>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome back to Dell technologies, world 2022. We're live in Vegas. Very happy to be here. Uh, this is the cubes multi-year coverage. This is year 13 for covering either, you know, EMC world or, uh, Dell world. And now of course, Dell tech world. My name is Dave Volante and I'm here with longtime Cub alum cube guest, Steve Kenon, the storage Alchemist, who's, uh, Beckett, Dell, uh, and his data protection role. And Tony Bryson is the chief information security officer of the town of Gilbert town in Arizona. Most, most towns don't have a CISO, but Tony, we're a thrilled, you're here to tell us that story. How did you become a CISO and how does the town of Gilbert have a CISO? >>Well, thank you for having me here. Uh, believe it or not. The town of Gilbert is actually the fourth largest municipality in Arizona. We serve as 281,000 citizens. So it's a fairly large enterprise. We're a billion dollar enterprise. And it got to the point where the, uh, cybersecurity concerns were at such a point that they elected to bring in their first chief information security officer. And I managed to, uh, be the lucky gentleman that got that particular position. >>That's awesome. And there's a, is there a CIO as well? Are you guys peers? Do you, how what's the reporting structure look like? >>We have a chief technology officer. Okay. I report through his office mm-hmm <affirmative> and then he reports, uh, directly to the town executive. >>So you guys talk a lot, you I'm sure you present a lot to the, to the board or wherever the governance structure is. Yeah, >>We do. I, I do quarterly report outs to the, I report through to the town council. Uh, let them know exactly what our cyber security posture is like, the type of threats that we're facing. As a matter of fact, I have to do one when I return to, uh, Gilbert from this particular conference. So really looking forward to that one, cuz this is an interesting time to be in cyber security. >>So obviously a sea. So Steve is gonna say, cyber's the number one priority, but I would say the CTO is gonna say the, say the same thing I would say the board is gonna say the same thing. I would also say Steve, that, uh, cyber and cyber resilience is probably the number one topic here at the show. When you walk around and you see the cyber demonstrations, the security demonstrations, they're packed, it's kind of your focus. Um, it's a good call. >>Yeah. <laugh> I'm the luckiest guy in storage, right? <laugh> um, yeah, there hasn't I in the last 24 months, I don't think that there's been a, a meeting that I've been to with a customer, no matter who's in the room where, uh, cyber resiliency, cybersecurity hasn't come up. I mean, it is, it is one of the hot topics in last night. I mean, Michael was just here. Uh, Michael Dell was just here last night. He came into the showroom floor, he came back, he took a look at what we were offering for cyber capabilities and was impressed. And, and so, so that's really good. >>Yeah. So I noticed, you know, when I talked to a lot of CIOs in particular, they would tell me that the pre pandemic, their cyber resiliency was very Dr. Focused, right. They really, it really wasn't an organizational resilience. It was a, if there's an oh crap moment, they could get it back in theory. And they sort of rethought that. Do you see you that amongst your peers, Tony? >>I think so. I think that people are quickly starting to understand that you just can't focus on, in, on protecting yourself from something that you think may never happen. The reality is that you're likely to see some type of cyber event, so you better be prepared for it. And you protect yourself against that. So plan for resiliency plan with making sure that you have the right people in place that can take that challenge on, because it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when >>I would imagine. Well, Steve, you and I have talked about this, that, you know, the data protection business used to be, we used to call it backup in recovery and security, which is a whole different animal, but they're really starting to come together. It's kind of an Adjay. I, I know you've got this, uh, Maverick report that, that you want to talk about. What, what is that as a new Gartner research? I, I'm not familiar with it. >>Yeah. So it's some very interesting Gartner research and what I think, and I'd be curious to, Tony's take on, especially after that last question is, you know, a lot of people are, are spending a lot of money to keep the bad actors out. Right. And Gardner's philosophy on this whole, um, it's, it's, you're going to get hacked. So embrace the breach, that's their report. Right. So what they're suggesting is you're spending a lot of money, but, but we're witnessing a lot of attacks still coming in. Are you prepared to recover that when it happens? Right. And so their philosophy is it's time to start thinking about the recovery aspects of, you know, if, if they're gonna get through, how do you handle that? Right. >>Well, so you got announcements this week, big one of the big four, I guess, or big five cyber recovery vault. It's been, you're enhancing that you guys are talking things like, you know, air gaps and so forth. Give us the overview of the news there. >>Yeah. So there's, uh, cyber recovery vault for AWS for the cloud. There is, uh, a lot of stuff we're doing with, uh, cyber recovery vault for, uh, Aw, uh, Azure also, right along with the cyber sense technology, which is the technology that scans the data. Once it comes in from the backup to ensure that it clean and can be recovered and you can feel confident that your recoveries look good, right? So now, now you can do that OnPrem, or you can do it through a colo. You can do it with in the cloud, or you can, uh, ask Dell technologies with our apex business services to help provide cyber recovery services wherever for you at your co at yet OnPrem or for you from the cloud. So it's kind of giving the customer, allowing them to keep that freedom of choice of how they want to operate, but provide them those same recovery capabilities. >>So Tony, give us paint us a picture without giving away too much for the bad guys. How, how you approach this, maybe are you using some of these products? What's your sort of infrastructure look like? >>Yeah. Without giving away the state secrets, um, we are heavily invested in the cyber recovery vault and cyber sense. Uh, it plays heavily in our strategy. We wanna make sure we have a safe Harbor for our data. And that's something that, that the Dell power protect cyber recovery vault provides to us. Uh, we're exceptionally excited about the, the development that's going on, especially with apex. We're looking at that, and that has really captured our imagination. It could be a game changer for us as a town because we're, we're a small organization transitioning to a midsize organization and what apex provides and what the Dell cyber recovery vault provides to us. Putting those two together gives us the elasticity we need as a small organization to expand quickly and deal with our internal data concerns. >>So cyber recovery as a service is what you're interested in. Let me ask you a question. Are you interested in a managed service or are you interested in managing it yourself? >>That's a great question, personally. I would prefer that we went with managed services. I think that from a manager's perspective, you get a bigger bang for the buck going with managed services. You have people that work with that technology all the time. You don't have to ramp people up and develop that expertise in house. You also then have that peace of mind that you have more people that are doing the services and it acts as a force multiplier for you. So from a dollar and cents perspective, it's the way that you want to go. When I start talking to my internal people, of course, there's that, that sense of fear that comes with the unknown and especially outsourcing that type of critical infrastructure, the there's some concern there, but I think that with education, with exposure, to some of the things that we get from the managed service, it makes sense for everybody to go that >>Route and, and you can, I presume sort of POC it and then expand it and then get more comfortable with it and then say, okay, when it's hardened and ready now, this is the, the Def facto standard across the organization. >>I suspect we'll end up in a hybrid environment to begin with where we'll some assets on site, and then we'll have some assets in the cloud. And that's again, where apex will be that, that big linchpin for us and really make it all work. How >>Important are air gaps? >>Oh, they're incredibly, incredibly, uh, needed right now. You cannot have true data of security without having an air gap. A lot of the ransomware that we see moves laterally through your organization. So if you have, uh, all your data backed up in the same data center that your, your backups and your primary data sources are in odds are they're all gonna get owned at the same time. So having that air gap solution in there is critical to having the peace of mind that allows the CISO to sleep at night. >>I always tell my crypto and NFT readers, this doesn't apply to data centers. You gotta air back air, air gap, your crypto, you know, when you're NFT. So how do you guys Steve deal with, with air gap? Can you explain the solutions? >>So in the, in the cyber recovery vault itself, it is driven through, uh, you've got one, uh, power protect, uh, appliance on one, one side in your data center, and then wherever your, your, your vaulted area is, whether it be a colo, whether it be on pre wherever it might be. Uh, we create a connection between between the two that is one directional, right? So we send the data to that vault. We call it the vault and, you know, we replicate a copy of your backup data. Once it lives over there, we make a copy of that data. And then what we do is with the cyber sense technology that Tony was talking about, we scan that data and we validate it against, with a whole cyber sense is built on IML machine learning. We look at a couple hundred different kind of profiles that come through and compare it to the, to the day before as backup and the day before that and understand kind of what's changing. >>And is it changing the right way? Right? Like there might be some reasons it it's supposed to change that way. Right. But things that look anomalous, we send up a warning when we let the people know that, you know, whoever's monitoring, something's going on. You might want to take a look. And then based on that, if there's whatever's happening in the environment, we have the ability to then recover that data back to the, to the original system. You can use the vault as a, as a clean room area, if you want to send people to it, depending on kind of what's going on in, in, in your main data center. So there's a lot of things we do to protect that. Do >>You recommend, like changing the timing of when you take, you know, snapshots or you do the same time every day, it's gotta create different patterns or >>I'll tell you that's, that's one thing to keep the, keep the hackers on their tow, right? It it's tough to do operationally, right? Because you kind that's processes. But, but the reality is if you really are that, uh, concerned about attacks, that makes a lot of sense, >>Tony, what's the CISOs number one challenge today? >>Uh, I, it has to be resilience. It has to be making sure your organization that if or when they get hit, that you're able to pick the pieces back up and get the operation back up as quickly and efficiently as possible. Making sure that the, the mission critical data is immediately, uh, recoverable and be able to be put back into play. >>And, and what's the biggest challenge or best practice in terms of doing that? Obviously the technology, the people, the process >>Right now, I would probably say it's it's people, uh, we're going through the, the, um, a period of, of uncertainty in the marketplace when it comes to trying to find people. So it is difficult to find the right people to do certain things, which is why managed services is so important to an organization of our size and, and what we're trying to do, where we are, are incorporating such big ideas. We need those manager services because we just can't find the bodies that can do some of this work. >>You got an interesting background, you a PhD in psychology, you're an educator, you're a golf pro and you're a CISO. I I've never met anybody like you, Tony <laugh>. So, thanks for coming on, Steve, give you the last word. >>Well, I think I, I think one of the things that Tony said, and I wanted to parlay this a little bit, uh, from that Gartner report, I even talked about people is so critical when it comes to cyber resiliency and that sort of thing. And one of the things I talked about in that embraced the breach report is as you're looking to hire staff for your environment, right, you wanna, you know, a lot of people might shy away from hiring that CSO that got fired because they had a cyber event. Right, right. Oh, maybe they didn't do their job. But the reality is, is those folks, because this is very new. I mean, of course we've been talking about cyber for a couple of years, but, but getting that experience under your belt and understanding what happens in the event. I mean, there are a lot of companies that run things like cyber ranges, resiliency, ranges to put people through the paces of, Hey, this is what have happens when an event happens and are you prepared to respond? I think there's a big set of learning lessons that happens when you go through one of those events and it helps kind of educate the people about what's needed. >>It's a great point. Failure used to mean fire right in this industry. And, and today it's different. The adversary is very well armed and quite capable and motivated that learning even during, even when you fail, can be applied to succeed in the future or not fail, I guess there's no such thing as success in your business. Guys. Thanks so much for coming on the cube. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks very >>Much. >>All right. And thank you for watching the cubes coverage of Dell tech world 2022. This is Dave Valenti. We'll be back with John furrier, Lisa Martin and David Nicholson. Two days of wall to wall coverage left. Keep it with us.

(snazzy music) >> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE, covering WTG Transform 2019, brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the CUBE exclusive coverage of WTG Transform 2019. It's the Winslow Technology's Dell MC user group, and therefore, we are always thrilled when, not only do we have a user on the program, but we have a local user who's also the Chief Information Officer. Shawn Rothman, who is the Chief Information Officer, CIO, of the town of Weymouth. Coming up from the south shore, a nice easy drive when the traffic isn't too bad. Shawn, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, glad to be here. It's Boston though, so there is no such thing as the traffic being easy. >> Yeah, the traffic and the weather. Just wait a little while, it'll change greatly. We've got the mast plate right behind us with Fenway, and yeah, it is starting to get to the evening. You know, Friday commute back. But uh, you're probably going to the Sox game, so you won't have to worry about that. >> Exactly. That's my plan, is to wait it out. >> All right. So, as I mentioned, town of Weymouth about 12 miles from where we're sitting right now. You know, you're the CIO. Give us a little bit about, you know, what that means to be the CIO of a town here in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. >> Yeah, so you know, IT is so different when you get out of the corporate setting. We have a lot of high needs or requirements. There's a lot of public safety needs, things like that, that are consuming often. But the drive isn't always there to take advantage of it, so we've been continually working to grow new things, to grow new technology in Weymouth. We uh, I'm really struggling, sorry. >> Yeah, no it's great Shawn. Give us a little bit about, you know, what you can, how many people that you've served in the community, and your team itself, how many people you've managed, just to give us a little bit of a scope. >> So, in Weymouth we have about 500 full time employees within the town side and another, you know, more than 2,000 if you take in our schools. Now we have a separate IT department for our schools. We share combined networks, so we have a private dark fiber network that runs throughout the town that we share. I provide services for police, fire, DPW, emergency management, finance, all the things that you kind of do, public works. It's a lot of different areas. There's a lot of different needs and ways that we can meet the needs of the public. >> Okay, that's awesome. So underneath that, so infrastructure is a piece of what your group owns, yes? >> Yes. >> Give us a little bit, kind of scope that out for us, what that means when kind of the pieces that allow you to deliver those services to your constituents. >> Right, so it starts with lots of things people don't see, right? So, IT is often very hidden. If we're doing our job well, people don't really notice us. So, like I said, we have dark fiber all throughout the town that enables us to do everything from public safety communication, data replication, allows for DR so we have multiple sites for our data. We run Compellent SANs, based off running Dell servers, running VM ware. And, we run two different set ups. One at the town hall and another at my police department, and that provides my disaster recovery and things like that. From there, then you start looking towards facing of customers. We need to run bills for taxes, and water, and utilities, things like that, so, all those pieces start to play in. We're continually looking to grow in that area, so, one of the areas that we're actually looking at right now is increasing our presence online, as far as people's ability to apply for permits online to have inspectional services done online, to pay their bills online. You know, I think everybody wants their experience online to be Amazon, right? Go, open up your cart, buy up, put a bunch of things in there, hit pay, and be done. And, that's the direction we're trying to move, these days. >> Shawn, some of the fascinating conversations I've had in the last few years is when you talk to government agencies, municipalities, and the like, and that word gets thrown out, digital transformation, and what that means from you. Right, you know, today, you know, me? I live in a town here in Massachusetts. Yeah, gosh, why can't everything just be something that, I talk to my home assistant and it just gets done magically, and it's nice and easy? But you know, it's a journey that we all need to go on and there's some things that, you know, you don't have unlimited budget and unlimited head count to be able to manage that, so talk to us a little bit about, you know, does digital transformation mean something in your world? And, how are you helping to deliver some of those mobile enabled services? >> Yeah, so that really, I run into really two challenges there, well multiple challenges, more than two, but two really big challenges. One is getting people used to the idea of doing things in a way that they haven't done it before. You don't need to come to the town hall, go online and do it. You have to understand that billing, if you pay online, you pay with a credit card, there's charges that get assumed. With Amazon, that gets eaten by the product managers and things like that. Well, we don't have that, so those are surprise fees for people. So, those are challenges to teach people about. We also then have problems with teaching people within the town. Hey, I've always done my business x way. People come and see me, they do things, they fill out this form, they move along, and it's kind of transforming their abilities to understand and move in that technical age, also. Those are kind of the two biggest areas. Outside of that, is, you know, the up side is huge. We're talking to another community that has kind of gone to these things online, and they say they're getting like 40 to 60 percent of their building permits between midnight and 6:00 AM. That's a whole new world for the way the government has worked in the past. >> Yeah. Shawn, come on. I live in a town here in Massachusetts. We are proud of our 300 year old legacy and the way things are done here, which is a little bit different than the conversation we're generally having in IT these days. >> Yes, for sure. (chuckling) >> Great. So, you mentioned a little bit, you know, I hear Compellent SANs. You've got disaster recovery and all these pieces, so tie us into this event. What brings you to WTG Transform? Of course, I know Compellant has a long history of the team here, Scott and the team, so how long have you been working with them? And, tell us a little bit about the relationship. >> We've had a Compellent SAN actually installed by Winslow, it's got to be nine plus years ago to get started, and it's just kind of been one of those things that grew. You know, we started with Compellent, and then Dell bought Compellent, and we had HP servers, and while it was nice to have everything together, so we moved to our Dell servers, but I love to come here and see kind of where things are moving, where Winslow is going, where there's opportunities for me kind of to meet people's needs in ways that they're looking for that maybe I don't know about, ways I can protect our data, ways I can protect my constituents and my residents. Those are all concerns, and this is a great opportunity for kind of see all those different pieces, to get my hands on things once in a while, or to hear something that would get me moving in a direction maybe I hadn't previously looked at. >> Shawn, is there any initiatives you have, or technologies that you're poking at that you'd like to understand more, or things that you're looking for from kind of the vendor community that would make your world easier? >> It's hard to know what you don't know, and so there's always something new. Every time I get here, I see something that I'm like, "Man, this could really be transformative for us." It's often different to figure out how and when to implement those things. So, I don't know that I have, you know, I don't know that thing I don't know yet, I think I haven't found that key hot button for this year, I don't think. >> You bring up a really good point, a question I actually asked for years is, how do you keep up? And, of course the answer is, I don't care if you're the smartest person at the most important company in the world, no one can keep up with all of it all the time. So, the question is, who do you rely on to help you to understand and learn some of those new things? >> Yeah, so I mean, we all look at things from media, and there's Spiceworks is a great community I use, but my VARs are kind of, that's really where the rubber meets the road for me, And, you know, Winslow has just been, there are many things that I would, I'll take and leave. There's technology I use, and if I had to replace it, I get rid of it. Well, Compellent, Winslow, that combo is, I mean, it's called dead-hand technology, I mean, it doesn't leave, it's not going any place. They're crucial to me, knowing where to go, how to go. They help me figure out road maps, they've always kind of gone above and beyond in making sure that my needs are met, and that I know the direction things are going before I get jammed into a spot where I can't get out. >> Yeah, so last question I have for you, Shawn. CIO of a town here in Massachusetts, where do you find it kind of different and the same compared to the peers that you'd be talking to at an event like this? >> It's hard to find other venues like this. There's some government run programs, but they're not the same. >> So, I guess just to, what I'm asking for is when you talk to your peers here, do you have some of the same concerns and the same looking at technology, or are there opportunities or challenges you have working for a town government that maybe the average mid-sized business wouldn't? >> Sorry, yeah. Yeah, I think we share a lot of security concerns. Security, I think our concerns are very much aligned, right, we're all worried about what's happening outside our environment, we're concerned about the weakest link, which tends to be our end users ability to click a button, but outside of that, when we get to like how business really works, at times we're very different, at times we're very similar. So, my needs for disaster recovery, again, two buildings across town, that works for me. If I lose those two buildings across town, two, three, four miles, I've lost everything I care about, where a company, you lose something, you need to have backups across the country. So, there's some different needs, but the reality is we both need to protect our data, we both want to provide quality service to the people that depend on us, we both want to be moving in positive directions, we both have constraints on our budgets. So, I think there's a lot of overlap for me that I can pick up information here, even if sometimes the exact model they use isn't the same as what I would use. >> All right, last question I have for you, Shawn is, when I travel, you know, I live about 26.2 miles from downtown Boston, but I say I'm from Boston because people definitely outside this country, and even across this country, don't necessary know much of Massachusetts, so when you talk to somebody, how do we put Weymouth on the map? >> So, Weymouth is on the south shore of Boston, but generally, I would say the same thing, I'm from Boston, but we're, like you said, I mean, we're less than 10 miles really from the edges of Boston. We're right along the water, we have one, actually, one of the busiest ports in Massachusetts, outside of Boston, itself, Boston harbor, and so, you know, we're kind of right here in the middle of everything. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well it's getting close to beach season, it's actually the first day of Summer here. So, Shawn, thank you so much for sharing this story, town of Weymouth, and what's happening in your world, really appreciate you joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, we'll be back with more coverage here from WTG Transform 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching the CUBE. (snazzy music)

>> Narrator: Live from Chicago Illinois, it's theCUBE! Covering VeammOn 2018. Brought to you by Veamm. >> Welcome back to VeammOn 2018 everybody, and you're watching theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. This is day one of our coverage of VeammOn, the second year theCUBE has been here. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. Zeb Ahmed is here, he's the Senior Offering Manager for VMWare, with the IBM Cloud, at IBM of course. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, good to see you Zeb. >> Thank you for having me, very excited to be here. >> Yeah so IBM, Cloud, big part of our business. Obviously VMWare, you've been there for a long time. Partnerships with Veamm. Lay it all out for us, what's going on at IBM, IBM Cloud. >> Yeah so we started the VMWare partnership a couple years ago, and our goal was really to build a practice run VMWare which was automated, take it to the next level essentially, not just be a me too player, what everybody else was doing out there, but rather, make the transition from on premises to the Cloud much easier for those VMWare customers. So we've automated a lot of things on the VMWare platform, you can deploy the inverse stack, in a matter of minutes, instead of days and months. So it's a much easier transition, we also work with a lot of partners, such as Veamm, but customers was using on premises, and we've allowed them to have those capabilities in the Cloud as well, in a very automated fashion. >> Quickly if I remember, I think you guys were first doing something with VMWare in the Cloud, you're kind of a year ahead of most. I mean-- >> Stu: It was a few months ahead, they were the first big partner out there with the VMWare Cloud basically. We got, put in Cloud air and everything. >> But in terms of shipping, actually, you guys-- >> We were the first ones, yeah. So we were the first ones to market with Cloud foundation stack right? Yeah and then the other vendors followed as well, but yeah that's been doing great, right? And again, it's fully automated, matter of minutes you can deploy the whole stack, a lot of value add there. >> Yeah Zeb, maybe help set the picture for us a little bit. 'Cause we talk about this multi-cloud world, IBM owns a lot of applications, IBM partners with a lot, where does IBM see themselves playing in this multi-cloud, multi-app world? >> Great question, I think I, so I refer to it two T's. So the first one being the transition, and then the transformation. So the transition is really where the challenge has been for those customers, the barrier to entry, how do these customers actually make that move seamless to the Cloud, especially the space that IBM is in on the enterprise side, these applications are legacy, very very complicated design, a lot of dependencies, so that was a challenge that we tried to solve for. And I think we're at a state now where we've not only solved for that, we've also, I don't know if you guys have seen HCX that we had with VMWare recently, which was a great migration tool, and helps customer on board Cloud, and adapt to Cloud much much faster. And then also build that ecosystem partner network. So all those tools, that we were using on premises like Veamm, right? Making those available in the Cloud for those customers, and it has been great, and also in the transformation side, right? So not only just move them to the Cloud, but also help them leverage, and go up the stack. So micro-services, blockchain, Watson, containers, all those things are available to our customers. >> I think that's a key point that I wanted to highlight is, people often say, how does IBM compete with some of the big Cloud players? You're not just infrastructure as a service, you've got a giant SAS portfolio, you mentioned Watson so, talk about your strategy in that regard. >> Yeah I mean so, the enterprise customer, typical customer, whether it's financial industry or whether health care or transportation et cetera, nobody is just looking for a partner where they can just move the infrastructure too. They're looking for the next state, they're looking to transform the business, they're trying to utilize all those new capabilities that exist in the Cloud today. And IBM has sought for that exactly because not only just use, move your infrastructure and workloads, but now you can consume all those additional gallywads, in the Cloud like Watson, make it for a more intelligent solution in the end. >> Right, so that's a key differentiator. There's only a couple of companies that have that, well I guess you guys, Oracle, Microsoft obviously has the applications, and IBM talks a lot about the cognitive piece, am I correct you can only get Watson in the IBM Cloud, is that still the case, or are you now have it on prem? >> No no, Watson can be consumed using an API. So it's a PAS platform, and if somebody wanted to consume Watson for the on premises workloads and wanted to bring that intelligence for that on premises environment they can do that. >> Dave: Are you seeing more demand for that? >> Oh yes. >> Or is it primarily in the Cloud? >> We've got huge traction in the healthcare space especially, there's a lot of financial customers that are onboarding that as well. So Watson's doing great in that regard. >> Sort of privacy reasons and-- >> Zeb: That's right. >> Zeb one of the things we've been watching with Veamm for the last few years is how do they penetrate deeper into the enterprise. Of course IBM has a strong position in the enterprise, help connect for us how the Veamm and IBM partnerships go together. >> So I think this was a very easy answer for a lot of our customers, because Veamm has a lot of penetration on the on premises workloads, especially on the back-up and business continuity space. So when we looked at the partners and the products that existed in the space, we really looked at the market space, what the customers were consuming. Veamm had a huge market share, and like I said previously, we wanted to solve for those problems and we wanted to keep the tools at the same tool set that they were using today on the premises, so this was very seamless for us, and it is seamless for the customers, to move to IBM Cloud and leverage those same tools exactly. >> So talk about choice because, I can imagine you're getting a call from Ed Walsh, "Hey, how about using my data protection software instead of Veamm?". How do you manage that? >> Zeb: It is tough, right? It is obviously tough, IBM also has a huge portfolio of products, right? In the end the decision was or it really came down to, what is it the customers are looking for? When it came to the back-up space, especially on the VMWare platform, The answer was there, a lot of the VMWare customers use Veamm. In addition to that, Veamm also checks a lot of other boxes for us. So, not only does VMWare stack, but also, I don't know if it's been announced yet or not, but AIX is something of beta that they're launching, at this event, so that is huge for IBM. >> Dave: Really? >> Oh yes, they're also in the bare metal space, so a consolidated view of all your back-ups, all your bare metal, for AIX, for virtualized platform. >> So the power guys will be happy. >> For those that aren't as familiar anymore, I mean remember AIX back in the day, but this is second week in a row I'm talking about AIX. It was Nutanix last week, and it's Veamm today. How much AIX is there still out in the wild? >> There's quite a bit, I mean IBM, if you guys know the background, right? When software was acquired it was a bare metal shop. So with that a lot of the power stuff came as well. So we have a huge power practice in IBM. >> Right, and well it's still, I remember the Steve Mills charts, which showed the availability of AIX versus, the only more available platform was the mainframe, and then with AIX, and then, and you had all that other stuff that everybody else buys but, it's a volume market so it kind of makes sense though. People will pay up for that. And still, a huge install base, now growing, and Nutanix has a relationship with the power guys, so maybe that's where sort of factored in, right? But Linux, of course, is the hot space, right? I mean sure you see it's powering the web. >> Well I'm a VMWare guy, so (laughs). >> There's Linux sitting on top of some of that. >> That's right, of course, of course. >> You've got Linux of mainframe, right? Okay, alright so, talk a little bit more about what you're seeing from the VMWare customer base, how it's synergistic and not just sort of a one way trip into a hotel California. >> Yeah, so a typical VMWare customer that we're seeing who's on premises today are looking to IBM Cloud, or actually take a leap into the Cloud, especially on the enterprise base, these customers want to transform. I mean, there has been a lot of questions for them, especially the customer base IBM focused on, questions around security, compliance, business continuity and data protection and such. So these customers not only want to just make the leap into the Cloud, but they also want to solve for some of these challenges, and also go up to stack like I was mentioning. So, we're seeing a huge push for containers, for those customers that are moving to VMWare, they want to build up the stack, on the PAS layer, and also want to leverage Watson and services like that. >> Yeah, could you expand on that a little more, things like are you working with PKS, the solution with VMWare and Pivotal, and the Kubernetes stuff, or? >> Yes, Kubernetes, Dockers, we also give the customers ability to do their own stuff, go up the stack. I mean, in the end, you know, they can consume us from an IS standpoint and build their PAS on top, or we can, they can use our own, so Kubernetes, Dockers, et cetera. >> What's the story, Stu, with Cloud foundry these days? There was a big push early on, and I fell like I can, I'm not as close as you are, but there seems to be a, I don't want to say a pull back, but maybe less enthusiasm, what's the lay of the land? >> Sure, I mean IBM was one of the earliest bloomix, I believe, and with IBM Cloud, IBM has a few different offerings, I didn't see as big of a push from IBM at the Cloud foundry summit I was at last month, but IBM, like most of the Cloud providers are giving customers choice. >> Zeb: That's right. >> So I guess the question is what-- >> And heavy in Open Source, I mean I'm seeing IBM heavy push, I'm wondering server-less, if you've got any commentary there. We've been looking at like Open Whisk and some of the pieces there. >> Yeah Open Whisk is there, there's, server-less is a thing that a lot of these customers, back to your own original question, a lot of these customers are looking for those types of services, and they're all available in the catalog. >> It's still pretty early, that hasn't overtaken the discussions of the (mumbles) and the (mumbles) stuff in your world has it? >> It hasn't, but I think the enterprise customers who are looking to move to Cloud, they are thinking about those things. So these are some of the check boxes that need to be checked for them for the future growth, et cetera. >> So you've got VMWare's obviously visualization strategy, you've got containers coming, I remember when we had Pat Gelsinger on theCUBE several years ago, when containers were, docker was rocketing, and everybody was like oh docker's going to kill VMWare. And Pat's response was, "Look, we've got the best containers in the world. We're going to embrace containers". They're like, oh sure. But that's exactly what happened. What's IBM's point of view on it? >> Yeah, here's the thing, we want to give them the option to do whatever they want to do. We're seeing a lot of traction on the micro-services side, on the containerization, but I think it's going hand in hand, a lot of the customers are using VMWare platform still, yet they're also leveraging some of these other micro-services and containers, so I think Pat's right on. I think originally what was people were talking about getting rid of the IS layer of VMWare and just going containers completely. Our take is, give the customers all the functionality and the ability to do whatever they want to do, we are seeing it's more of a mix at the moment. >> And we had Edouard Bugnion on recently, found of, one of the founders of VMWare, and he was talking about the challenges in the data center at scale. And in particular when you introduce virtualization and you reduce some of the hardware resources, how do you deliver predictable, high-performance, at scale, and some of the challenges there. That's even on prem. Now introduce Cloud, and you've got distance and latency and other physics so, what's the discussion like with customers around how to architect the ideal Cloud, on prem, hybrid. >> It's a great question, because that is a question I get asked all the time, because in the enterprise base like I said, these customers in a lot of cases have a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, so network becomes a key part of that discussion. For us, the answer is very simple. We've laid down the fiber of (mumbles) across all these data centers, so when you're talking about latency, and data transfer, and those types of speeds, or having a multi-cloud strategy across the globe, it's a very simple and easy conversation because not only do we make all that information available to our customers, far as what latency they expect from which data center to another one across the globe, but also it's all private, and it's all secure, and it makes for a very good multi-cloud story. >> I don't know if you saw Jenny Remmetti's talk at IBM Think, but she used the term, a lot of people tongue in cheek, but I kind of like it, "incumbent disruptors". I mean look if you're IBM and you've got the client base that IBM has, you better come up with a term like that because that's exactly what you're trying to help your customers do. So, my question is, where does the Cloud and your offering with VMWare fit into the incumbent disruptive scenario? >> Yeah, so VMWare like I said earlier, we didn't want to be a me too player with VMWare. Not only did we want to have a good story with VMWare because obviously VMWare is a huge market share when it comes to virtualization, but on top of that, we wanted to be more futuristic, and solve for those, some of those questions and concerns that the enterprise customer had. So, tight integration on the enterprise base, on the micro-services, containerization, Watson is a huge part of the VMWare platform, you can seamlessly integrate into Watson and really have intelligent decision making on the VMWare platform. So, we wanted to ensure that we were helping our enterprise customers move to Cloud, yet also solve for the future problems. >> So the incumbent piece, both VMWare and IBM, right, incumbent customers, the disruptor would be I guess Cloud, all the new Cloud services, certainly the machine intelligence cognitive, et cetera, components is the disruptive capability, now it's up to you to figure out, okay, how do you apply all that, presumably IBM and your partners can help. >> Yeah and here's the thing, you mentioned earlier, IBM is one of the only companies in the world that can have an end-to-end, not just infrastructure, but also services wrapped around it. So if you're a customer who's not only looking to move to the Cloud but also have services wrapped around, to go end-to-end, IBM is the company to do that for you. >> Dave: Well that's interesting. Okay, I got to ask him Stu. So we had, we were at Dell Technologies World a couple weeks ago, and we had Jeff Clark on, and we asked him, we said, "Look, companies like IBM, HPE, sort of, IBM selling off its X86 division, and HPE splitting, Dell did the opposite. The mega merger". And his comment was, "Well I don't see how you can do end-to-end without both ends". Now, his definition of end is obviously different to your end definition, and I have to ask you, what do you mean by end-to-end? Is the client sort of just a commodity, we can get that anywhere, it's not really an integration challenge? >> So when I'm saying end-to-end what I'm talking about is a enterprise customer looking to move to the Cloud, solve for the future problems, essentially re-invent themselves, transform their business, leverage the new applications, micro-services that are there, but also have services wrapped around it, right? Somebody who's there to help them end-to-end, whether it's just doing migrations for example, right, from on premises to the Cloud, but also help them onboard and guide them on what is there in the Cloud, or the micro-services, or our PAS layer, and how they can transform really. >> So that to me Stu is, Zeb's talking about not a hardware view, of end-to-end, but a, maybe a systems and a software view of end-to-end, in the Cloud services. Alright, Zeb, thank you very much for, do you have one more? You good? Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Guys, thank you very much, appreciate it. >> Appreciate it. Alright, keep it right there buddy, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from VeeamOn 2018, in Chi-town, we'll be right back. (electronic music)