the year that there was before COVID and after COVID and the people who change and modernize will build the winners and not, and the losers will, will be sitting still. So I think it's important. I think that was a great message by him. So great stuff. All right. We gotta leave it there. Dave, the analysis we're going to be back within the power panel. Two sessions from now, stay with us. We've got another great guest coming on next. And then we have a pair of lb talk about the marketplace pricing and how enterprises have CIO is going to be consuming the cloud in their ecosystem. This is the cube. Thanks for watching..

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE Virtual and our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 with special coverage of APN partner experience. We are theCUBE Virtual and I'm your host, Justin Warren. And today I'm joined by Ed Walsh, CEO of ChaosSearch. Ed, welcome to theCUBE. >> Well thank you for having me, I really appreciate it. >> Now, this is not your first time here on theCUBE. You're a regular here and I've loved it to have you back. >> I love the platform you guys are great. >> So let's start off by just reminding people about what ChaosSearch is and what do you do there? >> Sure, the best way to say is so ChaosSearch helps our clients know better. We don't do that by a special wizard or a widget that you give to your, you know, SecOp teams. What we do is a hard work to give you a data platform to get insights at scale. And we do that also by achieving the promise of data lakes. So what we have is a Chaos data platform, connects and indexes data in a customer's S3 or glacier accounts. So inside your data lake, not our data lake but renders that data fully searchable and available for analysis using your existing tools today 'cause what we do is index it and publish open API, it's like API like Elasticsearch API, and soon SQL. So give you an example. So based upon those capabilities were an ideal replacement for a commonly deployed, either Elasticsearch or ELK Stack deployments, if you're hitting scale issues. So we talk about scalable log analytics, and more and more people are hitting these scale issues. So let's say if you're using Elasticsearch ELK or Amazon Elasticsearch, and you're hitting scale issues, what I mean by that is like, you can't keep enough retention. You want longer retention, or it's getting very expensive to keep that retention, or because the scale you hit where you have availability, where the cluster is hard to keep up running or is crashing. That's what we mean by the issues at scale. And what we do is simply we allow you, because we're publishing the open API of Elasticsearch use all your tools, but we save you about 80% off your monthly bill. We also give you an, and it's an and statement and give you unlimited retention. And as much as you want to keep on S3 or into Glacier but we also take care of all the hassles and management and the time to manage these clusters, which ends up being on a database server called leucine. And we take care of that as a managed service. And probably the biggest thing is all of this without changing anything your end users are using. So we include Kibana, but imagine it's an Elastic API. So if you're using API or Kibana, it's just easy to use the exact same tools used today, but you get the benefits of a true data lake. In fact, we're running now Elasticsearch on top of S3 natively. If that makes it sense. >> Right and natively is pretty cool. And look, 80% savings, is a dramatic number, particularly this year. I think there's a lot of people who are looking to save a few quid. So it'd be very nice to be able to save up to 80%. I am curious as to how you're able to achieve that kind of saving though. >> Yeah, you won't be the first person to ask me that. So listen, Elastic came around, it was, you know we had Splunk and we also have a lot of Splunk clients, but Elastic was a more cost effective solution open source to go after it. But what happens is, especially at scale, if it's fall it's actually very cost-effective. But underneath last six tech ELK Stack is a leucine database, it's a database technology. And that sits on our servers that are heavy memory count CPU count in and SSDs. So you can do on-prem or even in the clouds, so if you do an Amazon, basically you're spinning up a server and it stays up, it doesn't spin up, spin down. So those clusters are not one server, it's a cluster of those servers. And typically if you have any scale you're actually having multiple clusters because you don't dare put it on one, for different use cases. So our savings are actually you no longer need those servers to spin up and you don't need to pay for those seen underneath. You can still use Kibana under API but literally it's $80 off your bill that you're paying for your service now, and it's hard dollars. So it's not... And we typically see clients between 70 and 80%. It's up to 80, but it's literally right within a 10% margin that you're saving a lot of money, but more importantly, saving money is a great thing. But now you have one unified data lake that you can have. You used to go across some of the data or all the data through the role-based access. You can give different people. Like we've seen people who say, hey give that, help that person 40 days of this data. But the SecOp up team gets to see across all the different law. You know, all the machine generated data they have. And we can give you a couple of examples of that and walk you through how people deploy if you want. >> I'm always keen to hear specific examples of how customers are doing things. And it's nice that you've thought of drawn that comparison there around what what cloud is good for and what it isn't is. I'll often like to say that AWS is cheap to fail in, but expensive to succeed. So when people are actually succeeding with this and using this, this broad amount of data so what you're saying there with that savings I've actually got access to a lot more data that I can do things with. So yeah, if you could walk through a couple of examples of what people are doing with this increased amount of data that they have access to in EKL Search, what are some of the things that people are now able to unlock with that data? >> Well, literally it's always good for a customer size so we can go through and we go through it however it might want, Kleiner, Blackboard, Alert Logic, Armor Security, HubSpot. Maybe I'll start with HubSpot. One of our good clients, they were doing some Cloud Flare data that was one of their clusters they were using a lot to search for. But they were looking at to look at a denial service. And they were, we find everyone kind of at scale, they get limited. So they were down to five days retention. Why? Well, it's not that they meant to but basically they couldn't cost-effectively handle that in the scale. And also they're having scale issues with the environment, how they set the cluster and sharding. And when they also denial service tech, what happened that's when the influx of data that is one thing about scale is how fast it comes out, yet another one is how much data you have. But this is as the data was coming after them at denial service, that's when the cluster would actually go down believe it or not, you know right. When you need your log analysis tools. So what we did is because they're just using Kibana, it was easy swap. They ran in parallel because we published the open API but we took them from five days to nine days. They could keep as much as they want but nine days for denial services is what they wanted. And then we did save them in over $4 million a year in hard dollars, What they're paying in their environment from really is the savings on the server farm and a little bit on the Elasticsearch Stack. But more importantly, they had no outages since. Now here's the thing. Are you talking about the use case? They also had other clusters and you find everyone does it. They don't dare put it on one cluster, even though these are not one server, they're multiple servers. So the next use case for CloudFlare was one, the next QS and it was a 10 terabyte a day influx kept it for 90 days. So it's about a petabyte. They brought another use case on which was NetMon, again, Network Monitoring. And again, I'm having the same scale issue, retention area. And what they're able to do is easily roll that on. So that's one data platform. Now they're adding the next one. They have about four different use cases and it's just different clusters able to bring together. But now what they're able to do give you use cases either they getting more cost effective, more stability and freedom. We say saves you a lot of time, cost and complexity. Just the time they manage that get the data in the complexities around it. And then the cost is easy to kind of quantify but they've got better but more importantly now for particular teams they only need their access to one data but the SecOP team wants to see across all the data. And it's very easy for them to see across all the data where before it was impossible to do. So now they have multiple large use cases streaming at them. And what I love about that particular case is at one point they were just trying to test our scale. So they started tossing more things at it, right. To see if they could kind of break us. So they spiked us up to 30 terabytes a day which is for Elastic would even 10 terabytes a day makes things fall over. Now, if you think of what they just did, what were doing is literally three steps, put your data in S3 and as fast as you can, don't modify, just put it there. Once it's there three steps connect to us, you give us readability access to those buckets and a place to write the indexy. All of that stuff is in your S3, it never comes out. And then basically you set up, do you want to do live or do you want to do real time analysis? Or do you want to go after old data? We do the rest, we ingest, we normalize the schema. And basically we give you our back and the refinery to give the right people access. So what they did is they basically throw a whole bunch of stuff at it. They were trying to outrun S3. So, you know, we're on shoulders of giants. You know, if you think about our platform for clients what's a better dental like than S3. You're not going to get a better cross curve, right? You're not going to get a better parallelism. And so, or security it's in your, you know a virtual environment. But if you... And also you can keep data in the right location. So Blackboard's a good example. They need to keep that in all the different regions and because it's personal data, they, you know, GDPR they got to keep data in that location. It's easy, we just put compute in each one of the different areas they are. But the net net is if you think that architecture is shoulders of giants if you think you can outrun by just sheer volume or you can put in more cost-effective place to keep long-term or you think you can out store you have so much data that S3 and glacier can't possibly do it. Then you got me at your bigger scale at me but that's the scale we'r&e talking about. So if you think about the spiked our throughput what they really did is they try to outrun S3. And we didn't pick up. Now, the next thing is they tossed a bunch of users at us which were just spinning up in our data fabric different ways to do the indexing, to keep up with it. And new use cases in case they're going after everyone gets their own worker nodes which are all expected to fail in place. So again, they did some of that but really they're like you guys handled all the influx. And if you think about it, it's the shoulders of giants being on top of an Amazon platform, which is amazing. You're not going to get a more cost effective data lake in the world, and it's continuing to fall in price. And it's a cost curve, like no other, but also all that resiliency, all that security and the parallelism you can get, out of an S3 Glacier is just a bar none is the most scalable environment, you can build an environment. And what we do is a thin layer. It's a data platform that allows you to have your data now fully searchable and queryable using your tools >> Right and you, you mentioned there that, I mean you're running in AWS, which has broad experience in doing these sorts of things at scale but on that operational management side of things. As you mentioned, you actually take that off, off the hands of customers so that you run it on their behalf. What are some of the areas that you see people making in trying to do this themselves, when you've gone into customers, and brought it into the EKL Search platform? >> Yeah, so either people are just trying their best to build out clusters of Elasticsearch or they're going to services like Logz.io, Sumo Logic or Amazon Elasticsearch services. And those are all basically on the same ELK Stack. So they have the exact same limits as the same bits. Then we see people trying to say, well I really want to go to a data lake. I want to get away from these database servers and which have their limits. I want to use a data Lake. And then we see a lot of people putting data into environments before they, instead of using Elasticsearch, they want to use SQL type tools. And what they do is they put it into a Parquet or Presto form. It's a Presto dialect, but it into Parquet and structure it. And they go a lot of other way to, Hey it's in the data lake, but they end up building these little islands inside their data lake. And it's a lot of time to transform the data, to get it in a format that you can go after our tools. And then what we do is we don't make you do that. Just literally put the data there. And then what we do is we do the index and a polish API. So right now it's Elasticsearch in a very short time we'll publish Presto or the SQL dialect. You can use the same tool. So we do see people, either brute forcing and trying their best with a bunch of physical servers. We do see another group that says, you know, I want to go use an Athena use cases, or I want to use a there's a whole bunch of different startups saying, I do data lake or data lake houses. But they are, what they really do is force you to put things in the structure before you get insight. True data lake economics is literally just put it there, and use your tools natively to go after it. And that's where we're unique compared to what we see from our competition. >> Hmm, so with people who have moved into ChaosSearch, what's, let's say pick one, if you can, the most interesting example of what people have started to do with, with their data. What's new? >> That's good. Well, I'll give you another one. And so Armor Security is a good one. So Armor Security is a security service company. You know, thousands of clients doing great I mean a beautiful platform, beautiful business. And they won Rackspace as a partner. So now imagine thousand clients, but now, you know massive scale that to keep up with. So that would be an example but another example where we were able to come in and they were facing a major upgrade of their environment just to keep up, and they expose actually to their customers is how their customers do logging analytics. What we're able to do is literally simply because they didn't go below the API they use the exact same tools that are on top and in 30 days replaced that use case, save them tremendous amount of dollars. But now they're able to go back and have unlimited retention. They used to restrict their clients to 14 days. Now they have an opportunity to do a bunch of different things, and possible revenue opportunities and other. But allow them to look at their business differently and free up their team to do other things. And now they're, they're putting billing and other things into the same environment with us because one is easy it's scale but also freed up their team. No one has enough team to do things. And then the biggest thing is what people do interesting with our product is actually in their own tools. So, you know, we talk about Kibana when we do SQL again we talk about Looker and Tableau and Power BI, you know, the really interesting thing, and we think we did the hard work on the data layer which you can say is, you know I can about all the ways you consolidate the performance. Now, what becomes really interesting is what they're doing at the visibility level, either Kibana or the API or Tableau or Looker. And the key thing for us is we just say, just use the tools you're used to. Now that might be a boring statement, but to me, a great value proposition is not changing what your end users have to use. And they're doing amazing things. They're doing the exact same things they did before. They're just doing it with more data at bigger scale. And also they're able to see across their different machine learning data compared to being limited going at one thing at a time. And that getting the correlation from a unified data lake is really what we, you know we get very excited about. What's most exciting to our clients is they don't have to tell the users they have to use a different tool, which, you know, we'll decide if that's really interesting in this conversation. But again, I always say we didn't build a new algorithm that you going to give the SecOp team or a new pipeline cool widget that going to help the machine learning team which is another API we'll publish. But basically what we do is a hard work of making the data platform scalable, but more importantly give you the APIs that you're used to. So it's the platform that you don't have to change what your end users are doing, which is a... So we're kind of invisible behind the scenes. >> Well, that's certainly a pretty strong proposition there and I'm sure that there's plenty of scope for customers to come and and talk to you because no one's creating any less data. So Ed, thanks for coming out of theCUBE. It's always great to see you here. >> Know, thank you. >> You've been watching theCUBE Virtual and our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 with special coverage of APN partner experience. Make sure you check out all our coverage online, either on your desktop, mobile on your phone, wherever you are. I've been your host, Justin Warren. And I look forward to seeing you again soon. (soft music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hey, everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this CXO Series. As you know, I've been running this series discussing major trends and CXOs, how they've navigated through the pandemic. And we've got some good news and some bad news today. And Ed Walsh is here to talk about that. Ed, how you doing? Great to see you. >> Great seeing you, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. So the bad news is Ed Walsh is leaving IBM as the head of the storage division (indistinct). But the good news is, he's joining a new startup as CEO, and we're going to talk about that, but Ed, always a pleasure to have you. You're quite a run at at IBM. You really have done a great job there. So, let's start there if we can before we get into the other part of the news. So, you give us the update. You're coming off another strong quarter for the storage business. >> I would say listen, they're sweet, heartily, but to be honest, we're leaving them in a really good position where they have sustainable growth. So they're actually IBM storage in a very good position. I think you're seeing it in the numbers as well. So, yeah, listen, I think the team... I'm very proud of what they were able to pull off. Four years ago, they kind of brought me in, hey, can we get IBM storage back to leadership? They were kind of on their heels, not quite growing, or not growing but falling back in market share. You know, kind of a distant third place finisher, and basically through real innovation that mattered to clients which that's a big deal. It's the right innovation that matters to the clients. We really were able to dramatically grow, grow all different four segments of the portfolio. But also get things like profitability growing, but also NPS growing. It really allowed us to go into a sustainable model. And it's really about the team. You heard I've talked about team all the time, which is you get a good team and they really nailed great client experiences. And they take the right offerings and go to market and merge it. And I'll tell you, I'm very proud of what the IBM team put together. And I'm still the number one fan and inside or outside IBM. So it might be bittersweet, but I actually think they're ready for quite some growth. >> You know Ed, when you came in theCUBE, right after you had joined IBM, a lot of people are saying, Ed Walsh joined an IBM storage division to sell the division. And I asked you on theCUBE, are you there to sell division? And you said, no, absolutely not. So it's always it seemed to me, well, hey, it's good. It's a good business, good cash flow business, got a big customer base, so why would IBM sell it? Never really made sense to me. >> I think it's integral to what IBM does, I think it places their client base in a big way. And under my leadership, really, we got more aligned with what IBM is doing from the big IBM right. What we're doing around Red Hat hybrid multi cloud and what we're doing with AI. And those are big focuses of the storage portfolio. So listen, I think IBM as a company is in a position where they're really innovating and thriving, and really customer centric. And I think IBM storage is benefiting from that. And vice versa. I think it's a good match. >> So one of the thing I want to bring up before we move on. So you had said you were seeing a number. So I want to bring up a chart here. As you know, we've been using a lot of data and sharing data reporting from our partner. ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, they do quarterly surveys. They have a very tight methodology, it's similar to NPS. But it's a net score, we call it methodology. And every quarter they go out and what we're showing here is the results from the last three quarter, specific to IBM storage and IBM net score in storage. And net scores is essentially, we ask people are you spending more, are you spending less, we subtract the less from the more and that's the net score. And you can see when you go back to the October 19, survey, you know, low single digits and then it dipped in the April survey, which was the height of the pandemic. So this was this is forward looking. So in the height of the pa, the lockdown people were saying, maybe I'm going to hold off on budgets. But then now look at the July survey. Huge, huge up check. And I think this is testament to a couple of things. One is, as you mentioned, the team. But the other is, you guys have done a good job of taking R&D, building a product pipeline and getting it into the field. And I think that shows up in the numbers. That was really a one of the hallmarks of your leadership. >> Yeah, I mean, they're the innovation. IBM is there's almost an embarrassment of riches inside. It's how do you get in the pipeline? We went from a typically about for four years, four and a half year cycles, not a two year cycle product cycle. So we're able to innovate and bring it to market much quicker. And I think that's what clients are looking for. >> Yeah, so I mean, you brought a startup mentality to the division and of course now, cause your startup guy, let's face it. Now you're going back to the startup world. So the other part of the news is Ed Walsh is joining ChaosSearch as the CEO. ChaosSearches is a local Boston company, they're focused on log analytics but more on we're going to talk about that. So first of all, congratulations. And tell us about your decision. Why ChaosSearch? And you know where you're out there? >> Yeah, listen, if you can tell from the way I describe IBM, I mean, it was a hard decision to leave IBM, but it was a very, very easy decision to go to Chaos, right. So I knew the founder, I knew what he was working on for the last seven years, right. Last five years as a company, and I was just blown away at their fundamental innovation, and how they're really driving like how to get insights at scale from your data lake in the cloud. But also and also instead, and statements slash cost dramatically. And they make it so simple. Simply put your data in your S3 or really Cloud object storage. But right now, it's, Amazon, they'll go the rest of clouds, but just put your data in S3. And what we'll do is we'll index it, give you API so you can search it and query it. And it literally brings a way to do at scale data analysts. And also login analytics on everything you just put into S3 basically bucket. It makes it very simple. And because they're really fundamental, we can go through it. Fundamental on hard technology that data layer, but they kept all the API. So you're using your normal tools that we did for Elastic Search API's. You want to do Glyfada, you want to do Cabana, or you want to do SQL or you want to do use Looker, Tableau, all those work. Which is that's a part of it. It's really revolutionary what they're doing as far as the value prop and we can explain it. But also they made it evolution, it's very easy for clients to go. Just run in parallel, and then they basically turn off what they currently have running. >> So data lakes, really the term became popular during the sort of early big data, Hadoop era. And, Hadoop obviously brought a lot of innovation, you know, leave the data where it is. Bring the compute to the data, really launched the Big Data initiative, but it was very complicated. You had, MapReduce and and elastic MapReduce in the cloud. And, it really was a big batch job, where storage was really kind of a second class citizen, if you will. There wasn't a lot of real time stuff going on. And then, Spark comes in. And still there's this very complicated situation. So it's sounds like, ChaosSearch is really attacking that problem. And the first use case, it's really going after is log analytics. Explain that a little bit more, please. >> Yeah, so listen, they finally went after it with this, it's called a data lake engine for scalable and we'll say log analytics firstly. It was the first use case to go after it. But basically, they allows for log analytics people, everyone does it, and everyone's kind of getting to scale with it, right. But if you asked your IT department, are you even challenged with scale, or cost, or retention levels, but also management overlay of what they're doing on log analytics or security log analytics, or all this machine data they're collecting? The answer be absolutely no, it's a nightmare. It starts easy and becomes a big, very costly application for our environments. And what Chaos does is because they deal with a real issue, which is the data layer, but keep the API's on top. And so people easily use the data insights at scale, what they're able to do is very simply run in parallel and we'll save 80% of your cost, but also get better data retention. Cause there's typically a trade off. Clients basically have this trade off, or it gets really expensive. It gets to scale. So I should just retain less. We have clients that went from nine day retention and security logs to literally four and five days. If they didn't catch it in that time, it was too late. Now what they're able to do is, they're able to go to our solution. Not change what they're doing applications, because you're using the same API's, but literally save 80% and this is millions and 10s of millions of dollars of savings, but also basically get 90 day retention. There's really limitless, whatever you put into your S3 bucket, we're going to give you access to. So that alone shows you that it's literally revolutions that CFO wins because they save money. The IT department wins because they don't that wrestle with this data technology that wasn't really built. It is really built 30 years ago, wasn't built for this volume and velocity of data coming in. And then the data analytics guys, hey, I keep my tool set but I get all the retention I want. No one's limiting me anymore. So it's kind of an easy win win. And it makes it really easy for clients to have this really big benefit for them. And dramatic cost savings. But also you get the scale, which really means a lot in security login or anything else. >> So let's dig into that a little bit. So Cloud Object Storage has kind of become the de facto bucket, if you will. Everybody wants it, because it's simple. It's a get put kind of paradigm. And it's cheap, but it's also got performance issues. So people will throw cash at the problem, they'll have to move data around. So is that the problem that you're solving? Is it a performance? You know, problem is it a cause problem or both? And explain that a little bit. >> Yeah, so it's all over. So basically, if you were building a data lake, they would like to just put all their data in one very cost effective, scalable, resilient environment. And that is Cloud Object Storage, or S3, or every cloud has around, right? You can do also on prem, everyone would love to do that. And then literally get their insights out of it. But they want to go after it with our tools. Is it Search or is it SQL, they want to go after their own tools. That's the vision everyone wants. But what everyone does now is because this is where the core special sauce what ChaosSearch provides, is we built from the ground up. The database, the indexing technology, the database technology, how to actually make your Cloud object storage a database. We don't move it somewhere, we don't cash it. You put it in the inside the bucket, we literally make the Cloud object storage, the database. And then around it, we basically built a Chaos fabric that allows you to spin up compute nodes to go at the data in different ways. We truly have separated that the data from the compute, but also if a worker nodes, beautiful, beauty of like containerization technology, a worker nodes goes away, nothing happens. It's not like what you do on Prem. And all sudden you have to rebuild clusters. So by fundamentally solving that data layer, but really what was interesting is they just published API's, you mentioned put and get. So the API's you're using cloud obvious sources of put and get. Imagine we just added to that API, your Search API from elastic, or your SQL interface. It's just all we're doing is extending. You put it in the bucket will extend your ability to get after it. Really is an API company, but it's a hard tech, putting that data layer together. So you have cost effectiveness, and scale simultaneously. But we can ask for instance, log analytics. We don't cash, nothing's on the SSD, nothing's on local storage. And we're as fast as you're running Elastic Search on SSDs. So we've solved the performance and scale issues simultaneously. And that's really the core fundamental technology. >> And you do that with math, with algorithms, with machine learning, what's the secret sauce? Yeah, we should really have I'll tell you, my founder, just has the right interesting way of looking at problems. And he really looked at this differently and went after how do you make a both, going after data. He really did it in a different way, and really a modern way. And the reason it differentiates itself is he built from the ground up to do this on object storage. Where basically everyone else is using 30 year old technology, right? So even really new up and coming companies, they're using Tableau, Looker, or Snowflake could be another example. They're not changing how the data stored, they always have to move it ETL at somewhere to go after it. We avoid all that. In fact, we're probably a pretty good ecosystem players for all those partners as we go forward. >> So your talking about Tom Hazel, you're founder and CTO and he's brought in the team and they've been working on this for a while. What's his background? >> Launched Telkom, building out God boxes. So he's always been in the database space. I can't do his in my first day of the job, I can't do justice to his deep technology. There's a really good white paper on our website that does that pretty well. But literally the patent technology is a Chaos index, which is a database that it makes your object storage, the database. And then it's really the chaos fabric that puts around in the chaos refinery that gives you virtual views. But that's one solution. And if you look for log analytics, you come in log in and you get all the tools you're used to. But underneath the covers, were just saving about 80% of overall cost, but also almost limitless retention. We see people going from literally have been reduced the number of logs are keeping because of cost, and complexity, and scale, down to literally a very small amount and going right back at nine days. You could do longer, but that's what we see most people go into when they go to our service. >> Let's talk about the market. I mean, as a startup person, you always look for large markets. Obviously, you got to have good tech, a great team. And you want large markets. So the, space that you're in, I mean, I would think it started, early days and kind of the decision support. Sort of morphed into the data warehouse, you mentioned ETL, that's kind of part of it. Business Intelligence, it's sort of all in there. If you look at the EDW market, it's probably around 18 to 20 billion. Small slice of that is data lakes, maybe a billion or a billion plus. And then you got this sort of BI layer on top, you mentioned a lot of those. You got ETL, you probably get up into the 30,35 billion just sort of off the top of my head and from my historical experience and looking at these markets. But I have to say these markets have traditionally failed to live up to the expectations. Things like 360 degree views of the customer, real time analytics, delivering insights and self service to the business. Those are promises that these industries made. And they ended up being cumbersome, slow, maybe requiring real experts, requiring a lot of infrastructure, the cloud is changing that. Is that right? Is that the way to look at the market that you're going after? You're a player inside of that very large team. >> Yeah, I think we're a key fundamental component underneath that whole ecosystem. And yes, you're seeing us build a full stack solution for log analytics, because there's really good way to prove just how game changing the technology is. But also how we publishing API's, and it's seamless for how you're using log analytics. Same thing can be applied as we go across the SQL and different BI and analytic type of platforms. So it's exactly how we're looking at the market. And it's those players that are all struggling with the same thing. How they add more value to clients? It's a big cost game, right? So if I can literally make your underlying how you store your data and mix it literally 80% more cost effective. that's a big deal or simultaneously saving 80% and give you much longer retention. Those two things are typically, Lily a trade off, you have to go through, and we don't have to do that. That's what really makes this kind of the underlying core technology. And really I look at log analytics is really the first application set. But or if you have any log analytics issues, if you talk to your teams and find out, scale, cost, management issues, it's a pretty we make it very easy. Just run in parallel, we'll do a PLC, and you'll see how easy it is you can just save 80% which is, 80% and better retention is really the value proposition you see at scale, right. >> So this is day zero for you. Give us the hundred day plan, what do you want to accomplish? Where are you going to focus your priorities? I mean, obviously, the company's been started, it's well funded, but where are you going to focus in the next 100 days? >> No, I think it's building out where are we taking the next? There's a lot of things we could do, there's degrees of freedom as far as where we'd go with this technology is pretty wide. You're going to see us be the best log analytic company there. We're getting, really a (mumbling) we, you saw the announcement, best quarter ever last quarter. And you're seeing this nice as a service ramp, you're going to see us go to VPC. So you can do as a service with us, but now we can put this same thing in your own virtual private data center. You're going to see us go to Google, Azure, and also IBM cloud. And the really, clients are driving this. It's not us driving it, but you're going to see actually the client. So we'll go into Google because we had a couple financial institutions that are saying they're driving us to go do exactly that. So it's more really working with our client sets and making sure we got the right roadmap to support what they're trying to do. And then the ecosystem is another play. How to, you know, my core technology is not necessarily competitive with anyone else. No one else is doing this. They're just kind of, hey, move it here, I'll put it on this, you know, a foundational DV or they'll put it on on a presto environment. They're not really worried about the bottom line economics, which is really that's the value prop and that's the hard tech and patented technology that we bring to this ecosystem. >> Well, people are definitely worried about their cloud bills. The the CFO saying, whoa, cause it's so easy to spin up, instances in the cloud. And so, Ed it really looks like you're going after a real problem. You got some great tech behind you. And of course, we love the fact that it's another Boston based company that you're joining, cause it's more Boston based startups. Better for us here at the East Coast Cube, so give us a give us your final thoughts. What should we look for? I'm sure we're going to be being touched and congratulations. >> No, hey, thank you for the time. I'm really excited about this. I really just think it's fundamental technology that allows us to get the most out of everything you're doing around analytics in the cloud. And if you look at a data lake model, I think that's our philosophy. And we're going to drive it pretty aggressively. And I think it's a good fundamental innovation for the space and that's the type of tech that I like. And I think we can also, do a lot of partnering across ecosystems to make it work for a lot of different people. So anyway, so I guess thank you very much for the time appreciate. >> Yeah, well, thanks for coming on theCUBE and best of luck. I'm sure we're going to be learning a lot more and hearing a lot more about ChaosSearch, Ed Walsh. This is Dave Vellante. Thank you for watching everybody, and we'll see you next time on theCUBE. (upbeat music)