(upbeat music) >> Hello friends and welcome back to theCUBE's Live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2022 from the Venetian Expo in Vegas, baby. This show is absolutely packed. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, Dave this is day two, but really full day one of our wall to wall coverage on theCUBE. We've had great conversations the last half day this morning already, we've been talking with a lot of companies, a lot of Amazonians and some Amazonians that have left and gone on to interesting more things, which is what we're going to talk about next. >> Well, I'm excited about this segment because it's a really interesting space. You've got a search company who's gotten into observability and security and through our ETR partner our research, we do quarterly research and Elastic off the charts. Obviously they're the public company, so you can see how well they're doing. But the spending momentum on this platform is very, very strong and it has been consistently for quite some time. So really excited to learn more. >> The voice of the customer speaking loudly, from Elastic, its Chief Product Officer joins us, Ken Exner. Ken, welcome to the program. Hi, thank you, good to be here. >> Dave Vellante: Hey Ken. >> So a lot of us know about Elastic from Elastic Search but it's so much more than that these days. Talk about Elastic, what's going on now? What's the current product strategy? What's your vision? >> Yeah. So people know Elastic from the ELK Stack, you know Elastic Search, Logstash, Kibana. Very, very popular open source projects. They've been used by millions of developers for years and years. But one of the things that we started noticing over the years is that people were using it for all kinds of different use cases beyond just traditional search. So people started using Elastic Search to search through operational data, search through logs, search through all kinds of other types of data just to find different answers. And what we started realizing is the customers were taking us into different spaces. They took us into log analytics they started building log management solutions. And we said, cool, we can actually help these customers by providing solutions that already do this for them. So it took us into observability, they took us into security, and we started building solutions for security and observability based on what customers were starting to do with the platform. So customers can still use the platform for any number of different use cases for how do you get answers added data or they can use our pre-built packaged solutions for observability and security. >> So you were a longtime Amazonian. >> I was. I was. >> Talk a little bit about some of the things that you did there and what attracted you to Elastic? 'Cause it's only been a couple months, right? >> I've been here three months, I think three months as of yesterday. And I was at AWS for 16 years. So I was there a long, long time. I was there pretty much from the beginning. I was hired as one of the first product managers in AWS. Adam Selipsky hired me. And it was a great run. I had a ton of fun, I learned a lot. But you know, after 16 years I was kind of itching to do something new and it was going to take something special because I had a great gig and enjoyed the team at AWS. But I saw in Elastic sort of a great foundational technology they had a lot of momentum, a huge community behind it. I saw the business opportunity where they were going. I saw, you know the business opportunity of observability and security. These are massive industries with tons of business problems. Customers are excited about trying to get more answers out of data about their operational environment. And I saw, you know, that customers were struggling with their operating environments and things were becoming increasingly complicated. We used to talk in AWS about, you know how customers want to move from monolithic applications to monoliths, but one of the secrets was that things were increasingly complicated. Suddenly people had all these different microservices they had all these different managed services and their operating environment got complicated became this constellation of different systems, all emitting data. So companies like Elastic were helping people find answers in that data, find the problems with their systems so helping tame that complexity. So I saw that opportunity and I said I want to jump on that. Great foundational technology, good community and building solutions that actually helped solve real problems. >> Right. >> So, before you joined you probably looked back, and said, let think about the market, what's happening in the market space. What were the big trends that you saw that sort of informed your decision? >> Well, just sort of the mountain of data that was sort of emerging. Adam Selipsky in his talk this morning began by talking about how data is just multiplying constant. And I saw this, I saw how much data businesses were drowning in. Operational data, security data. You know, if you're trying to secure your business you have all these different endpoints you have all these different devices, you have different systems that you need to monitor all tons of data. And companies like Elastic were helping companies sort of manage that complexity, helping them find answers in that. So, when you're trying to track intruders or trying to track you know, malicious activity, there's a ton of different systems you need to pay attention to. And you know, there's a bunch of data. It's different devices, laptops and phone devices and stuff that you need to pay attention to. And you find correlations across that to figure out what is going on in your network, what is going on in your business. And that was exciting to me. This is a company sort of tackling one of the hardest problems which is helping you understand your operating environment, helping you understand and secure your business. >> So everybody's getting into observability. >> Yep. >> Right, it's a very crowded space right now. First of all, you know it's like overnight it just became the hottest thing going. VCs were throwing money at it. Why was that and how were you guys different? >> Well, we began by focusing on log analytics because that was the core of what we were doing. But customers started using it beyond log analytics and started using it for APM and started using it for performance data. And what we realized is that we could do all this for customers. So we ended up, sort of overnight over the course of three years building that a complete observe observability suite. So you can do APM, you can do profiling, you can do tracing, sort of distributed tracing, you can do synthetic monitoring everything you want to do, wheel user wondering. >> Metrics? >> All of it, metrics, all of it. And you can use the same system for this. So this was sort of a powerful concept, not only is it the best in leading log system, it also provides everything you need for complete observability. And because it's based on this open platform you can extend it to a number of different scenarios. So this is important, a lot of the different observability companies provide you something that's sort of packaged and as long as you're trying to do what it wants to support, it's great. But with Elastic, you have this flexible data architecture that you can use for anything. So companies use it to monitor assembly lines, they use it to monitor dish networks, for example use it to not only manage their fleet of servers they also use it to manage all their devices. So 25 million desktop devices. So, you know, observability systems like that that can do a number of different scenarios, I think that's a powerful thing. It's not just about how do you manage your servers how do you manage the things that are simple. It's how do you manage anything? How do you get observability into anything. >> Multiple use cases. >> Sorry, when you say complete, okay you talked about all the different APM, log analytics tracing, metrics, and also end-to-end. >> Ken Exner: End-to-end, yeah. >> Could you talk about that component of complete? >> So, if you're trying to find an issue like you have some metric that goes into alarm. You want to have a metric system that has alarming. Once that metric goes in alarm you're going to want to dig into your log. So you're going to want it to take you to the area of your logs that has that issue. Once you gets to there, you're going to want to find the trace ID that takes you to your traces and looks at sort of profiling, distributed tracing information. So a system that can do all of that end-to-end is a powerful solution. So it not only helps you track things end-to-end across the different signals that you're monitoring, but it actually helps you remediate more quickly. And the other thing that Elastic does that is unique is a lot of ML in this. So not only helping you find the information but surfacing things before you even know of them. So anomaly detection for example, helps you know about something before you even realize that there was an issue. So you should pay attention to this because it's anomalous. So a lot of systems help you find something if you know what to look for. But we're trying to help you not only find the things that you know to look for, but help you find the things that you didn't even think to know about. >> And it's fair to say one of your differentiators is you're open, open source. I mean, maybe talk about the ELK stack a little bit and how that plays. >> Yeah, well, so the great thing about this is we've extended that openness to both security and to observability. An example of this on the security side is all the detection rules that you use for looking for intrusion all the detection rules are open source and there's an entire community around this. So if you wanted to create a detection rule you can publish an open source, there's a bunch in GitHub you can benefit from what the community is doing as well. So in the world of security you want to be supported by the entire community, everyone looking for the same kind of issues. And there's an entire community around Elastic that is helping support these detection rules. So that approach, you know wanting to focus on community is differentiating for us. Not just, we got you covered as long you use things from us you can use it from the entire community. >> Well there implies the name Elastic. >> Yeah >> Talk a little bit about the influence that the customer has in the product roadmap and the direction. You've talked a little bit in the beginning about customers were leading us in different directions. It sounds very Amazonian in terms of following the customers where they go. >> It does, it actually does, it was one of the things that resonated for me personally is the journey that Elastic took to observability and security was customer led. So, we started looking at what customers were doing and realized that they were taking us into log analytics they were taking us into APM, they were taking us into these different solutions, and yeah, it is an Amazonian thing, so it resonated for me personally. And they're going to continue taking us in new places. Like we love seeing all the novel things that customers do with the platform and it's sort of one of the hallmarks of a great platform is you can have all kinds of novel things that, novel use cases for how people use your platform and we'll continue to see things and we may get taken into other solutions as well as we start seeing things emerge, like common patterns. But for now we're really excited about security and observability. >> So what do you see, so security's a big space, right? >> Yep. >> You see the optiv taxonomy and it makes your eyes bleed 'cause there's so many tools in there. Where do you fit in that taxonomy? How do you see and think about the security space and the opportunity for your customers? >> Yeah, so we began with logs in the security space as well. So SIEM, which is intrusion detection is based on aggregating a bunch of logs and helping you do threat hunting on those logs. So looking for patterns of malicious behavior or intrusion. So we started there and we did both detections as well as just ad hoc threat hunting. But then we started expanding into endpoint protection. So if we were going to have agents on all these different devices they were gathering logs, what if we also started providing remediation. So if you had malicious activity that was happening on one of the servers, don't just grab the information quarantine it, isolate it. So that took us into sort of endpoint protection or XDR. And then beyond that, we recently got into cloud security as well. So similar to observability, we started with logs but expanded to a full suite so that you can do everything. You can have both endpoint protection, you can have cloud security, all of it from one solution. >> Security is a very crowded market as well. What's your superpower? >> Ken Exner: What's our super power? >> Yeah. >> I think it, a lot of it is just the openness. It's the open platform, there's the community around it. People know and love the, the Elastic Search ELK stack and use it, we go into businesses all the time and they're familiar, their security engineers are using our product for searching through logs. So they're familiar with the product already and the community behind it. So they were excited about being able to use detection rules from other businesses and stay on top of that and be part of that community. The transparency of that is important to the customers. So if you're trying to be the most secure place, the most secure business, you want to basically invest in a community that's going to support that and not be alone in that. >> Right, absolutely, so much that rides on that. Favorite customer example that you think really articulates the value of Elastic, its openness, its transparency. >> Well, there's a customer Dish Media Dish Networks that's going to present here at re:Invent tomorrow at 1:45 at Mandalay Bay. I'm excited about their example because they use it to manage, I think it's 10 billion records a day across 25 million devices. So it illustrates the scale that we can support for managing observability for a company but also just sort of the unique use cases. We can use this for set top boxes for all their customers and they can track the performance that those customers are having. It's a unique case that a lot of vendors couldn't support but we can support because of the openness of the platform, the open data architecture that we have. So I think it illustrates the scale that we support, the elasticity, but also the openness of the data platform. >> Awesome and folks can catch that tomorrow, 1:45 PM at the Mandalay Bay. Last question for you, Ken, is you have a bumper sticker. >> Ken Exner: A bumper sticker? >> A bumper sticker you're going to put it on your fancy sexy new car and it's about elastic, what does it say? >> Helping you get answers out of data. So yeah. >> Love it, love it. Brilliant. >> Ken Exner: Thank you. >> Short and sweet. Ken, it's been a pleasure. >> It's been a pleasure being here, thank you. >> Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us as an Amazonian now into Elastic what Elastic is doing from a product perspective. We will keep our eyes peeled as Dave was saying. >> Ken Exner: Fantastic. >> The data show is really strong spending momentum so well done. >> Thank you very much, good to meet you. >> Our pleasure. For our guest and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> We're back at the Big Apple, theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. Sahir Azam is here, he's the Chief Product Officer of MongoDB, and Guillermo Rauch who's the CEO of Vercel. Hot off the keynotes from this morning guys, good job. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us here. Thanks for having us. Guillermo when it comes to modern web development, you know the back-end, the cloud guys got to it kind of sewn up, >> you know- >> Guillermo: Forget about it. >> But all the action's in the front end, and that's where you are. Explain Vercel. >> Yeah so Vercel is the company that pioneers front-end development as serverless infrastructure. So we built Next.js which is the most popular React framework in the world. This is what front-end engineers choose to build innovative UI's, beautiful websites. Companies like Dior and GitHub and TikTok and Twitch, which we mentioned in the keynote, are powering their entire dot-coms or all of their new parts of their dot-coms with Next.js. And Vercel is the serverless platform where you can deploy frameworks like in Next.js and others like Svelte and Vue to create really fast experiences on the web. >> So I hear, so serverless, I hear that's the hot trend. You guys made some announcements today. I mean when you look at the, we have spending data with our friends at ETR right down the street. I mean it's just off the charts, whether it's Amazon, Google, Azure Functions, I mean it's just exploding. >> Sahir: Yeah, it's I think in many ways, it's a natural trend. You know, we talk a lot about, whether it be today's keynote or another industry talks you see around our industry that developers are constantly looking for ways to focus on innovation and the business logic that defines their application and as opposed to managing the plumbing, and management of infrastructure. And we've seen this happen over and over again across every layer of the stack. And so for us, you know MongoDB, we have a bit of, you know sort of a lens of a broad spectrum of the market. We certainly have you know, large enterprises that are modernizing existing kind of core systems, then we have developers all over the world who are building the next big best thing. And that's what led us to partner with Vercel is just the bleeding edge of developers building in a new way, in a much more efficient way. And we wanted to make sure we provide a data platform that fits naturally in the way they want to work. >> So explain to our audience the trade-offs of serverless, and I want to get into sort of how you've resolved that. And then I want to hear from Guillermo, what that means for developers. >> Sahir: Yeah in our case, we don't view it as an either or, there are certain workloads and definitely certain companies that will gravitate towards a more traditional database infrastructure where they're choosing the configuration of their cluster. They want full control over it. And that provides, you know, certain benefits around cost predictability or isolation or perceived benefits at least of those things. And customers will gravitate towards that. Now on the flip side, if you're building a new application or you want the ability to scale seamlessly and not have to worry about any of the plumbing, serverless is clearly the easier model. So over the long term, we certainly expect to see as a mix of things, more and more serverless workloads being built on our platform and just generally in the industry, which is why we leaned in so heavily on investing in Atlas serverless. But the flexibility to not be forced into a particular model, but to get the same database experience across your application and even switch between them is an important characteristic for us as we build going forward. >> And you stressed the cost efficiency, and not having to worry about, you know, starting cold. You've architected around that, and what does that mean for a developer? >> Guillermo: For a developer it means that you kind of get the best of both worlds, right? Like you get the best possible performance. Front-end developers are extremely sensitive to this. That's why us pioneering this concept, serverless front-end, has put us in a very privileged position because we have to deliver that really quick time to first buy, that really quick paint. So any of the old trade-offs of serverless are not accepted by the market. You have to be extremely fast. You have to be instant to deliver that front-end content. So what we talked about today for example, with the Vercel Edge network, we're removing all of the cost of that like first hit. That cold start doesn't really exist. And now we're seeing it all across the board, going into the back-end where Mongo has also gotten rid of it. >> Dave: How do you guys collaborate? What's the focus of integration specifically from, you know, an engineering resource standpoint? >> Yeah the main idea is, idea to global app in seconds, right? You have your idea. We give you the framework. We don't give you infrastructure primitives. We give you all the necessary tools to start your application. In practice this means you host it in a Git repo. You import it onto Vercel. You install the Mongo integration. Now your front-end and your data back-end are connected. And then your application just goes global in seconds. >> So, okay. So you've abstracted away the complexity of those primitives, is that correct? >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> Do do developers ever say, "That's awesome but I'd like to get to them every now and then." Or do you not allow that? >> Definitely. We expose all the underlying APIs, and the key thing we hear is that, especially with the push for usage-based billing models, observability is of the essence. So at any time you have to be able to query, in real time, every data point that the platform is observing. We give you performance analytics in real time to see how your front-end is performing. We give you statistics about how often you're querying your back-end and so on, and your cache hit ratios. So what I talked about today in the keynote is, it's not just about throwing more compute at the problem, but the ability to use the edge to your advantage to memoize computation and reuse it across different visits. >> When we think of mission critical historically, you know, you think about going to the ATM, right? I mean a financial transaction. But Mongo is positioning for mission critical applications across a variety of industries. Do we need to rethink what mission critical means? >> I think it's all in the eye of the beholder so to speak. If you're a new business starting up, your software and your application is your entire business. So if you have a cold start latency or God forbid something actually goes down, you don't have a business. So it's just as mission critical to that founder of a new business and new technology as it is, you know, an established enterprise that's running sort of a more, you know, day-to-day application that we may all interact with. So we treat all of those scenarios with equal fervor and importance right? And many times, it's a lot of those new experiences that the become the day-to-day experiences for us globally, and are super important. And we power all of those, whether it be an established enterprise all the way to the next big startup. >> I often talk about COVID as the forced march to digital. >> Sahir: Mm-Hmm. >> Which was obviously a little bit rushed, but if you weren't in digital business, you were out of business. And so now you're seeing people step back and say, "All right, let's be more thoughtful about our digital transformation. We've got some time, we've obviously learned some things made some mistakes." It's all about the customer experience though. And that becomes mission critical right? What are you seeing Guillermo, in terms of the patterns in digital transformation now that we're sort of exiting the isolation economy? >> One thing that comes to mind is, we're seeing that it's not always predictable how fast you're going to grow in this digital economy. So we have customers in the ecommerce space, they do a drop and they're piggybacking on serverless to give them that ability to instantly scale. And they couldn't even prepare for some of these events. We see that a lot with the Web3 space and NFT drops, where they're building in such a way that they're not sensitive to this massive fluctuations in traffic. They're taking it for granted. We've put in so much work together behind the scenes to support it. But the digital native creator just, "Oh things are scaling from one second to the next like I'm hitting like 20,000 requests per second, no problem Vercel is handling it." But the amount of infrastructural work that's gone behind the scenes in support has been incredible. >> We see that in gaming all the time, you know it's really hard for a gaming company to necessarily predict where in the globe a game's going to be particularly hot. Games get super popular super fast if they're successful, it's really hard to predict. It's another vertical that's got a similar dynamic. >> So gaming, crypto, so you're saying that you're able to assist your customers in architecting so that the website doesn't crash. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> But at the same time, if the the business dynamic changes, they can dial down. >> Yeah. >> Right and in many ways, slow is the new down, right? And if somebody has a slow experience they're going to leave your site just as much as if it's- >> I'm out of here- >> You were down. So you know, it's really maintaining that really fast performance, that amazing customer experience. Because this is all measured, it's scientific. Like anytime there's friction in the process, you're going to lose customers. >> So obviously people are excited about your keynote, but what have they been saying? Any specific comments you can share, or questions that you got that were really interesting or? >> I'm already getting links to the apps that people are deploying. So the whole idea- >> Come on! >> All over the world. Yeah so it's already working I'm excited. >> So they were show they were showing off, "Look what I did" Really? >> Yeah on Twitter. >> That's amazing. >> I think from my standpoint, I got a question earlier, we were with a bunch of financial analysts and investors, and they said they've been talking to a lot of the customers in the halls. And just to see, you know, from the last time we were all in person, the number of our customers that are using multiple capabilities across this idea of a developer data platform, you know, certainly MongoDB's been a popular core database open source for a long time. But the new capabilities around search, analytics, mobile being adopted much more broadly to power these experiences is the most exciting thing from our side. >> So from 2019 to now, you're saying substantial uptick in adoption for these features? >> Yeah. And many of them are new. >> Time series as well, that's pretty new, so yeah. >> Yeah and you know, our philosophy of development at MongoDB is to get capabilities in the hands of customers early. Get that feedback to enrich and drive that product-market fit. And over the last three years especially, we've been transitioning from a single product kind of core, you know, non relational modern database to a data platform, a developer data platform that adds more and more capabilities to power these modern applications. And a lot of those were released during the pandemic. Certainly we talked about them in our virtual conferences and all the zoom meetings we had over the years. But to actually go talk to all these customers, this is the largest conference we've ever put on, and to get a sense of, wow all the amazing things they're doing with them, it's definitely a different feeling when we're all together. >> So that's interesting, when you have such a hot product, product-led growth which is what Mongo has been in, and you add these new features. They're coming from the developers who are saying, "Hey, we need this." >> Yip. >> Okay so you have a pretty high degree of confidence, but how do you know when you have product-market fit? I mean, is it adoption, usage, renewals? What's your metric? >> Yeah I think it's a mix of quantitative measures that you know, around conversion rates, the size of your funnel, the retention rate, NPS which obviously can be measured, but also just qualitative. You know when you're talking to a developer or a technology executive around what their needs are, and then you see how they actually apply it to solve a problem, it's that balance between the qualitative and the quantitative measurement of things. And you can just sort of, frankly you can feel it. You can see it in the numbers sure, but you can kind of feel that excitement, you can see that adoption and what it empowers people to do. And so to me, as a product leader, it's always a blend of those things. If you get too obsessed with purely the metrics, you can always over optimize something for the wrong reason. So you have to bring in that qualitative feedback to balance yourself out. >> Right. >> Guillermo, what's next? What do you not have that you want from Sahir and Mongo? >> So the natural next step for serverless computing is, is the Edge. So we have to auto-scale, we have to tolerate fares. We have to be avail. We have to be easy, but we have to be global. And right now we've been doing this by using a lot of techniques like caching and replication and things like this. But the future's about personalizing even more to each visitor depending on where they are. So if I'm in New York, I want to get the latest offers for New York on demand, just for me, and using AI to continue to personalize that experience. So giving the developer these tools in a way where it feels natural to build an application like this. It doesn't feel like, "Oh I'm going to do this year 10 if I make it, I'm going to do it since the very beginning." >> Dave: Okay interesting. So that says to me that I'm not going to make a round trip to the cloud necessarily for that experience. So I'm going to have some kind, Apple today, at the Worldwide Developer Conference announced the M2, right. I've been looking at the M1 Ultra, and I'm going wow look at that! And so- >> Sahir: You were talking about that new one backstage. >> I mean it's this amazing pace of Silicon development and they're focusing on the NPU and you look at what Tesla's doing. I mean it's just incredible. So you're going to have some new hardware architecture that emerges. Most of the AI that's done today is modeling in the cloud. You're going to have a real time inferencing at the Edge. So that's not going to do the round trip. There's going to be a data store there, I think it has to be. You're going to persist some of the data, maybe not all of it. So it's a whole new architecture- >> Sahir: Absolutely. >> That's developing. That sounds very disruptive. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> How do you think about that, and how does Mongo play there? Guillermo first. >> What I spent a lot of time thinking about is obviously the developer experience, giving the programmer a programming model that is natural, intuitive, and produces its great results. So if they have to think about data that's local because of regulatory reasons for example, how can we let the framework guide them to success? I'm just writing an application I deployed to the cloud and then everything else is figured out. >> Yeah or speed of light is another challenge. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> How can we overcome the speed of light is our next task for sure. >> Well you're working on that aren't you? You've got the best engineers on that one. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> We can solve a lot of problems, I'm not sure of that one. >> So Mongo plays in that scenario or? >> Yeah so I think, absolutely you know, we've been focused heavily on becoming the globally distributed cloud data layer. The back-end data layer that allows you to persist data to align with performance and move data where it needs to be globally or deal with data sovereignty, data nationalism that's starting to rise, but absolutely there is more data being pushed out to the Edge, to your point around processing or inference happening at the Edge. And there's going to be a globally distributed front-end layer as well, whether data and processing takes apart. And so we're focused on one, making sure the data connectivity and the layer is all connected into one unified architecture. We do that in combination with technologies that we have that do with mobility or edge distribution and synchronization of data with realm. And we do it with partnerships. We have edge partnerships with AWS and Verizon. We have partnerships with a lot of CVM players who are building out that Edge platform and making sure that MongoDB is either connected to it or just driving that synchronization back and forth. >> I call that unified experience super cloud, Robbie Belson from Verizon the cloud continuum, but that consistent experience for developers whether you're on Prim, whether you're in you know, Azure, Google, AWS, and ultimately the Edge. That's the big- >> That's where it's going. >> White space right now I'm hearing, Guillermo, right? >> I think it'll define the next generation of how software is built. And we're seeing this almost like a coalition course between some of the ideas that the Web3 developers are excited about, which is like decentralization almost to the extreme. But the Web2 also needs more decentralization, because we're seeing it with like, the data needs to be local to me, I need more privacy. I was looking at the latest encryption features in Mongo, like I think both Web2 need to incorporate more of the ideas of Web3 and vice versa to create the best possible consumer experience. Privacy matters more than ever before. Latency for conversion matters more than ever before. And regulations are changing. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> And you talked about Web3 earlier, talked about new protocols, a new distributed you know, decentralized system emerging, new hardware architectures. I really believe we really think that new economics are going to bleed back into the data center, and yeah every 15 years or so this industry gets disrupted. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> You know you ain't see nothing yet guys. >> We all talked about hardware becoming commoditized 10, 15 years ago- >> Yeah of course. >> We get the virtualization, and it's like nope not at all. It's actually a lot of invention happening. >> The lower the price the more the consumption. So guys thanks so much. Great conversation. >> Thank you. >> Really appreciate your time. >> Really appreciate it I enjoyed the conversation. >> All right and thanks for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next segment right after this short break. Dave Vellante for theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. >> Man Offscreen: Clear. (clapping) >> All right wow. Don't get up. >> Sahir: Okay. >> Is that a Moonwatch? >> Sahir: It is a Speedmaster but it's that the-

>> Man Offscreen: Standby. Dave is coming you in 5, 4, 3, 2. >> We're back at the Big Apple, theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. Sahir Azam is here, he's the Chief Product Officer of MongoDB, and Guillermo Rauch who's the CEO of Vercel. Hot off the keynotes from this morning guys, good job. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us here. Thanks for having us. Guillermo when it comes to modern web development, you know the back-end, the cloud guys got to it kind of sewn up, >> you know- >> Guillermo: Forget about it. >> But all the action's in the front end, and that's where you are. Explain Vercel. >> Yeah so Vercel is the company that pioneers front-end development as serverless infrastructure. So we built Next.js which is the most popular React framework in the world. This is what front-end engineers choose to build innovative UI's, beautiful websites. Companies like Dior and GitHub and TikTok and Twitch, which we mentioned in the keynote, are powering their entire dot-coms or all of their new parts of their dot-coms with Next.js. And Vercel is the serverless platform where you can deploy frameworks like in Next.js and others like Svelte and Vue to create really fast experiences on the web. >> So I hear, so serverless, I hear that's the hot trend. You guys made some announcements today. I mean when you look at the, we have spending data with our friends at ETR right down the street. I mean it's just off the charts, whether it's Amazon, Google, Azure Functions, I mean it's just exploding. >> Sahir: Yeah, it's I think in many ways, it's a natural trend. You know, we talk a lot about, whether it be today's keynote or another industry talks you see around our industry that developers are constantly looking for ways to focus on innovation and the business logic that defines their application and as opposed to managing the plumbing, and management of infrastructure. And we've seen this happen over and over again across every layer of the stack. And so for us, you know MongoDB, we have a bit of, you know sort of a lens of a broad spectrum of the market. We certainly have you know, large enterprises that are modernizing existing kind of core systems, then we have developers all over the world who are building the next big best thing. And that's what led us to partner with Vercel is just the bleeding edge of developers building in a new way, in a much more efficient way. And we wanted to make sure we provide a data platform that fits naturally in the way they want to work. >> So explain to our audience the trade-offs of serverless, and I want to get into sort of how you've resolved that. And then I want to hear from Guillermo, what that means for developers. >> Sahir: Yeah in our case, we don't view it as an either or, there are certain workloads and definitely certain companies that will gravitate towards a more traditional database infrastructure where they're choosing the configuration of their cluster. They want full control over it. And that provides, you know, certain benefits around cost predictability or isolation or perceived benefits at least of those things. And customers will gravitate towards that. Now on the flip side, if you're building a new application or you want the ability to scale seamlessly and not have to worry about any of the plumbing, serverless is clearly the easier model. So over the long term, we certainly expect to see as a mix of things, more and more serverless workloads being built on our platform and just generally in the industry, which is why we leaned in so heavily on investing in Atlas serverless. But the flexibility to not be forced into a particular model, but to get the same database experience across your application and even switch between them is an important characteristic for us as we build going forward. >> And you stressed the cost efficiency, and not having to worry about, you know, starting cold. You've architected around that, and what does that mean for a developer? >> Guillermo: For a developer it means that you kind of get the best of both worlds, right? Like you get the best possible performance. Front-end developers are extremely sensitive to this. That's why us pioneering this concept, serverless front-end, has put us in a very privileged position because we have to deliver that really quick time to first buy, that really quick paint. So any of the old trade-offs of serverless are not accepted by the market. You have to be extremely fast. You have to be instant to deliver that front-end content. So what we talked about today for example, with the Vercel Edge network, we're removing all of the cost of that like first hit. That cold start doesn't really exist. And now we're seeing it all across the board, going into the back-end where Mongo has also gotten rid of it. >> Dave: How do you guys collaborate? What's the focus of integration specifically from, you know, an engineering resource standpoint? >> Yeah the main idea is, idea to global app in seconds, right? You have your idea. We give you the framework. We don't give you infrastructure primitives. We give you all the necessary tools to start your application. In practice this means you host it in a Git repo. You import it onto Vercel. You install the Mongo integration. Now your front-end and your data back-end are connected. And then your application just goes global in seconds. >> So, okay. So you've abstracted away the complexity of those primitives, is that correct? >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> Do do developers ever say, "That's awesome but I'd like to get to them every now and then." Or do you not allow that? >> Definitely. We expose all the underlying APIs, and the key thing we hear is that, especially with the push for usage-based billing models, observability is of the essence. So at any time you have to be able to query, in real time, every data point that the platform is observing. We give you performance analytics in real time to see how your front-end is performing. We give you statistics about how often you're querying your back-end and so on, and your cache hit ratios. So what I talked about today in the keynote is, it's not just about throwing more compute at the problem, but the ability to use the edge to your advantage to memoize computation and reuse it across different visits. >> When we think of mission critical historically, you know, you think about going to the ATM, right? I mean a financial transaction. But Mongo is positioning for mission critical applications across a variety of industries. Do we need to rethink what mission critical means? >> I think it's all in the eye of the beholder so to speak. If you're a new business starting up, your software and your application is your entire business. So if you have a cold start latency or God forbid something actually goes down, you don't have a business. So it's just as mission critical to that founder of a new business and new technology as it is, you know, an established enterprise that's running sort of a more, you know, day-to-day application that we may all interact with. So we treat all of those scenarios with equal fervor and importance right? And many times, it's a lot of those new experiences that the become the day-to-day experiences for us globally, and are super important. And we power all of those, whether it be an established enterprise all the way to the next big startup. >> I often talk about COVID as the forced march to digital. >> Sahir: Mm-Hmm. >> Which was obviously a little bit rushed, but if you weren't in digital business, you were out of business. And so now you're seeing people step back and say, "All right, let's be more thoughtful about our digital transformation. We've got some time, we've obviously learned some things made some mistakes." It's all about the customer experience though. And that becomes mission critical right? What are you seeing Guillermo, in terms of the patterns in digital transformation now that we're sort of exiting the isolation economy? >> One thing that comes to mind is, we're seeing that it's not always predictable how fast you're going to grow in this digital economy. So we have customers in the ecommerce space, they do a drop and they're piggybacking on serverless to give them that ability to instantly scale. And they couldn't even prepare for some of these events. We see that a lot with the Web3 space and NFT drops, where they're building in such a way that they're not sensitive to this massive fluctuations in traffic. They're taking it for granted. We've put in so much work together behind the scenes to support it. But the digital native creator just, "Oh things are scaling from one second to the next like I'm hitting like 20,000 requests per second, no problem Vercel is handling it." But the amount of infrastructural work that's gone behind the scenes in support has been incredible. >> We see that in gaming all the time, you know it's really hard for a gaming company to necessarily predict where in the globe a game's going to be particularly hot. Games get super popular super fast if they're successful, it's really hard to predict. It's another vertical that's got a similar dynamic. >> So gaming, crypto, so you're saying that you're able to assist your customers in architecting so that the website doesn't crash. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> But at the same time, if the the business dynamic changes, they can dial down. >> Yeah. >> Right and in many ways, slow is the new down, right? And if somebody has a slow experience they're going to leave your site just as much as if it's- >> I'm out of here- >> You were down. So you know, it's really maintaining that really fast performance, that amazing customer experience. Because this is all measured, it's scientific. Like anytime there's friction in the process, you're going to lose customers. >> So obviously people are excited about your keynote, but what have they been saying? Any specific comments you can share, or questions that you got that were really interesting or? >> I'm already getting links to the apps that people are deploying. So the whole idea- >> Come on! >> All over the world. Yeah so it's already working I'm excited. >> So they were show they were showing off, "Look what I did" Really? >> Yeah on Twitter. >> That's amazing. >> I think from my standpoint, I got a question earlier, we were with a bunch of financial analysts and investors, and they said they've been talking to a lot of the customers in the halls. And just to see, you know, from the last time we were all in person, the number of our customers that are using multiple capabilities across this idea of a developer data platform, you know, certainly MongoDB's been a popular core database open source for a long time. But the new capabilities around search, analytics, mobile being adopted much more broadly to power these experiences is the most exciting thing from our side. >> So from 2019 to now, you're saying substantial uptick in adoption for these features? >> Yeah. And many of them are new. >> Time series as well, that's pretty new, so yeah. >> Yeah and you know, our philosophy of development at MongoDB is to get capabilities in the hands of customers early. Get that feedback to enrich and drive that product-market fit. And over the last three years especially, we've been transitioning from a single product kind of core, you know, non relational modern database to a data platform, a developer data platform that adds more and more capabilities to power these modern applications. And a lot of those were released during the pandemic. Certainly we talked about them in our virtual conferences and all the zoom meetings we had over the years. But to actually go talk to all these customers, this is the largest conference we've ever put on, and to get a sense of, wow all the amazing things they're doing with them, it's definitely a different feeling when we're all together. >> So that's interesting, when you have such a hot product, product-led growth which is what Mongo has been in, and you add these new features. They're coming from the developers who are saying, "Hey, we need this." >> Yip. >> Okay so you have a pretty high degree of confidence, but how do you know when you have product-market fit? I mean, is it adoption, usage, renewals? What's your metric? >> Yeah I think it's a mix of quantitative measures that you know, around conversion rates, the size of your funnel, the retention rate, NPS which obviously can be measured, but also just qualitative. You know when you're talking to a developer or a technology executive around what their needs are, and then you see how they actually apply it to solve a problem, it's that balance between the qualitative and the quantitative measurement of things. And you can just sort of, frankly you can feel it. You can see it in the numbers sure, but you can kind of feel that excitement, you can see that adoption and what it empowers people to do. And so to me, as a product leader, it's always a blend of those things. If you get too obsessed with purely the metrics, you can always over optimize something for the wrong reason. So you have to bring in that qualitative feedback to balance yourself out. >> Right. >> Guillermo, what's next? What do you not have that you want from Sahir and Mongo? >> So the natural next step for serverless computing is, is the Edge. So we have to auto-scale, we have to tolerate fares. We have to be avail. We have to be easy, but we have to be global. And right now we've been doing this by using a lot of techniques like caching and replication and things like this. But the future's about personalizing even more to each visitor depending on where they are. So if I'm in New York, I want to get the latest offers for New York on demand, just for me, and using AI to continue to personalize that experience. So giving the developer these tools in a way where it feels natural to build an application like this. It doesn't feel like, "Oh I'm going to do this year 10 if I make it, I'm going to do it since the very beginning." >> Dave: Okay interesting. So that says to me that I'm not going to make a round trip to the cloud necessarily for that experience. So I'm going to have some kind, Apple today, at the Worldwide Developer Conference announced the M2, right. I've been looking at the M1 Ultra, and I'm going wow look at that! And so- >> Sahir: You were talking about that new one backstage. >> I mean it's this amazing pace of Silicon development and they're focusing on the NPU and you look at what Tesla's doing. I mean it's just incredible. So you're going to have some new hardware architecture that emerges. Most of the AI that's done today is modeling in the cloud. You're going to have a real time inferencing at the Edge. So that's not going to do the round trip. There's going to be a data store there, I think it has to be. You're going to persist some of the data, maybe not all of it. So it's a whole new architecture- >> Sahir: Absolutely. >> That's developing. That sounds very disruptive. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> How do you think about that, and how does Mongo play there? Guillermo first. >> What I spent a lot of time thinking about is obviously the developer experience, giving the programmer a programming model that is natural, intuitive, and produces its great results. So if they have to think about data that's local because of regulatory reasons for example, how can we let the framework guide them to success? I'm just writing an application I deployed to the cloud and then everything else is figured out. >> Yeah or speed of light is another challenge. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> How can we overcome the speed of light is our next task for sure. >> Well you're working on that aren't you? You've got the best engineers on that one. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> We can solve a lot of problems, I'm not sure of that one. >> So Mongo plays in that scenario or? >> Yeah so I think, absolutely you know, we've been focused heavily on becoming the globally distributed cloud data layer. The back-end data layer that allows you to persist data to align with performance and move data where it needs to be globally or deal with data sovereignty, data nationalism that's starting to rise, but absolutely there is more data being pushed out to the Edge, to your point around processing or inference happening at the Edge. And there's going to be a globally distributed front-end layer as well, whether data and processing takes apart. And so we're focused on one, making sure the data connectivity and the layer is all connected into one unified architecture. We do that in combination with technologies that we have that do with mobility or edge distribution and synchronization of data with realm. And we do it with partnerships. We have edge partnerships with AWS and Verizon. We have partnerships with a lot of CVM players who are building out that Edge platform and making sure that MongoDB is either connected to it or just driving that synchronization back and forth. >> I call that unified experience super cloud, Robbie Belson from Verizon the cloud continuum, but that consistent experience for developers whether you're on Prim, whether you're in you know, Azure, Google, AWS, and ultimately the Edge. That's the big- >> That's where it's going. >> White space right now I'm hearing, Guillermo, right? >> I think it'll define the next generation of how software is built. And we're seeing this almost like a coalition course between some of the ideas that the Web3 developers are excited about, which is like decentralization almost to the extreme. But the Web2 also needs more decentralization, because we're seeing it with like, the data needs to be local to me, I need more privacy. I was looking at the latest encryption features in Mongo, like I think both Web2 need to incorporate more of the ideas of Web3 and vice versa to create the best possible consumer experience. Privacy matters more than ever before. Latency for conversion matters more than ever before. And regulations are changing. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> And you talked about Web3 earlier, talked about new protocols, a new distributed you know, decentralized system emerging, new hardware architectures. I really believe we really think that new economics are going to bleed back into the data center, and yeah every 15 years or so this industry gets disrupted. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> You know you ain't see nothing yet guys. >> We all talked about hardware becoming commoditized 10, 15 years ago- >> Yeah of course. >> We get the virtualization, and it's like nope not at all. It's actually a lot of invention happening. >> The lower the price the more the consumption. So guys thanks so much. Great conversation. >> Thank you. >> Really appreciate your time. >> Really appreciate it I enjoyed the conversation. >> All right and thanks for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next segment right after this short break. Dave Vellante for theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. >> Man Offscreen: Clear. (clapping) >> All right wow. Don't get up. >> Sahir: Okay. >> Is that a Moonwatch? >> Sahir: It is a Speedmaster but it's that the-

>> From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from "theCUBE" in ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Chief Information Security Officer's site trust, is the number one value attribute, they can deliver to their organizations. And when it comes to security, identity is the new attack surface. As such identity and access management, continue to be the top priority among technology decision makers. It also happens to be one of the most challenging and complicated areas of the cybersecurity landscape. Okta, a leader in the identity space has announced its intent to converge privileged access and Identity Governance in an effort to simplify the landscape and re-imagine identity. Our research shows that interest in this type of consolidation is very high, but organizations believe technical debt, compatibility issues, expense and lack of talent are barriers to reaching cyber nirvana, with their evolving Zero-Trust networks. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we'll explore the complex and evolving world of identity access and privileged account management, with an assessment of Okta's market expansion aspirations and fresh data from ETR, and input from my colleague Eric Bradley. Let's start by exploring identity and why it's fundamental to digital transformations. Look the pandemic accelerated digital and digital raises the stakes in cybersecurity. We've covered this extensively, but today we're going to drill into identity, which is one of the hardest nuts to crack in security. If hackers can steal someone's identity, they can penetrate networks. If that someone has privileged access to databases, financial information, HR systems, transaction systems, the backup corpus, well. You get the point. There are many bespoke tools to support a comprehensive identity access management and privilege access system. Single sign-on, identity aggregation, de-duplication of identities, identity creation, the governance of those identities, group management. Many of these tools are open source. So you have lots of vendors, lots of different systems, and often many dashboards. Practitioners tell us that it's the paper cuts that kill them, patches that aren't applied, open ports, orphan profiles that aren't disabled. They'd love to have a single dashboard, but it's often not practical for large organizations because of the bespoke nature of the tooling and the skills required to manage them. Now, adding to this complexity, many organizations have different identity systems for privileged accounts, the general employee population and customer identity. For example, around 50 percent of ETR respondents in a recent survey use different systems for workforce identity and consumer identity. Now this is often done because the consumer identity is a totally different journey. The consumer is out in the wild and takes an unknown, nonlinear path and then enters the known space inside a brand's domain. The employee identity journey is known throughout. You go onboarding, to increasing responsibilities and more access to off-boarding. Privileged access may even have different attributes, does usually like no email and, or no shared credentials. And we haven't even touched on the other identity consumers in the ecosystem like selling partners, suppliers, machines, etcetera. Like I said, it's complicated and meeting the needs of auditors is stressful and expensive for CSOs. Open chest wounds, such as sloppy histories of privileged access approvals, obvious role conflicts, missing data, inconsistent application of policy and the list goes on. The expense of securing digital operations goes well beyond the software and hardware acquisition costs. So there's a real need and often desire, to converge these systems. But technical debt makes it difficult. Companies have spent a lot of time, effort and money on their identity systems and they can't just rip and replace. So they often build by integrating piece parts or they add on to their Quasi-integrated monolithic systems. And then there's the whole Zero-Trust concept. It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but folks are asking if I have Zero-Trust, does it eliminate the need for identity? And what does that mean for my architecture, going forward. So, let's take a snapshot of some of the key players in identity and PAM, Privileged Access Management. This is an X-Y graph that we always like to show. It shows the net score or spending velocity, spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share or presence in the ETR dataset on the horizontal axis. It's not like revenue market share. It's just, it's mentioned market share if you will. So it's really presence in the dataset. Now, note the chart insert, the table, which shows the actual data for Net Score and Shared In, which informs the position of the dot. The red dotted line there, it indicates an elevated level. Anything over 40 percent that mark, we consider the strongest spending velocity. Now within this subset of vendors that we've chosen, where we've tried to identify some, most of them are pure plays, in this identity space. You can see there are six above that 40 percent mark including Zscaler, which tops the charts, Okta, which has been at or near the top for several quarters. There's an argument by the way, to be made that Okta and Zscaler are on a collision course as Okta expands it's TAM, but let's just park that thought for a moment. You can see Microsoft with a highly elevated spending score and a massive presence on the horizontal axis, CyberArk and SailPoint, which Okta is now aiming to disrupt and Auth zero, which Okta officially acquired in may of this year, more on that later now. Now, below that 40 percent mark you can see Cisco, which is largely acquired companies in order to build its security portfolio. For example, Duo which focuses on access and multi-factor authentication. Now, word of caution, Cisco and Microsoft in particular are overstated because, this includes their entire portfolio of security products, whereas the others are more closely aligned as pure plays in identity and privileged access. ThycotyicCentrify is pretty close to that 40 percent mark and came about as a result of the two companies merging in April of this year. More evidence of consolidation in this space, BeyondTrust is close to the red line as well, which is really interesting because this is a company whose roots go back to the VAX VMS days, which many of you don't even know what a VAX VMS is in the mid 1980s. It was the mini computer standard and the company has evolved to provide more modern PAM solutions. Ping Identity is also notable in that, it essentially emerged after the dot com bust in the early 2000s as an identity solution provider for single sign-on, SSO and multifactor authentication, MFA solutions. In IPO'd in the second half of 2019, just prior to the pandemic. It's got a $2 billion market cap-down from its highs of around $3 billion earlier this year and last summer. And like many of the remote work stocks, they bounced around, as the reopening trade and lofty valuations have weighed on many of these names, including Okta and SailPoint. Although CyberArk, actually acted well after its August 12th earnings call as its revenue growth about doubled year on year. So hot space and a big theme this year is around Okta's acquisition of Auth zero and its announcement at Oktane 2021, where it entered the PAM market and announced its thrust to converge its platform around PAM and Identity Governance and administration. Now I spoke earlier this week with Diya Jolly, who's the Chief Product Officer at Okta and I'll share some of her thoughts later in this segment. But first let's look at some of the ETR data from a recent drill down study that our friends over there conducted. This data is from a drill down that was conducted early this summer, asking organizations how important it is to have a single dashboard for access management, Identity Governance and privileged access. This goes directly to Okta strategy that it announced this year at it's Oktane user conference. Basically 80 percent of the respondents want this. So this is no surprise. Now let's stay on this theme of convergence. ETR asks security pros if they thought convergence between access management and Identity Governance would occur within the next three years. And as you can see, 89% believe this is going to happen. They either strongly agree, agree, or somewhat agree. I mean, it's almost as though the CSOs are willing this to occur. And this seemingly bodes well for Okta, which in April announced its intent to converge PAM and IGA. Okta's Diya jolly stressed to me that this move was in response to customer demand. And this chart confirms that, but there's a deeper analysis worth exploring. Traditional tools of identity, single sign-on SSO and multi-factor authentication MFA, they're being commoditized. And the most obvious example of this is OAuth or Open Authorization. You know, log in with Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Amazon, Facebook. Now Okta currently has around a $35 billion market cap as of today, off from its highs, which were well over 40 billion earlier this year. Okta stated, previously stated, total addressable market was around 55 billion. So CEO, Todd McKinnon had to initiate a TAM expansion play, which is the job of any CEO, right? Now, this move does that. It increases the company's TAM by probably around $20 to $30 billion in our view. Moreover, the number one criticism of Okta is, "Your price is too high." That's a good problem to have I say. Regardless, Okta has to think about adding more value to its customers and prospects, and this move both expands its TAM and supports its longer-term vision to enable a secure user-controlled ubiquitous, digital identity, supporting federated users and data within a centralized system. Now, the other thing Jolly stressed to me is that Okta is heavily focused on the user experience, making it simple and consumer grade easy. At Oktane 21, she gave a keynote laying out the company's vision. It was a compelling presentation designed to show how complex the problem is and how Okta plans to simplify the experience for end users, service providers, brands, and the overall technical community across the ecosystem. But look, there are a lot of challenges, the company faces to pull this off. So let's dig into that a little bit. Zero-Trust has been the buzz word and it's a direction, the industry is moving towards, although there are skeptics. Zero-Trust today is aspirational. It essentially says you don't trust any user or device. And the system can ensure the right people or machines, have the proper level of access to the resources they need all the time, with a fantastic user experience. So you can see why I call this nirvana earlier. In previous breaking analysis segments, we've laid out a map for protecting your digital identity, your passwords, your crypto wallets, how to create Air Gaps. It's a bloody mess. So ETR asked security pros if they thought a hybrid of access management and Zero-Trust network could replace their PAM systems, because if you can achieve Zero-Trust in a world with no shared credentials and real-time access, a direction which Diya jolly clearly told me Okta is headed, then in theory, you can eliminate the need for Privileged Access Management. Another way of looking at this is, you do for every user what you do for PAM users. And that's how you achieve Zero-Trust. But you can see from this picture that there's more uncertainty here with nearly 50 percent of the sample, not in agreement that this is achievable. Practitioners in Eric Bradley's round tables tell us that you'll still need the PAM system to do things, like session auditing and credential checkouts and other things. But much of the PAM functionality could be handled by this Zero-Trust environment we believe. ETR then asks the security pros, how difficult it would be to replace their PAM systems. And this is where it gets interesting. You can see by this picture. The enthusiasm wanes quite a bit when the practitioners have to think about the challenges associated with replacing Privileged Access Management Systems with a new hybrid. Only 20 percent of the respondents see this as, something that is easy to do, likely because they are smaller and don't have a ton of technical debt. So the question and the obvious question is why? What are the difficulties and challenges of replacing these systems? Here's a diagram that shows the blockers. 53 percent say gaps in capabilities. 26 percent say there's no clear ROI. IE too expensive and 11 percent interestingly said, they want to stay with best of breed solutions. Presumably handling much of the integration of the bespoke capabilities on their own. Now speaking with our Eric Bradley, he shared that there's concern about "rip and replace" and the ability to justify that internally. There's also a significant buildup in technical debt, as we talked about earlier. One CSO on an Eric Bradley ETR insights panel explained that the big challenge Okta will face here, is the inertia of entrenched systems from the likes of SailPoint, Thycotic and others. Specifically, these companies have more mature stacks and have built in connectors to legacy systems over many years and processes are wired to these systems and would be very difficult to change with skill sets aligned as well. One practitioner told us that he went with SailPoint almost exclusively because of their ability to interface with SAP. Further, he said that he believed, Okta would be great at connecting to other cloud API enabled systems. There's a large market of legacy systems for which Okta would have to build custom integrations and that would be expensive and would require a lot of engineering. Another practitioner said, "We're not implementing Okta, but we strongly considered it." The reason they didn't go with was the company had a lot of on-prem legacy apps and so they went with Microsoft Identity Manager, but that didn't meet the grade because the user experience was subpar. So they're still searching for a solution that can be good at both cloud and on-prem. Now, a third CSO said, quote, " I've spent a lot of money, writing custom connectors to SailPoint", and he's stressed a lot of money, he said that several times. "So, who was going to write those custom connectors for me? Will Okta do it for free? I just don't see that happening", end quote. Further, this individual said, quote, "It's just not going to be an easy switch. And to be clear, SailPoint is not our PAM solution. That's why we're looking at CyberArk." So the complexity that, unquote. So the complexity and fragmentation continues. And personally I see this as a positive trend for Okta, if it can converge these capabilities. Now I pressed Okta's Diya Jolly on these challenges and the difficulties of replacing them over to our stacks of the competitors. She fully admitted, this was a real issue But her answer was that Okta is betting on the future of microservices and cloud disruption. Her premise is that Okta's platform is better suited for this new application environment, and they're essentially betting on organizations modernizing their application portfolios and Okta believes that it will be ultimately a tailwind for the company. Now let's look at the age old question of best of breed versus incumbent slash integrated suite. ETR and it's drilled down study ask customers, when thinking about identity and access management solutions, do you prefer best of breed and incumbent that you're already using or the most cost efficient solution? The respondents were asked to force rank one, two and three, and you can see, incumbent just edged out best in breed with a 2.2 score versus a 2.1, with the most cost-effective choice at 1.7. Now, overall, I would say, this is good news for Okta. Yes, they faced the issues that we brought up earlier but as digital transformations lead to modernizing much of the application portfolio with container and microservices, Okta will be in a position, assuming it continues to innovate, to pick up much of this business. And to the point earlier, where the CSO told us they're going to use both SailPoint and CyberArk. When ETR asked practitioners which vendors are in the best position to benefit from Zero-Trust, the Zero-Trust trend, the answers were not surprisingly all over the place. Lots of Okta came up. Zscaler came up a lot too, hmm. There's that collision course. But plenty of SailPoint, Palo Alto, Microsoft, Netskope, Dichotic, Centrify, Cisco, all over the map. So now let's look specifically at how practitioners are thinking about Okta's latest announcements. This chart shows the results of the question. Are you planning to evaluate Okta's recently announced Identity Governance and PAM offerings? 45 to nearly 50 percent of the respondents either were already using or plan to evaluate, with just around 40 percent saying they had no plans to evaluate. So again, this is positive news for Okta in our view. The huge portion of the market is going to take a look at what Okta's doing. Combined with the underlying trends that we shared earlier related to the need for convergence, this is good news for the company. Now, even if the blockers are too severe to overcome, Okta will be on the radar and is on the radar as you can see from this data. And as with the Microsoft MIM example, the company will be seen as increasingly strategic, Okta that is, and could get another bite at the apple. Moreover, Okta's acquisition of Auth zero is strategically important. One of the other things Jolly told me is they see initiative starting both from devs and then hand it over to IT to implement, and then the reverse where IT may be the starting point and then go to devs to productize the effort. The Auth zero acquisition gives Okta plays in both games, because as we've reported earlier, Okta wasn't strong with the devs, Auth zero that was their wheelhouse. Now Okta has both. Now on the one hand, when you talk to practitioners, they're excited about the joint capabilities and the gaps that Auth zero fills. On the other hand, it takes out one of Okta's main competitors and customers like competition. So I guess I look at it this way. Many enterprises will spend more money to save time. And that's where Okta has traditionally been strong. Premium pricing but there's clear value, in that it's easier, less resources required, skillsets are scarce. So boom, good fit. Other enterprises look at the price tag of an Okta and, they actually have internal development capabilities. So they prefer to spend engineering time to save money. That's where Auth zero has seen its momentum. Now Todd McKinnon and company, they can have it both ways because of that acquisition. If the price of Okta classic is too high, here's a lower cost solution with Auth zero that can save you money if you have the developer talent and the time. It's a compelling advantage, that's unique. Okay, let's wrap. The road to Zero-Trust networks is long and arduous. The goal is to understand, support and enable access for different roles, safely and securely, across an ecosystem of consumers, employees, partners, suppliers, all the consumers, (laughs softly) of your touch points to your security system. You've got to simplify the user experience. Today's kluge of password, password management, security exposures, just not going to cut it in the digital future. Supporting users in a decentralized, no-moat world, the queen has left her castle, as I often say is compulsory. But you must have federated governance. And there's always going to be room for specialists in this space. Especially for industry specific solutions for instance, within healthcare, education, government, etcetera. Hybrids are the reality for companies that have any on-prem legacy apps. Now Okta has put itself in a leadership position, but it's not alone. Complexity and fragmentation will likely remain. This is a highly competitive market with lots of barriers to entry, which is both good and bad for Okta. On the one hand, unseating incumbents will not be easy. On the other hand, Okta is both scaling and growing rapidly, revenues are growing almost 50% per annum and with it's convergence agenda and Auth zero, it can build a nice moat to its business and keep others out. Okay, that's it for now. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, just search braking analysis podcast, and please subscribe. Thanks to my colleague, Eric Bradley, and our friends over at ETR. Check out ETR website at "etr.plus" for all the data and all the survey action. We also publish a full report every week on "wikibon.com" and "siliconangle.com". So make sure you check that out and browse the breaking analysis collection. There are nearly a hundred of these episodes on a variety of topics, all available free of charge. Get in touch with me. You can email me at "david.vellante@siliconangle.com" or "@dvellante" on Twitter. Comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for "theCUBE" insights powered by ETR. Have a great week everybody. Stay safe, be well And we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Data Citizens'21. Brought to you by Collibra. >> We're back talking all things data at Data Citizens '21. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage, virtual coverage #DataCitizens21. I'm here with Jim Cushman who is Collibra's Chief Product Officer who shared the company's product vision at the event. Jim, welcome, good to see you. >> Thanks Dave, glad to be here. >> Now one of the themes of your session was all around self-service and access to data. This is a big big point of discussion amongst organizations that we talk to. I wonder if you could speak a little more toward what that means for Collibra and your customers and maybe some of the challenges of getting there. >> So Dave our ultimate goal at Collibra has always been to enable service access for all customers. Now, one of the challenges is they're limited to how they can access information, these knowledge workers. So our goal is to totally liberate them and so, why is this important? Well, in and of itself, self-service liberates, tens of millions of data lyric knowledge workers. This will drive more rapid, insightful decision-making, it'll drive productivity and competitiveness. And to make this level of adoption possible, the user experience has to be as intuitive as say, retail shopping, like I mentioned in my previous bit, like you're buying shoes online. But this is a little bit of foreshadowing and there's even a more profound future than just enabling a self-service, that we believe that a new class of shopper is coming online and she may not be as data-literate as our knowledge worker of today. Think of her as an algorithm developer, she builds machine learning or AI. The engagement model for this user will be, to kind of build automation, personalized experiences for people to engage with data. But in order to build that automation, she too needs data. Because she's not data literate, she needs the equivalent of a personal shopper. Someone that can guide her through the experience without actually having her know all the answers to the questions that would be asked. So this level of self-service goes one step further and becomes an automated service. One to really help find the best unbiased in a labeled training data to help train an algorithm in the future. >> That's, okay please continue. >> No please, and so all of this self and automated service, needs to be complemented with kind of a peace of mind that you're letting the right people gain access to it. So when you automate it, it's like, well, geez are the right people getting access to this. So it has to be governed and secured. This can't become like the Wild Wild West or like a data, what we call a data flea market or you know, data's everywhere. So, you know, history does quickly forget the companies that do not adjust to remain relevant. And I think we're in the midst of an exponential differentiation in Collibra data intelligence cloud is really kind of established to be the key catalyst for companies that will be on the winning side. >> Well, that's big because I mean, I'm a big believer in putting data in the hands of those folks in the line of business. And of course the big question that always comes up is, well, what about governance? What about security? So to the extent that you can federate that, that's huge. Because data is distributed by its very nature, it's going to stay that way. It's complex. You have to make the technology work in that complex environment, which brings me to this idea of low code or no code. It's gaining a lot of momentum in the industry. Everybody's talking about it, but there are a lot of questions, you know, what can you actually expect from no code and low code who were the right, you know potential users of that? Is there a difference between low and no? And so from your standpoint, why is this getting so much attention and why now, Jim? >> You don't want me to go back even 25 years ago we were talking about four and five generational languages that people were building. And it really didn't re reach the total value that folks were looking for because it always fell short. And you'd say, listen, if you didn't do all the work it took to get to a certain point how are you possibly going to finish it? And that's where the four GLs and five GLs fell short as capability. With our stuff where if you really get a great self-service how are you going to be self-service if it still requires somebody right though? Well, I guess you could do it if the only self-service people are people who write code, well, that's not bad factor. So if you truly want the ability to have something show up at your front door, without you having to call somebody or make any efforts to get it, then it needs to generate itself. The beauty of doing a catalog, new governance, understanding all the data that is available for choice, giving someone the selection that is using objective criteria, like this is the best objective cause if it's quality for what you want or it's labeled or it's unbiased and it has that level of deterministic value to it versus guessing or civic activity or what my neighbor used or what I used on my last job. Now that we've given people the power with confidence to say, this is the one that I want, the next step is okay, can you deliver it to them without them having to write any code? So imagine being able to generate those instructions from everything that we have in our metadata repository to say this is exactly the data I need you to go get and perform what we call a distributed query against those data sets and bringing it back to them. No code written. And here's the real beauty Dave, pipeline development, data pipeline development is a relatively expensive thing today and that's why people spend a lot of money maintaining these pipelines but imagine if there was zero cost to building your pipeline would you spend any money to maintain it? Probably not. So if we can build it for no cost, then why maintain it? Just build it every time you need it. And it then again, done on a self-service basis. >> I really liked the way you're thinking about this cause you're right. A lot of times when you hear self self-service it's about making the hardcore developers, you know be able to do self service. But the reality is, and you talk about that data pipeline it's complex a business person sitting there waiting for data or wants to put in new data and it turns out that the smallest unit is actually that entire team. And so you sit back and wait. And so to the extent that you can actually enable self-serve for the business by simplification that is it's been the holy grail for a while, isn't it? >> I agree. >> Let's look a little bit dig into where you're placing your bets. I mean, your head of products, you got to make bets, you know, certainly many many months if not years in advance. What are your big focus areas of investment right now? >> Yeah, certainly. So one of the things we've done very successfully since our origin over a decade ago, was building a business user-friendly software and it was predominantly kind of a plumbing or infrastructure area. So, business users love working with our software. They can find what they're looking for and they don't need to have some cryptic key of how to work with it. They can think about things in their terms and use our business glossary and they can navigate through what we call our data intelligence graph and find just what they're looking for. And we don't require a business to change everything just to make it happen. We give them kind of a universal translator to talk to the data. But with all that wonderful usability the common compromise that you make as well, its only good up to a certain amount of information, kind of like Excel. You know, you can do almost anything with Excel, right? But when you get to into large volumes, it becomes problematic and now you need that, you know go with a hardcore database and application on top. So what the industry is pulling us towards is far greater amounts of data not that just millions or even tens of millions but into the hundreds of millions and billions of things that we need to manage. So we have a huge focus on scale and performance on a global basis and that's a mouthful, right? Not only are you dealing with large amounts at performance but you have to do it in a global fashion and make it possible for somebody who might be operating in a Southeast Asia to have the same experience with the environment as they would be in Los Angeles. And the data needs to therefore go to the user as opposed to having the user come to the data as much as possible. So it really does put a lot of emphasis on some of what you call the non-functional requirements also known as the ilities and so our ability to bring the data and handle those large enterprise grade capabilities at scale and performance globally is what's really driving a good number of our investments today. >> I want to talk about data quality. This is a hard topic, but it's one that's so important. And I think it's been really challenging and somewhat misunderstood when you think about the chief data officer role itself, it kind of emerged from these highly regulated industries. And it came out of the data quality, kind of a back office role that's kind of gone front and center and now is, you know pretty strategic. Having said that, the you know, the prevailing philosophy is okay, we got to have this centralized data quality approach and that it's going to be imposed throughout. And it really is a hard problem and I think about, you know these hyper specialized roles, like, you know the quality engineer and so forth. And again, the prevailing wisdom is, if I could centralize that it can be lower cost and I can service these lines of business when in reality, the real value is, you know speed. And so how are you thinking about data quality? You hear so much about it. Why is it such a big deal and why is it so hard in a priority in the marketplace? You're thoughts. >> Thanks for that. So we of course acquired a data quality company, not burying delete, earlier this year LGQ and the big question is, okay, so why, why them and why now, not before? Well, at least a decade ago you started hearing people talk about big data. It was probably around 2009, it was becoming the big talk and what we don't really talk about when we talk about this ever expanding data, the byproduct is, this velocity of data, is increasing dramatically. So the speed of which new data is being presented the way in which data is changing is dramatic. And why is that important to data quality? Cause data quality historically for the last 30 years or so has been a rules-based business where you analyze the data at a certain point in time and you write a rule for it. Now there's already a room for error there cause humans are involved in writing those rules, but now with the increased velocity, the likelihood that it's going to atrophy and become no longer a valid or useful rule to you increases exponentially. So we were looking for a technology that was doing it in a new way similar to the way that we do auto classification when we're cataloging attributes is how do we look at millions of pieces of information around metadata and decide what it is to put it into context? The ability to automatically generate these rules and then continuously adapt as data changes to adjust these rules, is really a game changer for the industry itself. So we chose OwlDQ for that very reason. It's not only where they had this really kind of modern architecture to automatically generate rules but then to continuously monitor the data and adjust those rules, cutting out the huge amounts of costs, clearly having rules that aren't helping you save and frankly, you know how this works is, you know no one really complains about it until there's the squeaky wheel, you know, you get a fine or exposes and that's what is causing a lot of issues with data quality. And then why now? Well, I think and this is my speculation, but there's so much movement of data moving to the cloud right now. And so anyone who's made big investments in data quality historically for their on-premise data warehouses, Netezzas, Teradatas, Oracles, et cetera or even their data lakes are now moving to the cloud. And they're saying, hmm, what investments are we going to carry forward that we had on premise? And which ones are we going to start a new from and data quality seems to be ripe for something new and so these new investments in data in the cloud are now looking up. Let's look at new next generation method of doing data quality. And that's where we're really fitting in nicely. And of course, finally, you can't really do data governance and cataloging without data quality and data quality without data governance and cataloging is kind of a hollow a long-term story. So the three working together is very a powerful story. >> I got to ask you some Colombo questions about this cause you know, you're right. It's rules-based and so my, you know, immediate like, okay what are the rules around COVID or hybrid work, right? If there's static rules, there's so much unknown and so what you're saying is you've got a dynamic process to do that. So and one of the my gripes about the whole big data thing and you know, you referenced that 2009, 2010, I loved it, because there was a lot of profound things about Hadoop and a lot of failings. And one of the challenges is really that there's no context in the big data system. You know, the data, the folks in the data pipeline, they don't have the business context. So my question is, as you it's and it sounds like you've got this awesome magic to automate, who would adjudicates the dynamic rules? How does, do humans play a role? What role do they play there? >> Absolutely. There's the notion of sampling. So you can only trust a machine for certain point before you want to have some type of a steward or a assisted or supervised learning that goes on. So, you know, suspect maybe one out of 10, one out of 20 rules that are generated, you might want to have somebody look at it. Like there's ways to do the equivalent of supervised learning without actually paying the cost of the supervisor. Let's suppose that you've written a thousand rules for your system that are five years old. And we come in with our ability and we analyze the same data and we generate rules ourselves. We compare the two themselves and there's absolutely going to be some exact matching some overlap that validates one another. And that gives you confidence that the machine learning did exactly what you did and what's likelihood that you guessed wrong and machine learning guessed wrong exactly the right way that seems pretty, pretty small concern. So now you're really saying, well, why are they different? And now you start to study the samples. And what we learned, is that our ability to generate between 60 and 70% of these rules anytime we were different, we were right. Almost every single time, like almost every, like only one out of a hundred where was it proven that the handwritten rule was a more profound outcome. And of course, it's machine learning. So it learned, and it caught up the next time. So that's the true power of this innovation is it learns from the data as well as the stewards and it gives you confidence that you're not missing things and you start to trust it, but you should never completely walk away. You should constantly do your periodic sampling. >> And the secret sauce is math. I mean, I remember back in the mid two thousands it was like 2006 timeframe. You mentioned, you know, auto classification. That was a big problem with the federal rules of civil procedure trying to figure out, okay, you know, had humans classifying humans don't scale, until you had, you know, all kinds of support, vector machines and probabilistic, latent semantic indexing, but you didn't have the compute power or the data corpus to really do it well. So it sounds like a combination of you know, cheaper compute, a lot more data and machine intelligence have really changed the game there. Is that a fair assumption? >> That's absolutely fair. I think the other aspect that to keep in mind is that it's an innovative technology that actually brings all that compute as close into the data as possible. One of the greatest expenses of doing data quality was of course, the profiling concept bringing up the statistics of what the data represents. And in most traditional senses that data is completely pulled out of the database itself, into a separate area and now you start talking about terabytes or petabytes of data that takes a long time to extract that much information from a database and then to process through it all. Imagine bringing that profiling closer into the database, what's happening in the NAPE the same space as the data, that cuts out like 90% of the unnecessary processing speed. It also gives you the ability to do it incrementally. So you're not doing a full analysis each time, you have kind of an expensive play when you're first looking at a full database and then maybe over the course of a day, an hour, 15 minutes you've only seen a small segment of change. So now it feels more like a transactional analysis process. >> Yeah and that's, you know, again, we talked about the old days of big data, you know the Hadoop days and the boat was profound was it was all about bringing five megabytes of code to a petabyte of data, but that didn't happen. We shoved it all into a central data lake. I'm really excited for Collibra. It sounds like you guys are really on the cutting edge and doing some really interesting things. I'll give you the last word, Jim, please bring us on. >> Yeah thanks Dave. So one of the really exciting things about our solution is, it trying to be a combination of best of breed capabilities but also integrated. So to actually create a full and complete story that customers are looking for, you don't want to have them worry about a complex integration in trying to manage multiple vendors and the times of their releases, et cetera. If you can find one customer that you don't have to say well, that's good enough, but every single component is in fact best of breed that you can find in it's integrated and they'll manage it as a service. You truly unlock the power of your data, literate individuals in your organization. And again, that goes back to our overall goal. How do we empower the hundreds of millions of people around the world who are just looking for insightful decision? Did they feel completely locked it's as if they're looking for information before the internet and they're kind of limited to whatever their local library has and if we can truly become somewhat like the internet of data, we make it possible for anyone to access it without controls but we still govern it and secure it for privacy laws, I think we do have a chance to to change the world for better. >> Great. Thank you so much, Jim. Great conversation really appreciate your time and your insights. >> Yeah, thank you, Dave. Appreciate it. >> All right and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of Data Citizens'21. My name is Dave Vellante. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Narrator: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube conversation. >> Welcome to theCube's coverage of PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host from the cube Natalie Ehrlich. Now we're joined by Sean Scott the Chief Product Officer of PagerDuty. Thank you very much for joining the program. >> Glad to be here, thank you for having me. >> Terrific, while you've been with PagerDuty for about six months, how is it going? >> Well and great. So I joined PagerDuty because I saw the entire world was shifting to digital first and PagerDuty is key infrastructure for many of the world's largest companies. In fact, over 60% of the Fortune 100 are customers. And more importantly, I see a much broader future our platform will play in digital operations for these companies going forward. I'm excited to be a part of that. >> Terrific. Well, you have really robust experience over 20 years in the value leading product, marketing and engineering teams. What prompted the move? I mean, you explained it but just really curious why you made that. >> So, yeah, I had a long career at Amazon where I was responsible for much of the shopping experience. I ran the homepage, product page, checkout a lot of the underlying tools and tech that supports that worldwide across all devices. And then more recently I built and launched the scout autonomous delivery robot from the ground up. So, but after 15 years and I was starting to look for a change and I started talking to Jen, our CEO and the more we talked the more excited I became about the platform and what it can be going forward for our customers. You know, the fact that we are already integrated with so many customers around the world and playing such a critical role as part of their infrastructure. And yet I think we're just getting started and we can help out companies and so many more use cases across our organizations and really eliminate a lot of time in a waste from their processes. >> Well, this is your first PagerDuty summit. Do tell us, what do you think is the vision for this year's program? >> Yeah, so we'll be launching a lot of new products that I'm excited to talk about and I'll be sharing some of the vision about what I've been thinking about and what I've been working on for my time that I've been here so far. And that starts with our vision, which is really how do we enable more flexibility across our platform. I mentioned our customers are using us for a lot of unique ways beyond DevOps. Things like IOT device management. You know, I heard one yesterday of, you know really doing building management. So the building was having a water leak and instantly it was hooked up to PagerDuty already beforehand. And so within 30 seconds they had alerted and within a minute and a half, they had the water shut off of the building. So way beyond the DevOps use case to even organ transplant delivery, if you can believe that our platform is being used on. So it's pretty exciting to think about all our product already does, but we want to continue to accelerate that. And so building much more flexibility into our product to really capture more of that value and more of the work that's happening across the organization, connect to everyone. >> That's really incredible. We'd love it if you could share perhaps some insight what you're planning to announce this week. >> Yeah, sure. So we have a few things that we're announcing. One is we announced last year by the biggest news last September was our acquisition of Rundeck. And so as part of that, we're announcing our first integration of PagerDuty in Rundeck in the form of Runbook action. So this is a, you can think of it as kind of quick kind of micro automations or short automations to give responders much more insights into what's actually happening with an incident. So maybe it's say running a MIM command or a script on a server, we can actually run that directly from the PagerDuty interface. So you don't have to SSH into a box, for example what does all just takes time and effort. And so when you're trying to remediate that issue of maybe a site being down or a service being down, it all happens right there. And even your frontline responders can now do those remediations as well and those automation actions, to again before they need to escalate to the next tier or bring in other devs to help troubleshoot. So that's pretty exciting. We're also announcing service graft which is a new way to model your services and show your services and really understand your dependency graph. So if you think about one of the biggest challenges often when you're trying to remediate issues is understanding, is that me, or is that one of my dependent services? And so now we actually have new visualizations to really show that our responders exactly what's happening and you can quickly see, is it you or is it maybe some dependency maybe multiple teams are having the same issue that because one of the core services that everybody leverages is down and you can quickly see that. So that's pretty exciting as well. We have change correlation and internet outliers. So change correlation, you know, most incidents occur because of changes that were made by us people. And so being able to spotlight things like here's a change that was recently made, or here's a change based on our machine learning algorithms that we detected that could be a culprit here. So providing a much richer insights to again reduce that meantime to resolution. So this whole team, our intelligence team that's our whole purpose in life is really just to reduce that meantime to resolution for our customers. Imagine waking up, you know, tomorrow and your meantime to resolution just magically goes down because of our software updates and that's how that team focuses on. And then the last one in this group is internet outliers which is all about telling you have an incident, is this rare or is this a frequent incident? And just giving you a little more insights into what you're seeing which will again help the responders. We have some other announcements coming up, but I'll save that for something. >> Terrific. Well, you know, I'd love it if you could share some insight on the competitive landscape and how PagerDuty is, how you see its product offering different from the others. >> Sure. So we go head to head with a lot of our competitors and we have the, you know, being in the fortunate position that we do have a few competitors coming after us and some big names as well. But you know, when we go head to head with these companies we generally win and we see we're constantly getting put in bake-offs with these other competitors. We have one customer, I was talking to a few weeks back and they paired us against the incumbent and out of the box, we saw 50% improvement in meantime to acknowledge. So this is how quickly we can pull the responder. And then in addition, I thought was more interesting as we saw a 50% improvement in the meantime to resolution over the incumbent. And so while we do have competitors coming at us I'm really happy with the way our product performs and our customers are too. So after these bake-offs, it's usually pretty clear who's staying and who's going. >> Yeah. So when you were helping develop this program this week what were some of the key areas that you really wanted to highlight? >> So one of the big areas is really talking about our vision and what is our go forward plan, because I think while we're really known for incident response, I think some of the exciting things you'll hear about at the summit are kind of where we're going in terms of four pillars to our vision. One is flexibility. Flexible workflows and enabling flexibility. So if you think about all the things that our product is doing beyond DevOps. So for example, you know we had a customer telling us about they had put PagerDuty in front of everything they're doing. So their whole building is IP enabled. And so they had a contractor drill through a watermain and it was instantly able to shut off the water. So they, you know, within 30 seconds they had the PagerDuty had notified the right responders of building maintenance and within a minute and a half the water was shut off and they made the comment that PagerDuty just paid for itself with this one incident. We see IOT device management. We see even organ transplant delivery using our product. And so we will continue to fuel that with our flexibility. Second pillar is connect to everyone. We see that we have a lot of people connected, but we just launched fairly recently a customer service offering. So now we can get customer service not only informed what's going on, but also connecting to the dev teams and the engineering teams and the service owners to really give them more insights into the blast radius and what they may be seeing. The next one is connect everything. So we have over 550 out of the box integrations. So that makes it seamless to connect to apps like Datadog. But then also we work where our customers work. So we can actually do work in Slack or MS Teams and take action right in those tools. And the last one is automated way to toil. So we want to automate what can be automated. And this goes back to the one deck acquisition that I mentioned and getting that more deeply integrated with the stack and with processes across an organization. And we're seeing that when our customer has really taken advantage of that platform they can really automate a way to toil and automate a lot of redundant work and work that is just busy work and that keeps people from doing their day jobs, so to speak. >> Yeah, well obviously we had a really unusual last year with the pandemic. How do you think that it changed a business for you? Did it inspire you to move in a new direction? What do you see next in the near future? >> For sure. So I saw that, I mean, it's probably the reason why I came to PagerDuty because I saw the transformation industries are making a digital first, right. And so there was a lot of teams a lot of companies struggled, but then a lot of companies also flourished you'd take, you know companies like Instacart and DoorDash and Zoom, you know had a terrific year. And so, you know, PagerDuty even with the pandemic and companies that were struggling, we still grew pretty rapidly last year. And that's, I think it's pretty exciting. And it really speaks to that migration to digital where digital is now becoming table stakes and just part of what you have to do as a business as opposed to it used to be a goal that we need to do more on digital platform. And now it's like, you have to, you know focus on a digital platform if you want to simply stay relevant today. And so I think that's really important for PagerDuty because that's where we really help companies thrive. >> Sean, that's really interesting. To close out this interview, do you have any last thoughts? >> No, I think that covers it. I think we're really excited to grow with our customers and we're seeing great traction in the market and look forward to a bright future in our platform. Really helping customers solve new problems that they might've not even considered us for yet. >> Terrific, well, thank you very much for your insights. Sean Scott the Chief Product Officer at PagerDuty. And that wraps up our coverage today for the PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich for theCube. Thank you for watching. (bright music)

(calm music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, and today, I'm talking to Ivanti again and Intel, some breaking news. So please welcome two guests, the EVP and Chief Product Officer of Ivanti, Nayaki Nayyar. She's back, and we've also got the VP and GM of Business Client Salute Platforms for Intel, Stephanie Hallford. Nayaki and Stephanie, it's great to have you on the program. >> It's great to be back here with you Lisa, and Stephanie glad to have you here with us, thank you. >> Thank you, we're excited >> Yeah, you guys are going to break some news for us, so let's go ahead and start. Nayaki, hot off the presses is Ivanti's announcement of its new hyper-automation platform, Ivanti Neurons, helping organizations now in this new next normal of so much remote work. Now, just on the heels of that, you're announcing a new strategic partnership with Intel. Tell me about that. >> So Lisa, like we announced, our Ivanti Neurons platform that is helping our customers and all the IT organizations around the world to deal with this explosive growth of remote workers, the devices that would work is used, the data that it's getting from those devices, and also the security challenges, and Neurons really help address what we call discover all the devices, manage those devices, self-heal those devices, self-secure the devices, and with this partnership with Intel, we are extremely excited about the potential our customers and the benefits that customers can get. Intel is offering what they call Device as a Service, which includes both the hardware and software, and with this partnership, we are announcing the integration between Intel's vPro platform and Ivanti's Neurons platform, which is what we are so excited about. Our joint customers, joint enterprises that are using both the products can now benefit from this out of the box integration to take advantage of this Device as a Service combined offer. >> So Stephanie, talk to us from Intel's perspective. This is an integration of Intel's Endpoint Management Assistant with Ivanti Neurons. How does this drive up the value for the EMA solution for your customers who are already using it? >> Right, well, so vPro is just to step everyone back, vPro is the number one enterprise platform trusted now for over 14 years. We are in a vast majority of enterprises around the world, and that's because vPro is essentially our best performing CPUs, our highest level of security, our highest level manageability, which is our EMA or "Emma" manageability solution, which Ivanti is integrating, and also stability, so that is the promise to IT managers for a stable, the Intel Stable Image platform, and what that allows is IT managers to know that we will keep as much stability and fast forward and push through any fixes as quickly as possible on those vPro devices because we understand that IT networks usually QUAL, you know, not all at one time, but it's sequential. So vPro is our number one enterprise built for business, validated, enabled, and we're super excited today because we're taking that remote manageability solution that comes with vPro, and we are marrying it with Ivanti's top class in point management solution, and Ivanti is a world leader in managing and protecting endpoints, and today more than ever, because IT's remote and Intel. For instance, our IT over one weekend had to figure out how to support a hundred thousand remote workers, so the ability for Ivanti to now have our remote manageability in band, out of band, on-prem, in the cloud, it really rounds out. Ivanti's already fantastic world-class solution, so it's a fantastic start to what I foresee is going to be a great partnership. >> And probably a big target install base. Now, can you talk to me a little bit about COVID as a catalyst for this partnership? So many companies, the stuff they talked about a great example of Intel pivoting over a weekend for a hundred thousand people. We're hearing so many different numbers of an explosion of devices, but also experts and even C-suite from tech companies projecting maybe 30 to 40% of the workforce only will go back, so talk to me about COVID as really driving the necessity for organizations to benefit from this type of technology. >> Yeah, so Lisa, like Stephanie said, right, as Intel had to take hundred thousand employees remote over a weekend, that is true for pretty much every company, every organization, every enterprise independent of industry vertical that they had to take all their workforce and move them to be primarily remote workers, and the stats of BFC is what used to be, I would say, three to four percent before COVID of remote working. Post-COVID or during COVID, as we say, it's going to be around 30, 40, 50%, and this is a conversation and a challenge. Every IT organization, every C-level exec, and, in most cases, I'm also seeing this become a board conversation that they're trying to figure out not just how to support remote workers for a short time, but for a longer time as this becomes the new normal or the next normal, whatever you call that, Lisa, and really helping employees through this transition and providing what we call a seamless experience as we employees are working from home or on the move or location agnostic, being able to provide a experience, a service experience that understands what employee's preferences are, what their needs are, and providing that consumer with experiences, what this joint offering between Intel and Ivanti really brings together for our joint customers. >> So you talked about this being elevated to the board level conversation, you know, and this is something that we're hearing a lot of that suddenly there's so much more visibility and focus on certain parts of businesses, and survival is, so many businesses are at risk. Stephanie, I'd like to get your perspective on how this joint solution with Intel and Ivanti, do you see this as an opportunity to give your customers not just a competitive advantage, but for maybe some of those businesses who might be in jeopardy like a survival strategy? >> Absolutely, I mean, the, you know, while we both Ivanti and Intel have our own IT challenges and we support our workers directly, we are broadly experienced in supporting many many companies that frankly, perhaps, weren't planning for these types of instances, remote manageability overnight, security and cyber threats getting more and more sophisticated, but, you know, tech companies like Ivanti, like Intel, we have been thinking about this and experiencing and planning for these things and bringing them out in our products for some time, and so I think it is a great opportunity when we come together and we bring that, you know, IP expertise and IT expertise, both IP technical and that IT insight, and we bring it to customers who are of all industries, whether it be healthcare or financial or medium businesses who are increasingly being managed by service providers who can utilize this type of device as a service and endpoint manageability. Most companies and certainly all IT managers will tell you they're overwhelmed. They are traditionally squeezed on budget, and they have the massive requirement to take their companies entirely cloud and cloud oriented or maybe a hybrid of cloud and on-prem, and they really would prefer to leave network security and network management to experts, and that's where we can come in with our platform, with our intelligence, we work hard to continue to build that product roadmap to stay ahead of cyber threats. Our vPro platform, for instance, has what we call Intel Hardware Shield to set up technologies that actually protects against cyber attack, even under the OS, so if the OS is down or there's a cyber attack around the OS, we actually can lock down the BIOS and the Firmware and alert the OS and have that communication, which allows the system to protect those areas that need to be protected or lock down or encrypt those areas, so this is the type of thing we bring to the party, and than Ivanti has that absolute in Point Management credibility that there's just, I think, ease, So if IT managers are worried about moving to the cloud and getting workers remote and, you know, managing cyber threats, they really would prefer to leave this management and security of their network to experts like Ivanti, and so we're thrilled to kind of combine that expertise and give IT managers a little bit of peace of mind. >> I think it's even more than giving IT managers a peace of mind, but so talk to me, Nayaki, about how these technologies work together. So for example, when we talked about the Neurons and the hyper-automation platform that you just announced, you were talking about the discovery, the self-healing, self-securing of all these devices within an organization that they may not even know they have EDGE devices on-prem cloud. Talk to me about how these two technologies work together. Is it discovering all these devices first, self-security, self-healing? How does then EMA come into play? >> So let me give an analogy in our consumer world, Lisa. We all are used to or getting used to cars where they automatically heal themselves. I have a car sitting in my garage that I haven't taken to a workshop for last four years since I bought it, so it's almost a similar experience that combined offering things to our customers where all these endpoints, like Stephanie said, we are, I would say, one of the leading providers in the endpoint management where we support today. Ivanti supports over 40 million endpoints for our customers, and combining that with a strong vPro platform from Intel, that combined offering, which is what we call Device as a Service, so that the IT departments or the enterprises don't have to really worry about how we are discovering all of those devices, managing those devices. Self-healing, like if there's any performance issues, configuration drift issues, if there are any security vulnerabilities, anomalies on those devices, it automatically heals them. I mean, that is the beauty of it where IT doesn't have to worry about trying to do it reactively. These neurons detect and self-heal those devices automatically in the background, and almost augmenting IT with what I call these automation bots that are constantly running in the background on these devices and self-healing and self-securing those devices. So that's a benefit every organization, every company, every enterprise, every IT department gets from this joint offering, and if I were on their side, on the other side, I can really sleep at night knowing those devices are now not just being managed, but are secure because now we are able to auto-heal or auto-secure those devices in the background continuously. >> Let's talk about speed cause that's one of the things, speed and scale, we talk about with every different technology, but right now there's so much uncertainty across the globe, so for joint customers, Stephanie talked about the, you know, the large install base of customers on the vPro platform, how quickly would they be able to leverage this joint solution to really get those endpoints under management and start dialing down some of the risks like device sprawl and security threats? >> So the joint offering is available today and being released the integration between both the platforms with this announcement, so companies that have both of our platforms and solutions can start implementing it and really getting the benefit out of it. They don't have to wait for another three months or six months. Right after this release, they should be able to integrate the two platforms, discover everything that they have across their entire network, manage those, secure those devices and use these neurons to automatically heal and service those endpoints. >> So this is something that could get up and running pretty quickly? >> It's an AutoBox connection and integration that we worked very closely, Stephanie's team and my team had been working for months now, and, yeah, this is an exciting announcement not just from the product perspective, but also the benefit it gives our customers, the speed, the accuracy, and the service experience that they can provide to their end user, employees, customers, and consumers, I think, that's super beneficial for everyone. >> Absolutely, and then that 360 degree view. Stephanie, we'll wrap it up with you. Talk to us about how this new strategic partnership is a facilitator or an accelerant of Intel's device as a service vision. >> Well, you know, first off, I wanted to commend Nayaki's team because our engineers were so impressed. They, you know, felt like they were working with the PhD advanced version of so many other engineering partners they'd ever come across, so I think we have a very strong engineering culture between our two companies and the speed at which we were able to integrate our solutions, and at the same time start thinking about what we may be able to do in the future, should we put our heads together and start doing a joint product roadmap on opportunities in the future, network connectivity, wifi connectivity, all sorts of ideas, so huge congratulations to the engineering teams because the speed at which we were able to integrate and get a product offering out was impressive, but, you know, secondarily, on to your question on device as a service, this is going to be by far where the future moves. We know that companies will tend to continue to look for ways to have sustainability in their environments, and so when you have Device as a Service, you're able to do things like into end supporting that device from its start into a network to when you end of life a device and how you end of life that device has severe, some sustainability and costs, you know, complexities, and if we're able to manage that device from end to end and provide servicing to alert IT managers and self-heal before problems happen, that helps obviously not only with business models and, you know, protecting data, but it also helps in keeping systems running and being alert to when systems begin to degrade or if there are issues or if it's time to refresh because the hardware is not new enough to take advantage of the new software capabilities, then you're able to end of life that device in a sustainable way, in a safe way, and, even to some degree, provide some opportunity for remediation of data and, you know, remote erase and continue to provide that security all the way into the end, so when we look at device as a service, it's more than just one aspect. It's really taking a device and being responsible for the security, the manageability, the self-healing from beginning to end, and I know that all IT managers need that, appreciate that, and frankly don't have the time or skillsets to be able to provide that in their own house. So I think there's the beginnings today, and I think we have a huge upside to what we can do in the future. I look at Intel's strengths in enterprise and how long we have been, you know, operating in enterprises around the world. Ivanti's, you know, in the vast majority of Fortune 100s, and when you've got kind of engineering powerhouses that are coming together and brainstorming it's, I think, it's a great partnership for relief for customer pain points in the future, which unfortunately there's going to be more probably. >> And this is just the beginning. >> I think that's one thing we can guarantee. It's what, sorry? >> Yeah, and it's just the beginning. This partnership is just the beginning. You will see lot more happening between both the companies as we define the roadmap into the future, so we are super excited about all the work, the joint teams, and, Stephanie, I want to take this opportunity to thank you, your leadership, and your entire organization for helping us with this partnership. >> We're excited by it, we are, we know it's just the beginning of great things to come. >> Well, just the beginning means we have to have more conversations. The cultural fit really sounds like it's really there, and there's tight alignment with Ivanti and Intel. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me. Nayaki, great to have you back on the program. >> Thank you, thank you, Lisa. Thank you for hosting us, and, Stephanie, it's always a pleasure talking to you, thank you. >> Likewise, looking forward to the launch and all the customer reactions. >> Absolutely. >> Yes, all right, thanks Nayaki, thanks Stephanie. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE Conversation. (calm music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube, covering AWS reInforce, 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Boston with theCube's coverage of AWS, Amazon Web Services, reInforce their inaugural conference, getting into the security event business because the customers are here and it's growing like crazy. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We are two guests of a hot startup called Valtix, Vishal Jain CEO, and Brian Lazear, Chief Product Officer. Valtix, you guys just launched out of stealth, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> You guys got some good pedigree I here, in the company. >> Yeah. >> Welcome to the cube. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you John. >> Okay, so first of all, before we get to the conference, which I think is very relevant, you guys are are getting out there. What do you guys do? What is Valtix all about? What is the core problem you solve? Why start this company? What's the value proposition? >> Yeah, so Valtix is building the first cloud native network security platform. So before you start a company, you talk to lot of customers, and you talk to customers, and we saw the cloud is real. You can see here, cloud is real. And we saw that network security, have challenges in how to scale in the cloud, that mainly because of three things to look at that main thing is that the cloud is crawling. The data center used to be like three and four. Now the customer says is hard in the morning in the keynote, they have suddenly one than 10, hundred and 30 PCs. So the new logical perimeter you're seeing. Second thing we saw was that the apps are agile. And the third thing is security is always falling behind DevOps. So if you want to make security to be scaled with apps. >> So, you're saying level up the security apps piece to the DevOps pace. So DevOps is kind of pushing things really fast. You mentioned cloud come the new way. I mean, I remember the conversations around Software Defined data center, Brian, that was the holy grail for the on premises activity, was going to put some software on the storage and you got virtualization, we're done. In comes the cloud, changed the game on the Hadoop ecosystem, change the game on the on premises ecosystem. So what has it actually done differently? Where's it going? Where's the game happening now for security with kind of, because software is key to it? Where do you see it? >> Yeah, we definitely see that, I mean, DevOps is doing such a great job in the public cloud. I mean, DevOps is just, they're really doing a great job with the tooling, the teamwork, you know, automation aspects, and traditionally, security is always had a little bit of a lag to that. And in the cloud, that distance is much greater than ever has before so the security teams, particularly we do, which is network security, they are struggling. And so we focus on providing them a really good platform for that. And that platform includes the firewall. So we are building a cloud based firewall, that goes to the customer's premise, it's all structured around a controller, we have a cloud based controller that manages the firewall is in their central place to configure things. And also that controller is very aware of the applications. So we're keen on giving them that cloud-like experience with a vendor like us that comes over the top, and it can provide that capability as they grow. >> And the status of the product is what, shipping? It's a service? >> Yep. >> Explain the product. >> So last week, we did launch. We announced our funding, and we launched the the availability of the product, and it is built as a SAS. So the controller is a SAS model. The customer does own the firewall, we're a software company, so the software goes into their cloud premise, and it has all the services that they need for protecting their network edge. >> So what are the finer aspects, what are the real differences of network security in the cloud relative to traditional network security? >> Yeah, so what we saw was that the enterprises try to bring the our on prem vendor to the cloud, based as boxes, and as you said, a software defined environment, you need to bring up something more. So what we do is, we bring the whole lifecycle and three core elements of that is the visibility that we do the inventory of the apps, across your accounts, across your regions, across the cloud even. And second thing is how to plumb yours in the path and how to build an unified enforcement solution, which is what we call a firewall. So and built on three principles, cloud native, unification, and performance. >> And the the purpose of the company, when was the origination? When would you get the idea? Was it like, you decided to start a company? What was the motivation? >> Yeah, the big motivation was that, again, we talked to our customers, and we saw the cloud is real. But security is a big impediment to the public adoption and that's why we have this conference here, as well. And then we noticed the network security is not scaling the cloud. We like the problem, we found a team. Our team has the networking background, security background, and the cloud background. And we like the problem. We like a team and he said, okay, let's attack this problem and go after the market. >> So the blocker is scale, right? >> Scale and agility. Okay, so it's a company like Cisco is not solving this problem? Yeah, so what they did was they tried to bring the appliances to the cloud, in a virtual form factor. But in this new world of the cloud, getting sprawl. Agile's... You need kind of centralized control model to secure this new logical perimeter. You can't be appliance by appliance to secure the perimeter. You need to have a more data. >> You can't throw boxes at them. >> Yeah. >> Right, whether whether it's physical or virtual Yeah, exactly. I mean, what Vishal's pointing out too is that we want one aspect of what we do is that there's this super elegance to that day zero. You can just click a button and we deploy the gateway through the controller. That gateway is your firewall. Its right there. I mean, its almost instantaneous. So, even that level reflects the cloud native capabilities. That really gets people excited because the alternative is they grudgingly have to go and get the license and build it and build their functions to scale it and we handle all that. >> And I get why the hardware box model doesn't scale. Why doesn't the software defined virtual appliance scale? >> Yeah. Well, the background is that we see a couple competitors. We see the classic NG firewall players and we see the cloud native capabilities. On the cloud native side, they've made efforts to get into a virtual form factor, but its still basically a box. Its a VM form factor. The instrumentation for it, in a cloud environment, its sub-par and there's still a lot of manual effort to get these things up and running. The plumbing, its not... The user experience is very poor. >> So, its really bring your own box as opposed to here's a... >> Yeah and it has to be a solid form factor. >> So, network security, we heard yesterday at the partner event I attended, and I heard the folks from Amazon up there and they're getting serious about this cause they see the big enterprise opportunity. They want channel marketing, all kinds of new things. But, network security kind of has that same vibe that DevOps had. Which was, you have different consumption mechanisms, the customers are buying services, the pricing's different, the scale is different, you have policy, APIs too, its very cloud native. Are customers ready for that or is your controller, Valtix controller the gateway drug to the cloud so to speak cause, certainly if all those things are changing, that means the old just can be retrofitted for the new. You got to have something from scratch. And not a lot of people are lifting and shifting beyond infrastructure as a service. That's easy to replicate with the cloud, but when you get into some of the nuances with the apps that you're mentioning, these new dynamics have to be pure play features. >> Correct. >> Are you a solution to that? Or are you a gateway to that? Its the controller right? >> Yeah, we are a solution. For example, as I said, we do the full lifecycle. We have a controller will discover all your apps, so, an enterprise can have apps that cross your accounts and cross your cloud even and we discover all the apps. Second thing is once we discover the apps, put yourself in the path of security and we do that automatically. Third thing is enforcement. For that, we have two core engines, as I said. Provide re-development, which we call a cloud firewall from Valtix and secondly the cloud controller, which sees everything. So, its a global view of the entire enterprise infrastructure. >> In your marketing documentation, you talk about the trade-offs that people have to make between security and agility. That's always been a trade-off. Do you solve that problems and if so, how? >> So, again when we saw the customer we talked to and they bring their workshop appliances, or appliances to the cloud, then there are two choices they have. One is that are apps agile, but then you cannot secure using the client's model, so you kind of insecure, or naked we call it. The other option is that you must have heard, security slows me down. So you kind of become a secure and rigid. So every time you have a new app, a new EPC, you open a ticket and you install the new firewall. So, what we are giving a third option because both options I gave are bad choices, so we give a third option, which is agile and secure. That's what a centralized controller and a Valtix file will give you that option. >> Vishal and Brian, I want to get your thoughts on why you guys, so be the devil's advocate. You guys are just a startup, although your startups actually doing well in the cloud environment, I'm being a skeptic, I'm trying to shoot my own narrative here. But the reality is you guys are young company, you want to get the attention of the enterprise or customers, what's the pitch? Why you guys? What's your backgrounds, pedigrees, the backgrounds you guys bring to the table with software, talk about why you guys? What's the differentiator? >> In terms of the team, I would say, there are three core pillars, networking, security, and cloud, right? So, this team has built up billions of parkline and deployed in thousands of enterprises and there were two core expertise initially the team was, building fast performance by plans. Second thing is decoupling the control development. I mentioned some of that. So, those are some of the aspects and then you build your team around network expertise, security expertise, and a cloud expertise. >> Have they done it before? >> Yes, multiple times. >> How big's the team? >> The team is right now twenty people. >> Twenty people? And you just raised 14 million or over 14 million? >> Yeah, over 14 million we raised and we announced it last week. >> Yeah, great. Congratulations. >> What are some of the backgrounds of the team members? >> I mean they're Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto, Google Cloud... >> Fortinet. >> Yeah, Fortinet. Its kind of that bench strength of security in a networking cloud and then I think the other component to that is that we all come from a common denominator of building, hands on building, shipping and marketing products that are transformative. That's also exciting. So, we see this and say, this is clearly transformative or this big market opportunity to help customers and we're like, ecstatic. >> Yeah, the cloud really... It sounds like to me you guys have a real holistic systems view of the world. Because the cloud is essentially an operating system or large, distributed computer and decentralized with crypto and blockchain. Its the system thinking that's interesting. Right, you guys have that... To know the network, you got to know the system. And you get into the apps, you got to understand that middle layer that's developing with Kubernetes and containers. With cloud native, that's developing really fast. So, to see that end to end is more of a systems kind of mindset. A lot of companies are lacking that because they've outsourced everything to global SI's and now they got to rebuild. Capital One's Sie So said, we're investing everything building. We're building more. So, they're builders, they're systems guys. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, so basically we also know this, that all of the enterprise we talk to were told that a lot of wine products, what we're building the platform. So, we'll be starting off with the food services, but its a platform, so a wholistic platform could do the full network security in the public cloud. That's what we are working towards. >> What's the differentiator? Why you guys? What's the main value proposition that you guys bring to the table? What's in it for the customer? >> Correct, the main value proposition is the team can build it and second thing is taking a cloud related approach to this problem. We are building for the cloud and we are building using the cloud are the principles. >> So you just went through your raise, so all these answers to the questions are fresh in your mind. But, Brian you talked about a large market. Help us understand that because the market is enormous, its like a hundred billion dollars or whatever it is, but its so fragmented, there's so many different segments. How do you guys look at the TAM and then the served market for you guys, that you go after? >> Our goal is to protect their data center, this new data center, basically everything that's going in or out of the data center on the network side, that's our focus. We didn't mention some of these services, but in the product we're shipping right now, it does decryption of TLS traffic, it does firewall, it does intrusion prevention, it does WAF, so it has this, and more, so there's this set of things that when we talk to the customers, they'll say, my blueprint for the cloud is like the prep, I have to stack all these things together, risk in security says you have to emulate that environment, its worked well here, make it happen out there. And so that's where you see people getting a little bit amped up. Its hard to do that. We have a platform that can consolidates that really well and knows the system level things that John was mentioning, but it is covering a lot of space, but we are very optimistic. We're making good grounds with that. >> So its a platform approach versus five, six products? >> Exactly, so the consolidation story connects really well. >> What's the most important story that needs to be told in the security industry today in your opinion? What do you think that customers should know about, that the media and or the industry should be discussing? >> The main thing is that we talk about DevOps. DevOps is very agile. So one thing is the current security is slowing me down. Security has to be agile, especially network security, we have heard in the past, slows you down. So that's, in the cloud world, the main reason people are going to cloud is because of the agility and network security should not stop that. >> So, security's slowing down... >> Yeah and we don't want that. >> Its a deep bottleneck for mass adoption, we're seeing that more and more and that problem statement, there's a lot of Ops angles to this. Its understanding, like multi-AZ deploys and the Transit Gateway, the new Transit Gateway from Amazon and how does this all work together and we're on top of that in the network security perspective. >> What do you think about the show here? Amazon's inaugural re:Inforce. Its not a summit, summits are regional re-invents. This is its own name, just like re-invent's different for the customer. Re-invent isn't re:Inforce. Pretty important, pretty strategic for Amazon Web Services. What do you guys think? >> I think its great. I mean, we have been using all alternatives like Transit, their mutilated support, the ST bucket. We use all the infrastructure they provide. Its always good to know what they are doing because in the reinvent around Transit Gateway and we incorporate that into our product. So, we want to be ahead of what they announcing, incorporate that and giving our customer what they need as a whole solution. >> So, Brian you're running the product, Chief Product Officer. What's on the roadmap? (laughter) >> Lots of good stuff. >> C'mon! >> We're very busy. >> Feed your request coming in. Give you their services, you could just bang them out, no big deal. (talking over each other) >> Just so easy, 2,000 a year. Amazon does it, you could do a couple hundred a year, no problem. >> There's probably a couple things. One is that we will continue to expand to other clouds because our customers want that. But its also just about more capabilities. So, they're seeing what we could do today. There's a lot that it could do and they're with us, they're on the journey with us and saying we want more help and this show is an example of that. The cloud is becoming more than a thing and security's getting emphasized, literally, its emphasized here. So, we're happy to help our customers along. >> Well you guys are launched, what's the priority? You're obviously hiring, what kind of culture do you have? What are some of your needs here? Put a plug for the company real quick. >> In terms of hiring, initially I'm also hiring more engineering, building the product. They're the core of the engine. But, now we are expanding the go to market team, we have sales, marketing and we are going to expand on both the sides, like sell and build more and sell more. >> Yeah, get the revenue in. Congratulations, hot startup. Good job, well done. Thanks for coming on theCube. >> Thanks John. >> Valtix launching with new product out of stealth with funding, getting off the runway, here at Amazon Websters Re:Invent theCube coverage. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hey! Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we're pleased to welcome to theCUBE PJ Hough, EVP and Chief Product Officer at Citrix. PJ, it's great to have you on theCUBE! >> I'm delighted to be here, thank you. >> Really enjoyed your keynote yesterday morning. The excitement, the energy that you guys kicked off everything with yesterday with intelligent experience. People get it. We're all employees, we all want to have an experience. I would love to have a whole day back in a week. >> Yes. >> By bringing the apps and the actions to me, rather than me having to go and find and interact with all these different apps. What's been the feedback that you've heard over the last 24 hours with intelligent enterprise? >> The intelligent experience features, people are really liking it because I think, as you say, they recognize it. It feels already somewhat familiar. I think sometimes when you introduce new products, I've introduced brand new products in the past, where you really have to explain the use and why it's built that way. We are not having to explain very much about it. We show it to people and they identify with the workflows, the tasks. They recognize the challenges that they face today with getting access to that same information in the systems that they use. I think there is a need right now for us to solve this problem. I think customers are really feeling a sense of pain around the number of applications that they have, and I think I.T. knows that they have actually burdened their users with actually doing a lot of human workflow themselves. >> So since the WinFrame days, Microsoft, Citrix, synonymous with each other, huge partnership, huge and deep partnership over the years. Something that they'll appear to be a video yesterday. To say that Citrix and Microsoft has announced something, it's kind of a big deal, and it got lost, I think, in the excitement of the intelligent experience, which is a lot to say. Can you help explain that partnership, the deepening of that partnership, a little bit better? >> Sure. I think, as you know, and probably most of the audience know, the foundation of the partnership was in virtualization. That really is at the heart of what we do. Application delivery, particularly Windows applications, and Windows delivery, over all types of networks, and to all types of devices. Maybe what's more important about our relationship right now is if you look at the announcements we made yesterday, yes at the heart of it was new announcements around Windows virtual desktop on Azure and our desktop is a service that both run on Azure. That's at the heart of it. But then if you look at the continuing set of announcements we've made, improvements in the delivery of Microsoft Teams. In order to do that work we actually partnered really closely with that Microsoft Teams group at Microsoft. And then the Office 365 Networking initiatives that we have, that of course required partnership with all of the teams at Office 365. And then finally, the Intune partnership we have, which of course is with Brad Anderson, who was on stage with us. Across the whole delivery from cloud-hosted applications to applications themselves, the network over which the applications are delivered, and helping to secure the endpoint devices. We had innovation announcements in all categories, and every single one of them required a pretty deep partnership and co-development in many cases with Microsoft. >> So PJ, Citrix has over 400,000 customers globally. That's a lot! You've got, I think, 98 plus percent of the F100, the F500. As Chief Product Officer, if we look at the Microsoft, the deepening of that partnership, where are customers in terms of influence, maybe shed some light on some of the conversations that you have with customers that help dictate, for example, the deepening of that Microsoft relationship with Citrix. >> I think that's a really important point. It's not like our relationship with Microsoft is just for ourselves. It's actually spurred by many of the things that our customers are trying to do, primarily with their technology, and then with us as an enabler to help really deliver great experiences on that. Windows 10, kind of a big deal in the marketplace. I hear about that from all enterprise customers. And you combine Windows 10 with Office 365. Pretty much every customer I get to speak to has either initiatives around one or both of those technologies as part of their broader digital transformation. So the announcements we made yesterday align very well with these initiatives that Microsoft is driving into the enterprise, and I think customers see the promise of what Microsoft is offering with Windows and with the Office family of products, but they need to put that in everybody's hands, not just those who happen to be in the headquarters and on a great network and running on a top class device, you really have to get that out to your branches, to your mobile workers, and that's really where we come in to play, really helping, really delivered that great experience to all of those employees. >> We were just talking to Dana Garner right before our conversation with you, and he said that Citrix has been pretty modest over the years. You guys are kind of the original cloud. To be frank, a lot of SAAS services are built on Citrix. With that, you're looking into the intelligent experience, you guys are positioning yourselves once again to be at the forefront of innovation when it comes to employee experience. With that comes cultural change. I think you guys have experienced over the past 30 years of kind of saying, you know what, we can do cool stuff, too, and talking to a new audience. Talk to us about that new audience you're going to have to go after with these products because these are not just I.T. products when you're talking about changing processes, now you're getting into the wheelhouses of the PWCs, the EMYs, the big four of the world. >> Yep, yep. I think that's a really important point, and one that's certainly not lost on those of us at Citrix who know that this pivot to broaden our opportunity in the market and broaden our perspective on what we can do to help customers, it requires us to think about our go-to-market in a slightly different way. You mentioned some of those very large companies out there that I now look to for partnership in helping deliver those solutions to customers. I think we have great technology, but we really are going to need people who understand deeply the industries of these customers. If you're in finance, or oil and gas, or healthcare, you want your partner to understand the processes and the structure of your market. While we'll have great technology to help deliver oil and gas solutions, we're going to look to oil and gas solution partners and system integrators to really help build the, I will call it, the customized intelligent experience for those industries. We've always had a very strong partner network, I mean we have over 10,000 partners today at Citrix, and I think we are going to leverage that partner channel again, potentially in new ways, to deliver this intelligent experience to customers. But you do raise a very important point. We do not have, and never have had, a go it alone strategy, either from a technology point of view, with our partnership with Microsoft, and the announcements we made with Google, and in the past we've made with the other clouds, et cetera, but it's also true from a solution delivery perspective. We absolutely rely on really great partnerships in the marketplace. >> You've mentioned, you know, developing potentially customized solutions. If I think of customization, I think of personalization, and you talked a lot about that yesterday. As all of us are consumers, that consumerization, the influence that we're bringing into businesses, we want things personalized. We want experiences to come to us that have enough intelligence to know, show PJ this, not this. >> Yeah. >> So talk to us about how Citrix is distilling apps into what you called yesterday these personalized units of work. >> Yeah, I think that fundamentally, there's a initial set of those units of work that I think everyone recognizes and would say, oh yes, I know how that works. But they would also presume that it works pretty much the same way for all of us. Like the way that we book time off from our companies, or the way that we submit our expenses, other employees are going to do that the same way. I think what's much more interesting is using our analytics and our artificial intelligence to really figure out what's the pattern of work that PJ has and how that differs from the pattern of work that Lisa has. Now, we may both have similar responsibilities, but I expect that over time, and this is sort of one of the acid tests for me, for the workspace, even if we are in the same organization, after several months of use, my feed should look different to yours. Just like on our social feeds. Even if we more or less have the same friends, and we more or less have similar interests, still no two feeds are identical, and they're driven a little bit by our preferences, but they're also driven by our habits, the way we work with the software, and so we're building all of that intelligence into the workspace. >> So we don't get the chance to talk to people who are at the forefront of these products often, so I'm going to try to get a little peak into the future here. When the iPhone was created, what 10 years ago, it was an amazing thing. You give me a 10 year old iPhone today, and we'll have a conversation. (laughter) So you guys are innovating, innovating, employee experience, customer experience, is the output of digital transformation. You look at analytics, what is the output of the employee experience and the customer experience? What is Citrix looking at like, you know customers are not quite ready for this, but we have it in our back pocket? >> It's a really great question. I'm glad you brought up the example like the iPhone because I think the flip-side is that if you were to go back 10 years ago, I don't know that Apple knew what it would look like today. I think they had the broad brush stokes of where they were going, but I don't know they would have known exactly how to navigate the last decade in advance. I feel the same way about the journey that we're on. But that's partly what makes working on those forefront technology projects so exciting. I just did an interview where somebody asked me, "What do you think the future of work looks like?" And I said, well, in some ways, I'm already living it because I'm experiencing these products inside Citrix before they get released to customers. So we already have a little glimpse of what might be next. I think some of the biggest opportunities for us are really to take the assistance and the learning capabilities of the workspace in a different direction. Yes, we will add more applications, yes, the micro-applications will get richer, yes, the user interface might change a little bit, but really what's the fundamental technology shift that's going to drive innovation for the next decade, and I think it's analytics and machine learning. We're already, I think, at the very early stages of seeing some of the ways that impacts the work experience, but my hope for the decade is that all of the workspaces that we work in and all of the tools that we have get a little smarter about me, and some of the things that we've come to trust with regard to software in other environments and other places, that we get to trust our work tools to the same extent, which I don't think we're there yet. >> In terms of the messaging to customers, we've talked to your three innovation award finalists from different industries: financial services, education, global technology, all really helping to make big impacts to their employees, their customers. Those two things I see as absolutely tantamount. They're inextricably linked. You have to have a great employee experience to deliver a great customer experience. If there's a problem with employee experience, it's going to manifest. In some form or fashion as employees, we all in some way are interacting with customers and have the opportunity to influence their loyalty or churn. >> Yeah. >> So we've heard a lot about how these customers are really leveraging what Citrix is enabling. This modern workforce, let me do what I need to where it helps me be most productive, but also drive these big outcomes. When it comes to A.I. and machine learning, we talk about them at every event that we go to. Where are your customers in terms of being receptive to understanding it's not Big Brother looking in at PJ's productivity, it's really working to understand, like you said before, how differently you and I might be using the exact same software application to make our jobs far more productive. Where is that appetite for A.I. machine learning for that kind of productivity? >> Well I think a concern that all customers have, set aside our technology and just talk about the industry in general, I think as an industry, we have to really continue to earn the trust of customers, both in the consumer lives as well as in the professional lives with regard to the governance that we put around information that they share with us and how we treat that for their benefit, not just for ours. I think those same concerns exist, broadly speaking, whether it's a Microsoft, or a Google, or a Facebook, or a Citrix, maybe to some extent less to us because I think customers have historically not entrusted a lot of that type of information to us. They have entrusted that to our customers, who are delivering solutions, whether it's a financial solution or a healthcare solution, et cetera. So that's one thing for us to continue to improve is that we are good custodians of that information and that we're using it, I will say, for good and for the purposes of improving experiences that matter. I think in general our customers understand that there is a value exchange. That our ability to deliver new value to them requires them to exchange insight with us so that we can turn that into value for them. That I think is pretty clear to most customers right now. In some ways, we're at the forefront of what we're trying to do for intelligence in a workspace, but many of the core technologies have been proven in other fields, and we're certainly trying to leverage that and the comfort that customers already have achieved with some of those technologies. >> Excellent, alright. We have had just a great couple of days here. The excitement is palpable. The impact that you guys are having on a wide variety of customers in every industry is palpable, and I also really liked the fact that as an individual contributor you guys showed this is how Citrix workspace can impact your lives in a way that is really going to be a driving force of the workforce of the future. So, PJ, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this afternoon >> Thank you. I enjoyed being here on theCUBE and thank you for your coverage of the event. It's been really great. >> We've had a great time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering UiPath Forward Americas, brought to you by UiPath. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Miami Beach, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is UiPathForward Americas. We're talking about robotic process automation. We're seeing the ascendancy of a new marketplace. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Let's see, let's get into it. So Param Kahlon is here. He's the UiPath's Chief Product Officer. Welcome, so we're going to get into some of the product stuff. We haven't really dug down deep today, so that's great. >> Thank you. >> Jairo Quiros is here. He's the Vice President of Global Shared Services, an RPA COE, center of excellence, leader at Equifax. Welcome, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Jairo, let's start with you. Tell us about your role. I love the title. (Jairo laughs) You got automation in your title. Do people embrace you when they see you coming or run? >> No, no, no. Actually, that's very interesting. I've been with the company for 20 years now, so I'm responsible to lead Global Shared Services all across from business operations, financing, accounting, you name it, IT security, right? So, coming along with automation has been quite a journey for us. First of all, we love the product so thank you, Param for everything you guys do at the service, as well. But truly, automation, what it means to us is pushing our workforce to do stuff that is of more valued added to our customers, removing the but out of the human which is critical to us, so no fear of buts anymore. And it's been two years. >> The product's at the tip of the iceberg, I'm hearing. There's a whole lot of other stuff beneath it, culture, obviously process, mindset. >> Jairo: Yeah, correct. >> We will get into some of that. But Param, tell us about your role as Chief Product Officer. You make it all happen. (Param laughs) >> I'm responsible for making sure we can listen to what our customers want, what the market wants, translate that into requirements, and deliver that in the form of products. That's all I do, it's very simple. >> You're a translator. >> We translate it, transform it into requirements that can be given to the product team, their development team that can go write software for it. >> Kind of like that AI layer in UiPath that translates all this data into something that's actionable, right? >> Param: Absolutely. >> Jairo, you were saying you liked the product before. I mean, our personal experience is we could actually download it and play with it, and we're not ultra technical, some of our guys are. What do you like about the product? >> Well, I think many things. I mean, first of all, I think it's very easy to use, right? So, it's built for execution, right? For instance, in our case, we're having a lot of junior engineers coming on board. So we go out to colleges and recruit people that are passionate about process. So what UiPath offer us is a way for them to entry our operation and actually perform tasks and do, and realize results pretty easily. So then, they can see the work being done and appreciate it. >> So who are the users in your organization? Is it a spectrum? You got the sort of RPA developers and then you got business users, as well? Describe that. >> Well, it's a combination, right? So we built the COE over the past couple years. It's inclusive of not only configurators, but also analysts and people that can understand the business. So when you look at through the process, start thinking about how do you design for automation? So this tool allows a very comprehensive very easy to use and we see they make progress release after release, so it's very exciting. >> Alright, Param, why don't you walk us through the announcements that you made? What's new to the platform? Some enhancement to the community. >> Yeah, so we've done some really key announcements in this event today. The first one that we're very excited about is UiPath Go, which is our marketplace that enables broad innovation across our entire ecosystem of customers and partners. We can create on a platform or we can put it in a marketplace and then everybody else can easily access the innovation that's available there. We also released 2018.3 which is the third release we've done this year, but probably the most comprehensive release that we've done 'til date in the history of Enterprise Automation. So we're very excited about launching that release today, as well. And third, we've announced a $20 million fund that will fund our partners that will co-innovate together with us in bringing out new RPA capabilities, new machine learning and AI capabilities into the marketplace. Those are three key announcements. >> What are the-- >> I'm just-- Sorry, but from my understanding, you run on a quarterly cadence for the release of the primary product, correct? >> We're in a quarterly cadence, yes. >> What are the critical aspects of the new release? >> So, there's a few things we've done in the main release. One of the first things we've done is we've allowed for re-usability of the software. So if you're using a lot of components, if you've built a way to automate a certain process, it could be as simple as, here's how I log into a application, a financial application. The rest of the people in my organization don't have to go reinvent that thing themselves. They can reuse the component, the way I've built it, so they can be reused to process every single aspect of the customer, as well. We've made it very easy for our customers to upgrade to new versions of the software, as we're releasing very rapidly, we want to make sure that the upgrades are easy, but the upgrades are also seamless as in they don't affect any of the existing processes that are running in production. So we support version management and package management so we make it easier for people to manage that. There's some other capabilities that we've done. We've supported internationalization of the platform, so now customers in Japan can use our product in Japanese, customers can use it in Spanish, they can use it in Deutsche, German, so we've allowed that in this release, as well. Another cool thing we've done is allowing humans to provide input to what the robots need to do by putting a form that they can use to provide input to them, so it can provide a better symbiosis of humans working together with robots to achieve more processes and more automation in the ecosystems. There's a lot of stuff, this is some of the highlights. >> So what do you think? I mean, what of those, what of that compendium is of interest to you? >> I think, you know, I've been a member for a year now, from, of their customer advisory board, so they truly listen to what we need to say, right? Because the robotic aspect of it is critical, but there's so many other aspects, such as the analytics. So, understanding the business outcome, right? What's the bot producing? Not necessarily the bot that's up and running, but really, what's the impact to the business? I think that's part of the feedback that we've been given in UiPath, they're really working hard on that. The other aspect which is important also is how do you move forward from simple RPA to more complex automations? So, the human in the loop approach to things is important. We call that those small black boxes, you know people with 20 years of experience, they understand how to make decisions but those aren't documented, right? So, now we're giving the opportunity for that human to become part of the process, right? So that is very powerful to us. >> So one of the aspects we've been looking at, the marketplace seems interesting. I'm wondering if you've had a chance to look at that, are there things that you would consider using, and anything that you might even consider contributing in the future? >> I think so. I think this is a whole movement, it's a community today, so no matter where you are, developers, they love it. My guys are telling me, "When is this out?" Because, you know, they have I mean, they're so much hungry to get stuff done and to share what they can do, it makes a difference not only for our company, but for the world, right? So it means something. >> That's interesting. Your company's been around for a long time. You're not worried about, I mean, this open mindset is really intriguing to us, you're not worried about putting your IP in there? Or do you feel like, this open community, we're going to get back as much as we give? >> No, of course. Of course, there are controls in place, and of course, there'll be a protocol in place, but you know, at the end, you're making a difference in the world. So if someone wants to, for instance, have a mortgage because they're wanting to buy a house, you want to make it easy, right? At the end, that's the end goal. You know, for EquiFax and for all the institutions that are in the same sector. >> So from a product standpoint, we just have Craig LeClair on, he couldn't directly call out UiPath. It's not cool, right? I mean, he has to be independent. But, look, he wrote the report, UiPath went from third on the list to first on the list, out of I don't know, 10, 15 vendors. It's like the Gardiner magic quadrants, all these rating systems, right? We don't do 'em, but we read them because they're good, and they're informative. He said in there that last year's features have become this year's table stakes. And some of the things that are differentiating companies, and obviously UiPath won so I presume you have the differentiation ears. Analytics and governance. Those are two big areas, I see the heads nodding. Maybe you guys could each talk about that, Jairo let's start with you, why are those things important? You address the analytics, you kind of address governance, as well, but maybe you can summarize. >> I mean, we address governance as the get-go, and it's an evolution. So for instance, you know, really, truly when we're looking into RPA, it's not only so much about a tactical approach to a specific problem, but it's really turned into a strategy, right? So if you want to scale, you need to have the proper controls in place. So, these guys have done an amazing job integrating with tools such as Cyberart, for instance which is reall important for many companies. They're trying to secure their systems and make sure that the bots are operating on their very secure environment. >> So you guys not only you were in the place position, now you're in the lead. Now the pressure's really on. It's like the Red Sox, Stu. (laughs) So, how'd you get there? What is that enables that? Architecture? Mindset? Culture? You know, give us the insights there. >> Yeah, first of all, let's say we're super excited about being in the first place. I think it's really good, it's a really good testament to the hard work the team is putting in there, so we're super excited about that. We believe that our success and the product roadmap depends upon hearing a lot from customers and making sure that we're responding to their customers. So I think that's what we have done for the most part is ensuring that if there are things that our customers need, if there are things that our customers think our platform and technology is moving toward, we're actually doing the kinds of things that'll actually take us there. So a lot of the innovation that we've done on the platform has come from a direct result of engagement and working with customers and bringing their success into there. Specifically, the governance and analytics, those are very important aspects of what we're doing on a product. Most of our customers are very large corporations like Equifax, other corporations. They will not use our technology if we couldn't support the level of governance and compliance that they need from the ability to run those processes, especially when they're running autonomously without having a human look over what's happening. So that was a core part of what we've invested in. Analytics is also something that we've invested but we'll continue to make more investments there. We're now hearing from Equifax and other customers that people don't want to just get analytics that is responding to what the robots are doing but they want to understand what sort of business impact the robots are having on the corporation. So we want to build an analytics platform that is ingesting not just the robot workloads but bringing in information about line of business systems, as well, to be able to give the reports and perspectives that somebody can look at that and say the robots have done so much for me. Not just in terms of number of hours, but in terms of the business outcomes that I've achieved through the work the robots are executing. >> Jairo, I want to ask you about innovation at Equifax. We've observed many times in theCUBE that innovation in the tech industry used to march at the cadence of Moore's Law. Oh, new chip's out! We've got to do, we can now put better, faster data warehouse. You know, more storage, whatever it was. The innovation model is changing dramatically. And we've observed that it's a combination now, it seems, of data plus AI plus cloud, for scale. So, what do you think about that sort of innovation sandwich? Do you buy into it? How are you guys applying innovation in your business? >> I mean, I'll tell you I got a similar question the other day, you know. It's about, you know, I live in Costa Rica, right? So we surf all the time, right? So it's about riding, you know, the wave, right? So it's not about riding it, right? If you don't ride it, then you're going to drop, right? And then you're going to fall behind. >> Dave: You're going to be driftwood. >> So, yeah, innovation is there, you know. It's that demand for all companies. For us, innovating not only about how do we approach customers and consumers and we put them first in everything we do, but in how we operate internally. Creating a culture that drives automation, right? So giving time for people to think about stuff, you know, that makes a difference, right? I think that's how I can summarize innovation as of this moment. >> So, Stu had a question. >> So, if I understand this right now, we can blame the robots if our credit score isn't good enough now, right? (laughs) >> What do you think? Blame the robots, right? >> Blame the robots, always. >> Blame the innocent, as we say. Well, guys, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. >> Param: Thank you. >> Param and Jairo, it was great to have you, appreciate it. >> Thank you again. >> Alright, keep it right there. Stu and I will be back with our next guest from UiPath Forward Americas. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California, it's the Cube. Covering DevNet Create 2018, brought to you by Cisco. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, this is the Cube's live coverage here in Mountain View, Califonia, for Cisco's DevNet Create. It's their cloud native developer ecosystem. A new initiative, only a year and a half old, great, cloud native dev ops oriented. I'm John Furrier, your cost with my co-host Lauren Cooney, our next guest is Damon Edwards, Chief Product Officer of Rundeck. Welcome to the Cube, good to see you again. >> Yeah good to see you again as well. >> So, you were just on stage giving a talk. >> I was. >> About ops, dev ops. >> I was bumming people out, that's what I was doing, so all of the Cisco early stuff was about new products, new toys, new awesome stuff, and then my talk was about how silos and tickets ruin everything. Right that, we've got all these great advances on the dev side of the house and delivery side of the house and the new technologies we've got, and everything's high flying and going to be perfect, until it all hits operations and things tend to go wrong. So I walked through a bunch of names we changed to hide the not-so-innocent, we went through some incidents and tales of woe and how the disconnects, and basically the siloed way of working, number one, group like with like in operations, very siloed. But also, number two, that we run our lives through these ticket-driven request queues. Right and request queues or queues in general, if you look on the product side, and then the physics of the queuing, the queuing theory behind it, queues are economically very expensive things. You know, they add a lot of delays, they create a lot of bottlenecks. I ask you to do something, I write it down, you take it off the queue, you know, a week later, the context is all different, right? So you have all kinds of bottlenecks, all kinds of quality problems, all kinds of delays, and it's an expensive way to work. Yet that has become the defacto way that we run our lives. And studies and tickets for what they're good at, which is handling problems, we use tickets as the general work permission system for the entire operations organization, and it's no surprise that silos and ticket-driven request queues, that we get what we get. And so the talk was about how to say, well how can we stop using tickets as the primary way of doing things? How do we look at the organization and remove the need for hand-offs between the silos, and then replace, where we can't get rid of the hand-offs, with self-service, right? Pull-based self-service interfaces where people can get what they need to get done, do those operational tasks themselves, and then move on >> Lauren: Great. >> That's what it's all about. >> Tell us a little bit about what your company does and how you're solving this problem, 'cause it's definitely a problem that's out there right now, and people aren't talking about it a whole lot because it's kind of the ugly underbelly of development ops. You know, they're trying to solve it, but they don't really want to talk about it. >> It's less sexy because you get a promotion for delivering the next big project, right? Saying you fix how operations work, it generally doesn't- you know the board of directors doesn't know your name. So that's kind of problem number one. But how Rundeck factors into this is that we make tools for SREs and systems administrators to, number one, organize all their scripts and tools, connect all their scripts and tools, the platforms they currently have across those silos, create standard operating procedures, and then, probably most importantly use the access control features to start to give access to people who are traditionally outside of the operational boundaries. Let developers participate in operations. Let QA participate in operations. Let business analysts participate in operations. All those requests they normally have of operations, create those services, let them do them. By doing that, you're creating more capacity in operations to focus on issues you really need to be solved, and you're making everyone else happy because you're staying out of their way. They can move faster, have fast feedback, higher quality, all of that stuff. >> You know we've done a lot of crowd chats and we had the questions come up, Is it the culture, or is it the tooling, or is it the people? Thinking all of the above, culture, everyone goes to the (mumbles), yeah the culture's going to be there. You guys are doing tooling. Can you talk about some of the things that you've seen that works. How does someone go, "Hey, first it's self-awareness, "we got to change this." If someone's into that mindset, I want to move to the new model, to be more agile, to actually streamline those silos and that ticket system. What tool do they need to use? What are you guys providing? Where is the steps? What's the sequence of tooling and adoption, and picks and shovels. >> Number one, use what you have, right? So this idea that, okay we're going to solve this problem, we're going to teach everybody to use this one tool, so everyone's going to learn this DSL or this language, it just never works. I mean, you know, three years ago it was one tool, we all know the name. Couple of years ago is was another tool, we all know the name, you know, these configuration management tools. Now we're on to the new container world, I don't know if we need that or not. Everyone wants to do what they need to do, so let them do what they need to do. It's a very lean idea. Focus on how to connect those things. Focus on how to orchestrate and organize what you've got already. And then from there, focus on, you know, how do we two things? Limit those hand-offs, so that kind of is more of an organizational issue. And number two, all those hand-off points, Anything I need something from you John, you know, or you Lauren, I don't want to have to say, "do this for me, and you do this for me." I'm going to wait and you've got five other things you're working on. You should create services that I can pull from. I need something from you, I need something you normally do. Hit an automated service, sort of like, don't do the old Savist managed service way of doing things. Do it the Amazon way, right, which is I can hit an API and get what I want when I want it. And most importantly, it's not just a one way button I can push. But I can actually create those buttons myself. So I can give the thing that I need to do, you can look at it and say, yeah that's going to work, give me back permission to go and run it. Everybody's happy, you guys get more of the scenario, get more capacity and I get what I want without having- >> So is microservices going to impact operations in a way? Cause then what you're getting at is more of a microservices, more of the primitives are going to be in the ops side. So there's a development mindset anyway. Is that standard dev ops now is ops? >> Well you need to handle the operational concerns as early in the life-cycle as possible. Meaning developers have to build from- it's kind of like in the car world, you build a car for manufactureability. You have to build the services for operability, and so that's number one. And with the new microservices decoupled world, you have to move to this model of operations because the old model that did work balances across these silos, it just doesn't work in this decoupled world. It makes everything kind of grind back to a lumpen mass of who-knows-what. So if you want to let the organization decouple, you have to be able to decouple your operations to match. >> So how long is it taking for customers to realize the value of your solutions that you bring to the table? And how much time is it saving them? >> Yeah, I mean, for Rundeck specifically, because it doesn't force you to learn new languages, you can start with what you've got today. So literally it takes days, right? Start plugging in things that you have. You can set up the access control. You can set up the options interface, and next thing you know, I've got this self-service interface and I can turn around and let somebody use it. So, you know, Rundeck doesn't do the culture and the organization change for you. This becomes a tool that greases that, makes it a lot easier to get that. >> What specifically in the tool that works for customers that's resonating in your tool? What's the big impact when people engage with you guys? When do they know when to bring you in for the tool? Let's just say that the gurus can... hey, here's the culture, you know, you do some yoga, whatever you got to do culture-wise, make that happen. You come in, what do you do? >> Sure, so for us, we're kind of more the bottom-up, right? It's usually a team that says, "hey we're getting overrun with these requests." Or it's a team that's saying, we've got to get like- it could be as simple as our restarts are a mess. There's too many ways to do things across all these tools. And then it's, hey, these people keep bugging us to do this. Or, that team keeps bugging us to refresh this environment. Or, this team, we need to give them access to something that goes wrong in production, to run some health checks and see what's happening. Really, those kind of operational, support-type use cases. It's generally at the team-level, be brought in to solve these different problems. And then where, really, the gas gets poured on, is when the upper management is following all the dev ops and SREs conversations and realize that things need to change, then they usually see Rundeck as, ooh, we can use that, right? That's going to help us unlock things, and let's do more of that, and it spreads from team to team. >> So you're really not trying to come in and boil the ocean over. You come in on a very specific entry point, and then get momentum and scales. >> Yeah, we get organizations that aren't touching their culture at all. It's literally just, we're doing things the old, classic, off-shore, application operations call center model, and we're just going to get better at that, and use Rundeck to create more capacity, standardize things, bring some more people into this process, and that's it. And they're very successful as that. And then, the really exciting ones is when the coder gets caught up into larger organizational transformation. >> You mentioned SRE, site reliability engineers. Google uses that term. So I've got to ask you, we talked before we came on camera about "no ops", having a no ops culture because dev ops is more developer. And we were kind of pooh-poohing that, and you were kind of more aggressive. I won't say what you said to me because it's a children's show here. >> Damon: Yes I'm sure a lot of children watch the Cube. (laughs) >> The ops guys, no pun intended. So, Google is really hardcore on this. Do you have an opinion on this? Ops, no ops, dev ops, the role of ops? >> I mean it's ridiculous, ops happens, right? I mean, ops everyday. John Alspot was a formerly dexy, and now he's kind of a researcher, does this thing at conferences where he says, "Everybody raise your hand, if I locked everybody out, "so hands off the keyboard, you can't do anything. "How many of your companies "would still be in business tomorrow? "Or in a week? Or in a month? Or in a year?" And people's hands kind of going... You know, a day and a week, you know? And the reality is operations happens, right? These are complex, moving systems, interacting with complex things in the world, and you have to be able to operate them. So, you know, the original no ops idea was, oh I don't want to have a separate thing called operations, I want to distribute operations where it makes sense, have engineers everywhere. Google has an interesting view, which is, no we have a distinct organization. But they call it SRE and they use more software engineering discipline to do. We have a whole methodology behind it. But they're very much proving you can still have a separate engineering and operations organization and do it right. And then there's folks like Netflix and Amazon who are more like, no no we're going to distribute it within these cross-functional teams and organizations. >> And they're still ops no matter how you slice them. But here's the thing, my observation... People get confused automation and operations. Just because you're automating something doesn't mean it goes away. >> Damon: Right. >> You might automate some tasks and things- >> Damon: Or it could make it worse. >> Yeah so talk about that pull-push, that tug between that. Because it's the tension that's positive, because you want to automate things that you're doing multiple repetitive tasks on. But that eliminates some tasks but you're still operating. Talk about that dynamic. >> Well, there's certain things computers are very good at. Repetitive, no-end tasks, computers are great at. But it takes human creativity, or sort of the super complex connecting-the-dots. Humans are good at that. So how do you automate as much of the things as possible that the computers are good at? And that gives you the time and the cognitive bandwidth to focus on the creative. That's creative in building things, creative in "oh crap, we've got to solve this". Right, and the tool should be there to support that. The idea that you can automate all of that away, it just is not- >> Give me an example, if you look four or five years and think about how we're moving fast with the evolution with the cloud and everything else happening. (mumbles) IOG, AO, all this great stuff's happening. You got blog chain, you got cryptocurrent, a lot of things going on. That is super positive, it also could be detrimental. Where does the human piece come in? Where will always be the pieces where human creativity, human intuition, human judgment... Where is it always going to shine? What specific things do you see never going away? >> It's what you said, the intuition and the judgment, right? In the day-to-day work activities, you need to use that intuition and judgment to get things done, to see the different signals, and understand what they mean, to create new solutions on how to solve these new challenges. You know, that is where the human beings are needed. So, it's both in the delivery time, and in the idea of operations. If you think of an airplane, there's still pilots. You think of a nuclear power plant, there's still operators. Tons of automation, tons of alarms, tons of things to assist them, but it still comes down to the things that human brains are good at. So there's always a role- >> So categorically, how you see security, latency is one, multi-cloud, workload movement, is the areas that you start to see the categorical areas that are never going to go away. >> Yeah, and at a certain point you're going to have things where the platforms get better, and you kind of climb the stack, and more things that only human beings can do in the past you can start to automate things. Like deployment, deployment used to be a human task, now we start to standardize things, have standard parts, have virtualization, now the cloud, now the cloud native technology. That allows you to... Okay, you've standardized things, you've build the right tooling, now you can focus the humans on more important problems, and move at a higher velocity and better quality. >> Lauren: Great. >> Great stuff. Okay, what's going on for you? What are you up to now these days? What events are you going to? What are you working on? what are the cool things you're excited about right now? >> What am I excited about? The dev ops enterprise summit, I've been involved with that for a number of years, that is the best collection of enterprise, big corporation thinking around the whole sphere of transformation. >> John: And it's growing too. >> Yeah, it's growing. There's one now in London, one now going to be in Las Vegas, you know, 1000 to 2000 people. SREcon. SRE is a... It's like a specialized implementation of all the dev ops thinking. I think that's another great place to be. And then devopsdays, Velocity, all the traditional conferences. >> Great community. You've got to say being involved in the dev ops from day one, watching the pioneers, a few with arrows in their back, but now have gone mainstream, super exciting. I think Cooper Netties brings that mainstream, just highlights everything. >> Yeah, that's that platform I was talking about. A lot of the concerns that human beings had to struggle with on a day-to-day basis are now being put into the orchestration and scheduling and the containerization of things. >> Damon, great work. Congratulations on all the work you've done. You've been a real contribution to the industry. >> Thank you. >> Good luck with the business. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Alright, this Cube live coverage here in Mountain View for Cisco's DEVNET Create. Really the Cisco's foray into cloud native. Really getting at that dev ops culture, solving big problems, programming the networks. Cisco's bringing that together with their communities. Of course, Cube's here covering it. More live coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge17, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> And we're back in Orlando, everybody, this is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick, CJ Desai is here, he's the Chief Product Officer of ServiceNow, the newly-minted, 150 days in, CJ, great to see you off the keynote, fantastic job. >> Thank you, thank you, thank you. >> Very crisp, I was struck by your story about last October, when you were contacted by ServiceNow, you fired up the platform and started playing around and built an app. >> Yeah! (chuckling) >> And you found it was a good experience. >> It was a great experience, I'll tell you, Dave, from my standpoint, when you join a company that is built on a platform like ServiceNow, you want to make sure that you feel great about the foundational elements, because as always, you can build floors on top of a foundation, only when the foundation is strong. So ServiceNow always, I don't know if you know, but it started out as a platform company, and then they used the service management use case, and went deep in that use case, and then went to Operations Management and other products, as you know, and I just wanted to make sure that, hey, how easy it is, if I'm a customer, or if I'm in the product development organization, to create an app, and having that strong foundational layer, even simple things like, it's the cloud offering, first of all, you have a integrated development environment, you can start creating workflows, UI, all of that is so easy, and there's no headache of figuring out how to deploy the app, because it's right there, so you just publish it and you're done. >> Yeah, it's interesting, one of the first CUBE interviews we did at Knowledge was with Doug Leone, the famous VC, and he told the story of, he saw this, "What am I going to do with this?" And sent Fred away and said, "Build something on top of it," and that's what happened, but. But help our audience understand, CJ, because you talked about Jakarta today. >> Yeah. >> Now, Jakarta is a platform capability, and if we understand it correctly, we were talking about it earlier, the business units have to figure out, "Okay, how do we apply that capability "to our particular needs, and our customer needs," so explain that. >> Yeah, so ultimately, there are two things that happens in the products organization, right? First is, we do release this every six months, twice a year, so every six months, twice a year, and we go by alphabets, and we pick cities, just a fun factoid, we pick cities that go from North America or South America, to Europe, to Asia. So, H released last year, around this time, was Helsinki, after Helsinki was Istanbul, and then we have Jakarta, so are now in Asia, and then next will be Kingston, and the one after that is London, so you go alphabetically, and the reason we pick this city names in alphabets, we support our customers, because it's a multi-instance paradigm, n minus one and n minus two releases, so when you make, name of the cities, customers will have a conversation with me and say, "CJ, we went on Helsinki, we're upgrading to Istanbul, "or we're going to skip Istanbul, "and go straight to Jakarta," for example, so, first of all, that's our naming system that we use, every six months, you will see us talk about a specific release, and you heard from John yesterday, he was very clear in saying, "Listen, "our customers want to hear our roadmap, "they want to know what we are up to," and so we took that customer feedback to heart, and decided, why don't we just tell them what's coming in Jakarta? So Jakarta will be released this summer, and from a planning standpoint, Dave, to answer your question, we figure out first, what do our customers want, and is it in the applications that we talked about, like ITSM or CSM or security or HR, and for those applications to deliver the functionality, what do we need to do in the platform so that the functionality can be delivered? So the requirement process is a complex requirement process, the applications team will give requirements to the platform, customers also sometimes have requirements for the platform on scale, platform will build a functionality, applications team will build the features on top of it, so in Jakarta, which is coming out this summer, we have six new products, you saw some of them, software asset management and others, 30 major features, and that's close, so after Jakarta, we're already in planning for Kingston. After Kingston, I think I'm going to announce it for the first time, will be London, so it's Jakarta, Kingston, London, are the three-- >> Yeah, so when we go to these events, a lot of times, at the keynotes, somebody will make a product announcement and you get a little golf clap, it always happens at ServiceNow Knowledge that you get somebody hooting in the audience, today, the hoot came for software asset management, they were the three high level things you talked about today, performance with UX, and performance, and then the vendor risk management, which is very interesting, we'll talk about that a little bit, and then the software asset management, the guy must've been an Oracle customer hooting and hollering. But so, give us the high level overview. >> Alright, so, here is the thing, right? Our buyer is IT organization, we started with IT. We love our buyer, and CIO, to all the organizations that support CIO, head of infrastructure, the portfolio management team, the business management within IT. And one of the things that we saw, and this is the requirement that we got is, when we talk to CIOs about how to make the IT organization productive, because IT, it's a tough job, man, it's a tough job, things go down, you're like, "Okay, of course, IT," and technology's such an integral part of our life that people are always looking at IT to make sure they deliver great technologies. So, IT budget, and every, debated this all the time, everybody talks about IT budgets, what's happening to IT budgets, how the IT budget is going up or down, are you asked to do more with less, there are so many examples I can use, but as per Gartner, 25% of the IT budget is on software licensing. Then there is hardware and all the other infrastructure and people-related cost. 25%, so if, and as you know, some of the vendors put you through a pretty complex audit process, so why can't we, our chief buyer is IT, why can't we give them a platform, or a product, that allows them to discover how many products you are using by vendor, Microsoft, Oracle, some of you examples you used, for desktop, it's Adobe and others, you use these products, are you really utilizing all the licenses you have, or are you potentially in overage so that you actually have a sense of where you stand with every vendor that you're using that makes up your 25% budget. We talk to financial customers, manufacturing industrial customers, these are billions of dollars of budget, 25% is still a big number, any improvement in that 25% could go a long way, and what CFOs do not like is when CIOs go and tell the CFO, "Hey, we didn't clear this audit, "or potentially these guys may sue us "for a contract violation," so we decided we are going to create a product that helps you get a good posture on what your licensing is, does that make sense? And that's why, you know, I also saw on Twitter, a lot of people love this idea that, hey, can we automate this software as a management process, discover what's being deployed, allow you to reclaim, and at the end, help you save the cost. >> And the other one was the cloud management platform, which again, similar type of situation, especially with all the freemium services, and test dev, and card swiping, that they can get unruly pretty quickly. >> In my last job, as you are aware, I was in infrastructure space, and one of the things in speaking to customers, always realized that hey, IT was not agile enough, we decided, for some customers, we decided to go and use some of the public cloud services, re-enter infrastructure, because IT could not keep up with our demands, and you go and speak to IT, they say there is so much going on that sometimes it's not easy for devops communities, in particular, that you pointed out, so much going on. So, IT felt like they were losing control, developers, whether they're application developers in IT organization or in business units, just wanted agility, and IT felt like if they cannot deliver that level of service, you had the share-to-IT functions going on in the departments, and with cloud, we acquired a company called iTapp about a year ago in April. The first year was all focused on re-platforming, like I said today, I think many times, I'm sure people got sick of listening to me, is, we are going to re-platform every acquisition that we make, and we usually buy technologies in our business so far. And we re-platform it, and now, IT gets the control back, once for, you know, you help the developers, devops people, sure, go and use public cloud, but IT will still have a single pane of glass that allows you to look at your resource mapping, utilization, understanding the cost and the usage, whether you are on public cloud service, or in private cloud service. >> Well, it's huge, because it's very unpredictable, and people often complain, "Oh, I get the cloud bill at the end of the month," but a lot of times, there's not just one cloud bill, it's many, many cloud bills, and what happens, you know, you remember this, in the downturn, a lot of CFOs said, "Go to the public cloud, "eliminate Capax" and then, when we came out of the downturn, lines of business said, "I got to move fast, "and this cloud thing seems to be working for me." IT seems to have really, you know, in previous big picture trends like this, mega trends, IT oftentimes has been sort of pushing back, you saw that with client server. >> Yeah, their security concerns, compliances-- >> And today, they're announcing, okay, we have to embrace cloud, or we're toast. >> And Dave, I'll tell you, there are customers, I mean, some very large customers in regulated industries who tell me that, "CJ, we are now cloud first, "before we decide to do something," I mean, that's a pretty big statement, cloud first, I mean, if you remember 2008, '09, '10, '11, '12, '13, that journey, and how customers were reluctant, and they're like, "I don't know, my data losing from here," and this and that-- >> Well, I got to bring this up, so, I was reading an article on SiliconANGLE, EMC World is going on, Dell EMC World this week, and Michael Dell basically made this statement in his keynote, "If you're a cloud first, "you could be in trouble because of the expanse," and so forth. I don't buy it. I think the other, I love you, Michael, but the value that customers are getting out of going cloud-first, maybe, yeah, maybe the bill at the end of the month is high, but the other residual effects on your business, the speed, the agility, the processes, you're seeing it, aren't you? >> I mean, I'll tell you straight up, there are customers that are asking us, because, you know, again, IT's our key buyer, and key customer, and we appeal to the IT department, and the CIOs, even at the CIO dinner the night before, people are embracing cloud. Now, they are on a journey, some of them have maybe mode few percent of their workload, some of them may have mode a little higher, but they're on some journey, and they're trying to balance when the cost pros out with the cons, or the cons out with the pros, but, can you give us some kind of control plane to manage our cloud resources, understand the usage, understand the billing, which we do for financial management, and tie-in with IT processes, because that resource life cycle, that VMU provision, right, that VMU provision in the cloud, what happens to the life cycle of VM, can you create an incident, can you close it out, that's equally important besides just saying, "Yeah, I'm going to move this particular workload to cloud." So I feel that customers are on this journey of some kind of combination of public and private cloud, and it doesn't have to be zero-sum game, infrastructure continues to grow, I don't feel like, okay, if you do this, that means you do not do private, or if you do private, that doesn't mean-- >> Certainly both, and containers are going to just exacerbate the problem. >> Right, and the demand for compute, store, and networking is not going down any time soon. >> I'll tell you, my role environment, so my team lends cloud infrastructure, so our platforms runs on cloud infrastructure, and you saw some of the elevated numbers, I mean, our growth, we are trying to invest in compute network storage ahead of our growth, so it's not, and we are a cloud service, so I always look at it as, this doesn't have to be zero-sum game, customers are expanding, they want the agility, like you said, the agility, the business is asking, "Can you develop this app faster, "can you give me what I need," is what's driving-- >> It's a topline game for businesses, Jeff, I just want to inject some of those numbers on your cloud, 50,000 instances, 150 million active users, and 10 billion transactions per month. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, but I want to get, it's funny you're talking about Jakarta and London, I remember when we were doing interviews around Dublin, which I guess was a while ago, but I'm curious, 'cause there's this other trade-off, and get your perspective, is in a devops world, in kind of a continuous integration and development world, people want to push code frequently. On the other hand, in an enterprise world, and we've talked to a couple of customers, they can only take it so much, and so you've kind of got this yin and yang, and you want to get stuff out, and there's patches, and this and that, and you're on a relatively aggressive for current enterprise release schedule, on the other hand, the trend is clearly, just keep pumping it out, pumping it out, pumping it out, how do you see that kind of sorting itself out over time with these big enterprise customers? >> I will tell you, from a technology standpoint, there is nothing that prevents us from doing more frequent releases, yes, we have to mature our product release processes, we have to mature our cloud operations and how fast we can churn the code. There is nothing that prevents us, technically, from instead of two releases a year, maybe do four releases, it doesn't! But our customers, and we talk about customers first, listening to customers, you saw John today, I mean, we want to listen to them, and they will tell us, that I was at a large financial institution in Boston two weeks ago, and, your hometown, and they told me that, "I cannot do every six months, "I cannot do every six months, CJ, "we usually skip a release," right? And so we are just listening for specific use cases around service management, the processes, customer-run, same thing with operations management, right now, six months about feels right, every six months, release, we do quarterly patches, where we do not release features in those quarterly patches, and for emerging products, like you saw customer service, they challenge security, the team did a great job, when I look at those releases, is it potentially can we push things fast? Maybe, but right now, I'm okay, based on customer feedback. If customers come and say, "I want every three months," I hope to see what does that mean-- >> Let me run something by you, I told Jeff I've been sharing cabs with practitioners all week, it's great to just have wonderful conversations, and one said to me, "I've asked ServiceNow "if they can give me more granularity in the releases," I said, that doesn't sound trivial, in other words, if I can selectively choose features, is that even technically feasible? >> I mean, this is the isolating the feature, micro-feature development, making sure your schema is abstracted enough, I mean, there are companies in consumer world who do that, and push code out really fast. I would say, right now, one of the requirements I do get is, we're on IT service management, we have been a customer of ServiceNow for a while, but on this other thing, say, customer service, or HR, I want to take the new features, so my IT service management is at, say, Helsinki, but I want to take the HR, like the onboarding you saw, the onboarding, which is in Jakarta. So does that mean I need to upgrade this thing to leverage the HR feature? The answer is yes, because it's all built on single platform. Now, I do not want to do where customers, we give them two instances, and then we do a back-end pipe integration, a connector, so you can be on Helsinki for ITSM, and Jakarta, that-- >> Architecturally-- >> That breaks our model, and I do not want to do that. There are companies who, say, reside in different tenant, and will give you one for, I do not want to do that. >> I wanted to ask you about this too, CJ, because, you have a dogma, you have your own cloud, you see a lot of SaaS companies now saying, okay, you see Workday, a little bit of Salesforce, certainly Infor, putting their applications on AWS, for example. You guys, very proud of your cloud, you have availability, and I think when you show availability numbers, you downplay it, actually, people don't understand this, you're talking about application availability, you're not talking about the server light-- >> No. >> Okay, so you're very dogmatic about your cloud, and this issue here, you won't do something that maybe is going to help one customer but is going to ruin the experience down the road for all, and that dogma, is that a valid, it's not a criticism, it's an observation, and is that a good thing? >> So I would say there are some design principles, or operational principles that we live with, and we are going to stick to them, like we talk about acquisitions and re-platforming, think about, Dave, you have somebody coming in, you acquire a machine learning company, really smart kids, really smart people, machine learning or data sciences, an art more than a science, and looking at prediction accuracies and things like that. Now you tell them, "Welcome to ServiceNow, "here's your badge, you just got onboarded, "it's great what you've built, "we are not going to sell that standalone, "you need to re-platform," which typically takes one year, "Before we can launch your product." That's a tough message. That's a tough message for an engineering team to hear, that now I have to figure out how does this platform work, I mean, if I had a magic bullet, I would tell you, if I can wave the magic wand, I'll say, acquire this technology in machine learning AI, combine that with our organic development, it's a re-platform and I have a toolkit that does this thing, and it is a re-platform, but that's not easy. So on these kind of principles, whether it's re-platforming, how we do the releases, how we look at the cloud, and I want to answer your public cloud question. Right now, as you know, we're active, active, I've seen your interviews in the past here, we're active, active, we have eight pair of data centers, 16 around the world, and we make sure with our multi-instance architecture, the availability of the uptimes are very high for our customers, and when they upgrade, we know, they can pull the upgrade, "I'm going, CJ, "from Helsinki to Istanbul, or Helsinki to Jakarta," and that's available, but, can we potentially look at moving our footprint, and renting infrastructure in a public cloud? I'll never say never, but right now, there is no need for it. >> No, you see it, and there are advantages to having your own cloud. I want to ask about your role as Chief Product Officer. Fred Luddy had that title, we were sort of joking earlier, Fred was a coder, the company brought Frank in for adult supervision, and so you're inheriting that title, but I sense that you're a different type of manager, what do you bring to ServiceNow? >> I'll tell you, first of all, Fred, Frank, and even Dan McGee, who had this role last year, he was here, I saw his interview, he's here today, phenomenal people, I mean, I have interacted with all three of them, Dan McGee helped me transition into my role, Frank hired me, and just great, great guy, and even with Fred, going through this user experience, how do I think about the user experience based on the persona, he's always there to provide input with lots and lots energy and feedback. So let me just tell you for, in less than 30 seconds, what my role is, right? My role is, I help platform team, and the cloud infrastructure team, that's lead by Pat Casey, who is doing CreativeCon tomorrow, I have individual application general managers that you saw some of them today, and I also have the customer support organization, and the user experience teams. So that's my overall responsibility, so it's the responsibility that Fred Luddy had til last October, and Dan McGee had til last December, combined into one. So, it's a big job, and it comes with a lot of responsibilities on behalf of our customers, you talk about high availability number, we help to make sure that we keep our cloud service up and running secure, but at the same time, bringing this innovation in platform and the applications is my job. So, I'd done, fortunately, when I started out of college, makes me sound old, I know, but when I came out of college, I worked for a company that was doing business applications for a long time, eight years there, and I worked in that applications technology team, I worked in the CRM applications, did things for financial applications, and I went on security software, understanding how you protect the applications you write, all the way from OS up to the application stack, and then I worked for a infrastructure company, as you know. So that gave me a really good feel on the entire stack, how do you scale that stack, and be maniacally focused on, what do customers want? I mean, I am very fortunate to have great customer relationships, many companies around the globe, I reach out to them, ask them, tell me what you think, tell me what we are doing well, so customer focus, having done product development for 20-plus years now, and understanding all the way from application stack to the underlying infrastructure, is where I can help-- >> Yeah, it's like a triple threat that you have, the product innovation, the enterprise class, security, and scaling, as you mentioned, very, very important. Alright, CJ, I love having you on theCUBE, you're a great guest, we could continue, but we got to leave it right there. Great to see you again-- >> Thank you, thank you so much, I really appreciate it. >> Alright, keep it right there, everybody, we'll be back with our next guest, this is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17, we'll be right back.

>> Live from New York. It's The Cube, covering Big Data NYC 2015. Brought to you by Horton Works, IBM, EMC, and Pivotal. Now for your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to live in New York City for the Cube. A special big data [inaudible 00:00:27] our flagship program will go out to the events. They expect a [Inaudible 00:00:30] We are here live as part of Strata Hadoop Big Data NYC. I'm John Furrier. My co-host, Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Jim Campigli, the Chief Product Officer at WANdisco. Welcome back to The Cube. Great to see you. >> Thanks, great to be here. >> You've been COO of WANdisco, head of marketing, now Chief Product Officer for a few years. You guys have always had the patent. David was on earlier. I asked him specifically, why doesn't the other guys just do what you do? I wanted you to comment deeper on that because he had a great answer. He said, patents. But you guys do something that's really hard that people can't do. >> Right. >> So let's get into it because Fusion is a big announcement you guys made. Big deal with EMC, lot of traction with that, and it's one of these things that is kind of talked about, but not talked about. It's really a big deal, so what is the reason why you guys are so successful on the product side? >> Well I think, first of all, it starts with the technology that we have patented, and it's this true active active replication capability that we have. Other software products claim to have active active replication, but when you drill down on what they're really doing, typically, what's happening is they'll have a set of servers that they replicate across, and you can write a transaction at any server, but then that server is responsible for propagating it to all of the other servers in the implementation. There's no mechanism for pre-agreeing to that transaction before it's actually written, so there's no way to avoid conflicts up front, there's no way to effectively handle scenarios where some of the servers in the implementation go down while the replication is in process, and very frequently, those solutions end up requiring administrators to do periodic resynchronization, go back and manually find out what didn't take, and deal with all the deltas, whereas we offer guaranteed consistency. And effectively what happens is with us, you can write at any server as well, but the difference is we go through a peer-to-peer agreement process, and once a quorum of the servers in the implementation agree to the transaction, they all accept it, and we make sure everything is written in the same order on every server. And every server knows the last good transaction it processed, so if it goes down at some point in time, as soon as it comes back up, it can grab all the transactions it missed during that time slice while it was offline, resync itself automatically without an administrator having to do anything. And you can use that feature not only for network and server outages that cause downtime, but even for planned maintenance, which is one of the biggest causes of Hadoop availability issues, because obviously if you've got a global appointment, when it's midnight on Sunday in the U.S., it's the start of the business day on Monday in Europe, and then it's the middle of the afternoon in Asia. So if you take Hadoop clusters down, somebody somewhere in the world is going to be going without their applications and data. >> It's interesting; I want to get your comments on this because this has a great highlight into the next conversation we've been hearing all throughout The Cube this week is analytics, outcomes. These are the kind of things that people talk about because that means there's checks being written. Hadoop is moving into production. People have done the clusters. It used to be the conversation, hey, x number of clusters, you do this, you do that, replication here and there, YARN, all these different buzz words. Really feeds and speeds. Now, Hadoop is relevant, but it's kind of invisible. It's under the hood. >> Right. >> Yet, it's part of other things in the network, so high availability, non-disruptive operations, is what our table stakes now. So I want you to talk about that nuance because that's what we're seeing as the things that are powering, as the engine of Hadoop deployments. What is that? Take us through that nuance, because that's one of the things that you guys have been doing a lot of work in that's making it reliable and stable. To actually go out and play with Hadoop, deploy it, make sure it's always on. >> Well, we really come into play when companies are moving Hadoop out of the lab and into production. When they have defined application SLAs, when they can only have so much down time, and it may be business requirements, it may be regulatory compliance issues, for example, financial services. They pretty much always have to have their data available. They have to have a solid back-up of the data. That's a hard requirement for them to put anything into production in their data centers. >> The other use case we've been hearing is okay, I've got Hadoop, I've been playing with it, now I need to scale it up big time. I need to double, triple my clusters. I have to put it with my applications. Then the conversation's, okay, wait, do I need to do more cis admin work? How do you address that particular piece because I think that's where I think Fusion comes in from how I'm reading it, but is that a Fusion value proposition? Is it a WANdisco thing, and what does the customer, and is that happening? >> Yeah, so there's actually two angles to that, and the first is how do we maintain that up-time? How do we make sure there's performance availability to meet the SLA's, the production SLA's? The active active replication that we have patents for, that I described earlier, and it's embodied in our discount distributed coordination engine, is at the core of Fusion, and once a Fusion server's installed with each of your Hadoop clusters, that active active replication capability is extended to them, and we expose that HDFS API so the client applications, Sqoop, Flume, Impala, HIVE, anything that would normally run against a Hadoop cluster, would talk through us. If it's been defined for replication, we do the active active replication of it. Pass straight through and process normally on the local cluster. So how does that address the issues you were talking about? What you're getting by default with our active active replication is effectively continuous hot back-up. That means if one cluster or an entire data center goes offline, that data exists elsewhere. Your users can fail over. They can continue accessing the data, running their applications. As soon as that cluster comes back online, it resyncs automatically. Now what's the other >> No user involvement? No admin? >> No user involvement in that. Now the only time, and this gets back into what I was talking about earlier, if I take servers offline for planned maintenance, upgrade the hardware, the operating system, whatever it may be, I can take advantage of that feature, as I was alluding to earlier. I can take the servers of the entire cluster offline, and Fusion knows the last good transactions that were processed on that cluster. As soon as the admin turns it back on, it'll resync itself automatically. So that's how you avoid down time, even for planned maintenance, if you have to take an entire location off. Now, to your other question, how do you scale this stuff up? Think about what we do. We eliminate idle standby hardware, because everything is full read write. You don't have standby read-only back-up clusters and servers when we come into the picture. So let's say we walk into an existing implementation, and they've got two clusters. One is the active cluster where everything's being written to, read from, actively being accessed by users. The other's just simply taking snapshots or periodic back-ups, or they're using dis(CP) or something else, but they really can't get full utilization out of that. We come in with our active active replication capability, and they don't have to change anything, but what suddenly happens is, as soon as they define what they want replicated, we'll replicate it for them initially to the other clusters. They don't have to pre-sync it, and the cluster that was formally for disaster recovery, for back-up, is now live and fully usable. So guess what? I'm now able to scale up to twice my original implementation by just leveraging that formally read-only back-up cluster that I was >> Is there a lot of configuration involved in that, or is it automatically? >> No, so basically what happens, again, you don't have to synchronize the clusters in advance. The way we replicate is based on this concept of folders, and you can think of a folder as basically a collection of files and subdirectories that roll up into root directories, effectively, that reflect typically particular applications that people are using with Hadoop or groups of users that have data sets that they access for their various sets of applications. And you define the replicated folders, basically a high level directory that consists of everything in it, and as soon as you do that, what we'll do automatically, in a new implementation. Let's keep it simple. Let's say you just have two clusters, two locations. We'll replicate that folder in its entirety to the target you specify, and then from that point on, we're just moving the deltas over the wire. So you don't have to do anything in advance. And then suddenly that back-up hardware is fully usable, and you've doubled the size of your implementations. You've scaled up to 2x. >> So, I mean what you're describing before, really strikes me that the way you tell the complexity of a product and the value of a product in this space is what happens when something goes wrong. >> Yep. >> That's the question you always ask. How do you recover, because recovery's a very hard thing, and your patents, you've got a lot of math inside there. >> Right. >> But you also said something that's interesting, which is you're an asset utilization play. >> Right. >> You're being able to go in relatively simply and say, okay, you've got this asset that's underutilized. I'm now going to give you back some capacity that's on the floor and take advantage of that. >> Right, and you're able to scale up without spending any more on hardware and infrastructure. >> So I'm interested in, so another company. You're now with an EMC partnership this week. And they sort of got into this way back in the mainframe days with SRDF. I always thought when I first heard about WANdisco, it's like SRDF for Hadoop, but it's active active. Then they bought that Yada Yada. >> And there's no distance limitations for their active active. >> So what's the nature of the relationship with EMC? >> Okay, so basically EMC, like the other storage vendors that want to play in the Hadoop space, expose some form of an HDFS API, and in fact, if you look at Hortonworks or Cloudera, if you go and look at Cloudera Manager, one of the things it asks you when you're installing it is are you going to run this on regular HDFS storage, effectively a bunch of commodity boxes typically, or are you going to use EMC Isilon or the various other options? And what we're able to do is replicate across Hadoop clusters running on Isilon, running on EMC ECS, running on standard HDFS, and what that allows these companies to do is without modifying those storage systems, without migrating that data off of them, incorporate it into an enterprise-wide data lake, if that's what they want to do, and selectively replicate across all of those different storage systems. It could be a mix of different Hadoop distributions. You could have replication between C/D/H, HDP, Pivotal, MapR, all of those things, including EMC Storage that I just mentioned, it was mentioned in the press release, Isilon, and ECS effectively has a Hadoop-compatible API support. And we can create in effect a single virtual cluster out of all of those different platforms. >> So is it a go-to-market relationship? Is it an OEM deal? >> Yeah, it was really born out of the fact that we have some mutual customers that want to do exactly what I just described. They have standard Hortonworks or Cloudera deployments in house. They've got data running on Isilon, and they want to deploy a data lake that includes what they've got stored on Isilon with what they've got in HDFS and Hadoop and replicate across that. >> Like onerous EMC certification process? >> Yeah, we went through that process. We actually set up environments in our labs where we had EMC, Isilon, and ECS running and did demonstration integrations, replication across Isilon to HDP to Hortonworks, Isilon to Cloudera, ECS to Isilon to HDP and Cloudera and so forth. So we did prove it out. They saw that. In fact, they lent us boxes to actually do this in our labs, so they were very motivated, and they're seeing us in some of their bigger accounts. >> Talk about the aspect of two things: non-disruptive operations, meaning I have to want to deploy stuff because now that Hadoop has a hardened top with some abstraction layer, with analytics to focus, there's a lot of work going on under the hood, and a large scale enterprise might have a zillion versions of Hadoop. They might have little Hortonworks here. They might have something over here, so there might be some diversity in the distributions. That's one thing. The other one is operational disruption. >> Right. >> What do you guys do there? Is it zero disruption, and how do you deal with multiple versions of the distro? >> Okay, so basically what we're doing, the simplest way to describe it is we're providing a common API across all of these different distributions, running on different storage platforms and so forth, so that the client applications are always interacting with us. They're not worrying about the nuances of the particular Hadoop API's that these different things expose. So we're providing a layer of abstraction effectively. So we're transparent in effect, in that sense, operationally, once we're installed. The other thing is, and I mentioned this earlier, we come in, basically, you don't have to pre-sync clusters, you don't have to make sure they're all the same versions or the same distros or any of that, just install us, select the data that you want to replicate, we'll replicate it over initially to the target clusters, and then from that point on, you just go. It just works, and we talked about the core patent for active active replication. We've got other patents that have been approved, three patents now and seven pending applications pending, that allow this active active replication to take place while servers are being added and removed from implementations without disrupting user access or running applications and so forth. >> Final question for you, sum up the show this week. What's the vibe here? What's the aroma? Is it really Hadoop next? What is the overall Big Data NYC story here in Strata Hadoop? What's the main theme that you're seeing coming out of the show? >> I think the main theme that we're starting to see, it's twofold. I think one is we are seeing more and more companies moving this into production. There's a lot of interest in Spark and the whole fast data concept, and I don't think that Spark is necessarily orthogonal to Hadoop at all. I think the two have to coexist. If you think about Spark streaming and the whole fast data concept, basically, Hadoop provides the historical data at rest. It provides the historical context. The streaming data provides the point in time information. What Spark together with Hadoop allows you to do is that real time analysis, do the real time informed decision-making, but do it within historical context instead of a single point in time vacuum. So I think what's happening, and you notice the vendors themselves aren't saying, oh it's all Spark, forget Hadoop. They're really talking about coexisting. >> Alright, Jim, from WANdisco, Chief Product Officer, really in the trenches, talking about what's under the hood and making it all scale in the infrastructure so his analysts can hit the scene. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming and sharing your insight here on The Cube. Live in New York City. We are here, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage of Big Data NYC in conjunction with Strata. We'll be right back with more live coverage in the moment here in New York City after this short break.