(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Prem Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Prem, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Prem phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Prem, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Prem for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Prem said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Prem I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Prem to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Prem what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(inspirational music) >> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (uplifting electronic music) (crowd chattering in background) >> Hi everybody. We're back at the Fira in Barcelona. Winding up our four day wall-to-wall coverage of MWC23 theCUBE has been thrilled to cover the telco transformation. Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Really excited to have NTT on. Shahid Ahmed is the Group EVP of New Ventures and Innovation at NTT in from Chicago. Welcome to Barcelona. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me over. >> So, really interesting title. You have, you know, people might not know NTT you know, huge Japan telco but a lot of other businesses, explain your business. >> So we do a lot of things. Most of us are known for our Docomo business in Japan. We have one of the largest wireless cellular carriers in the world. We serve most of Japan. Outside of Japan, we are B2B systems, integration, professional services company. So we offer managed services. We have data centers, we have undersea cables. We offer all kinds of outsourcing services. So we're a big company. >> So there's a narrative out there that says, you know, 5G, it's a lot of hype, not a lot of adoption. Nobody's ever going to make money at 5G. You have a different point of view, I understand. You're like leaning into 5G and you've actually got some traction there. Explain that. >> So 5G can be viewed from two lenses. One is just you and I using our cell phones and we get 5G coverage over it. And the other one is for businesses to use 5G, and we call that private 5G or enterprise grade 5G. Two very separate distinct things, but it is 5G in the end. Now the big debate here in Europe and US is how to monetize 5G. As a consumer, you and I are not going to pay extra for 5G. I mean, I haven't. I just expect the carrier to offer faster, cheaper services. And so would I pay extra? Not really. I just want a reliable network from my carrier. >> Paid up for the good camera though, didn't you? >> I did. (Dave and Dave laughing) >> I'm waiting for four cameras now. >> So the carriers are in this little bit of a pickle at the moment because they've just spent billions of dollars, not only on spectrum but the infrastructure needed to upgrade to 5G, yet nobody's willing to pay extra for that 5G service. >> Oh, right. >> So what do they do? And one idea is to look at enterprises, companies, industrial companies, manufacturing companies who want to build their own 5G networks to support their own use cases. And these use cases could be anything from automating the surveyor belt to cameras with 5G in it to AGVs. These are little carts running around warehouses picking up products and goods, but they have to be connected all the time. Wifi doesn't work all the time there. And so those businesses are willing to pay for 5G. So your question is, is there a business case for 5G? Yes. I don't think it's in the consumer side. I think it's in the business side. And that's where NTT is finding success. >> So you said, you know, how they going to make money, right? You very well described the telco dilemma. We heard earlier this week, you know, well, we could tax the OTT vendors, like Netflix of course shot back and said, "Well, we spent a lot of money on content. We're driving a lot of value. Why don't you help us pay for the content development?" Which is incredibly expensive. I think I heard we're going to tax the developers for API calls on the network. I'm not sure how well that's going to work out. Look at Twitter, you know, we'll see. And then yeah, there's the B2B piece. What's your take on, we heard the Orange CEO say, "We need help." You know, maybe implying we're going to tax the OTT vendors, but we're for net neutrality, which seems like it's completely counter-posed. What's your take on, you know, fair share in the network? >> Look, we've seen this debate unfold in the US for the last 10 years. >> Yeah. >> Tom Wheeler, the FCC chairman started that debate and he made great progress and open internet and net neutrality. The thing is that if you create a lane, a tollway, where some companies have to pay toll and others don't have to, you create an environment where the innovation could be stifled. Content providers may not appear on the scene anymore. And with everything happening around AI, we may see that backfire. So creating a toll for rich companies to be able to pay that toll and get on a faster speed internet, that may work some places may backfire in others. >> It's, you know, you're bringing up a great point. It's one of those sort of unintended consequences. You got to be be careful because the little guy gets crushed in that environment, and then what? Right? Then you stifle innovation. So, okay, so you're a fan of net neutrality. You think the balance that the US model, for a change, maybe the US got it right instead of like GDPR, who sort of informed the US on privacy, maybe the opposite on net neutrality. >> I think so. I mean, look, the way the US, particularly the FCC and the FTC has mandated these rules and regulation. I think it's a nice balance. FTC is all looking at big tech at the moment, but- >> Lena Khan wants to break up big tech. I mean for, you know, you big tech, boom, break 'em up, right? So, but that's, you know- >> That's a whole different story. >> Yeah. Right. We could talk about that too, if you want. >> Right. But I think that we have a balanced approach, a measured approach. Asking the content providers or the developers to pay for your innovative creative application that's on your phone, you know, that's asking for too much in my opinion. >> You know, I think you're right though. Government did do a good job with net neutrality in the US and, I mean, I'm just going to go my high horse for a second, so forgive me. >> Go for it. >> Market forces have always done a better job at adjudicating, you know, competition. Now, if a company's a monopoly, in my view they should be, you know, regulated, or at least penalized. Yeah, but generally speaking, you know the attack on big tech, I think is perhaps misplaced. I sat through, and the reason it's relevant to Mobile World Congress or MWC, is I sat through a Nokia presentation this week and they were talking about Bell Labs when United States broke up, you know, the US telcos, >> Yeah. >> Bell Labs was a gem in the US and now it's owned by Nokia. >> Yeah. >> Right? And so you got to be careful about, you know what you wish for with breaking up big tech. You got AI, you've got, you know, competition with China- >> Yeah, but the upside to breaking up Ma Bell was not just the baby Bells and maybe the stranded orphan asset of Bell Labs, but I would argue it led to innovation. I'm old enough to remember- >> I would say it made the US less competitive. >> I know. >> You were in junior high school, but I remember as an adult, having a rotary dial phone and having to pay for that access, and there was no such- >> Yeah, but they all came back together. The baby Bells are all, they got all acquired. And the cable company, it was no different. So I don't know, do you have a perspective of this? Because you know this better than I do. >> Well, I think look at Nokia, just they announced a whole new branding strategy and new brand. >> I like the brand. >> Yeah. And- >> It looks cool. >> But guess what? It's B2B oriented. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> It's no longer consumer, >> Right, yeah. >> because they felt that Nokia brand phone was sort of misleading towards a lot of business to business work that they do. And so they've oriented themselves to B2B. Look, my point is, the carriers and the service providers, network operators, and look, I'm a network operator, too, in Japan. We need to innovate ourselves. Nobody's stopping us from coming up with a content strategy. Nobody's stopping a carrier from building a interesting, new, over-the-top app. In fact, we have better control over that because we are closer to the customer. We need to innovate, we need to be more creative. I don't think taxing the little developer that's building a very innovative application is going to help in the long run. >> NTT Japan, what do they have a content play? I, sorry, I'm not familiar with it. Are they strong in content, or competitive like Netflix-like, or? >> We have relationships with them, and you remember i-mode? >> Yeah. Oh yeah, sure. >> Remember in the old days. I mean, that was a big hit. >> Yeah, yeah, you're right. >> Right? I mean, that was actually the original app marketplace. >> Right. >> And the application store. So, of course we've evolved from that and we should, and this is an evolution and we should look at it more positively instead of looking at ways to regulate it. We should let it prosper and let it see where- >> But why do you think that telcos generally have failed at content? I mean, AT&T is sort of the exception that proves the rule. I mean, they got some great properties, obviously, CNN and HBO, but generally it's viewed as a challenging asset and others have had to diversify or, you know, sell the assets. Why do you think that telcos have had such trouble there? >> Well, Comcast owns also a lot of content. >> Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. >> And I think, I think that is definitely a strategy that should be explored here in Europe. And I think that has been underexplored. I, in my opinion, I believe that every large carrier must have some sort of content strategy at some point, or else you are a pipe. >> Yeah. You lose touch with a customer. >> Yeah. And by the way, being a dump pipe is okay. >> No, it's a lucrative business. >> It's a good business. You just have to focus. And if you start to do a lot of ancillary things around it then you start to see the margins erode. But if you just focus on being a pipe, I think that's a very good business and it's very lucrative. Everybody wants bandwidth. There's insatiable demand for bandwidth all the time. >> Enjoy the monopoly, I say. >> Yeah, well, capital is like an organism in and of itself. It's going to seek a place where it can insert itself and grow. Do you think that the questions around fair share right now are having people wait in the wings to see what's going to happen? Because especially if I'm on the small end of creating content, creating services, and there's possibly a death blow to my fixed costs that could be coming down the line, I'm going to hold back and wait. Do you think that the answer is let's solve this sooner than later? What are your thoughts? >> I think in Europe the opinion has been always to go after the big tech. I mean, we've seen a lot of moves either through antitrust, or other means. >> Or the guillotine! >> That's right. (all chuckle) A guillotine. Yes. And I've heard those directly. I think, look, in the end, EU has to decide what's right for their constituents, the countries they operate, and the economy. Frankly, with where the economy is, you got recession, inflation pressures, a war, and who knows what else might come down the pipe. I would be very careful in messing with this equilibrium in this economy. Until at least we have gone through this inflation and recessionary pressure and see what happens. >> I, again, I think I come back to markets, ultimately, will adjudicate. I think what we're seeing with chatGPT is like a Netscape moment in some ways. And I can't predict what's going to happen, but I can predict that it's going to change the world. And there's going to be new disruptors that come about. That just, I don't think Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple are going to rule the world forever. They're just, I guarantee they're not, you know. They'll make it through. But there's going to be some new companies. I think it might be open AI, might not be. Give us a plug for NTT at the show. What do you guys got going here? Really appreciate you coming on. >> Thank you. So, you know, we're showing off our private 5G network for enterprises, for businesses. We see this as a huge opportunities. If you look around here you've got Rohde & Schwarz, that's the industrial company. You got Airbus here. All the big industrial companies are here. Automotive companies and private 5G. 5G inside a factory, inside a hospital, a warehouse, a mining operation. That's where the dollars are. >> Is it a meaningful business for you today? >> It is. We just started this business only a couple of years ago. We're seeing amazing growth and I think there's a lot of good opportunities there. >> Shahid Ahmed, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. Really a pleasure. >> Thanks for having me over. Great questions. >> Oh, you're welcome. All right. For David Nicholson, Dave Vellante. We'll be back, right after this short break, from the Fira in Barcelona, MWC23. You're watching theCUBE. (uplifting electronic music)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Prem Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Prem, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Prem phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Prem, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Prem for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Prem said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Prem I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Prem to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Prem what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Param Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Param, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Param phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Param, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Param for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Param said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Param I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Param to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Param what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

>> TheCUBE presents Ignite 22 brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everyone. We're glad you're with us. This is theCUBE live at Palo Alto Ignite 22 at the MGM Grant in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante, day one of our coverage. We've had great conversations. The cybersecurity landscape is so interesting Dave, it's such a challenging problem to solve but it's so diverse and dynamic at the same time. >> You know, Lisa theCUBE started in May of 2010 in Boston. We called it the chowder event, chowder and Lobster. It was a EMC world, 2010. BJ Jenkins, who's here, of course, was a longtime friend of theCUBE and made the, made the transition into from, well, it's still data, data to, to cyber. So >> True. And BJ is back with us. BJ Jenkins, president Palo Alto Networks great to have you back on theCUBE. >> It is great to be here in person on theCube >> Isn't it great? >> In Vegas. It's awesome. >> And we can tell by your voice will be, will be gentle. You, you've been in Vegas typical Vegas occupational hazard of losing the voice. >> Yeah. It was one of the benefits of Covid. I didn't lose my voice at home sitting talking to a TV. You lose it when you come to Vegas. >> Exactly. >> But it's a small price to pay. >> So things kick off yesterday with the partner summit. You had a keynote then, you had a customer, a CISO on stage. You had a keynote today, which we didn't get to see. But talk to us a little bit about the lay of the land. What are you hearing from CISOs, from CIOs as we know security is a board level conversation. >> Yeah, I, you know it's been an interesting three or four months here. Let me start with that. I think, cybersecurity in general is still front and center on CIOs and CISO's minds. It has to be, if you saw Wendy's presentation today and the threats out there companies have to have it front and center. I do think it's been interesting though with the macro uncertainty. We've taken to calling this year the revenge of the CFO and you know these deals in cybersecurity are still a top priority but they're getting finance and procurements, scrutiny which I think in this environment is a necessity but it's still a, you know, number one number two imperative no matter who you talked to, in my mind >> It was interesting what Nikesh was saying in the last conference call that, hey we just have to get more approvals. We know this. We're, we're bringing more go-to-market people on board. We, we have, we're filling the pipeline 'cause we know they're going to split up deals big deals go into smaller chunks. So the question I have for you is is how are you able to successfully integrate those people so that you can get ahead of that sort of macro transition? >> Yeah I, you know, I think there's two things I'd say about uncertain macro situations and Dave, you know how old I am. I'm pretty old. I've been through a lot of cycles. And in those cycles I've always found stronger companies with stronger value proposition separate themselves actually in uncertain, economic times. And so I think there's actually an opportunity here. The message tilts a little bit though where it's been about innovation and new threat vectors to one of you have 20, 30, 40 vendors you can consolidate become more effective in your security posture and save money on your TCOs. So one of the things as we bring people on board it's training them on that business value proposition. How do you take a customer who's got 20 or 30 tools take 'em down to 5 or 10 where Palo is more central and strategic and be able to demonstrate that value. So we do that through, we're making a huge investment in our people but macroeconomic times also puts some stronger people back on the market and we're able to incorporate them into the business. >> What are the conditions that are necessary for that consolidation? Like I would imagine if you're, if you're a big customer of a big, you know, competitor of yours that that migration is going to be harder than if you're dealing with lots of little point tools. Do those, do those point tools, are they sort of is it the end of the subscription? Is it just stuff that's off the books now? What's, the condition that is ripe for that kind of consolidation? >> Look, I think the challenge coming into this year was skills. And so customers had all of these point products. It required a lot more human intervention as Nikesh was talking about to integrate them or make them work. And as all of us know finding people with cybersecurity skills over the last 12 months has been incredibly hard. That drove, if you know, if you think about that a CIO and a CISO sitting there going, I have all all this investment in tools. I don't have the people to operate 'em. What do I need to do? What we tried to do is elevate that conversation because in a customer, everybody who's bought one of those, they they bought it to solve a problem. And there's people with affinity for that tool. They're not just going to say I want to get consolidated and give up my tool. They're going to wrap their arms around it. And so what we needed to do and this changed our ecosystem strategy too how we leverage partners. We needed to get into the CIO and CISO and say look at this chaos you have here and the challenges around people that it's, it's presenting you. We can help solve that by, by standardizing, consolidating taking that integration away from you as Nikesh talked about, and making it easier for your your high skill people to work on high skill, you know high challenges in there. >> Let chaos reign, and then reign in the chaos. >> Yes. >> Andy Grove. >> I was looking at some stats that there's 26 million developers but less than 3 million cybersecurity professionals. >> Talked about that skills gap and what CISOs and CIOs are facing is do you consider from a value prop perspective Palo Alto Networks to be a, a facilitator of helping organizations deal with that skills gap? >> I think there's a short term and a long term. I think Nikesh today talked about the long term that we'll never win this battle with human beings. We're going to have to win it with automation. That, that's the long term the short term right here and now is that people need people with cybersecurity skills. Now what we're trying to do, you know, is multifaceted. We work with universities to standardize programs to develop skills that people can come into the marketplace with. We run our own programs inside the company. We have a cloud academy program now where we take people high aptitude for sales and technical aptitude and we will put them through a six month boot camp on cloud and they'll come out of that ready to really work with the leading experts in cloud security. The third angle is partners, right, there are partners in the marketplace who want to drive their business into high services areas. They have people, they know how to train. We give them, we partner with them to give them training. Hopefully that helps solve some of the short-term gaps that are out there today. >> So you made the jump from data storage to security and >> Yeah. >> You know, network security, all kinds of security. What was that like? What you must have learned a lot in the last better part of a decade? >> Yeah. >> Take us through that. >> You know, so the first jump was from EMC. I was 15 years there to be CEO of Barracuda. And you know, it was interesting because EMC was, you know large enterprise for the most part. At Barracuda we had, you know 250,000 small and mid-size enterprises. And it was, it's interesting to get into security in small and mid-size businesses because, you know Wendy today was talking about nation states. For small and mid-size business, it's common thievery right? It's ransomware, it's, and, those customers don't have, you know, the human and financial resources to keep up with the threat factor. So, you know, Nikesh talked about how it's taken 'em four and a half years to get into cybersecurity. I remember my first week at Barracuda, I was talking with a customer who had, you know, breached data shut down. There wasn't much bitcoin back then so it was just a pure ransom. And I'm like, wow, this is, you know, incredible industry. So it's been a good, you know, transition for me. I still think data is at the heart of all of this. Right? And I have always believed there's a strong connection between the things I learned growing up at EMC and what I put into practice today at Palo Alto Networks. >> And how about a culture because I, you know I know have observed the EMC culture >> Yeah. >> And you were there in really the heyday. >> Yeah. >> Right? Which was an awesome place. And it seems like Palo Alto obviously, different times but you know, similar like laser focus on solving problems, you know, obviously great, you know value sellers, you know, you guys aren't the commodity >> Yeah. For Product. But there seemed to be some similarities from afar. I don't know Palo Alto as well as I know EMC. >> I think there's a lot. When I joined EMC, it was about, it was 2 billion in in revenue and I think when I left it was over 20, 20, 21. And, you know, we're at, you know hopefully 5, 5 5 in revenue. I feel like it's this very similar, there's a sense of urgency, there's an incredible focus on the customer. you know, Near and Moche are definitely different individuals but the both same kind of disruptive, Israeli force out there driving the business. There are a lot of similarities. I, you know, the passion, I feel privileged as a, you know go to market person that I have this incredible portfolio to go, you know, work with customers on. It's a lucky position to be in, but very I feel like it is a movie I've seen before. >> Yeah. And but, and the course, the challenges from the, the target that you're disrupting is different. It was, you know, EMC had a lot of big, you know IBM obviously was, you know, bigger target whereas you got thousands of, you know, smaller companies. >> Yes. >> And, and so that's a different dynamic but that's why the consolidation play is so important. >> Look at, that's why I joined Palo Alto Networks when I was at Barracuda for nine years. It just fascinated me, that there was 3000 plus players in security and why didn't security evolve like the storage market did or the server market or network where working >> Yeah, right. >> You know, two or three big gorillas came to, to dominate those markets. And it's, I think it's what Nikesh talked about today. There was a new problem in best of breed. It was always best of breed. You can never in security go in and, you know, say, Hey it's good I saved us some money but I got the third best product in the marketplace. And there was that kind of gap between products. I, believe in why I joined here I think this is my last gig is we have a chance to change that. And this is the first company as I look from the outside in that had best of breed as, you know Nikesh said 13 categories. >> Yeah. >> And you know, we're in the leaders quadrant and it's a conversation I have with customers. You don't have to sacrifice best of breed but get the benefits of a platform. And I, think that resonates today. I think we have a chance to change the industry from that viewpoint. >> Give us a little view of the voice of the customer. You had, was it Sabre? >> Yeah. >> That was on >> Scott Moser, The CISO from Sabre. >> Give us a view, what are you hearing from the voice of the customer? Obviously they're quite a successful customer but challenges, concerns, the partnership. >> Yeah. Look, I think security is similar to industries where we come up with magic marketing phrases and, you know, things to you know, make you want to procure our solutions. You know, zero trust is one. And you know, you'll talk to customers and they're like, okay, yes. And you know, the government, right? Joe, Joe Biden's putting out zero trust executive orders. And the, the problem is if you talk to customers, it's a journey. They have legacy infrastructure they have business drivers that you know they just don't deal with us. They've got to deal with the business side who's trying to make the money that keeps the, the company going. it's really helped them draw a map from where they're at today to zero trust or to a better security architecture. Or, you know, they're moving their apps into the cloud. How am I going to migrate? Right? Again, that discussion three years ago was around lift and shift, right? Today it's about, well, no I need cloud native developed apps to service the business the way I want to, I want to service it. How do I, so I, I think there's this element of a trusted partner and relationship. And again, I think this is why you can't have 40 or 50 of those. You got to start narrowing it down if you want to be able to meet and beat the threats that are out there for you. So I, you know, the customers, I see a lot of 'em. It's, here's where I'm at help me get here to a better position. And they know it's, you know Scott said in our keynote today, you don't just, you know have layer three firewall policies and decide, okay tomorrow I'm going to go to layer seven. That, that's not how it works. Right? There's, and, and by the way these things are a mission critical type areas. So there's got to be a game plan that you help customers go through to get there. >> Definitely. Last question, my last question for you is, is security being a board level conversation I was reading some stats from a survey I think it was the what's new in Cypress survey that that Palo Alto released today that showed that while significant numbers of organizations think they've got a cyber resiliency playbook, there's a lot of disconnect or lack of alignment at the boardroom. Are you in those conversations? How can you help facilitate that alignment between the executive team and the board when it comes to security being so foundational to any business? >> Yeah, it's, I've been on three, four public company boards. I'm on, I'm on two today. I would say four years ago, this was a almost a taboo topic. It was a, put your head in the sand and pray to God nothing happened. And you know, the world has changed significantly. And because of the number of breaches the impact it's had on brand, boards have to think about this in duty of care and their fiduciary duty. Okay. So then you start with a board that may not have the technical skills. The first problem the security industry had is how do I explain your risk profile in a way you can understand it. I'm, I'm on the board of Generac that makes home generators. It's a manufacturing, you know, company but they put Wifi modules in their boxes so that the dealers could help do the maintenance on 'em. And all of a sudden these things were getting attacked. Right? And they're being used for bot attacks. >> Yeah. >> Everybody on their board had a manufacturing background. >> Ah. >> So how do you help that board understand the risk they have that's what's changed over the last four years. It's a constant discussion. It's one I have with CISOs where they're like help us put it in layman's terms so they understand they know what we're doing and they feel confident but at the same time understand the marketplace better. And that's a journey for us. >> That Generac example is a great one because, you know, think about IOT Technologies. They've historically been air gaped >> Yes. >> By design. And all of a sudden the business comes in and says, "Hey we can put wifi in there", you know >> Connect it to a home Wifi system that >> Make our lives so much easier. Next thing you know, it's being used to attack. >> Yeah. >> So that's why, as you go around the world are you discerning, I know you were just in Japan are you discerning significant differences in sort of attitudes toward, towards cyber? Whether it's public policy, you know things like regulation where you, they don't want you sharing data, but as as a cyber company, you want to share that data with you know, public and private? >> Look it, I, I think around the world we see incredible government activity first of all. And I think given the position we're in we get to have some unique conversations there. I would say worldwide security is an imperative. I, no matter where I go, you know it's in front of everybody's mind. The, on the, the governance side, it's really what do we need to adapt to make sure we meet local regulations. And I, and I would just tell you Dave there's ways when you do that, and we talk with governments that because of how they want to do it reduce our ability to give them full insight into all the threats and how we can help them. And I do think over time governments understand that we can anonymize the data. There's, but that, that's a work in process. Definitely there is a balance. We need to have privacy, we need to have, you know personal security for people. But there's ways to collect that data in an anonymous way and give better security insight back into the architectures that are out there. >> All right. A little shift the gears here. A little sports question. We've had some great Boston's sports guests on theCUBE right? I mean, Randy Seidel, we were talking about him. Peter McKay, Snyk, I guess he's a competitor now but you know, there's no question got >> He got a little funding today. I saw that. >> Down round. But they still got a lot of money. Not of a down round, but they were, but yeah, but actually, you know, he was on several years ago and it was around the time they were talking about trading Brady. He said Never trade Brady. And he got that right. We, I think we can agree Brady's the goat. >> Yes. >> The big question I have for you is, Belichick. Do you ever question Has your belief in him as the greatest coach of all time wavered, you know, now that- No. Okay. >> Never. >> Weigh in on that. >> Never, he says >> Still the Goat. >> I'll give you my best. You know, never In Bill we trust. >> Okay. Still. >> All right >> I, you know, the NFL is a unique property that's designed for parody and is designed, I mean actively designed to not let Mr. Craft and Bill Belichick do what they do every year. I feel privileged as a Boston sports fan that in our worst years we're in the seventh playoff spot. And I have a lot of family in Chicago who would kill for that position, by the way. And you know, they're in perpetual rebuilding. And so look, and I think he, you know the way he's been able to manage the cap and the skill levels, I think we have a top five defense. There's different ways to win titles. And if I, you know, remember in Brady's last title with Boston, the defense won us that Super Bowl. >> Well thanks for weighing in on that because there's a lot of crazy talk going on. Like, 'Hey, if he doesn't beat Arizona, he's got to go.' I'm like, what? So, okay, I'm sometimes it takes a good good loyal fan who's maybe, you know, has >> The good news in Boston is we're emotional fans too so I understand you got to keep the long term long term in mind. And we're, we're in a privileged position in Boston. We've got Celtics, we've got Bruins we've got the Patriots right on the edge of the playoffs and we need the Red Sox to get to work. >> Yeah, no, you know they were last, last year so maybe they're going to win it all like they usually do. So >> Fingers crossed. >> Crazy worst to first. >> Exactly. Well you said, in Bill we trust it sounds like from our conversation in BJ we trust from the customers, the partners. >> I hope so. >> Thank you so much BJ, for coming back on theCUBE giving us the lay of the land, what's new, the voice of the customer and how Palo Alto was really differentiated in the market. We always appreciate your, coming on the show you >> Honor and privilege seeing you here. Thanks. >> You may be thinking that you were watching ESPN just now but you know, we call ourselves the ESPN at Tech News. This is Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante and our guest. You're watching theCUBE, the Leader and live emerging in enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat sparkling music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to our wall-to-wall coverage of AWS re:Invent. We are live from the show floor here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, here with my cohost John Furrier on theCUBE. John, end of day three. You're smiling. >> Yeah. >> You're still radiating energy. Is it, is it the community that's keeping your, your level up? >> It's just all the action. We've got a great special guest joining us for the first time on theCUBE. It's going to be great and Serverless wave is hitting. More and more Serverless embedded into the like, things like analytics, are going to make things tightly integrated. You can see a lot more kind of tightly coupled but yet still cohesive elements together being kind of end-to-end, and again, the, the zero-ELT vision is soon to be here. That and security, major news here at Amazon. Of course, this next segment is going to be awesome, about the modernization journey. We're going to hear a lot about that. >> Yeah, we are, and our next guest is also an extraordinarily adventurous one. Please welcome Joe from Arc XP. Thank you so much for being here. >> Thanks for having me. >> Savannah: How this show going for you? >> It's been great and you know, it's the end of the day but there's so much great energy at the show this year. >> Savannah: There really is. >> It's great walking the halls, seeing the great engineers, the thought leaders, including this session. So, it's been really a stimulating time. >> What do you do at Arc, what do you, what's your role? >> So, I'm Vice President of Technology and Product Development. I recently joined Arc to lead all the product development teams. We're an experience platform, so, in that platform we have content tools, we have delivery tools, we have subscription tools. It's a really exciting time in all those spaces. >> John: And your customer base is? >> Our customers today started with publishers. So, Arc XP was built for the Washington Post's internal needs many years ago and word got out about how great it was, built on top of the AWS tech stack and other publishers came and started licensing the software. We've moved from there to B2C commerce as well as enterprise scenarios. >> I think that's really interesting and I want to touch on your background a little bit here. You just mentioned the Washington Post. You have a background in broadcast. What was it, since you, since you are fresh, what was it that attracted you to Arc? What made you say yes? >> Yeah, so I spent a little under 10 years building the Associated Press Broadcast Newsroom Tools, some of them that you have used for many years, and you know, one of the things that was really exciting about joining ARC, was they were cloud native and they were cloud native from the start and so that really gave them a leg up with how quickly they could innovate, and now we see developers here at re:Invent be able to do custom Lambdas and new extensibility points in a way that, really, no one else can do in the CMS space >> Which, which is very exciting. Let's talk a little bit about your team and the development cycle. We've touched a lot on the economic uncertainty right now. How are things internally? What's the culture pulse? >> Yeah, so the return to work has been a thing for us, just like- >> Savannah: Are you back in office? >> All of them. We actually have a globally distributed team, and so, if you happen to be lucky enough to be in Washington, DC or Chicago or some of our other centers, there's an opportunity to be in the office, but most of our engineers work remotely. One of the exciting things we did earlier this year was ARC week. We brought everyone to DC to see each other face-to-face, and that same energy you see at re:Invent, was there in person with our engineers. >> I believe that. So, I'm a marketer by trade. I love that you're all about the digital experience. Are you creating digital- I mean everyone needs some sort of digital experience. >> Joe: Yes. >> Every company is a technology company now. Do you work across verticals? You see more niche or industry specific? >> Yeah, so we began with a very large vertical of media and broadcast. >> Savannah: There's a couple companies in that category. >> There's a couple big ones out there. >> Savannah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> And actually their challenges are really high volume production of great digital storytelling, and so, solving their problems has enabled us to have a platform that works for anyone that needs to tell a story digitally, whether it's a commerce site, corporate HR department. >> Savannah: Which is everyone, right? >> Virtually everyone needs to get their story out today. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And so we have gone to a bunch of other verticals and we've seen the benefits of having that strong, cloud-based platform offer the scale that all storytellers need. >> What are some of the challenges today that aren't, that weren't there a decade ago or even five years ago? We see a lot of media companies looking at the business model innovations, changing landscapes omnichannel distribution, different formats. What's some of the challenges that's going on in content? >> So, you know, content challenges include both production of content and delivery of that content through a great experience. So different parts of ARC focus on those problems and you got to monetize it as well, but what I'd say is unique to Arc and the challenge we talk to our customers about a lot is multi-format production. So, it's not just about one channel. >> Savannah: Right. It's about telling a story and having it go across multi-channels, multi-sites, and having the infrastructure both technically and in the workflow tools, is super critical for our customers and it is a challenge that we receive well. >> A lot of AI is coming into the conversation here. Data, AI, publishing, video, user generated content. It's all data. >> Absolutely, yep. >> It's all data. >> Joe: It's an immense amount of data. >> How do you look at the data plane or the data layer, the data aspect of the platform and what are some of the customers leaning into or are kicking the tires around? What are some of the trends, and what are some of the core issues you see? >> Yeah, so I've spent a lot of time in data ML and analytics looking at giant data sets, and you know, when you look at CMS systems and experience platforms, the first class that it's in, is really the, the documents themselves. What is the story you're saying? But where the rich data is that we can analyze is user behaviors, global distribution of content, how we optimize our CDN and really give a personal experience to the reader, but beyond that, we see a lot of advantages in our digital asset management platform, which is for video, audio, photos, all kinds of media formats, and applying AIML to do detection, suggest photos that might be appropriate based on what a journalist or a marketer is writing in their story. So, there's a lot of opportunities around that sort of data. >> What are some of the business model changes that you're seeing? 'Cause remember we're in digital, Page view advertising has gone down, subscription firewalls on blogs. You got things like Substack emerging. Journalists are kind of like changing. I've seen companies go out of business, some of the media companies or change, some of the small ones go out of business, the bigger ones are evolving. What are some of the business model enablements that you guys see coming, that a platform could deliver, so that a company can value their content, and their talent? >> For sure. I mean this is a perennial question in the media space, right? It's been going on for two decades. >> I was going to say we're- >> Right. >> So it's like- >> Joe: Right, and so we've seen that play out- >> John: Little softball for you. >> Really for almost every format. It's a softball, but- >> It's day three. >> How are we addressing that? You know what, first and foremost, you got to do great storytelling, so, we have tools for that, but then presenting that story, and a great experience no matter what device you're on, that's going to be critical no matter how you're monetizing it, and so, you know, we have customers that go very ad heavy. We also have a subscription platform that can do that built into our infrastructure. >> 50 million plus registered users, correct? >> Yeah, it's unbelievable to scale. Really, Arc is a growth story, and so we went from serving the Washington Post needs, to over 2000 sites today, across 25 countries. >> Very- >> How do we get to that? How do we get that audience if we want to? Can we join that network? Is it a network of people? >> I love that question. >> Of people that are using Arc XP? >> Yeah. >> Actually, we recently launched a new effort around our community, so I think they actually had a meeting yesterday, and so that's one way to get involved, but as you said, everyone needs to have a site and tell great stories. >> Yeah. >> So, we see a wide appeal for our platform, and what's unique about ARC, is it's truly a SaaS model. This is delivered via SaaS, where we take care of all of the services, over a hundred Amazon services, behind the scenes- >> Wow. >> Built into Arc. We manage all of that for our customers, including the CDN. So, it's not as though as our customers have to be making sure the site is up, we've got teams to take care of that 24/7 >> Great value proposition and a lot of need for this, people doing their own media systems themselves. What's the secret sauce to your success? If you had to kind of look at the technology? I see serverless is a big part of it on the EDB stack. What's the, what's the secret sauce? >> I think the secret sauce comes from the roots that Arc has in the Washington Post >> You understand it. >> And some of the most challenging content production workflows anywhere in the world, and I've spent a lot of time, in many newsrooms. So, I think that knowledge, the urgency of what it takes to get a story out, the zero tolerance for the site going down. That DNA really enables our engineers to do great solutions. >> Talk about understanding your user. I mean that that's, and drinking the Kool-Aid, but in a totally amazing way. One of the other things that stuck out to me in doing my research is not only are you a service used, now, by 50 million subscribers, but beyond that, you pride yourself on being a turnkey solution. Folks can get Arc up and running quite quickly. Correct? >> For sure. So, one of the things we built into Arc XP is something called Themes, which has a bunch of pre-built blocks, that our customers don't have to end up with a custom codebase when they've developed a new experience platform. That's not a good solution, of every site be a custom codebase. We're a product with extensibility hooks. >> Savannah: Right. >> That really enables someone to get started very quickly, and that also includes bringing in content from other platforms into Arc, itself. So that journey of migrating a site is really smooth with our toolset. >> What's the history of the company? Is it, did it come from the Washington Post or was that it's original customer? What's the DNA of the firm? >> Yeah, so it was originally built by the Washington Post for the Washington Post. So, designed by digital storytellers, for storytelling. >> Savannah: And one of the largest media outlets out there. >> So, that's that "DNA", the "special sauce". >> Yeah, yeah. >> So that's where that connection is. >> That really is where it comes through. >> John: Awesome. Congratulations on- >> Now today, you know, those roots are still apparent, but we've been very responsive to other needs in the markets around commerce. There's a whole other set of DNA we've brought in, experts in understanding different systems for inventory management, so we can do a great experience on top of some of those legacy platforms. >> My final question, before we go to the challenge- >> Savannah: To the challenge. >> Is, what's next? What's on the roadmap as you look at the technology and the teams that you're managing? What's some of the next milestone or priorities for your business? >> So, it is really about growth and that's the story of Arc XP, which has driven our technology decisions. So, our choice to go serverless was driven by growth and need to make sure we had exceptional experience but most importantly that our engineers could be focused on product development and responding to what the market needed. So, that's why I'd say next year is about, it's enabling our engineers to keep up with the scaling business but still provide great value on the roadmap. >> And it's not like there's ever going to be a shortage of content or stories that need to be told. So I suspect there's a lot of resilience in what you're doing. >> And we hope to be inspired with new ways of telling stories. >> Yeah. >> So if you're in the Washington Post or other media outlets. >> John: Or theCUBE. >> Joe: Or theCUBE. >> Savannah: I know, I was just- >> There's just great formats out there. >> Best dev meeting, let's chat after, for sure. >> Exactly, that's what I've been thinking the whole time. I'm sure the wheels are turning over on this side- >> So great to have you on. >> In a lot of different ways. So, we have a new tradition here at re:Invent, where we are providing you with an opportunity for quite a sizzle reel, Instagram video, 30 second, thought leadership soundbite. What is your hot take, key theme or most important thing that you are thinking about since we're here at this year's show? >> I would say it's the energy that's building in the industry, getting back together, the collaboration, and how that's resulting in us using new technologies. You know, the conversation's no longer about shifting to the cloud. We all have huge infrastructure, the conversation's about observability, how do we know what's going in? How do we make sure we're getting the most value for our customers with those, that technology set. So, I think the energy around that is super exciting. I've always loved building products. So, next year think it's going to be a great year with that, putting together these new technologies. >> I think you nailed it. The energy really is the story and the collaboration. Joe, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story. Arc is lucky to have you and we'll close with one personal anecdote. Favorite place to sail? >> Favorite place to sail. So, I lived in the Caribbean for many years, as we were talking about earlier >> None of us are jealous up here at all. >> And so my favorite place to sail would be in the British Virgin Islands, which was closed during Covid but is now back open, so, if any you've had a chance to go to the BVI, make some time, hop on Catamaran, there's some great spots. >> Well, I think you just gave us a catalyst for our next vacation, maybe a team off-site. >> Bucket list item, of course. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, Let's bring everyone together. >> Here we go. I love it. Well Joe, thanks so much again for being on the show. We hope to have you back on theCUBE again sometime soon, and thank all of you for tuning in to this scintillating coverage that we have here, live from the AWS re:Invent show floor in Las Vegas, Nevada with John Furrier. I'm Savannah Peterson. This is theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back. We're here at Supercomputing 22 in Dallas. My name's Paul Gill, I'm your host. With me, Dave Nicholson, my co-host. And one thing that struck me about this conference arriving here, was the number of universities that are exhibiting here. I mean, big, big exhibits from universities. Never seen that at a conference before. And one of those universities is Indiana University. Our two guests, Dave Jent, who's the AVP of Networks at Indiana University, Aaron Neal, Deputy CIO at Indiana University. Welcome, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> I've always thought that the CIO job at a university has got to be the toughest CIO job there is, because you're managing this sprawling network, people are doing all kinds of different things on it. You've got to secure it. You've got to make it performant. And it just seems to be a big challenge. Talk about the network at Indiana University and what you have done particularly since the pandemic, how that has affected the architecture of your network. And what you do to maintain the levels of performance and security that you need. >> On the network side one of the things we've done is, kept in close contact with what the incoming students are looking for. It's a different environment than it was then 10 years ago when a student would come, maybe they had a phone, maybe they had one laptop. Today they're coming with multiple phones, multiple laptops, gaming devices. And the expectation that they have to come on a campus and plug all that stuff in causes lots of problems for us, in managing just the security aspect of it, the capacity, the IP space required to manage six, seven devices per student when you have 35,000 students on campus, has always been a challenge. And keeping ahead of that knowing what students are going to come in with, has been interesting. During the pandemic the campus was closed for a bit of time. What we found was our biggest challenge was keeping up with the number of people who wanted to VPN to campus. We had to buy additional VPN licenses so they could do their work, authenticate to the network. We doubled, maybe even tripled our our VPN license count. And that has settled down now that we're back on campus. But again, they came back with a vengeance. More gaming devices, more things to be connected, and into an environment that was a couple years old, that we hadn't done much with. We had gone through a pretty good size network deployment of new hardware to try to get ready for them. And it's worked well, but it's always challenging to keep up with students. >> Aaron, I want to ask you about security because that really is one of your key areas of focus. And you're collaborating with counties, local municipalities, as well as other educational institutions. How's your security strategy evolving in light of some of the vulnerabilities of VPNs that became obvious during the pandemic, and this kind of perfusion of new devices that that Dave was talking about? >> Yeah, so one of the things that we we did several years ago was establish what we call OmniSOC, which is a shared security operations center in collaboration with other institutions as well as research centers across the United States and in Indiana. And really what that is, is we took the lessons that we've learned and the capabilities that we've had within the institution and looked to partner with those key institutions to bring that data in-house, utilize our staff such that we can look for security threats and share that information across the the other institutions so that we can give each of those areas a heads up and work with those institutions to address any kind of vulnerabilities that might be out there. One of the other things that you mentioned is, we're partnering with Purdue in the Indiana Office of Technology on a grant to actually work with municipalities, county governments, to really assess their posture as it relates to security in those areas. It's a great opportunity for us to work together as institutions as well as work with the state in general to increase our posture as it relates to security. >> Dave, what brings IU to Supercomputing 2022? >> We've been here for a long time. And I think one of the things that we're always interested in is, what's next? What's new? There's so many, there's network vendors, software vendors, hardware vendors, high performance computing suppliers. What is out there that we're interested in? IU runs a large Cray system in Indiana called Big Red 200. And with any system you procure it, you get it running, you operate it, and your next goal is to upgrade it. And what's out there that we might be interested? That I think why we come to IU. We also like to showcase what we do at IU. If you come by the booth you'll see the OmniSOC, there's some video on that. The GlobalNOC, which I manage, which supports a lot of the RNE institutions in the country. We talk about that. Being able to have a place for people to come and see us. If you stand by the booth long enough people come and find you, and want to talk about a project they have, or a collaboration they'd like to partner with. We had a guy come by a while ago wanting a job. Those are all good things having a big booth can do for you. >> Well, so on that subject, in each of your areas of expertise and your purview are you kind of interleaved with the academic side of things on campus? Do you include students? I mean, I would think it would be a great source of cheap labor for you at least. Or is there kind of a wall between what you guys are responsible for and what students? >> Absolutely we try to support faculty and students as much as we can. And just to go back a little bit on the OmniSOC discussion. One of the things that we provide is internships for each of the universities that we work with. They have to sponsor at least three students every year and make that financial commitment. We bring them on site for three weeks. They learn us alongside the other analysts, information security analysts and work in a real world environment and gain those skills to be able to go back to their institutions and do an additional work there. So it's a great program for us to work with students. I think the other thing that we do is we provide obviously the infrastructure that enable our faculty members to do the research that they need to do. Whether that's through Big Red 200, our Supercomputer or just kind of the everyday infrastructure that allows them to do what they need to do. We have an environment on premise called our Intelligent Infrastructure, that we provide managed access to hardware and storage resources in a way that we know it's secure and they can utilize that environment to do virtually anything that they need in a server environment. >> Dave, I want to get back to the GigaPOP, which you mentioned earlier you're the managing director of the Indiana GigaPOP. What exactly is it? >> Well, the GigaPOP and there are a number of GigaPOP around the country. It was really the aggregation facility for Indiana and all of the universities in Indiana to connect to outside resources. GigaPOP has connections to internet too, the commodity internet, Esnet, the Big Ten or the BTAA a network in Chicago. It's a way for all universities in Indiana to connect to a single source to allow them to connect nationally to research organizations. >> And what are the benefits of having this collaboration of university. >> If you could think of a researcher at Indiana wants to do something with a researcher in Wisconsin, they both connect to their research networks in Wisconsin and Indiana, and they have essentially direct connection. There's no commodity internet, there's no throttling of of capacity. Both networks and the interconnects because we use internet too, are essentially UNT throttled access for the researchers to do anything they need to do. It's secure, it's fast, easy to use, in fact, so easy they don't even know that they're using it. It just we manage the networks and organize the networks in a way configure them that's the path of least resistance and that's the path traffic will take. And that's nationally. There are lots of these that are interconnected in various ways. I do want to get back to the labor point, just for a moment. (laughs) Because... >> You're here to claim you're not violating any labor laws. Is that what you're going to be? >> I'm here to hopefully hire, get more people to be interested to coming to IU. >> Stop by the booth. >> It's a great place to work. >> Exactly. >> We hire lots of interns and in the network space hiring really experienced network engineers, really hard to do, hard to attract people. And these days when you can work from anywhere, you don't have to be any place to work for anybody. We try to attract as many students as we can. And really we're exposing 'em to an environment that exists in very few places. Tens of thousands of wireless access points, big fast networks, interconnections and national international networks. We support the Noah network which supports satellite systems and secure traffic. It really is a very unique experience and you can come to IU, spend lots of years there and never see the same thing twice. We think we have an environment that's really a good way for people to come out of college, graduate school, work for some number of years and hopefully stay at IU, but if not, leave and get a good job and talk well about IU. In fact, the wireless network today here at SC was installed and is managed by a person who manages our campus network wireless, James Dickerson. That's the kind of opportunity we can provide people at IU. >> Aaron, I'd like to ask, you hear a lot about everything moving to the cloud these days, but in the HPC world I don't think that move is happening as quickly as it is in some areas. In fact, there's a good argument some workloads should never move to the cloud. You're having to balance these decisions. Where are you on the thinking of what belongs in the data center and what belongs in the cloud? >> I think our approach has really been specific to what the needs are. As an institution, we've not pushed all our chips in on the cloud, whether it be for high performance computing or otherwise. It's really looking at what the specific need is and addressing it with the proper solution. We made an investment several years ago in a data center internally, and we're leveraging that through the intelligent infrastructure that I spoke about. But really it's addressing what the specific need is and finding the specific solution, rather than going all in in one direction or another. I dunno if Jet Stream is something that you would like to bring up as well. >> By having our own data center and having our own facilities we're able to compete for NSF grants and work on projects that provide shared resources for the research community. Just dream is a project that does that. Without a data center and without the ability to work on large projects, we don't have any of that. If you don't have that then you're dependent on someone else. We like to say that, what we are proud of is the people come to IU and ask us if they can partner on our projects. Without a data center and those resources we are the ones who have to go out and say can we partner on your project? We'd like to be the leaders of that in that space. >> I wanted to kind of double click on something you mentioned. Couple of things. Historically IU has been I'm sure closely associated with Chicago. You think of what are students thinking of doing when they graduate? Maybe they're going to go home, but the sort of center of gravity it's like Chicago. You mentioned talking about, especially post pandemic, the idea that you can live anywhere. Not everybody wants to live in Manhattan or Santa Clara. And of course, technology over decades has given us the ability to do things remotely and IU is plugged into the globe, doesn't matter where you are. But have you seen either during or post pandemic 'cause we're really in the early stages of this. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing people say, Hey, thinking about their family, where do I want to live? Where do I want to raise my family? I'm in academia and no, I don't want to live in Manhattan. Hey, we can go to IU and we're plugged into the globe. And then students in California we see this, there's some schools on the central coast where people loved living there when they were in college but there was no economic opportunity there. Are you seeing a shift, are basically houses in Bloomington becoming unaffordable because people are saying, you know what, I'm going to stay here. What does that look like? >> I mean, for our group there are a lot of people who do work from home, have chosen to stay in Bloomington. We have had some people who for various reasons want to leave. We want to retain them, so we allow them to work remotely. And that has turned into a tool for recruiting. The kid that graduates from Caltech. Doesn't want to stay in Caltech in California, we have an opportunity now he can move to wherever between here and there and we can hire him do work. We love to have people come to Indiana. We think it is a unique experience, Bloomington, Indianapolis are great places. But I think the reality is, we're not going to get everybody to come live, be a Hoosier, how do we get them to come and work at IU? In some ways disappointing when we don't have buildings full of people, but 40 paying Zoom or teams window, not kind the same thing. But I think this is what we're going to have to figure out, how do we make this kind of environment work. >> Last question here, give you a chance to put in a plug for Indiana University. For those those data scientists those researchers who may be open to working somewhere else, why would they come to Indiana University? What's different about what you do from what every other academic institution does, Aaron? >> Yeah, I think a lot of what we just talked about today in terms of from a network's perspective, that were plugged in globally. I think if you look beyond the networks I think there are tremendous opportunities for folks to come to Bloomington and experience some bleeding edge technology and to work with some very talented people. I've been amazed, I've been at IU for 20 years and as I look at our peers across higher ed, well, I don't want to say they're not doing as well I do want brag at how well we're doing in terms of organizationally addressing things like security in a centralized way that really puts us in a better position. We're just doing a lot of things that I think some of our peers are catching up to and have been catching up to over the last 10, 12 years. >> And I think to sure scale of IU goes unnoticed at times. IU has the largest medical school in the country. One of the largest nursing schools in the country. And people just kind of overlook some of that. Maybe we need to do a better job of talking about it. But for those who are aware there are a lot of opportunities in life sciences, healthcare, the social sciences. IU has the largest logistics program in the world. We teach more languages than anybody else in the world. The varying kinds of things you can get involved with at IU including networks, I think pretty unparalleled. >> Well, making the case for high performance computing in the Hoosier State. Aaron, Dave, thanks very much for joining you making a great case. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We'll be back right after this short message. This is theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Greetings, brilliant community and thank you so much for tuning in to theCUBE here for the last three days where we've been live from Detroit, Michigan. I've had the pleasure of spending this week with Lisa Martin and John Furrier. Thank you both so much for hanging out, for inviting me into the CUBE family. It's our first show together, it's been wonderful. >> Thank you. >> You nailed it. >> Oh thanks, sweetheart. >> Great job. Great job team, well done. Free wall to wall coverage, it's what we do. We stay till everyone else-- >> Savannah: 100 percent. >> Everyone else leaves, till they pull the plug. >> Lisa: Till they turn the lights out. We're still there. >> Literally. >> Literally last night. >> Still broadcasting. >> Whatever takes to get the stories and get 'em out there at scale. >> Yeah. >> Great time. >> 33. 33 different segments too. Very impressive. John, I'm curious, you're a trend watcher and you've been at every single KubeCon. >> Yep. >> What are the trends this year? Give us the breakdown. >> I think CNCF does this, it's a hard job to balance all the stakeholders. So one, congratulations to the CNCF for another great KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. It is really hard to balance bringing in the experts who, as time goes by, seven years we've been all of, as you said, you get experts, you get seniority, and people who can be mentors, 60% new people. You have vendors who are sponsoring and there's always people complaining and bitching and moaning. They want this, they want that. It's always hard and they always do a good job of balancing it. We're lucky that we get to scale the stories with CUBE and that's been great. We had some great stories here, but it's a great community and again, they're inclusive. As I've said before, we've talked about it. This year though is an inflection point in my opinion, because you're seeing the developer ecosystem growing so fast. It's global. You're seeing events pop up, you're seeing derivative events. CNCF is at the center point and they have to maintain the culture of developer experts, maintainers, while balancing the newbies. And that's going to be >> Savannah: Mm-hmm. really hard. And they've done a great job. We had a great conversation with them. So great job. And I think it's going to continue. I think the attendance metric is a little bit of a false positive. There's a lot of online people who didn't come to Detroit this year. And I think maybe the combination of the venue, the city, or just Covid preferences may not look good on paper, on the numbers 'cause it's not a major step up in attendance. It's still bigger, but the community, I think, is going to continue to grow. I'm bullish on it. >> Yeah, I mean at least we did see double the number of people that we had in Los Angeles. Very curious. I think Amsterdam, where we'll be next with CNCF in the spring, in April. I think that's actually going to be a better pulse check. We'll be in Europe, we'll see what's going on. >> John: Totally. >> I mean, who doesn't like Amsterdam in the springtime? Lisa, what have been some of your observations? >> Oh, so many observations. The evolution of the conference, the hallway track conversations really shifting towards adjusting to the enterprise. The enterprise momentum that we saw here as well. We had on the show, Ford. >> Savannah: Yes. We had MassMutual, we had ING, that was today. Home Depot is here. We are seeing all these big companies that we know and love, become software companies right before our eyes. >> Yeah. Well, and I think we forget that software powers our entire world. And so of course they're going to have to be here. So much running on Kubernetes. It's on-prem, it's at the edge, it's everywhere. It's exciting. Woo, I'm excited. John, what do you think is the number one story? This is your question. I love asking you this question. What is the number one story out KubeCon? >> Well, I think the top story is a combination of two things. One is the evolution of Cloud Native. We're starting to see web assembly. That's a big hyped up area. It got a lot of attention. >> Savannah: Yeah. That's kind of teething out the future. >> Savannah: Rightfully so. The future of this kind of lightweight. You got the heavy duty VMs, you got Kubernetes and containers, and now this web assembly, shows a trajectory of apps, server-like environment. And then the big story is security. Software supply chain is, to me, was the number one consistent theme. At almost all the interviews, in the containers, and the workflows, >> Savannah: Very hot. software supply chain is real. The CD Foundation mentioned >> Savannah: Mm-hmm. >> they had 16,000 vulnerabilities identified in their code base. They were going to automate that. So again, >> Savannah: That was wild. >> That's the top story. The growth of open source exposes potential vulnerabilities with security. So software supply chain gets my vote. >> Did you hear anything that surprised you? You guys did this great preview of what you thought we were going to hear and see and feel and touch at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2022. You talked about, for example, the, you know, healthcare financial services being early adopters of this. Anything surprise either one of you in terms of what you predicted versus what we saw? Savannah, let's start with you. >> You know what really surprised me, and this is ironic, so I'm a community gal by trade. But I was really just impressed by the energy that everyone brought here and the desire to help. The thing about the open source community that always strikes me is, I mean 187 different countries participating. You've got, I believe it's something like 175,000 people contributing to the 140 projects plus that CNCF is working on. But that culture of collaboration extends far beyond just the CNCF projects. Everyone here is keen to help each other. We had the conversation just before about the teaching and the learnings that are going on here. They brought in Detroit's students to come and learn, which is just the most heartwarming story out of this entire thing. And I think it's just the authenticity of everyone in this community and their passion. Even though I know it's here, it still surprises me to see it in the flesh. Especially in a place like Detroit. >> It's nice. >> Yeah. >> It's so nice to see it. And you bring up a good point. It's very authentic. >> Savannah: It's super authentic. >> I mean, what surprised me is one, the Wasm, or web assembly. I didn't see that coming at the scale of the conversation. It sucked a lot of options out of the room in my opinion, still hyped up. But this looks like it's got a good trajectory. I like that. The other thing that surprised me that was a learning was my interview with Solo.io, Idit, and Brian Gracely, because he's a CUBE alumni and former host of theCUBE, and analyst at Wikibon, was how their go-to-market was an example of a modern company in Covid with a clean sheet of paper and smart people, they're just doing things different. They're in Slack with their customers. And I walked away with, "Wow that's like a playbook that's not, was never, in the go-to-market VC-backed company playbook." I thought that was, for me, a personal walk away saying that's important. I like how they did that. And there's a lot of companies I think could learn from that. Especially as the recession comes where partnering with customers has always been a top priority. And how they did that was very clever, very effective, very efficient. So I walked away with that saying, "I think that's going to be a standard." So that was a pleasant surprise. >> That was a great surprise. Also, that's a female-founded company, which is obviously not super common. And the growth that they've experienced, to your point, really being catalyzed by Covid, is incredibly impressive. I mean they have some massive brand name customers, Amex, BMW for example. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> Great point. >> And I interviewed her years ago and I remember saying to myself, "Wow, she's impressive." I liked her. She's a player. A player for sure. And she's got confidence. Even on the interview she said, "We're just better, we have better product." And I just like the point of view. Very customer-focused but confident. And I just took, that's again, a great company. And again, I'm not surprised that Brian Gracely left Red Hat to go work there. So yeah, great, great call there. And of course other things that weren't surprising that I predicted, Red Hat continued to invest. They continue to bring people on theCUBE, they support theCUBE but more importantly they have a good strategy. They're in that multicloud positioning. They're going to have an opportunity to get a bite at the apple. And I what I call the supercloud. As enterprises try to go and be mainstream, Cloud Native, they're going to need some help. And Red Hat is always has the large enterprise customers. >> Savannah: What surprised you, Lisa? >> Oh my gosh, so many things. I think some of the memorable conversations that we had. I love talking with some of the enterprises that we mentioned, ING Bank for example. You know, or institutions that have been around for 100 plus years. >> Savannah: Oh, yeah. To see not only how much they've innovated and stayed relevant to meet the demands of the consumer, which are only increasing, but they're doing so while fostering a culture of innovation and a culture that allows these technology leaders to really grow within the organization. That was a really refreshing conversation that I think we had. 'Cause you can kind of >> Savannah: Absolutely. think about these old stodgy companies. Nah, of course they're going to digitize. >> Thinking about working for the bank, I think it's boring. >> Right? >> Yeah. And they were talking about, in fact, those great t-shirts that they had on, >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. were all about getting more people to understand how fun it is to work in tech for ING Bank in different industries. You don't just have to work for the big tech companies to be doing really cool stuff in technology. >> What I really liked about this show is we had two female hosts. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> How about that? Come on. >> Hey, well done, well done on your recruitment there, champ. >> Yes, thank you boss. (John laughs) >> And not to mention we have a really all-star production team. I do just want to give them a little shout out. To all the wonderful folks behind the lines here. (people clapping) >> John: Brendan. Good job. >> Yeah. Without Brendan, Anderson, Noah, and Andrew, we would be-- >> Of course Frank Faye holding it back there too. >> Yeah, >> Of course, Frank. >> I mean, without the business development wheels on the ship we'd really be in an unfortunate spot. I almost just swore on television. We're not going to do that. >> It's okay. No one's regulating. >> Yeah. (all laugh) >> Elon Musk just took over Twitter. >> It was a close call. >> That's right! >> It's going to be a hellscape. >> Yeah, I mean it's, shit's on fire. So we'll just see what happens next. I do, I really want to talk about this because I think it's really special. It's an ethos and some magic has happened here. Let's talk about Detroit. Let's talk about what it means to be here. We saw so many, and I can't stress this enough, but I think it really matters. There was a commitment to celebrating place here. Lisa, did you notice this too? >> Absolutely. And it surprised me because we just don't see that at conferences. >> Yeah. We're so used to going to the same places. >> Right. >> Vegas. Vegas, Vegas. More Vegas. >> Your tone-- >> San Francisco >> (both laugh) sums up my feelings. Yes. >> Right? >> Yeah. And, well, it's almost robotic but, and the fact that we're like, oh Detroit, really? But there was so much love for this city and recognizing and supporting its residents that we just don't see at conferences. You uncovered a lot of that with your swag-savvy segments, >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And you got more of that to talk about today. >> Don't worry, it's coming. Yeah. (laughs) >> What about you? Have you enjoyed Detroit? I know you hadn't been here in a long time, when we did our intro session. >> I think it's a bold move for the CNCF to come here and celebrate. What they did, from teaching the kids in the city some tech, they had a session. I thought that was good. >> Savannah: Loved that. I think it was a risky move because a lot of people, like, weren't sure if they were going to fly to Detroit. So some say it might impact the attendance. I thought they did a good job. Their theme, Road Ahead. Nice tie in. >> Savannah: Yeah. And so I think I enjoyed Detroit. The weather was great. It didn't rain. Nice breeze outside. >> Yeah. >> The weather was great, the restaurants are phenomenal. So Detroit's a good city. I missed some hockey games. I'd love to see the Red Wings play. Missed that game. But we always come back. >> I think it's really special. I mean, every time I talked to a company about their swag, that had sourced it locally, there was a real reason for this story. I mean even with Kasten in that last segment when I noticed that they had done Carhartt beanies, Carhartt being a Michigan company. They said, "I'm so glad you noticed. That's why we did it." And I think that type of, the community commitment to place, it all comes back to community. One of the bigger themes of the show. But that passion and that support, we need more of that. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> And the thing about the guests we've had this past three days have been phenomenal. We had a diverse set of companies, individuals come on theCUBE, you know, from Scott Johnston at Docker. A really one on one. We had a great intense conversation. >> Savannah: Great way to kick it off. >> We shared a lot of inside baseball, about Docker, super important company. You know, impressed with companies like Platform9 it's been around since the OpenStack days who are now in a relevant position. Rafi Systems, hot startup, they don't have a lot of resources, a lot of guerilla marketing going on. So I love to see the mix of startups really contributing. The big players are here. So it's a real great mix of companies. And I thought the interviews were phenomenal, like you said, Ford. We had, Kubia launched on theCUBE. >> Savannah: Yes. >> That's-- >> We snooped the location for KubeCon North America. >> You did? >> Chicago, everyone. In case you missed it, Bianca was nice enough to share that with us. >> We had Sarbjeet Johal, CUBE analyst came on, Keith Townsend, yesterday with you guys. >> We had like analyst speed dating last night. (all laugh) >> How'd that go? (laughs) >> It was actually great. One of the things that they-- >> Did they hug and kiss at the end? >> Here's the funny thing is that they were debating the size of the CNC app. One thinks it's too big, one thinks it's too small. And I thought, is John Goldilocks? (John laughs) >> Savannah: Yeah. >> What is John going to think about that? >> Well I loved that segment. I thought, 'cause Keith and Sarbjeet argue with each other on Twitter all the time. And I heard Keith say before, he went, "Yeah let's have it out on theCUBE." So that was fun to watch. >> Thank you for creating this forum for us to have that kind of discourse. >> Lisa: Yes, thank you. >> Well, it wouldn't be possible without the sponsors. Want to thank the CNCF. >> Absolutely. >> And all the ecosystem partners and sponsors that make theCUBE possible. We love doing this. We love getting the stories. No story's too small for theCUBE. We'll go with it. Do whatever it takes. And if it wasn't for the sponsors, the community wouldn't get all the great knowledge. So, and thank you guys. >> Hey. Yeah, we're, we're happy to be here. Speaking of sponsors and vendors, should we talk a little swag? >> Yeah. >> What do you guys think? All right. Okay. So now this is becoming a tradition on theCUBE so I'm very delighted, the savvy swag segment. I do think it's interesting though. I mean, it's not, this isn't just me shouting out folks and showing off t-shirts and socks. It's about standing out from the noise. There's a lot of players in this space. We got a lot of CNCF projects and one of the ways to catch the attention of people walking the show floor is to have interesting swag. So we looked for the most unique swag on Wednesday and I hadn't found this yet, but I do just want to bring it up. Oops, I think I might have just dropped it. This is cute. Is, most random swag of the entire show goes to this toothbrush. I don't really have more in terms of the pitch there because this is just random. (Lisa laughs) >> But so, everyone needs that. >> John: So what's their tagline? >> And you forget these. >> Yeah, so the idea was to brush your cloud bills. So I think they're reducing the cost of-- >> Kind of a hygiene angle. >> Yeah, yeah. Very much a hygiene angle, which I found a little ironic in this crowd to be completely honest with you. >> John: Don't leave the lights on theCUBE. That's what they say. >> Yeah. >> I mean we are theCUBE so it would be unjust of me not to show you a Rubik's cube. This is actually one of those speed cubes. I'm not going to be able to solve this for you with one hand on camera, but apparently someone did it in 17 seconds at the booth. Knowing this audience, not surprising to me at all. Today we are, and yesterday, was the t-shirt contest. Best t-shirt contest. Today we really dove into the socks. So this is, I noticed this trend at KubeCon in Los Angeles last year. Lots of different socks, clouds obviously a theme for the cloud. I'm just going to lay these out. Lots of gamers in the house. Not surprising. Here on this one. >> John: Level up. >> Got to level up. I love these 'cause they say, "It's not a bug." And anyone who's coded has obviously had to deal with that. We've got, so Star Wars is a huge theme here. There's Lego sets. >> John: I think it's Star Trek. But. >> That's Star Trek? >> John: That's okay. >> Could be both. (Lisa laughs) >> John: Nevermind, I don't want to. >> You can flex your nerd and geek with us anytime you want, John. I don't mind getting corrected. I'm all about, I'm all about the truth. >> Star Trek. Star Wars. Okay, we're all the same. Okay, go ahead. >> Yeah, no, no, this is great. Slim.ai was nice enough to host us for dinner on Tuesday night. These are their lovely cloud socks. You can see Cloud Native, obviously Cloud Native Foundation, cloud socks, whole theme here. But if we're going to narrow it down to some champions, I love these little bee elephants from Raft. And when I went up to these guys, I actually probably would've called these my personal winner. They said, again, so community focused and humble here at CNCF, they said that Wiz was actually the champion according to the community. These unicorn socks are pretty excellent. And I have to say the branding is flawless. So we'll go ahead and give Wiz the win on the best sock contest. >> John: For the win. >> Yeah, Wiz for the win. However, the thing that I am probably going to use the most is this really dope Detroit snapback from Kasten. So I'm going to be rocking this from now on for the rest of the segment as well. And I feel great about this snapback. >> Looks great. Looks good on you. >> Yeah. >> Thanks John. (John laughs) >> So what are we expecting between now and KubeCon in Amsterdam? >> Well, I think it's going to be great to see how they, the European side, it's a chill show. It's great. Brings in the European audience from the global perspective. I always love the EU shows because one, it's a great destination. Amsterdam's going to be a great location. >> Savannah: I'm pumped. >> The American crowd loves going over there. All the event cities that they choose are always awesome. I missed Valencia cause I got Covid. I'm really bummed about that. But I love the European shows. It's just a little bit, it's high intensity, but it's the European chill. They got a little bit more of that siesta vibe going on. >> Yeah. >> And it's just awesome. >> Yeah, >> And I think that the mojo that carried throughout this week, it's really challenging to not only have a show that's five days, >> but to go through all week, >> Savannah: Seriously. >> to a Friday at 4:00 PM Eastern Time, and still have the people here, the energy and all the collaboration. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> The conversations that are still happening. I think we're going to see a lot more innovation come spring 2023. >> Savannah: Mm-hmm. >> Yeah. >> So should we do a bet, somebody's got to buy dinner? Who, well, I guess the folks who lose this will buy dinner for the other one. How many attendees do you think we'll see in Amsterdam? So we had 4,000, >> Oh, I'm going to lose this one. >> roughly in Los Angeles. Priyanka was nice enough to share with us, there was 8,000 here in Detroit. And I'm talking in person, we're not going to meddle this with the online. >> 6500. >> Lisa: I was going to say six, six K. >> I'm going 12,000. >> Ooh! >> I'm going to go ahead and go big I'm going to go opposite Price Is Right. >> One dollar. >> Yeah. (all laugh) That's exactly where I was driving with it. I'm going, I'm going absolutely all in. I think the momentum here is building. I think if we look at the numbers from-- >> John: You could go Family Feud >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they mentioned that they had 11,000 people who have taken their Kubernetes course in that first year. If that's a benchmark and an indicator, we've got the veteran players here. But I do think that, I personally think that the hype of Kubernetes has actually preceded adoption. If you look at the data and now we're finally tipping over. I think the last two years we were on the fringe and right now we're there. It's great. (voice blares loudly on loudspeaker) >> Well, on that note (all laugh) On that note, actually, on that note, as we are talking, so I got to give cred to my cohosts. We deal with a lot of background noise here on theCUBE. It is a live show floor. There's literally someone on an e-scooter behind me. There's been Pong going on in the background. The sound will haunt the three of us for the rest of our lives, as well as the production crew. (Lisa laughs) And, and just as we're sitting here doing this segment last night, they turned the lights off on us, today they're letting everyone know that the event is over. So on that note, I just want to say, Lisa, thank you so much. Such a warm welcome to the team. >> Thank you. >> John, what would we do without you? >> You did an amazing job. First CUBE, three days. It's a big show. You got staying power, I got to say. >> Lisa: Absolutely. >> Look at that. Not bad. >> You said it on camera now. >> Not bad. >> So you all are stuck with me. (all laugh) >> A plus. Great job to the team. Again, we do so much flow here. Brandon, Team, Andrew, Noah, Anderson, Frank. >> They're doing our hair, they're touching up makeup. They're helping me clean my teeth, staying hydrated. >> We look good because of you. >> And the guests. Thanks for coming on and spending time with us. And of course the sponsors, again, we can't do it without the sponsors. If you're watching this and you're a sponsor, support theCUBE, it helps people get what they need. And also we're do a lot more segments around community and a lot more educational stuff. >> Savannah: Yeah. So we're going to do a lot more in the EU and beyond. So thank you. >> Yeah, thank you. And thank you to everyone. Thank you to the community, thank you to theCUBE community and thank you for tuning in, making it possible for us to have somebody to talk to on the other side of the camera. My name is Savannah Peterson for the last time in Detroit, Michigan. Thanks for tuning into theCUBE. >> Okay, we're done. (bright upbeat music)

>>Set restaurants. And who says TEUs had got a little ass more skin in the game for us, in charge of his destiny? You guys are excited. Robert Worship is Chief Alumni. >>My name is Dave Ante, and I'm a long time industry analyst. So when you're as old as I am, you've seen a lot of transitions. Everybody talks about industry cycles and waves. I've seen many, many waves. Met a lot of industry executives and of a little bit of a, an industry historian. When you interview many thousands of people, probably five or 6,000 people as I have over the last half of a decade, you get to interact with a lot of people's knowledge and you begin to develop patterns. And so that's sort of what I bring is, is an ability to catalyze the conversation and, you know, share that knowledge with others in the community. Our philosophy is everybody's expert at something. Everybody's passionate about something and has real deep knowledge about that's something well, we wanna focus in on that area and extract that knowledge and share it with our communities. This is Dave Ante. Thanks for watching the Cube. >>Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cube where we are streaming live this week from CubeCon. I am Savannah Peterson and I am joined by an absolutely stellar lineup of cube brilliance this afternoon. To my left, a familiar face, Lisa Martin. Lisa, how you feeling? End of day two. >>Excellent. It was so much fun today. The buzz started yesterday, the momentum, the swell, and we only heard even more greatness today. >>Yeah, yeah, abs, absolutely. You know, I, I sometimes think we've hit an energy cliff, but it feels like the energy is just >>Continuous. Well, I think we're gonna, we're gonna slide right into tomorrow. >>Yeah, me too. I love it. And we've got two fantastic analysts with us today, Sarge and Keith. Thank you both for joining us. We feel so lucky today. >>Great being back on. >>Thanks for having us. Yeah, Yeah. It's nice to have you back on the show. We were, had you yesterday, but I miss hosting with you. It's been a while. >>It has been a while. We haven't done anything in since, Since pre >>Pandemic, right? Yeah, I think you're >>Right. Four times there >>Be four times back in the day. >>We, I always enjoy whole thing, Lisa, cuz she's so well prepared. I don't have to do any research when I come >>Home. >>Lisa will bring up some, Oh, sorry. Jeep, I see that in 2008 you won this award for Yeah. Being just excellent and I, I'm like, Oh >>Yeah. All right Keith. So, >>So did you do his analysis? >>Yeah, it's all done. Yeah. Great. He only part, he's not sitting next to me too. We can't see it, so it's gonna be like a magic crystal bell. Right. So a lot of people here. You got some stats in terms of the attendees compared >>To last year? Yeah, Priyanka told us we were double last year up to 8,000. We also got the scoop earlier that 2023 is gonna be in Chicago, which is very exciting. >>Oh, that is, is nice. Yeah, >>We got to break that here. >>Excellent. Keith, talk to us about what some of the things are that you've seen the last couple of days. The momentum. What's the vibe? I saw your tweet about the top three things you were being asked. Kubernetes was not one of them. >>Kubernetes were, was not one of 'em. This conference is starting to, it, it still feels very different than a vendor conference. The keynote is kind of, you know, kind of all over the place talking about projects, but the hallway track has been, you know, I've, this is maybe my fifth or sixth CU con in person. And the hallway track is different. It's less about projects and more about how, how do we adjust to the enterprise? How do we Yes. Actually do enterprise things. And it has been amazing watching this community grow. I'm gonna say grow up and mature. Yes. You know, you know, they're not wearing ties yet, but they are definitely understanding kind of the, the friction of implementing new technology in, in an enterprise. >>Yeah. So ge what's your, what's been your take, We were with you yesterday. What's been the take today to take aways? >>NOMA has changed since yesterday, but a few things I think I, I missed talking about that yesterday were that, first of all, let's just talk about Amazon. Amazon earnings came out, it spooked the market and I think it's relevant in this context as well, because they're number one cloud provider. Yeah. And all, I mean, almost all of these technologies on the back of us here, they are related to cloud, right? So it will have some impact on these. Like we have to analyze that. Like will it make the open source go faster or slower in, in lieu of the fact that the, the cloud growth is slowing. Right? So that's, that's one thing that's put that's put that aside. I've been thinking about the, the future of Kubernetes. What is the future of Kubernetes? And in that context, I was thinking like, you know, I think in, when I put a pointer there, I think in tangents, like, what else is around this thing? So I think CN CNCF has been writing the success of Kubernetes. They are, that was their number one flagship project, if you will. And it was mature enough to stand on its own. It it was Google, it's Google's Borg dub da Kubernetes. It's a genericized version of that. Right? So folks who do tech deep down, they know that, Right. So I think it's easier to stand with a solid, you know, project. But when the newer projects come in, then your medal will get tested at cncf. Right. >>And cncf, I mean they've got over 140 projects Yeah. Right now. So there's definitely much beyond >>Kubernetes. Yeah. So they, I have numbers there. 18 graduated, right, 37 in incubation and then 81 in Sandbox stage. They have three stages, right. So it's, they have a lot to chew on and the more they take on, the less, you know, quality you get goes into it. Who is, who's putting the money behind it? Which vendors are sponsoring like cncf, like how they're getting funded up. I think it >>Something I pay attention to as well. Yeah. Yeah. Lisa, I know you've got >>Some insight. Those are the things I was thinking about today. >>I gotta ask you, what's your take on what Keith said? Are you also seeing the maturation of the enterprise here at at coupon? >>Yes, I am actually, when you say enterprise versus what's the other side? Startups, right? Yeah. So startups start using open source a lot more earlier or lot more than enterprises. The enterprise is what they need. Number one thing is the, for their production workloads, they want a vendor sporting them. I said that yesterday as well, right? So it depend depending on the size of the enterprise. If you're a big shop, definitely if you have one of the 500 or Fortune five hundreds and your tech savvy shop, then you can absorb the open source directly coming from the open source sort of universe right. Coming to you. But if you are the second tier of enterprise, you want to go to a provider which is managed service provider, or it can be cloud service provider in this case. Yep. Most of the cloud service providers have multiple versions of Kubernetes, for example. >>I'm not talking about Kubernetes only, but like, but that is one example, right? So at Amazon you can get five different flavors of Kubernetes, right? Fully manage, have, manage all kind of stuff. So people don't have bandwidth to manage that stuff locally. You have to patch it, you have to roll in the new, you know, updates and all that stuff. Like, it's a lot of work for many. So CNCF actually is formed for that reason. Like the, the charter is to bring the quality to open source. Like in other companies they have the release process and they, the stringent guidelines and QA and all that stuff. So is is something ready for production? That's the question when it comes to any software, right? So they do that kind of work and, and, and they have these buckets defined at high level, but it needs more >>Work. Yeah. So one of the things that, you know, kind of stood out to me, I have good friend in the community, Alex Ellis, who does open Fast. It's a serverless platform, great platform. Two years ago or in 2019, there was a serverless day date. And in serverless day you had K Native, you had Open Pass, you had Ws, which is supported by IBM completely, not CNCF platforms. K native came into the CNCF full when Google donated the project a few months ago or a couple of years ago, now all of a sudden there's a K native day. Yes. Not a serverless day, it's a K native day. And I asked the, the CNCF event folks like, what happened to Serverless Day? I missed having open at serverless day. And you know, they, they came out and said, you know what, K native got big enough. >>They came in and I think Red Hat and Google wanted to sponsor a K native day. So serverless day went away. So I think what what I'm interested in and over the next couple of years is, is they're gonna be pushback from the C against the cncf. Is the CNCF now too big? Is it now the gatekeeper for do I have to be one of those 147 projects, right? In order enough to get my project noticed the open, fast, great project. I don't think Al Alex has any desire to have his project hosted by cncf, but it probably deserves, you know, shoulder left recognition with that. So I'm pushing to happen to say, okay, if this is open community, this is open source. If CNC is the place to have the cloud native conversation, what about the projects that's not cncf? Like how do we have that conversation when we don't have the power of a Google right. Or a, or a Lenox, et cetera, or a Lenox Foundation. So GE what, >>What are your thoughts on that? Is, is CNC too big? >>I don't think it's too big. I think it's too small to handle the, what we are doing in open source, right? So it's a bottle. It can become a bottleneck. Okay. I think too big in a way that yeah, it has, it has, it has power from that point of view. It has that cloud, if you will. The people listen to it. If it's CNCF project or this must be good, it's like in, in incubators. Like if you are y white Combinator, you know, company, it must be good. You know, I mean, may not be >>True, but, >>Oh, I think there's a bold assumption there though. I mean, I think everyone's just trying to do the best they can. And when we're evaluating projects, a very different origin and background, it's incredibly hard. Very c and staff is a staff of 30 people. They've got 180,000 people that are contributing to these projects and a thousand maintainers that they're trying to uphold. I think the challenge is actually really great. And to me, I actually look at events as an illustration of, you know, what's the culture and the health of an organization. If I were to evaluate CNCF based on that, I'd say we're very healthy right now. I would say that we're in a good spot. There's a lot of momentum. >>Yeah. I, I think CNCF is very healthy. I'm, I'm appreciative for it being here. I love coupon. It's becoming the, the facto conference to have this conversation has >>A totally >>Different vibe to other, It's a totally different vibe. Yeah. There needs to be a conduit and truth be told, enterprise buyers, to subject's point, this is something that we do absolutely agree on, on enterprise buyers. We want someone to pick winners and losers. We do, we, we don't want a box of Lego dumped on our, the middle of our table. We want somebody to have sorted that out. So while there may be five or six different service mesh solutions, at least the cncf, I can go there and say, Oh, I'll pick between the three or four that are most popular. And it, it's a place to curate. But I think with that curation comes the other side of it. Of how do we, how, you know, without the big corporate sponsor, how do I get my project pushed up? Right? Elevated. Elevated, Yep. And, and put onto the show floor. You know, another way that projects get noticed is that startups will adopt them, Push them. They may not even be, I don't, my CNCF project may not, my product may not even be based on the CNCF product. But the new stack has a booth, Ford has a booth. Nothing to do with a individual prod up, but promoting open source. What happens when you're not sponsored? >>I gotta ask you guys, what do you disagree on? >>Oh, so what, what do we disagree on? So I'm of the mindset, I can, I can say this, I I believe hybrid infrastructure is the future of it. Bar none. If I built my infrastructure, if I built my application in the cloud 10 years ago and I'm still building net new applications, I have stuff that I built 10 years ago that looks a lot like on-prem, what do I do with it? I can't modernize it cuz I don't have the developers to do it. I need to stick that somewhere. And where I'm going to stick that at is probably a hybrid infrastructure. So colo, I'm not gonna go back to the data center, but I'm, I'm gonna look, pick up something that looks very much like the data center and I'm saying embrace that it's the future. And if you're Boeing and you have, and Boeing is a member, cncf, that's a whole nother topic. If you have as 400 s, hpu X, et cetera, stick that stuff. Colo, build new stuff, but, and, and continue to support OpenStack, et cetera, et cetera. Because that's the future. Hybrid is the future. >>And sub g agree, disagree. >>I okay. Hybrid. Nobody can deny that the hybrid is the reality, not the future. It's a reality right now. It's, it's a necessity right now you can't do without it. Right. And okay, hybrid is very relative term. You can be like 10% here, 90% still hybrid, right? So the data center is shrinking and it will keep shrinking. Right? And >>So if by whole is the data center shrinking? >>This is where >>Quick one quick getting guys for it. How is growing by a clip? Yeah, but there's no data supporting. David Lym just came out for a report I think last year that showed that the data center is holding steady, holding steady, not growing, but not shrinking. >>Who sponsored that study? Wait, hold on. So the, that's a question, right? So more than 1 million data centers have been closed. I have, I can dig that through number through somebody like some organizations we published that maybe they're cloud, you know, people only. So the, when you get these kind of statements like it, it can be very skewed statements, right. But if you have seen the, the scene out there, which you have, I know, but I have also seen a lot of data centers walk the floor of, you know, a hundred thousand servers in a data center. I cannot imagine us consuming the infrastructure the way we were going into the future of co Okay. With, with one caveat actually. I am not big fan of like broad strokes. Like make a blanket statement. Oh no, data center's dead. Or if you are, >>That's how you get those esty headlines now. Yeah, I know. >>I'm all about to >>Put a stake in the ground. >>Actually. The, I think that you get more intelligence from the new end, right? A small little details if you will. If you're golden gold manak or Bank of America, you have so many data centers and you will still have data centers because performance matters to you, right? Your late latency matters for applications. But if you are even a Fortune 500 company on the lower end and or a healthcare vertical, right? That your situation is different. If you are a high, you know, growth startup, your situation is different, right? You will be a hundred percent cloud. So cloud gives you velocity, the, the, the pace of change, the pace of experimentation that actually you are buying innovation through cloud. It's proxy for innovation. And that's how I see it. But if you have, if you're stuck with older applications, I totally understand. >>Yeah. So the >>We need that OnPrem. Yeah, >>Well I think the, the bring your fuel sober, what we agree is that cloud is the place where innovation happens. Okay? At some point innovation becomes legacy debt and you have thus hybrid, you are not going to keep your old applications up to date forever. The, the, the math just doesn't add up. And where I differ in opinion is that not everyone needs innovation to keep moving. They need innovation for a period of time and then they need steady state. So Sergeant, we >>Argue about this. I have a, I >>Love this debate though. I say it's efficiency and stability also plays an important role. I see exactly what you're talking about. No, it's >>Great. I have a counter to that. Let me tell you >>Why. Let's >>Hear it. Because if you look at the storage only, right? Just storage. Just take storage computer network for, for a minute. There three cost reps in, in infrastructure, right? So storage earlier, early on there was one tier of storage. You say pay the same price, then now there are like five storage tiers, right? What I'm trying to say is the market sets the price, the market will tell you where this whole thing will go, but I know their margins are high in cloud, 20 plus percent and margin will shrink as, as we go forward. That means the, the cloud will become cheaper relative to on-prem. It, it, in some cases it's already cheaper. But even if it's a stable workload, even in that case, we will have a lower tier of service. I mean, you, you can't argue with me that the cloud versus your data center, they are on the same tier of services. Like cloud is a better, you know, product than your data center. Hands off. >>I love it. We, we are gonna relish in the debates between the two of you. Mic drops. The energy is great. I love it. Perspective. It's not like any of us can quite see through the crystal ball that we have very informed opinions, which is super exciting. Yeah. Lisa, any last thoughts today? >>Just love, I love the debate as well. That, and that's, that's part of what being in this community is all about. So sharing about, sharing opinions, expressing opinions. That's how it grows. That's how, that's how we innovate. Yeah. Obviously we need the cloud, but that's how we innovate. That's how we grow. Yeah. And we've seen that demonstrated the last couple days and I and your, your takes here on the Cuban on Twitter. Brilliant. >>Thank you. I absolutely love it. I'm gonna close this out with a really important analysis on the swag of the show. Yes. And if you know, yesterday we were looking at what is the weirdest swag or most unique swag We had that bucket hat that took the grand prize. Today we're gonna focus on something that's actually quite cool. A lot of the vendors here have really dedicated their swag to being local to Detroit. Very specific in their sourcing. Sonotype here has COOs. They're beautiful. You can't quite feel this flannel, but it's very legit hand sound here in Michigan. I can't say that I've been to too many conferences, if any, where there was this kind of commitment to localizing and sourcing swag from around the corner. We also see this with the Intel booth. They've got screen printers out here doing custom hoodies on spot. >>Oh fun. They're even like appropriately sized. They had local artists do these designs and if you're like me and you care about what's on your wrist, you're familiar with Shinola. This is one of my favorite swags that's available. There is a contest. Oh going on. Hello here. Yeah, so if you are Atan, make sure that you go and check this out. The we, I talked about this on the show. We've had the founder on the show or the CEO and yeah, I mean Shine is just full of class as since we are in Detroit as well. One of the fun themes is cars. >>Yes. >>And Storm Forge, who are also on the show, is actually giving away an Aston Martin, which is very exciting. Not exactly manufactured in Detroit. However, still very cool on the car front and >>The double oh seven version named the best I >>Know in the sixties. It's love it. It's very cool. Two quick last things. We talk about it a lot on the show. Every company now wants to be a software company. Yep. On that vein, and keeping up with my hat theme, the Home Depot is here because they want everybody to know that they in fact are a technology company, which is very cool. They have over 500,000 employees. You can imagine there's a lot of technology that has to go into keeping Napa. Absolutely. Yep. Wild to think about. And then last, but not at least very quick, rapid fire, best t-shirt contest. If you've ever ran to one of these events, there are a ton of T-shirts out there. I rate them on two things. Wittiest line and softness. If you combine the two, you'll really be our grand champion for the year. I'm just gonna hold these up and set them down for your laughs. Not afraid to commit, which is pretty great. This is another one designed by locals here. Detroit Code City. Oh, love it. This one made me chuckle the most. Kiss my cash. >>Oh, that's >>Good. These are also really nice and soft, which is fantastic. Also high on the softness category is this Op Sarah one. I also like their bird logo. These guys, there's just, you know, just real nice touch. So unfortunately, if you have the fumble, you're not here with us, live in Detroit. At least you're gonna get taste of the swag. I taste of the stories and some smiles hear from those of us on the cube. Thank you both so much for being here with us. Lisa, thanks for another fabulous day. Got it, girl. My name's Savannah Peterson. Thank you for joining us from Detroit. We're the cube and we can't wait to see you tomorrow.

(gentle upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome back to KubeCon CloudNativeCon here in Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined with John Furrier. John, we are in the meat of the conference. >> It's really in crunch time, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage and this next guest is running the show at CNCF, the OG and been in the community doing a great job. I'm looking forward to this segment. >> Me too. I'm even wearing... You may notice, I am in my CNCF tee, and I actually brought my tee from last year for those of you. And the reason I brought it, actually, I want to use this to help introduce our next guest is the theme last year was resistance realized, and I think that KubeCon this year is an illustration of that resistance realized. Please welcome Priyanka Sharma to the show. Priyanka, thank you so much for being here with us. >> Thank you for having me. >> This is your show. How are you feeling right now? What does it feel like to be here? >> It's all of our show. I am just another participant, but I am so happy to be here. I think this is our third hybrid in person back event. And the whole ecosystem, we seem to have gotten into the groove now. You know, the first one we did, was in LA >> Savannah: Yes. >> Where you have that shirt from. Then we went to Valencia, and now here in Detroit I could sense the ease in the attendees. I can sense that it just feels great for everyone to be here. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And you guys, who were face to face in LA, but this is really kind of back face to face, somewhat normalized, right? >> Priyanka: Yeah. >> And so that's a lot of feedback there. What's your reaction? Because the community's changed so much in three years, >> Savannah: Yes. >> Even two years, even last year. Where do you see it now? Because there's so much more work to do, but it feels like it's just getting started, but also at the same time it feels like people are celebrating at the same time. >> Yeah. >> Kubernetes is mainstream, CloudNative at scale. >> Savannah: That feels like a celebration. >> People are talking about developer... more developers coming on board, more traction, more scale, more interoperability, just a lot of action. What's your thoughts? >> I think you're absolutely right that we are just getting started. I've been part of many open source movements and communities. This is... I think this is something special where we have our flagship project considered mainstream, but yet so much to be done right over there. I mean, you've seen announcements around more and more vendors coming to support the project in, you know, the boring but essential ways that happened I think this week, just today, I think. And so Kubernetes continues to garner support and energy, which is unique in the ecosystem, right? Because once something becomes mainstream, normally, it's like, "Okay, boring." (John laughs) But that's happening. And I think the reason for that is CloudNative. It's built upon Kubernetes and so much more than Kubernetes. >> We have 140 plus projects >> Absolutely. >> and folks have a choice to contribute to something totally cutting edge or something that's, you know, used by everyone. So, the diversity of options and room for innovation at the same time means this is just the beginning. >> And also projects are coming together too. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> You're starting to see formation, you're starting to see some defacto alignment. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> You're starting to see the- >> Priyanka: Clustering. >> Some visibility into how the big moves are being playing out, almost the harvesting of that hard work. >> Priyanka: Yes, I do think there is consolidation, but I would definitely say that there's consolidation and innovation. >> John: Yeah. >> And that is something... I genuinely have not seen this before. I think there are definitely areas we're all really focusing on. I talked a lot about security in my keynote because it continues to gain importance in CloudNative, whether that is through projects or through practices. The same, I did not mention this in my keynote, but around like, you know, continuous delivery generally the software delivery cycle, there's a lot coming together happening there. And, you know, >> John: Yeah. >> many other spaces. So, absolutely right. >> Let's dig in a little bit actually, because I'm curious. You get to see these 140 plus projects. >> Yes. >> What are some of the other trends that you're seeing, especially now, as we're feeling this momentum around Kubernetes? The excitement is back in the ecosystem. >> Yes. So, so much happening. But I would definitely say that like the underlying basis of all these projects, right? I brought that up in my keynote, is the maintainers. And I think the maintainer group, is the talent keeps thriving and growing, the load on them is very heavy though. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And I do think there's a lot more we all company, the companies around us need to do to support these people, because the innovation they're bringing is unprecedented. Besides Kubernetes, which has its own cool stuff all the time. I think I'm particularly excited about the Argo projects. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> So, they're the quadruplets as I like to call them. Right? Because there's four of them within the Argo banner. I had Yuan from Argo on my keynote actually. >> Savannah: Oh, nice. >> Alongside Hiba from Kubernetes. And we talked about their maintainer journey. And it's interesting. Totally different projects. Same asks, you know, which is more support and time from employers, more ways to build up contributors and ultimately they love the CNCF marketing supports. >> That Argo project's really in a great umbrella. There are a lot of action going on. Arlon, I saw that. Got some traction. A lot of great stuff. The question I want to ask you, and I want to get your reaction to this, you know, we always go to a lot of events with theCUBE and you can always tell the vibrant of the ecosystem when you see developers doing stuff, projects going on. But when you start seeing the commercialization >> Priyanka: Yes. >> The news briefings coming out of this show feels a lot like reinvent, like it's like a tsunami. I've never seen this much news. Everyone's got a story, they got announcing products. >> Savannah: That was a lot of news. That's a great point, John. >> There was a lot of flow even from the CNCF. >> Yeah. >> What's your reaction to that? I mean like to me it's a tell sign of activity, certainly, >> Right. >> And engagement. >> Right. >> But there's real proof coming out, real visibility into the value propositions, >> Priyanka: Yes. >> rendering itself with real products. What's your reaction to the news flow? >> Absolutely. I think it's market proof, like you said, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> That we have awesome technologies that are useful to lots of people around the world. And I think that, I hope this continues to increase. And with the bite basket of project portfolios that's what I hope to see. CNCF itself will continue supporting the maintainers with things like conformance programs which are really essential when you are... when you have people building products on top of your projects and other initiatives so that the technological integrity remains solid while innovation keeps happening. >> I know from a little birdie, Brendan, good friend of mine that you had a board meeting today. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> And I am curious because I hope I'm not going out about an assumption I imagine that room is full of passionate people. >> Priyanka: Absolutely. >> CNCF board would be a wild one. (Priyanka laughs) What are the priorities for the board between now and KubeCon next year? >> Sure. So the CNCF governing board is an over... It's like an oversight body. And their focus is on working with us on the executive team to make sure that we have the right game plan for the foundation. They tend to focus on the business decisions, things such as how do we manage our budget, how do we deploy it, and what are the initiatives? And that's always their priority. But because this is CloudNative and we are all technologists who love our projects, >> Savannah: Yeah. >> we also engage closely with the technical oversight committee who was in the said meeting that we just talked about. And so lots of discussions are around project health, sustainability. How do we keep moving? Because as you said, Kubernetes is going mainstream but it's still cool. There are all these other cool things. It's a lot going on, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. You got a lot of balls in the air. It's complex decision making and balancing of priorities. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> John: And demands, stakeholders. You have how many stakeholders? Every project, every person, every company. >> Everyone's a stakeholder. You're a stakeholder, too. >> And a hundred... I mean, I love how community focused you are. Obviously we're here to talk about the community. You have contributors from 187 different countries. >> Priyanka: It's one of the things I'm the most proud of. >> Savannah: It's... Yeah. It gives me all the feels as a community builder as well. >> Priyanka: Yeah. >> What an accomplishment and supporting community members in those different environments must be so dynamic for you and the team. >> Absolutely, and it behooves us to think globally in how we solve problems. Even when we introduce programs. My first question is, are we by accident being, let's say, default U.S. or are we being default Europe, whatever it may be because we really got to think about the whole world. >> John: It's global culture, it's a global village. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> And I think global now more than ever is so important. And, the Ukraine >> Priyanka: Yes. >> discussion on the main stage was awesome. I love how you guys did that because this is impacting the technology. We need the diverse input. Now I made a comment yesterday that it's going to make... it might slow things down. I meant as is more diversity, there's more conversations. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> But once people get aligned and committed, that's where the magic happens. Share your thoughts on the global diversity, why it's important, how things are made, how decisions are made. What's the philosophy? Because there's more to get your arms around. >> Yes, absolutely. It may seem harder or slower or whatever but once it gets done, aligned and committed, the product's better, everything's better. >> Priyanka: Yes, absolutely. I think the more people involved, the better it is for sure. Especially from a robustness resilience perspective. Because you know, as they say, sunlight makes bugs shallow. That's because the more eyes on something the faster people will solve problems, fix bugs and make, you know, look for security, vulnerability, solve all that. So especially in those areas, I think, where you want to be more resilient, the more the people, the better it is. A hundred percent. And then when it comes to direct technical direction and choosing a path, I think that's where, you know it's the role of the maintainers. And as I was saying there's only a thousand audit maintainers for 140 plus projects, right? So they are catering- >> Wow, they have a lot of responsibility. >> Right. >> Serious amount of responsibility. >> It's crazy. I know. And we have to do everything we can for those people because they are the ones who set the vision, set the direction, and then 176,000 plus contributors follow their lead. So we have... I think, the bright mechanisms of contribution and collaboration in a global way are in place. And we keep chugging along and doing better and better each year. >> What's next for you guys? You got the EU of show coming out, >> Priyanka: Correct, Amsterdam. the economy looking, I don't see your recession for technology, but that's me. I'm Polish on tech. Yeah, there's some layoffs going on, some cleaning up, overinflated expectations on valuations of startups, but I don't see this stopping or slowing down. But what's your take? >> Priyanka: Yeah, I mean, as I said in my keynote, right? Open source usage soars in times of turmoil and financial turmoil is one example of that. So we are expecting growth and heavy growth this year, next year and onwards. And in fact, going back to the whole maintainer journey, now is a time there's even more pressure on them and companies as they manage their, you know, workforces and prioritization, they really need to remember they're building products off of open source. They are... This is open sources on which what their business realize, whether they're a vendor or end user and give maintainers a space time to work on what they need to work on. >> Yeah. They need a little work-life balance. I mean the self-care there, I can't even imagine the complexity of the decision matrix in their mind. Speaking of that, and obviously you... Culture must be a huge part of how you lead these teams. How do you approach that as leader? >> I think the number one... So the foundation is a very small set of staff, just so you know. >> Savannah: I was actually... Let's tell the audience, how many people are on the team? >> Priyanka: You know, it's actually a difficult question because we have folks who like spin up and down and we have matrix support from the Linux Foundation, but about 30 people in total are dedicated to CNCF at any given time. >> Savannah: Wow. >> But compared... >> Savannah: You all do hard work. >> Yes. >> Savannah: You're doing great. I am impressed. >> It's a flat organization. >> It's pretty flat. >> Seriously, it's beautiful. >> It's actually in some ways very similar to the projects and there the, you know, contribution communities there where it's like everyone kind of like steps up and does what needs to be done, which is wonderful and beautiful, but with the responsibility on our shoulders, it's definitely a balancing act. So first off, it is, I ask everyone to have some grace for the staff. They are in a startup land with no IPO on the other side of the rainbow. They're doing it because they love love, love this community and technology so much. >> John: Yeah. Yeah, and then also they're acknowledging that nobody in open source wants to see a bureaucracy. >> Priyanka: Right. >> I mean, everyone see lean, efficient. >> Savannah: Yeah, absolutely John. It's great. It's a great point. And and I think that it's just... It's amazing what passionate people can do if given the opportunity. Let's talk a little bit about the literal event that we're at right now. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> Theme today, building for the road ahead. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> What was the inspiration for that? >> Detroit. (group laughs) We're in Detroit, people drive here. >> Savannah: In case you didn't know, cars have been made in this city. >> Motor city. >> It's everywhere being here in this city, which is awesome. >> But you know, it did... There was of course a geographical element but it also aligns with where we're at, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> We're building for the road ahead, which frankly given the changes going on in the world is a bumpy road. So it's important to talk about it. And that's what the theme was. >> And how many folks have shown up... This is a totally different energy from Los Angeles last year. I'm sure we can both agree. Everyone was excited last year, but this is an order of magnitude. >> Yes. >> How many folks do you think are milling around? >> Yeah, it's much more than double of Los Angeles. We are close to 8,000. >> Savannah: That's amazing. And it's so... You're absolutely right. The energy is just... >> Savannah: Way up. >> It's so good. People are enjoying themselves. It's been lovely. >> That's great. So you're feeling good? You're riding the high? >> Congratulations. >> Awesome. >> Yeah, thank you. I mean, I'm a little bit of a zombie right now. (group laughs) >> You don't look it, we wouldn't know. Nobody knows. They don't know. >> If you want to take a break, We got 12 interviews tomorrow. (Savannah and Priyanka laughing) You can co-host with us. We'd love to have you. >> Exactly. You're welcome anytime. Welcome anytime, Priyanka. >> Well thank you. But no, it's been such a wonderful show and you folks are part of the reason you say everybody here is contributing to the awesomeness. >> John: Yep. >> You're part of it. Look at your smiley faces. >> John: And Lisa Marty is over there. Lisa's over there. >> Yes! >> Say hi to Lisa and team. >> Yes, the team is awesome. >> Guys, thank you for your support for theCUBE. We really appreciate it. We enjoy it a lot. And we love the community. Thank you. >> Yes. Thank you for your support for CloudNative. >> Thank you. >> One last thing I just want to point out, because it's not always it happens in this industry. The women outnumber the men on this stage right now. >> John: Proud of that? >> And I know the diversity and inclusion is a priority for CNCF. >> Priyanka: Top priority. >> Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? >> Yes. It is something at the forefront of my mind, no matter what we do. And it's because I have such great role models. You know, when I was just a participant in the ecosystem, Dan Conn was leading the foundation and he took it so seriously to always try to uplift people from a diverse backgrounds and bring those faces into CloudNative. >> Savannah: Yes. >> And he made a serious lasting impact. >> John: Yes. >> And I am not going to let that go to waste. It's not going to be me who drops the ball. (group laughs) >> We're behind you all the way. >> Right? >> We see improvement over here. >> We got your back. >> I mean, even from an attendance perspective on stage I feel like you've done just an outstanding job with the curation and representation. I don't say that lightly. It really matters to me. But even in the audience looking around, it's so refreshing. Even it sounds silly. The shirts are more fitted. >> It's not silly. >> There's different types of shirts, and I mean, you know how it is. We've been in this industry long enough. >> It's a shirt you want to wear. >> Savannah: Exactly. And that's the whole point. I absolutely love it. Have we announced a location for KubeCon North America 2023, yet? >> It's Chicago. >> Savannah: Exciting! >> Yes. >> Savannah: All right. So we'll be seeing you >> Midwest. >> not that far away. >> This is the first time I've said this publicly, I just realized, It's Chicago, people. >> The scoop, yay! >> Oh, I feel so lucky we got to break the scoop. I was learning from John's lead there and I'm very excited. Amsterdam, Chicago. It's going to be absolutely >> I'll get my hotel now. >> Fantastic. >> Yes. >> Smart move. Everybody listen to him. >> Yeah, right? Especially after Detroit. It's actually not a... It's not a bad move. Priyanka, is there anything else you'd like to say to folks? Maybe they're thinking about coming or contributing to the ecosystem? >> Priyanka: Yes. Anyone and everyone can and should contribute and join us. The maintainers are holding us all up. Let's rally to support them. We have more and more programs to do that. As you know, we did ContribFest here this week which was the first time. So we will help you get involved so you're not on your own. So that's my number one message, which is anyone and everyone, you're welcome here. We'll make sure you have a good time. So just come. >> Okay. Please do it. >> I can tell you that Priyanka is not blowing smoke. I feel very welcome here. This community has welcomed me as a non-technical, so I think you're absolutely preaching the truth. Priyanka, thank you so much for being here with us today on the show, for helping herd the cats and wrangle the brilliant minds that make CNCF possible. And honestly for just bringing your energy and joy to the entire experience. John, thank you for hanging out with me. >> I'm glad I can contribute in a small way. >> I was going to say... I was going to say thank you for founding theCUBE so that we could be here in this little marriage and collaboration can be possible. And thank all of you for tuning in to theCUBE here, live from Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson. I am thrilled to be sharing this content with you today and I hope to see you for the rest of our interviews this afternoon. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. We are live in Chicago. This is day two of Waldo Wall coverage on the cube. John Fhrer here with me. Lisa Martin. John, today's a big news day. Yeah, >>Big time. I mean, we got the chief architect on this segments to be great. We have the lead product management. All the new stuff coming out really is a game changer. It's very cool and relevant. Very key to be relevant. And then, and being a part of the future. This is a changeover you see in the NextGen Cloud developer environment. Open source all coming together. So Ansible we've been covering for many, many years. We've always said they're in the middle of all the action and you're starting to see the picture. Yes. For me. So we're looking forward to a great segment. >>Yes. We've got two alumni back with us to unpack the news and all the great stuff that's going on here. Richard Hensel joins us Senior manager, Ansible Product Management, and Matthew Jones here, fresh from the keynote stage, Chief architect of Ansible Automation. Guys, great to have you on the program. Thanks >>For having us. Good to be here. >>So this morning was all about event driven Ansible. Unpack that. Talk about the impact that this is gonna have, The excitement, the buzz that you've heard on the show floor today. >>Yeah. You know, it's, it's exciting. We've been working on this for a while. We've been really excited to show this off because it's something that feels like the natural evolution of the platform and where it's going. Really being able to connect the automation with the sources of data and the actions that we know people want to use. We, we came into this knowing everybody here at this conference, this is something that everybody will be able to use. >>Talk about the innovations strategy. Cause we've always had these great conversations with Ansible. Oh yeah. The, the practitioners, they're, they're building the product with you. You guys are very hardcore on that. No secret. This is different. This is like a whole nother level of opportunity that's gonna take the, the community to new heights in terms of what they do in their job and free them up to do more creative development. >>Yeah, you're exactly right. You know, we, we know that people need to bring that sort of reactive and active automation to it. We've, we've done a lot of work to bring automation to everybody, to the masses. Now we need to meet them at the place where they are, where the, the where, where they have to do the most work and, and act in the most strategic and specific ways. >>All right. So now before we get into some of the deep dive, cause a ton of questions. This is really exciting product. Take a minute to explain what was the key announcement? Why, what specifically does this mean for the audience, watching customers and future customers? What's the big deal? To take a minute to explain what was announced. >>So this is about the, the evolution and the maturity of the automation that our users are doing. So, you know, you think about provisioning servers, you know, configuring networks, all that sort of, the stuff that we've established and everybody's been doing for a number of years. And then you go, Well, I've invested in that. I've done the heavy lifting, I've done the things that cost me agility. I think that cost me time. Well now I need to go further. So what can I go further into? And you move further at the stacks. You move away from the infrastructure, please. You move away from infrastructure as code. You move towards through configures code, up to officer's code. And you start to get into, well, I've got, I've got road tasks, I've got repetitive actions that I'm doing. I've got investigations, I've got remediations, I've got responses. >>Well, there's work that I do on a daily basis that is toil. Right. It's not efficient work. Right. Actually, we doing valuable work in the operation space as much as you were doing in, in the build space. And how do we move them up into that space? And it's, this is all based off observation. You can do this today, but how do we make it easier? We've gonna make it easier for them to do that and get, it's all about success. It's about the outcomes we're gonna drive users towards. They need to be successful as quickly as possible. How do we make that >>Happen? And Matt, I remember we talked in 2019 with Ansible, the word platform where we say, Hey, you know, platforms are super important. It's not a tool, tools and platforms as distinctions. You mentioned platform. This is now platform. A lot of people put a lot of work in into this Yeah. Claim what went on behind the scenes. So >>You're exactly right. And we've spent the last couple of years really taking that disparate set of tools that, that we've invested a lot of time in building that platform. It's been exciting to see it come together. We always knew that we wanted to capture more of, more of where people find automation and find they need automation, not just out on the edge, on the end of the, of the, of the actions and tasks that they need to do. They've got a lot of things coming in, a lot of things that they need to take care of. And the community is really what drives this for us. People who have been doing this for years and they've been asking us, Meet me halfway. Give me something. Give me a part of this platform and a capability that enables me to do this. So I I feel like we've done that and you did >>It. Yeah, exactly. For step one. >>And that must feel pretty good too, to be able to deliver what, you know, the masses are looking for and why they're looking >>For it. Yeah. This was, there was no question that we knew this was gonna deliver the kind of real value that people were looking for. >>Take us through the building blocks real quick. I know on stage you went through it in detail. What should people know about the core building blocks of, of this particular event driven >>Piece? Yeah. You know, I think the most important thing to understand at the, at the outset is the sources of data and events that come in. It's really easy to get lost in the details. Like, what do you mean a source? But, you know, we've shown examples using Kafka, but it's not just Kafka, right? It's, it's, it's web hooks, it's CI systems, it's any, any place that you can imagine an evict coming from your monitoring platforms. You can bring those together under the same umbrella. We're not requiring you to pick one or choose or what's your favorite one. You can bring, you can use them all and and condense them down into the, into the same place. >>There's a lot of data events everywhere now. There's more events. Yeah. Is there a standard interface? Is what's the, is there any kind of hook in there? Is what's, what's gonna limit? Or is there any limits? >>I I don't think there is a limit. I, you know, it's, and we can't even imagine where events and data are gonna come from, but we know we need to get them into the system in a way that makes the most sense for the, the customers. And then that, that drives through into the rule books. Like, okay, we have the data now, but what do we do with that data? How do we translate that into, into the action? What are the rules that need to follow? It's giving the, the, the person who is automating, who understands the data that's coming in and understands the task that they need to take. The, the rules are where they map those into it. And then the last part, of course is the playbook, the automation itself, which they already know. They're already experts in the system. So we've, we've, we've built this like eight lane highway. They get some right end of those actions. >>Let's talk about Richard, let's unpack those actions and the really kind of double click on the business outcomes that this is actually gonna enable organizations and any industry to achieve. >>Yeah, so >>I mean, it's, it, like Matt said, it's really hard to encapsulate everything that we see as possible. But if you just think about what happens when a system goes down, right? At that point in time, I'm potentially not making money, right? I'd say it's costing me time, it's costing me, that's a business impact. If I can speed up how quick I can resolve that problem, if I can reduce time in there, that's customer improvement, that's custom satisfaction. That's bottom line money for businesses, right? But it's also, it's also satisfaction for the users. You know, they're not involved in having the stressful get online, get quickly, activate whatever accounts you need to do, go and start doing discovery. You can detect a lot of that information for the discovery use case that we see, respond to an event, scan the system for that same logic that you would normally do as a user, as a human. >>And that's why the rules are important to add into ed. It's like, how do I take that human, that brain part that I would say, well, if I see this bit, oh, I'll go and have a look in this other log file. If I see this piece, I'll go and do something different. How do we translate that into Ansible so that you've got that conditional logic just to be able to say, if this do that, or if I see these three things, it means a certain outcome has happened. And then again, that defined, that's what's gonna help people like choose where it becomes useful. And that's how we, that's how we take that process >>Forward. I'm sure people are gonna get excited by this. I'm not sure the community already knows that, but as it's gonna attract more potential customers, what's different about it? Can you share the differentiation? Like wait minute, I already have that already. Do they have it already? What's different? What makes this different? What's, what's in it for them? >>Yeah. When we step up into a customer situation, an enterprise, an organization, what's really important becomes the, the ability to control where you do some of that work. So the control and the trust, You know, would you trust an automatic system to go and start making changes to hundreds of thousands of devices? And the answer is often not, not straight away. So how do we put this sort of sep the same separation of duties we have between dev and ops and all the nice structures we've done over the last number of years, and actually apply that to that programmatic access of automation that other systems do. So let's say a AIML systems that are detecting what's going on, observability platforms are, are much more intru or intrusive is the wrong word. They're much more observable of what's going on in the systems, right? But at the same time you go, I wanna make sure that I know that any point in time I can decide what, what is there and what can be run and who can run it and when they can run it. And that becomes an important dimension. >>The versatility seems like a big deal too. They can, Yeah. Any team could get >>Involved. And, and that's the, the same flexibility and the same extensibility of Ansible exists in this use case, right? The, the, the ability to take any of those tasks you wanna do in action, string them together, but what the way that it works for you, not the way that it works that we see, but the way that you see and you convert your operational DNA into how you do that automation and how that gets triggered as you see fit. >>Talk about this both of you. I'd like to get your perspectives on event driven Ansible as part of the automation journey that businesses are on. Obviously you can look at different industries and different businesses are, are at different places along that journey, but where does this fit in and kind of plugin to accelerating that journey? That's, >>That's a good question. You know, sometimes this ends up being like that last mile of we've adopted this automation, we've learned how to write automation. We even understand the things that we would need to automate, but how do we carry it over that last topic and connect it to our, our knowledge systems, our data stores, our data lakes, and how do we combine the expertise of the systems that we're managing with this automation that we've learned? Like you, you mentioned the, the, the community and the, the coalescing of data and information, the, the definition of the event rules and, and the event driven architecture. It lives alongside the automation that you've developed in the exact same place where you can feel that trust and ubiquity that we keep talking about. Right? It's there, it's certified. And we've talked a lot about secure supply chain recently. This gives you the ability to sign and certify that the rules and actions that we're taking and the sources that we're communicating with works exactly the same way. Yeah. And >>There's something we didn't, we didn't correlate this when we first started doing the work. We were, we were, we observe teams doing self-healing and you know, extending Ansible. And then over the last 18 months, what we've also seen is this movement, this platform engineering movement, the SRE teams becoming much more prominent. And this just nicely sits in as a type of use case for that type of transformation. You know, we've gotta remember that Ansible at is heart is also a transformative tool. Is like, how do you teach this behavior to a bunch of people? How do you upscale a larger base of engineers with what you want to be able to do? And I think this is such an important part that we, we just one say we stumbled into it, but it was a very, very nice, >>It was a natural progression. >>Exactly. >>Yeah. Yeah. Tom, Tom, when we were talking about Tom yesterday, Tom Anderson and he said, You guys bring up the SRE to you guys when you come on the cube. This is exactly a culture shift that we're talking about. I mean, SRE is really his legacy with Google. We all know that. Everyone kind of knows that, but it's become like a job title. Well they kind of, what does that even mean now if you're not Google, it means you're running stuff. DevOps has become a title. Yeah. So what that means is that's a cultural shift, not so much semantics Yeah. On title. This is kind of what you guys are targeting here, enabling people to run platforms, engineer them. Yeah. Like an architect and enable more co composability coding. >>And, and it's, so that's, that distinction is so important because one of the, you know, we see many customers come from different places. Many users from, you know, all the legacy or heritage of tools that have existed. And so often those processes are defined by the way that tool worked. Right? You had no other way that, that, and the, and it's, it happened 10 years ago, somebody implemented it, that's how it now works. And then they come and try and take something new and you go, well, you can't let the tool define your process. Now your culture and your objective has to define the process. So this is really, you know, how do we make sure we match that ability by giving them a flexible tool that let's say, Well what are you trying to achieve? I wanna achieve this outcome. That's the way you can do it. I >>Mean, that's how we match basically means my mind to get your reaction. It means I'm running stuff at scale. Yep. Engineer, I'm engineering and infrastructure at scale to enable, >>I'm responsible for it. And it's, it's my, it's my baby. It's my responsibility to do that. And how do we, how do we allow people to do that better? And you know, it, it's about, it's about freeing people up to focus on things that are really important and transformative. We can be transformative. And we do that by taking away the complexity and making things work fast. >>And that's what people want. People in their daily jobs want to be able to deliver value to the organization. You wanna feel that. But something Richard that you were talking about that struck me a couple minutes ago is, was a venture of an Ansible. There's employee benefits, there's customer benefits, Those two are ex inextricably linked. But I liked how you were talking about what it facilitates for both Yes. And all the way to the customer satisfaction, brand reputation. That's an important Yeah. Element for any brand to >>Consider. And that, I mean, you know, think about what digital transformation was all about. I mean, as we evolve past all these initial terms that come about, you know, we actually start getting to the meat of what these things are. And that is it connecting what you do with actually what is the purpose of what your business is trying to achieve. And you can't, you can't almost put money on that. That's, that's the, that's the holy grail of what you're trying to get to. So how, you know, and again, it just comes back to how do we facilitate, how do we make it easy? If we don't make it easier, we're not doing it right. We've gotta make it easier. >>Right. Well, exciting news. I want to get your guys' reaction and if you don't mind sharing your opinion or your commentary on what's different now with Ansible this year than just a few years ago in terms of the scope of what's out there, what's been built, what you guys are doing for the, for the customer base and the community. What's changed? Obviously the people's roles looked that they're gonna expand and have more, I say more power, you know, more keys to the kingdom, however you wanna look at it. But things have changed. What's changed now from a few years >>Ago. It's, you know, it, it's funny because we've spent a lot of time over the last couple years setting up the capabilities that you're seeing us deliver right now. Right. We, we look back two or three years ago and we knew where we wanted to be. We wanted to build things like eda. We wanted to invest in systems like Project Wisdom and the, the types of content, the cloud journey that, that now we're on and we're enabling for folks. But we had to make some really big changes. And those changes take time and, and take investment. The move into last year, John, we talked about execution environments. Yeah. And separating the control plane from the execution plane. All of that work that we did and the investment into the platform and stability of the platform leads us now into what >>Cap. And that's architectural decision. That's the long game in mind. Exactly. Making things more cohesive, but decoupled, that's an operating system kind of thinking. >>It, it totally is. It's a systems engineering and system architecture thinking. And now we can start building on top of these things like what comes after ed, what does ED allow us to do within the platform? All of the dev tools that we focused on that we haven't spent a lot of time talking about that from the product side. But being, coming in with prescriptive and opinionated dev tools, now we can show you how to build it. We can show you how to use it and connect it to your systems. Where can we go next? I'm really excited. >>Yeah. Your customer base two has also been part of from the beginning and they solve their own problems and they rolled it up, grow with it, and now it's a full on platform. The question I then ask is, okay, you believe it's a platform, which it is, it's enabling. What do you guys see as that possible dots that could connect that might come on top of this from a creativity standpoint, from an ecosystem standpoint, from an Ansible standpoint, from maybe Red Hat. I mean, wisdom shows that you can go into the treasure trove of IBM's research, pull out some AI and some machine learning. Both that in or shim layered in whatever you do. >>I mean, what I'm starting to see much more, especially as I, the nice thing about being here is actually getting face to face with customers again and you know, actually hearing what they're talking about. But you know, we've moved away from a Ansible specific story where I'm talking about how I, I was always, I was looking to automate, I was looking to go to Ansible. Well now I've got the automation capability. Now we've enhanced the automation. Capabil wisdom enhances the automation capability further. What about all those, those broader set of management solutions that I've got that I would like to start connecting to each other. So we're starting to take the same like, you know, you mentioned as then software architecture, software design principles. We'll apply those same application design principles, apply them to your IT management because we've got data center with the pressures on there. We've got the expansion into cloud, we've got the expansion to the edge, right? Each adding a new layer of complexity and a new layer of, you know, more that you have to then look after. But there's still the same >>Number of people. So a thousand flower blooms kind of situation. >>Exactly. And so how do I, how do I constrain, how do I tame it, right? How do I sit there and go, I, I can control that now I can look after that. I contain that. I can, I can deal with what I wanna do. So I'm focusing on what's important and we are getting stuff done. >>We, we've been quoting Andy Grove on the cube lately. Let chaos, rain and then rain in the chaos. Yes. Right? I mean that's kind of every inflection point has complexity before it gets simpler. >>Yeah, that's right. >>Yeah. You can't, there's answer that one. That's >>Perfectly. >>Yeah. Yeah. What do you expect to see chief ar you gotta have the vision. What's gonna pop out? What's that low, low hanging fruit? What's gonna bloom first? What do you think's gonna come? >>I, you know, my overarching vision is that I just want to be able to automate more. Where, where can we bring back, So edge cloud, right? That's obvious, but what things run in the cloud and and on the edge, right? Devices, you heard Chad in the keynote this morning talk about programmable logic controllers, sensors, fans, motors, things like that. This is the, the sort of, this is the next frontier of automation is that connecting your data centers and your systems, your applications and needs all the way out to where your customers are. Gas stations, point of sale systems. >>It's instant. It's instant. It is what it is. It's like just add, Just >>Add faster and bigger. Yeah. >>But what happens if, I'll give you a tease. What I think is, is what happens if this happens? So I've got much more rich feature, rich diverse set of tools looking after my systems, observing what's going on. And they go through a whole filtering process and they say such and such has happened, right? Wisdom picks that up and decides from that natural language statement that comes outta the back of that system. That's the task I think is now appropriate to run. Where do you run that? You need a secure execution capability. Pass that to an support, that single task. And now we run inside the automation platform at any of those locations that you just mentioned, right? Stitching those things together and having that sequence of events all the way through where you, you predefine what's possible. You know, you start to bias the system towards what is your accepted standard and then let those clever systems do what you are investing in them for, which is to run your IT and make it >>Easier. Rich here was on earlier, I said, hey, about voice activated it. Provision the cluster. Yeah. >>Last question guys, before we run out of time for this. For customers who take advantage of this new frontier, how can they get started with the bench of an what's? >>That's a good question. You know, we, we've engaged our community because they trust us and we trust them to build really good products. ansible.com/events. Oh man, >>I did have the, I >>Had the cup, the landing page. >>Find somebody find that. >>Well it's on GitHub, right? GitHub It is. >>Yeah it >>Is. Absolutely ansible.com. It's probably a link somewhere if I on the front page. Exactly. On GitHub. The good code too. >>Right? Exactly. And so look at there, you can see where we're going on our roadmap, what we're capable of today. Examples, we're gonna be doing labs and blogs and demonstrations of it over the next day, week, month. Right. You'll be able to see this evolve. You get to be the, the sort of vanguard of support and actions on this and >>Cause we really want, we really want users to play with it, right? Of course. We've been doing this for a while. We've seen what we think is right. We want users to play with it. Tell us whether the syntax works, whether it makes sense, how does it run, how does it work? That's the exciting part. But at the same time, we want the partners, you know, we, we don't know all the technologies, right? We want the partners that we have that work with us already in the community to go and sort of, you know, do those integrations, do those triggers to their systems, define rules for their stuff cuz they'll talk to their customers about it as >>Well. Right? Right. It'll be exciting to see what unfolds over the next six to nine months or so with the partners getting involved, the community getting involved. Guys, congratulations on the big announcements. Sounds like a lot of work. I can tell. We can tell. Your excitement level is huge and job well done. Thank you so much for joining us on the Cube. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our pleasure. Just All right, for our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, Ansible Fest 22. John and I will be right back with our next guest of Stay tuned.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Chicago, guys and gals. Lisa Martin here in Chicago with Ansible Fest 2022 with John Furrier. John, we've had great conversations. This is day two of our coverage. We were here yesterday. >> Yeah. >> We're here today. We've gotten to talk with great folks in the Ansible community, the partner ecosystem customers. We've broken some news that they've talked about. Now we're going to talk about industrial automation, IT/OT convergence. What excites you about this conversation? >> Yeah, this is going to be a great segment. This is one of the feature keynote presenters, customer Rockwell. Huge in OT, IT, edge, robotics, plants, equipment. Everything that we probably have, they do. This guest has really great story about what's cutting edge and what's relevant in the edge and IT slash automation area. Super relevant. Looking forward to the segment. >> Yes, please welcome David Rapini, the Global PlantPAx business manager at Rockwell Automation. David, great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Nice to be here. >> Give the audience a bit of an overview of Rockwell Automation and then let's dig into what you guys are doing there. >> Sure. Rockwell Automation probably is the largest global automation provider of equipment focused exclusively on automation. About 22,000 employees. About 7 billion kind of revenue numbers. We make, basically, controllers for the automation industry, industrialized software, power drives, you know, of the robotics content, smart cart kind of applications. >> Lisa: And what are your key industries that you're covering? >> Wow, so that's a broad market. So we do a lot of different industries. So we cover, obviously, oil and gas, life science, water, wastewater. We do automotive. So just about any industry, actually. Any place that needs industrial automation covering any type of manufacturing process or any type of process application. We're pretty much there. >> John: You know, it's interesting, IOT has been a word, in and of things, light bulb, wearables, industrial IOT where you're in is a really key space. It's physical plants. Sometimes it's sensitive critical infrastructure for governments, businesses. >> David: Exactly. >> I mean there's running stuff. >> David: Definitely. >> This is huge. >> Yeah, and it's a big area for us, like getting that data, you know, everybody talks about analytics and what the world's going to be happening to in that IT, OT space. And Rockwell's really well positioned at that lower level where we actually own the data, create the data for all that analytics that you're talking about. >> What was your main message today on stage? I want to replay that here and then get into it because I think this is really, we're starting to see, real traction in adoption, in automation, cloud scale, edges happening, exploding. What was your key message on stage today? >> Yeah, I think it's that the world's really changing in that space. You know, five years ago you would have had a completely different message around, you know that connectivity and having that content actually delivered to that space and having, like even the connectivity to that OT space makes people uncomfortable in that world because there's obviously moving pieces, you know, damage to equipment, you know God forbid any types of explosions or things like that on bad environmental type conditions. So we're working in that space to really make those connections much more open and now that those connections are starting to happen and we're getting more and more comfort with that, in that layer, there's a lot more we can do in that space which is kind of why we're here. >> And talk about why Ansible and what it's going to be able to unlock for Rockwell to be able to achieve. >> Sure. There's a lot of areas that we want to play with, but our, in Ansible but our first targets are really our, primarily our servers. So there's a lot of edge based servers out there, you know, we call them a pass server, which is a process automation system server. And there's an engineering workstation operator, which are those main core servers. Some of them are redundant, you know, the OT guys to them it's a burden to manage that content. They're good at making, you know, oil and gas they know how to do water wastewater. They know how to build cars. But managing servers, you know, not in their wheelhouse. >> John: Not in their wheelhouse.(laughs) >> Exactly. Right. So having that capability and that connection to get down there gives us some power with Ansible to go ahead and start building them initially. So making that initial builds out of the gate. That makes them really consistent and built together, so every application looks and feels the same and they know what they're going to get when their servers power up. So that's a big one. But, but just maintain them, keeping them patched, you know keeping security vulnerabilities down. You know, I was in a facility not long ago that was still running Windows 2000. Right. So, you know, they have an application there that's just working. It works. They don't want to touch it and it's been running for 20 years, so why touch it? Right. So this was going to kind of hopefully break that challenge. >> Make sure that you keep that password handy. (laughs) >> David: Yeah, exactly right. (laughs) >> We've had (indistinct) people leave. What about the security aspect is OT has been locked down, mindset, hardened, end to end, supply chains, vetted. Everything's kind of tight on the old OT model. Relatively secure when you get to IT, you mentioned vulnerabilities but the innovation's there too. So how does that reconcile for you? What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, we see a big move there, right? So it used to be they were always head head to head butting heads IT, OT, you know it focuses on, you know, keeping the system secure keeping the data down, locked down, and reliable. OT focuses more on production, right? Making sure they hit their numbers in the production. So oftentimes, you know, having it push out a patch in the middle of production line in the middle of a day and rebooting a server shuts down production and you know, that those kind of conflicts. Yeah, exactly. So those conflicts were, were pretty common. There's still a lot of that there, but it's getting better. Yeah, right. And I see more and more of that working together as a team to, to solve a lot of those challenges. And honestly, I keep going back to the analytics angle and the diagnostics and that world of deep data, you know, big data kind of mining, you know, without the IT space to cover that the cloud data storage, the horsepower. >> If you had to kind of like rank the complexity 'cause we were just talking before you came on about things got to get complex before they can get simpler 'cause the inflection points bring that new capability. What's some of the complexities that you're seeing that are going to be either abstracted away or solved with some of these new technologies like Ansible and others that are coming fast? Cause at the end of the day it's got to still be easier. It's not going to be hard. That can't be harder. >> Yeah. So I'll give you a real world example that's a little embarrassing. So today we deliver our past servers as a solution and we we provide that as a VM image that people start with as the first building block. But once you start to deploy that and actually connect it with the rest of the infrastructure, hook it up to our factory talk directory, hook it up to the DNS service, once you start doing all that work it's about 700 mouse clicks that somebody has to know what they're doing to actually spin it up the rest of the way and get it connected with Ansible. We're cutting that number like in half is the hope. So, and, and we're going to continue to expand that and make it even less work for the users to >> Talk about skill gap issue. The training alone on that is to have the right people. >> That's the second big piece, right? So, so those OT people typically don't have that skill set. So you have to have a fairly high skilled level person to do that work. We're hoping to take that, that work off of them and put that on on answer. >> Yeah, that sounds pretty consistent. Do you think, is that the, kind of the consistency of the problem space is that the OT just has a different goal and they just need something to be invisible and easy, like electricity? >> Yeah, I think so. Especially in this world, right? In that OT space, right in in that IT space. Sorry. Yeah, so, so managing servers and things like that it's just is not what they want to want to deal with and it's not what they went to school for and it's not what they're doing when their job when they get hired. Right. Yeah. >> It sounds to me like Rockwell Automation is a facilitator of the IT and OT folks coming together and actually working better together, maybe understanding each other's requirements, goals, objectives. >> Most definitely. So we have, you know we are offering a lot of cloud content now. We're continuing to expand that content. We're working with a lot of different IT departments and OT departments to try to marriage those two groups together to try to bring that stuff together. We have a partnership with Cisco where we actually, you know, industrialize you know, some of their switch components and sell that as as part of our content and that relationship gives us a big inroad with a lot of the IT departments. >> That's important to have that be able to speak the language of both sides. >> Yeah, definitely. Right. Knowing and understanding the terminology and just being able to know the challenges that IT guys face as well as the OTs is really a big component of what we do. >> You know, one of the questions I wanted to ask and 'cause the keynote was very cool, but you made a comment that your claim to fame was that you wrote the code for the Spider-Man ride at Universal. Tell a story. How does that work? I'm just, I've rode them many times. So take us through that little journey. >> Yeah, so I, every time people ask me what we do for a living and automation, you know, I can talk about, you know, making cars and things like that, but it doesn't ring troops. So I did do a lot of work on Spider-Man Ride which is at Universal Studios, you know it was a real challenge, making sure you know how that connections actually work and make, I did most of the motion control content for that to make the movements of the cars, you know, seamless with the backgrounds. Definitely a lot of fun. So those kind of projects are rare but they're really fun when you get those. >> I hope you have a free pass for any time you want to go on it. >> I don't, unfortunately. >> Oh, you should. >> I try to get in the backrooms all the time at that facility but it's rare to hear. >> I mean it's like, it's a high end rollercoaster machine. It's like, I mean that is this robotics, industrial cause, this, I mean it's an intense ride. >> It is, and you know, you never move more than like eight feet on that whole ride and it feels like you've dropped, you know 2000 feet out of the sky on some of that content. So it's really amazing. I will say it's a little dated. I've been writing on the part of my team worked on the the Harry Potter rides, which are much next generation. >> I couldn't get on that one, line was too long. >> It's a long way, but it's worth it. >> Dave I asked you a question on the future for people watching who are new observing industrial IOT. What's the most important story going on in your world today? Is it the transformation? Is it the standards? Is it the security? What's, what are the top two or three things that are going on that are really transformative right now in automating at the edge? >> I really want to say that it's standardization. It's about using open standards and standard protocols to deliver content in a reusable fashion. So, you know, having custom proprietary content like a lot of automation suppliers or even like a lot of other industries, it's hard to maintain. It doesn't work well with other products. It's great 'cause you can do a lot of flexibility what you want to do, but at the end of the day it's about keeping the thing running and hooking it up to other components so that open standards based solution you'll see us spending more energy on you know, part of the Ansible open community thing is nice in that space as well. And you'll see us doing more stuff in that place that, that play. >> Talk about your influence there in the community. You know, we, we've been talking the last couple of days about Ansible is nothing if not the power of the community, the collaboration within. Talk about being able to influence that and what that means to you personally as well as to Rockwell. >> Yeah, so open communities are big for us. We have, you know, obviously a customer advisory boards and things like that that we deal with but we also have an open community forum where people can share dialogues and share ideas. We have large events, we have a process solution users group events where we bring in, you know hundreds not thousands of engineering people to to talk to all of these problems that they're facing. And it's not a Rockwell event it's a, you know, community event, right. Where we actually are talking about, you know what industry problem people are seeing. And a lot of the IT OT convergence thing is really top of mind. A lot of people say no minds especially the cybersecurity content. >> What are some of the things that you heard the last couple of days, announcement wise? Obviously big news coming out today that excites you about the direction that Ansible's going and how it's responding to the community. >> Yeah, I think a lot of their feedback that they get and sitting a lot of these sessions, they get a lot of interesting feedback from their customer base. And reacting to that I think is very high on their priority list. And what I've been seeing here, you know, some of the AI stuff that they were showing on automatically, like defining some of the scripts for their code that intelligence behind a lot of that content was amazing. I see a lot of that moving forward. And we're heading the same direction at Rockwell as well with more AI in our company. >> The data's a big story too coming out of all the devices, analytics, great stuff. >> Yeah, I'm pulling that data up into the cloud space and trying to do something valuable with all that data. It's, you know, we've had big data for a long time. It's just figuring out analytics and how to actually act on that data and get it back into the control to do something with. >> It's all getting aside. My serious question on this is that, you know is it the year finally OT and IT converge? Seems like it's been trying for about a decade. >> Yeah, that's a tough one to answer. So I would say it's not there yet. I think there's still a lot of conflict in that space. You know, the OT guys still have a long history of that space, but as you see more retirement and more people phasing out of that and younger crowds coming in, you know the automation space is ripe for that kind of transition because coming out of college, you know jumping into automation isn't always the top of the notch. A lot of people want to go work at the big Amazons or wherever. >> A lot, a lot of stuff going on in space. It's pretty cool. A lot of physical, I've seen a lot more machine learning and physical devices in the industry we've been reporting on. It's interesting. I think it's close to a tipping point because we saw machine learning and the trivial apps like chat bots never really took off, yep. Just expert systems basically, but they're not really going the next level. So now they are, you're starting to see more, you know of wisdom projects, you know, different models being adopted. So I see AI now kind of kicking up similar to OT IT. >> Yeah, most definitely. You know, we have a lot of projects in that space like doing predictive analysis on, let's just say something simple like a pump, right? If you have pumps out there that are running for years and years, but you notice that there's a trend that on day 305 or whatever you know, a bearing starts to fail all the time. You know, that kind of analytics can start doing predictive maintenance content and start pushing out work orders in advance before the things fail because downtime costs millions of dollars for these maintenance. >> Downtime also incidents, right? So you never know, right? >> Exactly. Right, right. So it's good to have that safety net at least from a manufacturing perspective. >> Final question for me. What's the most exciting thing going on in your world right now if you had to kind of pick one thing that you're most jazzed up about? >> I have to say, you know, Rockwell's doing a big shift to cloud-based content and more big data numbers like we were just talking about for that AI. That complexity of what you can do with AI and the value that you can do to like just, you know if I can make quality of a product a half a percent better that's millions of dollars for my customer and I see us doing a lot of work in that space and moving that forward. That's big for me, I think. >> And what are some of that, my last question is what are some of the impacts that customers can expect from that? >> Yeah, so everything from downtime to product quality to increasing production rates and volumes of data that come out. You know, we do something called model predictive control that does, you know, very tight control on control loops to improve like just the general product quality with a lot of the big data numbers that are coming in on that. So you'll see us moving more in that space too to improve you know, product quality and then downtime. >> And really driving outcomes, business outcomes for your customers. David, thank you so much for joining us on the program, sharing what Rockwell Automation is doing. We appreciate your insights, your time and we want to keep watching to see what comes next. >> Sure. Glad to be here. It's great. Thank you very much. >> Our pleasure. For our guest, our John Furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You've watched theCUBE Live in Chicago, Ansible Fest 2022. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(soft music) >> Welcome back to Chicago guys and gals. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We have been covering Ansible Fest '22 for the last two days. This is our show wrap. We're going to leave you with some great insights into the things that we were able to dissect over the last two days. John, this has been an action packed two days. A lot of excitement, a lot of momentum. Good to be back in person. >> It's great to be back in person. It was the first time for you to do Ansible Fest. >> Yes. >> My first one was 2019 in person. That's the last time they had an event in person. So again, it's a very chill environment here, but it's content packed, great active loyal community and is growing. It's changing. Ansible now owned by Red Hat, and now Red Hat owned by IBM. Kind of see some game changing kind of movements here on the chess board, so to speak, in the industry. Ansible has always been a great product. It started in open source. It evolved configuration management configuring servers, networks. You know, really the nuts and bolts of IT. And became a fan favorite mainly because it was built by the fans and I think that never stopped. And I think you started to see an opportunity for Ansible to be not only just a, I won't say niche product or niche kind of use case to being the overall capabilities for large scale enterprise system architectures, system management. So it's very interesting. I mean I find it fascinating how, how it stays relevant and cool and continues to power through a massive shift >> A massive shift. They've done a great job though since the inception and through the acquisition of being still community first. You know, we talked a lot yesterday and today about helping organizations become automation first that Ansible has really stayed true to its roots in being community first, community driven and really that community flywheel was something that was very obvious the last couple of days. >> Yeah, I mean the community thing is is is their production system. I mean if you look at Red Hat, their open source, Ansible started open source, good that they're together. But what people may or may not know about Ansible is that they build their product from the community. So the community actually makes the suggestions. Ansible's just in listening modes. So when you have a system that's that efficient where you have direct working backwards from the customer like that, it's very efficient. Now, as a product manager you might want to worry about scope creep, but at the end of the day they do a good job of democratizing that process. So again, very strong product production system with open source, very relevant, solves the right problems. But this year the big story to me is the cultural shift of Ansible's relevance. And I think with multicloud on the horizon, operations is the new kind of developer kind of ground. DevOps has been around for a while. That's now shifted up to the developer themselves, the cloud native developer. But at cloud scale and hybrid computing, it's about the operations. It's about the data and the security. All of it's about the data. So to me there's a new ops configuration operating model that you're seeing people use, SRE and DevOps. That's the new culture, and the persona's changing. The operator of a large scale enterprise is going to be a lot different than it was past five, 10 years. So major cultural shift, and I think this community's going to step up to that position and fill that role. >> They seem to be having a lot of success meeting people where they are, meeting the demographics, delivering on how their community wants to work, how they want to collaborate. But yesterday you talked about operations. We talked a lot about Ops as code. Talk about what does that mean from your perspective, and what did you hear from our guests on the program with respect that being viable? >> Well great, that's a great point. Ops as code is the kind of their next layer of progression. Infrastructure is code. Configuration is code. Operations is code. To me that means running the company as software. So software influencing how operators, usually hardware in the past. Now it's infrastructure and software going to run things. So ops as code's, the next progression in how people are going to manage it. And I think most people think of that as enterprises get larger, when they hear words like SRE, which stands for Site Reliable Engineer. That came out of Google, and Google had all these servers that ran the search engine and at scale. And so one person managed boatload of servers and that was efficient. It was like a multiple 10x engineer, they used to call it. So that that was unique to Google but not everyone's Google. So it became language or parlance for someone who's running infrastructure but not everyone's that scale. So scale is a big issue. Ops as code is about scale and having that program ability as an operator. That's what Ops as code is. And that to me is a sign of where the scale meets the automation. Large scale is hard to do. Automating at large scale is even harder. So that's where Ansible fits in with their new automation platform. And you're seeing new things like signing code, making sure it's trusted and verified. So that's the software supply chain issue. So they're getting into the world where software, open source, automation are all happening at scale. So to me that's a huge concept of Ops as code. It's going to be very relevant, kind of the next gen positioning. >> Let's switch gears and talk about the partner ecosystem. We had Stefanie Chiras on yesterday, one of our longtime theCUBE alumni, talking about what they're doing with AWS in the marketplace. What was your take on that, and what's the "what's in it for me" for both Red Hat, Ansible and AWS? >> Yeah, so the big news on the automation platform was one. The other big news I thought was really, I won't say watered down, but it seems small but it's not. It's the Amazon Web Services relationship with Red Hat, now Ansible, where Ansible's now a product in AWS's marketplace. AWS marketplace is kind of hanging around. It's a catalog right now. It's not the most advanced technical system in the world, and it does over 2 billion plus revenue transactions. So even if it's just sitting there as a large marketplace, that's already doing massive amounts of disruption in the procurement, how software is bought. So we interviewed them in the past, and they're innovating on that. They're going to make that a real great platform. But the fact that Ansible's in the marketplace means that their sales are going to go up, number one. Number two, that means customers can consume it simply by clicking a button on their Amazon bill. That means they don't have to do anything. It's like getting a PO for free. It's like, hey, I'm going to buy Ansible, click, click, click. And then by the way, draw that down from their commitment to AWS. So that means Amazon's going into business with Ansible, and that is a huge revenue thing for Ansible, but also an operational efficiency thing that gives them more of an advantage over the competition. >> Talk what's in it for me as a customer. At Red Hat Summit a few months ago they announced similar partnership with Azure. Now we're talking about AWS. Customers are living in this hybrid cloud world, often by default. We're going to see that proliferate. What do you think this means for customers in terms of being able to- >> In the marketplace deal or Ansible? >> Yeah, the marketplace deal, but also what Red Hat and Ansible are doing with the hyperscalers to enable customers to live successfully in the hyper hybrid cloud world. >> It's just in the roots of the company. They give them the choice to consume the product on clouds that they like. So we're seeing a lot of clients that have standardized on AWS with their dev teams but also have productivity software on Azure. So you have the large enterprises, they sit on both clouds. So you know, Ansible, the customer wants to use Ansible anyway, they want that to happen. So it's a natural thing for them to work anywhere. I call that the Switzerland strategy. They'll play with all the clouds. Even though the clouds are fighting against each other, and they have to to differentiate, there's still going to be some common services. I think Ansible fits this shim layer between clouds but also a bolt on. Now that's a really a double win for them. They can bolt on to the cloud, Azure and bolt on to AWS and Google, and also be a shim layer technically in clouds as well. So there's two technical advantages to that strategy >> Can Ansible be a facilitator of hybrid cloud infrastructure for organizations, or a catalyst? >> I think it's going to be a gateway on ramp or gateway to multicloud or supercloud, as we call it, because Ansible's in that configuration layer. So you know, it's interesting to hear the IBM research story, which we're going to get to in a second around how they're doing the AI for Ansible with that wisdom project. But the idea of configuring stuff on the fly is really a concept that's needed for multicloud 'Cause programs don't want to have to configure anything. (he laughs) So standing up an application to run on Azure that's on AWS that spans both clouds, you're going to need to have that automation, and I think this is an opportunity whether they can get it or not, we'll see. I think Red Hat is probably angling on that hard, and I can see them kind of going there and some of the commentary kind of connects the dots for that. >> Let's dig into some of news that came out today. You just alluded to this. IBM research, we had on with Red Hat. Talk about what they call project wisdom, the value in that, what it also means for for Red Hat and IBM working together very synergistically. >> I mean, I think the project wisdom is an interesting dynamic because you got the confluence of the organic community of Ansible partnering with a research institution of IBM research. And I think that combination of practitioners and research groups is going to map itself out to academic and then you're going to see this kind of collaboration going forward. So I think it's a very nuanced story, but the impact to me is very clear that this is the new power brokers in the tech industry, because researchers have a lot of muscle in terms of deep research in the academic area, and the practitioners are the ones who are actually doing it. So when you bring those two forces together, that pretty much trumps any kind of standards bodies or anything else. So I think that's a huge signaling benefit to Ansible and Red Hat. I think that's an influence of Red Hat being bought by IBM. But the project itself is really amazing. It's taking AI and bringing it to Ansible, so you can do automated configurations. So for people who don't know how to code they can actually just automate stuff and know the process. I don't need to be a coder, I can just use the AI to do that. That's a low code, no code dynamic. That kind of helps with skill gaps, because I need to hire someone to do that. Today if I want to automate something, and I don't know how to code, I've got to get someone who codes. Here I can just do it and automate it. So if that continues to progress the way they want it to, that could literally be a game changer, 'cause now you have software configuring machines and that's pretty badass in my opinion. So that thought that was pretty cool. And again it's just an evolution of how AI is becoming more relevant. And I think it's directionally correct, and we'll see how it goes. >> And they also talked about we're nearing an inflection point in AI. You agree? >> Yeah I think AI is at an inflection point because it just falls short on the scale side. You see it with chatbots, NLP. You see what Amazon's doing. They're building these models. I think we're one step away from model scaling. I think the building the models is going to be one of these things where you're going to start to see marketplace and models and you start to composability of AI. That's where it's going to get very interesting to see which cloud is the best AI scale. So I think AI at scale's coming, and that's going to be something to watch really closely. >> Something exciting. Another thing that was big news today was the event driven Ansible. Talk about that, and that's something they've been working on in conjunction with the community for quite a while. They were very proud of that release and what that's going to enable organizations to do. >> Well I think that's more meat on the bone on the AI side 'cause in the big trend right now is MLAI ops. You hear that a lot. Oh, data ops or AI ops. What event driven automation does is allows you to take things that are going on in your world, infrastructure, triggers, alarms, notifications, data pipelining flows, things that go on in the plumbing of infrastructure. are being monitored and observed. So when events happen they trigger events. You want to stream something, you send a trigger and things happen. So these are called events. Events are wide ranging number of events. Kafka streaming for data. You got anything that produces data is an event. So harnessing that data into a pipeline is huge. So doing that at scale, that's where I think that product's a home run, and I think that's going to be a very valuable product, 'cause once you understand what the event triggers are, you then can automate that, and no humans involved. So that will save a lot of time for people in the the higher pay grade of MLAI ops automate some of that low level plumbing. They move their skill set to something more valuable or more impactful. >> And we talked about, speaking of impact, we talked about a lot of the business impact that organizations across industries are going to be able to likely achieve by using that. >> Yeah, I mean I think that you're going to see the community fill the gap on that. I mean the big part about all this is that their community builds the product and they have the the playbooks and they're shareable and they're reusable. So we produce content as a media company. They'd talk about content as is playbooks and documentation for people to use. So reuse and and reusing these playbooks is a huge part of it. So as they build up these catalogs and these playbooks and rules, it gets better by the community. So it's going to be interesting to see the adoption. That's going to be a big tell sign for what's going to happen. >> Yep, we get definitely are going to be watching that space. And the last thing, we got to talk to a couple of customers. We talked to Wells Fargo who says "We are a tech company that does banking," which I loved. We got to talk with Rockwell Automation. What are some of your takeaways from how the customers are leveraging Ansible and the technology to drive their businesses forward to meet demanding customers where they are? >> I think you're seeing the script flipping a little bit here, where the folks that used to use Ansible for configuration are flipping to be on the front edge of the innovation strategy where what process to automate is going to drive the profitability and scale. Cause you're talking about things like skill gaps, workflows. These are business constructs and people These are assets so they have economic value. So before it was just, IT serve the business, configure some servers, do some stuff. When you start getting into automation where you have expertise around what this means, that's economic value. So I think you're going to see the personas change significantly in this community where they're on the front lines, kind of like developers are. That's why ops as code is to me a developer kind of vibe. That's going to completely change how operations runs in IT. And I think that's going to be a very interesting cultural shift. And some will make it, some won't. That's going to be a big thing. Some people say, I'm going to retire. I'm old school storage server person, or no, I'm the new guard. I'm going to be the new team. I'm going be on the right side of history here. So they're clearly going down that right path in my opinion. >> What's your overall summary in the last minute of what this event delivered the last couple of days in terms of really talking about the transformation of enterprises and industries through automation? >> I think the big takeaway from me in listening and reading the tea leaves was the Ansible company and staff and the community together. It was really a call for arms. Like, hey, we've had it right from the beginning. We're on the right wave and the wave's getting bigger. So expand your scope, uplevel your skills. They're on the right side of history. And I think the message was engage more. Bring more people in because it is open source, and if they are on that track, you're going to see more of hey, we got it right, let's continue. So they got platform release. They got the key products coming out after years of work. So you know, they're doing their work. And the message I heard was, it's bigger than we thought. So I think that's interesting. We'll see what that means. We're going to unpack that after the event in series of showcases. But yeah, it was very positive, I thought. Very positive. >> Yeah, I think there was definitely some surprises in there for them. John, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure co-hosting with you the last couple of days, really uncovering what Ansible is doing, what they're enabling customers in every industry to achieve. >> Been fun. >> Yes. All right for my co-host, John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE's coverage of Ansible Fest 2022 live from Chicago. We hope you take good care and we'll see you soon.

>>Hey guys. Welcome back to the Cubes coverage of Ansible Fast 2022. This is day two of our wall to wall coverage. Lisa Martin here with John Ferer. John, we're seeing this world where companies are saying if we can't automate it, we need to, The automation market is transforming. There's been a lot of buzz about that. A lot of technical chops here at Ansible Fest. >>Yeah, I mean, we've got a great guest here coming on Cuba alumni, Dean Newman, future room. He travels every event he's got. He's got his nose to the grindstone ear to the ground. Great analysis. I mean, we're gonna get into why it's important. How does Ansible fit into the big picture? It's really gonna be a great segment. The >>Board do it well, John just did my job for me about, I'll introduce him again. Daniel Newman, one of our alumni is Back Principal Analyst at Future and Research. Great to have you back on the cube. >>Yeah, it's good to join you. Excited to be back in Chicago. I don't know if you guys knew this, but for 40 years, this was my hometown. Now I don't necessarily brag about that anymore. I'm, I live in Austin now. I'm a proud Texan, but I did grow up here actually out in the west suburbs. I got off the plane, I felt the cold air, and I almost turned around and said, Does this thing go back? Yeah. Cause I'm, I've, I've grown thin skin. It did not take me long. I, I like the warm, Come on, >>I'm the saying, I'm from California and I got off the plane Monday. I went, Whoa, I need a coat. And I was in Miami a week ago and it was 85. >>Oh goodness. >>Crazy. So you just flew in. Talk about what's going on, your take on, on Ansible. We've talked a lot with the community, with partners, with customers, a lot of momentum. The flywheel of the community is going around and round and round. What are some of your perspectives that you see? >>Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's you know, I'm gonna take a quick step back. We're entering an era where companies are gonna have to figure out how to do more with less. Okay? We've got exponential data growth, we've got more architectural complexity than ever before. Companies are trying to discern how to deal with many different environments. And just at a macro level, Red Hat is one of the companies that is almost certainly gonna be part of this multi-cloud hybrid cloud era. So that should initially give a lot of confidence to the buying group that are looking at how to automate their environments. You're automating workflows, but really with, with Ansible, we're focused on automating it, automating the network. So as companies are kind of dig out, we're entering this recessionary period, Okay, we're gonna call it what it is. The first thing that they're gonna look at is how do we tech our way out of it? >>I had a wonderful one-on-one conversation with ServiceNow ceo, Bill McDermott, and we saw ServiceNow was in focus this morning in the initial opening session. This is the integration, right? Ansible integrating with ServiceNow. What we need to see is infrastructure automation, layers and applications working in concert to basically enable enterprises to be up and running all the time. Let's first fix the problems that are most common. Let's, let's automate 'em, let's script them. And then at some point, let's have them self resolving, which we saw at the end with Project Wisdom. So as I see it, automation is that layer that enterprises, boards, technologists, all can agree upon are basically here's something that can make our business more efficient, more profitable, and it's gonna deal with this short term downturn in a way that tech is actually gonna be the answer. Just like Bill and I said, let's tech our way out of it. >>If you look at the Red Hat being bought by ibm, you see Project Wisdom Project, not a product, it's a project. Project Wisdom is the confluence of research and practitioners kind of coming together with ai. So bringing AI power to the Ansible is interesting. Red Hat, Linux, Rel OpenShift, I mean, Red Hat's kind of position, isn't it? Kind of be in that right spot where a puck might be coming maybe. I mean, what do you think? >>Yeah, as analysts, we're really good at predicting the, the recent past. It's a joke I always like to make, but Red Hat's been building toward the future. I think for some time. Project Wisdom, first of all, I was very encouraged with it. One of the things that many people in the market probably have commented on is how close is IBM in Red Hat? Now, again, it's a $34 billion acquisition that was made, but boy, the cultures of these two companies couldn't be more different. And of course, Red Hat kind of carries this, this sort of middle ground layer where they provide a lot of value in services to companies that maybe don't use IBM at, at, for the public cloud especially. This was a great indication of how you can take the power of IBM's research, which of course has some of the world's most prolific data scientists, engineers, building things for the future. >>You know, you see things like yesterday they launched a, you know, an AI solution. You know, they're building chips, semiconductors, and technologies that are gonna power the future. They're building quantum. Long story short, they have these really brilliant technologists here that could be adding value to Red Hat. And I don't know that the, the world has fully been able to appreciate that. So when, when they got on stage and they kind of say, Here's how IBM is gonna help power the next generation, I was immediately very encouraged by the fact that the two companies are starting to show signs of how they can collaborate to offer value to their customers. Because of course, as John kind of started off with, his question is, they've kind of been where the puck is going. Open source, Linux hybrid cloud, This is the future. In the future. Every company's multi-cloud. And I said in a one-on-one meeting this morning, every company is going to probably have workloads on every cloud, especially large enterprises. >>Yeah. And I think that the secret's gonna be how do you make that evolve? And one of the things that's coming out of the industry over the years, and looking back as historians, we would say, gotta have standards. Well, with cloud, now people standards might slow things down. So you're gonna start to figure out how does the community and the developers are thinking it'll be the canary in the coal mine. And I'd love to get your reaction on that, because we got Cuban next week. You're seeing people kind of align and try to win the developers, which, you know, I always laugh cuz like, you don't wanna win, you want, you want them on your team, but you don't wanna win them. It's like a, it's like, so developers will decide, >>Well, I, I think what's happening is there are multiple forces that are driving product adoption. And John, getting the developers to support the utilization and adoption of any sort of stack goes a long way. We've seen how sticky it can be, how sticky it is with many of the public cloud pro providers, how sticky it is with certain applications. And it's gonna be sticky here in these interim layers like open source automation. And Red Hat does have a very compelling developer ecosystem. I mean, if you sat in the keynote this morning, I said, you know, if you're not a developer, some of this stuff would've been fairly difficult to understand. But as a developer you saw them laughing at jokes because, you know, what was it the whole part about, you know, it didn't actually, the ping wasn't a success, right? And everybody started laughing and you know, I, I was sitting next to someone who wasn't technical and, and you know, she kinda goes, What, what was so funny? >>I'm like, well, he said it worked. Do you see that? It said zero data trans or whatever that was. So, but if I may just really quickly, one, one other thing I did wanna say about Project Wisdom, John, that the low code and no code to the full stack developer is a continuum that every technology company is gonna have to think deeply about as we go to the future. Because the people that tend to know the process that needs to be automated tend to not be able to code it. And so we've seen every automation company on the planet sort of figuring out and how to address this low code, no code environment. I think the power of this partnership between IBM Research and Red Hat is that they have an incredibly deep bench of capabilities to do things like, like self-training. Okay, you've got so much data, such significant size models and accuracy is a problem, but we need systems that can self teach. They need to be able self-teach, self learn, self-heal so that we can actually get to the crux of what automation is supposed to do for us. And that's supposed to take the mundane out and enable those humans that know how to code to work on the really difficult and hard stuff because the automation's not gonna replace any of that stuff anytime soon. >>So where do you think looking at, at the partnership and the evolution of it between IBM research and Red Hat, and you're saying, you know, they're, they're, they're finally getting this synergy together. How is it gonna affect the future of automation and how is it poised to give them a competitive advantage in the market? >>Yeah, I think the future or the, the competitive space is that, that is, is ecosystems and integration. So yesterday you heard, you know, Red Hat Ansible focusing on a partnership with aws. You know, this week I was at Oracle Cloud world and they're talking about running their database in aws. And, and so I'm kind of going around to get to the answer to your question, but I think collaboration is sort of the future of growth and innovation. You need multiple companies working towards the same goal to put gobs of resources, that's the technical term, gobs of resources towards doing really hard things. And so Ansible has been very successful in automating and securing and focusing on very certain specific workloads that need to be automated, but we need more and there's gonna be more data created. The proliferation, especially the edge. So you saw all this stuff about Rockwell, How do you really automate the edge at scale? You need large models that are able to look and consume a ton of data that are gonna be continuously learning, and then eventually they're gonna be able to deliver value to these companies at scale. IBM plus Red Hat have really great resources to drive this kind of automation. Having said that, I see those partnerships with aws, with Microsoft, with ibm, with ServiceNow. It's not one player coming to the table. It's a lot of players. They >>Gotta be Switzerland. I mean they have the Switzerland. I mean, but the thing about the Amazon deal is like that marketplace integration essentially puts Ansible once a client's in on, on marketplace and you get the central on the same bill. I mean, that's gonna be a money maker for Ansible. I >>Couldn't agree more, John. I think being part of these public cloud marketplaces is gonna be so critical and having Ansible land and of course AWS largest public cloud by volume, largest marketplace today. And my opinion is that partnership will be extensible to the other public clouds over time. That just makes sense. And so you start, you know, I think we've learned this, John, you've done enough of these interviews that, you know, you start with the biggest, with the highest distribution and probability rates, which in this case right now is aws, but it'll land on in Azure, it'll land in Google and it'll continue to, to grow. And that kind of adoption, streamlining make it consumption more consumable. That's >>Always, I think, Red Hat and Ansible, you nailed it on that whole point about multicloud, because what happens then is why would I want to alienate a marketplace audience to use my product when it could span multiple environments, right? So you saw, you heard that Stephanie yesterday talk about they, they didn't say multiple clouds, multiple environments. And I think that is where I think I see this layer coming in because some companies just have to work on all clouds. That's the way it has to be. Why wouldn't you? >>Yeah. Well every, every company will probably end up with some workloads in every cloud. I just think that is the fate. Whether it's how we consume our SaaS, which a lot of people don't think about, but it always tends to be running on another hyperscale public cloud. Most companies tend to be consuming some workloads from every cloud. It's not always direct. So they might have a single control plane that they tend to lead the way with, but that is only gonna continue to change. And every public cloud company seems to be working on figuring out what their niche is. What is the one thing that sort of drives whether, you know, it is, you know, traditional, we know the commoditization of traditional storage network compute. So now you're seeing things like ai, things like automation, things like the edge collaboration tools, software being put into the, to the forefront because it's a different consumption model, it's a different margin and economic model. And then of course it gives competitive advantages. And we've seen that, you know, I came back from Google Cloud next and at Google Cloud next, you know, you can see they're leaning into the data AI cloud. I mean, that is their focus, like data ai. This is how we get people to come in and start using Google, who in most cases, they're probably using AWS or Microsoft today. >>It's a great specialty cloud right there. That's a big use case. I can run data on Google and run something on aws. >>And then of course you've got all kinds of, and this is a little off topic, but you got sovereignty, compliance, regulatory that tends to drive different clouds over, you know, global clouds like Tencent and Alibaba. You know, if your workloads are in China, >>Well, this comes back down at least to the whole complexity issue. I mean, it has to get complex before it gets easier. And I think that's what we're seeing companies opportunities like Ansible to be like, Okay, tame, tame the complexity. >>Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree with you. I mean, look, when I was watching the demonstrations today, my take is there's so many kind of simple, repeatable and mundane tasks in everyday life that enterprises need to, to automate. Do that first, you know? Then the second thing is working on how do you create self-healing, self-teaching, self-learning, You know, and, and I realize I'm a little broken of a broken record at this, but these are those first things to fix. You know, I know we want to jump to the future where we automate every task and we have multi-term conversational AI that is booking our calendars and driving our cars for us. But in the first place, we just need to say, Hey, the network's down. Like, let's make sure that we can quickly get access back to that network again. Let's make sure that we're able to reach our different zones and locations. Let's make sure that robotic arm is continually doing the thing it's supposed to be doing on the schedule that it's been committed to. That's first. And then we can get to some of these really intensive deep metaverse state of automation that we talk about. Self-learning, data replication, synthetic data. I'm just gonna throw terms around. So I sound super smart. >>In your customer conversations though, from an looking at the automation journey, are you finding most of them, or some percentage is, is wanting to go directly into those really complex projects rather than starting with the basics? >>I don't know that you're, you're finding that the customers want to do that? I think it's the architecture that often ends up being a problem is we as, as the vendor side, will tend to talk about the most complex problems that they're able to solve before companies have really started solving the, the immediate problems that are before them. You know, it's, we talk about, you know, the metaphor of the cloud is a great one, but we talk about the cloud, like it's ubiquitous. Yeah. But less than 30% of our workloads are in the public cloud. Automation is still in very early days and in many industries it's fairly nascent. And doing things like self-healing networks is still something that hasn't even been able to be deployed on an enterprise-wide basis, let alone at the industrial layer. Maybe at the company's on manufacturing PLAs or in oil fields. Like these are places that have difficult to reach infrastructure that needs to be running all the time. We need to build systems and leverage the power of automation to keep that stuff up and running. That's, that's just business value, which by the way is what makes the world go running. Yeah. Awesome. >>A lot of customers and users are struggling to find what's the value in automating certain process, What's the ROI in it? How do you help them get there so that they understand how to start, but truly to make it a journey that is a success. >>ROI tends to be a little bit nebulous. It's one of those things I think a lot of analysts do. Things like TCO analysis Yeah. Is an ROI analysis. I think the businesses actually tend to know what the ROI is gonna be because they can basically look at something like, you know, when you have an msa, here's the downtime, right? Business can typically tell you, you know, I guarantee you Amazon could say, Look for every second of downtime, this is how much commerce it costs us. Yeah. A company can generally say, if it was, you know, we had the energy, the windmills company, like they could say every minute that windmill isn't running, we're creating, you know, X amount less energy. So there's a, there's a time value proposition that companies can determine. Now the question is, is about the deployment. You know, we, I've seen it more nascent, like cybersecurity can tend to be nascent. >>Like what does a breach cost us? Well there's, you know, specific costs of actually getting the breach cured or paying for the cybersecurity services. And then there's the actual, you know, ephemeral costs of brand damage and of risks and customer, you know, negative customer sentiment that potentially comes out of it. With automation, I think it's actually pretty well understood. They can look at, hey, if we can do this many more cycles, if we can keep our uptime at this rate, if we can reduce specific workforce, and I'm always very careful about this because I don't believe automation is about replacement or displacement, but I do think it is about up-leveling and it is about helping people work on things that are complex problems that machines can't solve. I mean, said that if you don't need to put as many bodies on something that can be immediately returned to the organization's bottom line, or those resources can be used for something more innovative. So all those things are pretty well understood. Getting the automation to full deployment at scale, though, I think what often, it's not that roi, it's the timeline that gets misunderstood. Like all it projects, they tend to take longer. And even when things are made really easy, like with what Project Wisdom is trying to do, semantically enable through low code, no code and the ability to get more accuracy, it just never tends to happen quite as fast. So, but that's not an automation problem, That's just the crux of it. >>Okay. What are some of the, the next things on your plate? You're quite a, a busy guy. We, you, you were at Google, you were at Oracle, you're here today. What are some of the next things that we can expect from Daniel Newman? >>Oh boy, I moved Really, I do move really quickly and thank you for that. Well, I'm very excited. I'm taking a couple of work personal days. I don't know if you're a fan, but F1 is this weekend. I'm the US Grand Prix. Oh, you're gonna Austin. So I will be, I live in Austin. Oh. So I will be in Austin. I will be at the Grand Prix. It is work because it, you know, I'm going with a number of our clients that have, have sponsorships there. So I'll be spending time figuring out how the data that comes off of these really fun cars is meaningfully gonna change the world. I'll actually be talking to Splunk CEO at the, at the race on Saturday morning. But yeah, I got a lot of great things. I got a, a conversation coming up with the CEO of Twilio next week. We got a huge week of earnings ahead and so I do a lot of work on that. So I'll be on Bloomberg next week with Emily Chang talking about Microsoft and Google. Love talking to Emily, but just as much love being here on, on the queue with you >>Guys. Well we like to hear that. Who you're rooting for F one's your favorite driver. I, >>I, I like Lando. Do you? I'm Norris. I know it's not necessarily a fan favorite, but I'm a bit of a McLaren guy. I mean obviously I have clients with Oracle and Red Bull with Ball Common Ferrari. I've got Cly Splunk and so I have clients in all. So I'm cheering for all of 'em. And on Sunday I'm actually gonna be in the Williams Paddock. So I don't, I don't know if that's gonna gimme me a chance to really root for anything, but I'm always, always a big fan of the underdog. So maybe Latifi. >>There you go. And the data that comes off the how many central unbeliev, the car, it's crazy's. Such a scientific sport. Believable. >>We could have Christian, I was with Christian Horner yesterday, the team principal from Reside. Oh yeah, yeah. He was at the Oracle event and we did a q and a with him and with the CMO of, it's so much fun. F1 has been unbelievable to watch the momentum and what a great, you know, transitional conversation to to, to CX and automation of experiences for fans as the fan has grown by hundreds of percent. But just to circle back full way, I was very encouraged with what I saw today. Red Hat, Ansible, IBM Strong partnership. I like what they're doing in their expanded ecosystem. And automation, by the way, is gonna be one of the most robust investment areas over the next few years, even as other parts of tech continue to struggle that in cyber security. >>You heard it here. First guys, investment in automation and cyber security straight from two analysts. I got to sit between. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, Ansible Fest 22. John and I will be back after a short break. SO'S stick around.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Chicago. The Cube is excited to be live on day two of Ansible Fest, 2022. Lisa Martin and John Fur. You're here having some great conversations, a lot of cube alumni, a lot of wisdom from the Ansible community coming at you on this program this week. You know, John, we've been, we've been hearing stories about the power and the capabilities and the collective wisdom of the Ansible community. You can feel it here. Yeah, there's no doubt about that. It's, Ansible is nothing, as Stephanie Chair said yesterday, if not a community and the significant contributions that it makes over and over again, or it's fuel. >>I mean the power of the community is what drives Ansible is gonna drive the future of, I think, cloud in our next generation modern application environment. And it's collective intelligence. It's a production system at the end of the day. And I think these guys have harnessed it. So it should be a really great segment to talk about all the contributor work that's been done. So I'm looking forward to it. >>We've got two great alumni here to talk about the contributor work, how you can get involved. Please welcome back to the cube. Carol Chen, principal community architect at Red Hat. Adam Miller joins us as well, fresh from the keynote stage senior principal software engineer at Red Hat. Guys, great to have you on the cube. Great to be here. Yeah, thank you. So we, we talked, we enjoyed your keynotes, Adam, and what you were talking about on stage, the Ansible contributor summit. That's, you guys have been doing what, this is the seven you've had seven so far in just a couple of years. >>Well, we had seven virtual contributor summits. >>Seven virtual. This is the first Monday was the first in person in. >>First in person since the pandemic and actually the 15th contributor summit overall >>15th overall. Talk about the contributor summits, what the contributors are able to do and the influence that it's having on Ansible Red Hat and what people are able to do with cloud. At the Edge automation. Yeah. >>So our community contributors have always had ways to influence and contribute to the project. But the contributor Summit is really a place where we can get people together, preferably in the same place so that we can, you know, have a really great dynamic conversations and interactions. But we also want to make sure that we don't leave out people who have been constantly online joining us. So this year we are so happy to be here in Chicago in person. We've had about 60 to 70 here joining us. And at first I thought maybe we'll have one third of the attendees joining online because about 30 to 40 people signed up to join online. But in the end, we have more than 100 per people watching our live stream. So that's more than half of the attendees overall, were joining us online. So that really shows where, you know, the contributors are interested in participating for >>Develop. Right. Yeah, it's been, it's been interesting. It's been since 2019, since the in-person Ansible Fest in Atlanta. Now we're in Chicago, we had the pandemic. Couple interesting observations from our side that I wanna get your reaction to Adam Carol. And that is one Ansible's relevance has grown significantly since then. Just from a cloud growth standpoint, developer open source standpoint, and how people work and collaborate has changed. So your contributor based in your community is getting more powerful in scope, in my opinion. Like in, as they become, have the keys to the kingdom in the, in their respective worlds as it gets bigger and larger. So the personas are changing, the makeup of the community's changing and also how you guys collaborate is changing. Can you share your, what's going on with those two dynamics? Cause I think that power dynamic is, is looking really good. How are you guys handling >>That? Yeah, so I mean, I, I had the opportunity to represent the community on stage yesterday as part of the keynote and talk to this point specifically is one of the things that we've seen is the project has had the opportunity to kind of grow and evolve. There's been certain elements that have had to kind of decompose from a technology perspective. We actually had to kind of break it apart and change the architecture a little bit and move things into what are called Ansible collections, which, you know, folks here are very familiar with No One Love. And we've seen a lot of community work in the form of working groups coalesce around those organically. However, they've done so in kind of different ways. They, they pick tools and collaboration platforms that are popular to their subject matter expertise audience and things like that. So we find ourselves in a place where kind of the, the community itself had more or less segmented naturally in a way. And we needed to find ways to, you know, kind of ke that >>Fragmentation by demographics or by expertise or both as >>A Mostly, mostly expertise. Yeah. And so there was a open source technology called Matrix. It is a open source, standardized, federated messaging platform that we're able to use to start to bridge back some of those communities that have kind of broken off and, and made their their own home elsewhere on the internet. So now we're able to, for example, the right, the docs organization, they had a, a group of people who was very interested in contributing to the Ansible documentation, but they'd already self-organized on Discord. And what was interesting there is the existing team for the Ansible documentation, they were already on internet Relay Chat, also known as irc. And Matrix allowed us to actually bring those two together and bridge that into the other matrix cha chat channels that we had. So now we're able to have people from all over the world in different areas and different platforms, coalesce and, and cross. It's like a festival cross pollinate. Yeah. >>And you're meeting the contributors exactly where they are and where they want to be, where they're comfortable. >>Yes. Yeah, we always say we, we reach out to where they are. So, >>And, and, and much in the way that Ansible has the capability to reach out to things in their own way, Right. And allow that subject matter expertise to, you know, cause the technology has the potential and possibility and capability to talk to anything over any protocol. We're able to do, you know, kind of the same thing with Matrix, allowing us to bridge into any chat platform that it has support for bridging and, and we're able to bring a lot of people >>Together. Yeah. And how's that, how's the feedback been on that so far? >>I, I think it has been very positive. For example, I want to highlight that the technical writers that we have contributing via Discord is actually a group from Nigeria. And Dave also participated in the contributor summit online virtually joining us in, in, you know, on the matrix platform. So that, that bridge that really helps to bring together people from different geographical regions and also different topics and arenas like that. >>So what were some of the outcomes of the contributor summit? The, the first in person in a while, great. That you guys were able to do seven virtually during the pandemic. That's hard. It's hard to get people together. You, there's so much greatness and innovation that comes when we're all together in person that just can't replicate by video. You can do a lot. Right. But talk about some of the outcomes from Monday. What were some of the feedback? What were some of the contributions that you think are really going to impact the community? >>I think for a lot of us, myself included, the fact that we are in person and meeting people face to face, it helps to really build the connections. And when we do talk about contribution, the connection is so important that you understand, well this person a little bit about their background, what they've done for the SPO project and or just generally what, what they're interested in that builds the rapport and connection that helps, you know, further, further collaboration in the future. Because maybe on that day we did not have any, you know, co contributions or anything, but the fact that we had a chance to sit together in the same place to discuss things and share new ideas, roadmaps is really the, the kind of a big step to the future for our community. Yes, >>Yes. And in a lot of ways we often online the project has various elements that are able to function asynchronously. So we work very well globally across many time zones. And now we were able to get a lot of people in the same place at the same time, synchronously in the same time zone. And then we had breakout sessions where the subject matter, you know, working groups were able to kind of go and focus on things that maybe have been taking a little while to discuss in, in that asynchronous form of communication and do it synchronously and, you know, be in the same room and work on things. It's been, it's been fantastic >>Developers there, like they, they take to asynchronous like fish to water. It's not a problem. But I do want to ask if there's any observations that you guys have had now that we're kind of coming out of that one way, but the pandemic, but the world's changed. It's hybrid, hybrid work environment, steady state. So we see that. Any observations on your end on what's new that you observed that people are gravitating to? Is there a pattern of styles is or same old self-governing, or what's new? What do you see that's coming out of the pandemic that might be a norm? >>I I think that even though people are excited to get back in person, there are, things have changed, like you said, and we have to be more aware of, there are people who think that not be in person, it's okay. And that's how they want to do it. And we have to make sure that they, they are included. So we, we did want to make a high priority for online participation in this event. And like I said, even though only 4 30, 40 people signed up to join us online initially, so that it was what we were expecting, but in the end, more than 100 people were watching us and, and joining participation in >>Actually on demand consumption be good too, >>Right? Yeah. So, you know, I think going forward that is probably the trend. And as, as much as we, we love being in person, we, we want this to continue that we, we take care of people who are, has been constantly participating online and contributing you >>Meaning again, meaning folks where they are, but also allowing the, the, those members that want to get together to, to collaborate in person. I can only imagine the innovation that's gonna come even from having part of the back, Right. >>And, and not to continue to harp on the matrix point, but it, it's been very cool because Matrix has the ability to do live video sessions using open source another to open source technology called jy. So we're able to actually use the same place that we normally find ourselves, you know, congregating and collaborating for the project itself in an asynchronous and, you know, somewhat synchronous way to also host these types of things that are, are now hybrid that used to be, you know, all one way or all the other. Yeah. And it's been, it's >>Been incredible. Integration is, the integration is have been fascinating to watch how you guys do that. And also, you know, with q we've been virtual too. It's like, it's like people don't want another microsite, but they want a more of a festival vibe, a hub, right? Like a place to kind of check in and have choice, not get absolutely jammed into a, you know, forum or, you know, or whatever. Hey, if you wanna be on Discord, be on Discord, right? Why >>Not? And we still, you know, we do still have our asynchronous forms of >>Work through >>Our get GitHub. We have our projects, we have our issues, we have our, you know, wiki, we have various elements there that everybody can continue to collaborate on. And it's all been, it's all been very good. >>Speaking of festivals, octoberfest that's going on, not to be confused with Octoberfest, that was last month. Talk about how the Ansible project and the Ansible community is involved in Octoberfest. Give us the dates, Carol. So >>YesTo Fest is a annual thing in October. So October Octoberfest, I think it's organized by Digital Ocean for the past eight or nine years. And it's really a, a way to kind of encourage people to contribute to open source projects. So it's not anal specific, but we as an Ansible project encourage people to take this opportunity to, you know, a lot of them doing their first contributions during this event. And when, when we first announced, we're participating in Octoberfest within the first four days of October, which is over a weekend actually. We've had 24 contributions, it, 24 issues fixed, which is like amazing, like, you know, just the interest and the, the momentum that we had. And so far until I just checked with my teammates this morning that we've had about 35 contributions so far during the month, which is, and I'm sorry, I forgot to mention this is only for Ansible documentation. So yeah, specifically. And, and that's also one thing we want to highlight, that contributions don't just come in code in, you know, kind of software side, but really there's many ways to contribute and documentation is such a, a great way for first time users, first time contributors to get involved. So it's really amazing to see these contributions from all over the world. And also partly thanks to the technical writers in Nigeria kind of promoting and sharing this initiative. And it's just great to see the, the results from that. Can >>You double click on the different ways of contribution? You mentioned a couple documentation being one, code being the other, but what is the breadth of opportunities that the contributors have to contribute to the project? >>Oh, there's, there's so many. So I actually take care more of outreach efforts in the community. So I helped to organize events and meetups from around the world. And now that we're slowly coming out of the pandemic, I've seen more and more in person meetups. I was just talking to someone from Minneapolis, they're trying to get, get people back together again. They have people in Singapore, in Netherlands from pretty much, you know, all corners of the globe wanting to form not just for the Ansible project, but the local kind of connection with the re people in the region, sometimes in their own language, in their local languages to really work together on the project and just, >>You know, you to create a global Yeah. Network, right? I mean it's like Ansible Global. >>Exactly. >>Create local subnets not to get all networking, >>Right? >>Yeah. >>Yeah. One, one quick thing I want to touch on Theto Fest. I think it's a great opportunity for existing contributors to mentor cause many people like to help bring in new contributors and this is kind of a focal point to be able to focus on that. And then to, to the the other point we, you know, it, it's been, it's been extremely powerful to see as we return these sub communities pop up and, and kind of work with themselves, so on different ways to contribute. So code is kind of the one that gets the most attention. I think documentation I think is a unsung hero, highly important, great way. The logistical component, which is invaluable because it allows us to continue with our adoption and evangelization and things like that. So specifically adoption and evangelize. Evangelization is another place that contributors can join and actually spawn a local meetup and then connect in with the existing community and try to, you know, help increase the network, create a new subject. Yeah. >>Yeah. Network affects huge. And I think the thing that you brought up about reuse is, is part of that whole things get documented properly. The leverage that comes out of that just feeds into the system that flywheel. Absolutely. I mean it's, that's how communities are supposed to work, right? Yep. Yes. >>That's what I was just gonna comment on is the flywheel effect that it's clearly present and very palpable. Thank you so much for joining John, me on the program, talking about the contributors summit, the ways of contribution, the impacts that are being made so far, what Octoberfest is already delivering. And we're, we still have about 10 days or so left in October, so there's still more time for contributors to get involved. We thank you so much for your insights and your time. Thank >>You. Thank you so much for having us. >>Our pleasure. For our guests and John Purer, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, day two of our coverage of Red Hat Ansible Summit 22. We will see you right n after this short break with our next guest.

>>Good morning live from Chicago. It's the cube on the floor at Ansible Fast 2022. This is day two of our wall to wall coverage. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, we're gonna be talking next in the segment with two alumni about what Red Hat and IBM are doing to give Ansible users AI superpowers. As one of our alumni guests said, just off the keynote stage, we're nearing an inflection point in ai. >>The power of AI with Ansible is really gonna be an innovative, I think an inflection point for a long time because Ansible does such great things. This segment's gonna explore that innovation, bringing AI and making people more productive and more importantly, you know, this whole low code, no code, kind of right in the sweet spot of the skills gap. So should be a great segment. >>Great segment. Please welcome back two of our alumni. Perry is here, the Chief scientist, IBM Research and IBM Fellow. And Tom Anderson joins us once again, VP and general manager at Red Hat. Gentlemen, great to have you on the program. We're gonna have you back. >>Thank you for having >>Us and thanks for joining us. Fresh off the keynote stage. Really enjoyed your keynote this morning. Very exciting news. You have a project called Project Wisdom. We're talking about this inflection point in ai. Tell the audience, the viewers, what is Project Wisdom And Wisdom differs from intelligence. How >>I think Project Wisdom is really about, as I said, sort of combining two major forces that are in many ways disrupting and, and really constructing many a aspects of our society, which are software and AI together. Yeah. And I truly believe it's gonna result in a se shift on how not just enterprises, but society carries forefront. And as I said, intelligence is, is, I would argue at least artificial intelligence is more, in some ways mechanical, if I may say it, it's about algorithms, it's about data, it's about compute. Wisdom is all about what is truly important to bring out. It's not just about when you bring out a, a insight, when you bring out a decision to be able to explain that decision as well. It's almost like humans have wisdom. Machines have intelligence and, and it's about project wisdom. That's why we called it wisdom. >>Because it is about being a, a assistant augmenting humans. Just like be there with the humans and, and almost think of it as behave and interact with them as another colleague will versus intelligence, which is, you know, as I said, more mechanical is about data. Computer algorithms crunch together and, and we wanna bring the power of project wisdom and artificial intelligence to developers to, as you said, close the skills gap to be able to really make them more productive and have wisdom for Ansible be their assistant. Yeah. To be able to get things for them that they would find many ways mundane, many ways hard to find and again, be an assistant and augmented, >>You know, you know what's interesting, I want to get into the origin, how it all happened, but interesting IBM research, well known for the deep tech, big engineering. And you guys have been doing this for a long time, so congratulations. But it's interesting here at this event, even on stage here event, you're starting to see the automation come in. So the question comes up, scale. So what happens, IBM buys Red Hat, you go raid the, the raid, the ip, Trevor Treasure trove of ai. I mean this cuz this is kind of like bringing two killer apps together. The Ansible configuration automation layer with ai just kind of a, >>Yeah, it's an amazing relationship. I was gonna say marriage, but I don't wanna say marriage cause I may be >>Last. I didn't mean say raid the Treasure Trobe, but the kind of >>Like, oh my God. An amazing relationship where we bring all this expertise around automation, obviously around IP and application infrastructure automation and IBM research, Richie and his team bring this amazing capacity and experience around ai. Bring those two things together and applying AI to automation for our teams is so incredibly fantastic. I just can't contain my enthusiasm about it. And you could feel it in the keynote this morning that Richie was doing the energy in the room and when folks saw that, it's just amazing. >>The geeks are gonna love it for sure. But here I wanna get into the whole evolution. Computers on computers, remember the old days thinking machines was a company generations ago that I think they've sold or went outta business, but self-learning, learning machines, computers, programming, computers was actually on your slide you kind of piece out this next wave of AI and machine learning, starting with expert systems really kind of, I'm almost say static, but like okay programs. Yeah, yeah. And then now with machine learning and that big debate was unsupervised, supervised, which is not really perfect. Deep learning, which now explores some things, but now we're at another wave. Take, take us through the thought there explaining what this transition looks like and why. >>I think we are, as I said, we are really at an inflection point in the journey of ai. And if ai, I think it's fair to say data is the pain of ai without data, AI doesn't exist. But if I were to train AI with what is known as supervised learning or or data that is labeled, you are almost sort of limited because there are only so many people who have that expertise. And interestingly, they all have day jobs. So they're not just gonna sit around and label this for you. Some people may be available, but you know, this is not, again, as I as Tom said, we are really trying to apply it to some very sort of key domains which require subject matter expertise. This is not like labeling cats and dogs that everybody else in the board knows there are, the community's very large, but still the skills to go around are not that many. >>And I truly believe to apply AI to the, to the word of, you know, enterprises information technology automation, you have to have unsupervised learning and that's the only way to skate. Yeah. And these two trends really about, you know, information technology percolating across every enterprise and unsupervised learning, which is learning on this very large amount of data with of course know very large compute with some very powerful algorithms like transformer architectures and others which have been disrupting the, the domain of natural language as well are coming together with what I described as foundation models. Yeah. Which anybody who plays with it, you'll be blown away. That's literally blown away. >>And you call that self supervision at scale, which is kind of the foundation. So I have to ask you, cuz this comes up a lot with cloud, cloud scale, everyone tells horizontally scalable cloud, but vertically specialized applications where domain expertise and data plays. So the better the data, the better the self supervision, better the learning. But if it's horizontally scalable is a lot to learn. So how do you create that data ops where it's where the machines are gonna be peaked to maximize what's addressable, but what's also in the domain too, you gotta have that kind of diversity. Can you share your thoughts on that? >>Absolutely. So in, in the domain of foundation models, there are two main stages I would say. One is what I'll describe as pre-training, which is think of it as the, the machine in this particular case is knowledgeable about the domain of code in general. It knows syntax of Python, Java script know, go see Java and so, so on actually, and, and also Yammel as well, which is obviously one would argue is the domain of information technology. And once you get to that level, it's a, it's almost like having a developer who knows all of this but may not be an expert at Ansible just yet. He or she can be an expert at Ansible but is not there yet. That's what I'll call background knowledge. And also in the, in the case of foundation models, they are very adept at natural language as well. So they can connect natural language to code, but they are not yet expert at the domain of Ansible. >>Now there's something called, the second stage of learning is called fine tuning, which is about this data ops where I take data, which is sort of the SME data in this particular case. And it's curated. So this is not just generic data, you pick off GitHub, you don't know what exists out there. This is the data which is governed, which we know is of high quality as well. And you think of it as you specialize the generic AI with pre-trained AI with that data. And those two stages, including the governance of that data that goes into it results in this sort of really breakthrough technology that we've been calling Project Wisdom for. Our first application is Ansible, but just watch out that area. There are many more to come and, and we are gonna really, I'm really excited about this partnership with Red Hat because across IBM and research, I think where wherever we, if there is one place where we can find excited, open source, open developer community, it is Right. That's, >>Yeah. >>Tom, talk about the, the role of open source and Project Wisdom, the involvement of the community and maybe Richard, any feedback that you've gotten since coming off stage? I'm sure you were mobbed. >>Yeah, so for us this is, it's called Project Wisdom, not Product Wisdom. Right? Sorry. Right. And so, no, you didn't say that but I wanna just emphasize that it is a project and for us that is a key word in the upstream community that this is where we're inviting the community to jump on board with us and bring their expertise. All these people that are here will start to participate. They're excited in it. They'll bring their expertise and experience and that fine tuning of the model will just get better and better. So we're really excited about introducing this now and involving the community because it's super nuts. Everything that Red Hat does is around the community and this is no different. And so we're really excited about Project Wisdom. >>That's interesting. The project piece because if you see in today's world the innovation strategy before where we are now, go back to say 15 years ago it was of standard, it's gotta have standard bodies. You can still innovate and differentiate, but yet with open source and community, it's a blending of research and practitioners. I think that to me is a big story here is that what you guys are demonstrating is the combination of research and practitioners in the project. Yes. So how does this play out? Cuz this is kind of like how things are gonna get done in the cloud cuz Amazon's not gonna just standardize their stack at at higher level services, nor is Azure and they might get some plumbing commonalities below, but for Project Project Wisdom to be successful, they can, it doesn't need to have standards. If I get this right, if I can my on point here, what do you guys think about that? React to that? Yeah, >>So I definitely, I think standardization in terms of what we will call ML ops pipeline for models to be deployed and managed and operated. It's like models, like any other code, there's standardization on DevOps ops pipeline, there's standardization on machine learning pipeline. And these models will be deployed in the cloud because they need to scale. The only way to scale to, you know, thousands of users is through cloud. And there is, there are standard pipelines that we are working and architecting together with the Red Hat community leveraging open source packages. Yeah. Is really to, to help scale out the AI models of wisdom together. And another point I wanted to pick up on just what Tom said, I've been sort of in the area of productizing AI for for long now having experience with Watson as well. The only scenario where I've seen AI being successful is in this scenario where, what I describe as it meets the criteria of flywheel of ai. >>What do I mean by flywheel of ai? It cannot be some research people build a model. It may be wowing, but you roll it out and there's no feedback. Yeah, exactly. Okay. We are duh. So what actually, the only way the more people use these models, the more they give you feedback, the better it gets because it knows what is right and what is not right. It will never be right the first time. Actually, you know, the data it is trained on is a depiction of reality. Yeah. It is not a reality in itself. Yeah. The reality is a constantly moving target and the only way to make AI successful is to close that loop with the community. And that's why I just wanted to reemphasize the point on why community is that important >>Actually. And what's interesting Tom is this is a difference between standards bodies, old school and communities. Because developers are very efficient in their feedback. Yes. They jump to patterns that serve their needs, whether it's self-service or whatever. You can kind of see what's going on. Yeah. It's either working or not. Yeah, yeah, >>Yeah. We get immediate feedback from the community and we know real fast when something isn't working, when something is working, there are no problems with the flow of data between the members of the community and, and the developers themselves. So yeah, it's, I'm it's great. It's gonna be fantastic. The energy around Project Wisdom already. I bet. We're gonna go down to the Project Wisdom session, the breakout session, and I bet you the room will be overflowed. >>How do people get involved real quick? Get, get a take a minute to explain how I would get involved. I'm a community member. Yep. I'm watching this video, I'm intrigued. This has got me enthusiastic. How do I get more confident with this opportunity? >>So you go to, first of all, you go to red hat.com/project Wisdom and you register your interests and you wanna participate. We're gonna start growing this process, bringing people in, getting ready to make the service available to people to start using and to experiment with. Start getting their feedback. So this is the beginning of, of a journey. This isn't the, you know, this isn't the midpoint of a journey, this is the begin. You know, even though the work has been going on for a year, this is the beginning of the community journey now. And so we're gonna start working together through channels like Discord and whatnot to be able to exchange information and bring people in. >>What are some of the key use cases, maybe Richie are starting with you that, that you think maybe dream use cases that you think the community will help to really uncover as we're looking at Project Wisdom really helping in this transformation of ai. >>So if I focus on let's say Ansible itself, there are much wider use cases, but Ansible itself and you know, I, I would say I had not realized, I've been working on AI for Good for long, but I had not realized the excitement and the power of Ansible community itself. It's very large, it's very bottom sum, which I love actually. But as I went to lot of like CTOs and CIOs of lot of our customers as well, it was becoming clear the use cases of, you know, I've got thousand Ansible developers or IT or automation experts. They write code all the time. I don't know what all of this code is about. So the, the system administrators, managers, they're trying to figure out sort of how to organize all of this together and think of it as Google for finding all of these automation code automation content. >>And I'm very excited about not just the use cases that we demonstrated today, that is beginning of the journey, but to be able to help enterprises in finding the right code through natural language interfaces, generating the code, helping Del us debug their code as well. Giving them predictive insights into this may happen. Just watch out for it when you deploy this. Something like that happened before, just watch out for it as well. So I'm, I'm excited about the entire life cycle of IT automation, Not just about at the build time, but also at the time of deployment. At the time of management. This is just a start of a journey, but there are many exciting use cases abound for Ansible and beyond. >>It's gonna be great to watch this as it unfolds. Obviously just announcing this today. We thank you both so much for joining us on the program, talking about Project wisdom and, and sharing how the community can get involved. So you're gonna have to come back next year. We're gonna have to talk about what's going on. Cause I imagine with the excitement of the community and the volume of the community, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Absolutely. >>This is absolutely exactly. You're excited about. >>Excellent. And you should be. Congratulations. Thank, thanks again for joining us. We really appreciate your insights. Thank you. Thank >>You for having >>Us. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Barton and you're watching The Cube Lie from Chicago at Ansible Fest 22. This is day two of wall to wall coverage on the cube. Stick around. Our next guest joins us in just a minute.