(slow music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's ongoing coverage of VMworld 2021, the second year in a row we've done this virtually. My name is Dave Vellante and long-time VMware technologist and new CTO Kit Colbert is here. Kit, welcome. Good to see you again. >> Thanks, Dave. Super excited to be here. >> So let's talk about your new role. You've been at VMware. You've touched all the bases so to speak (Kit chuckles) and, you know, love the career evolution. You're ready for this job. So tell us about that role. >> Well, I hope so. I don't know. It's definitely a big step up. Been here at VMware for 18 years now, which, if know Silicon Valley, you know that's a long time. It's probably like four or five normal Silicon Valley lifetime's in terms of stints at a company. But I love it. I love the company. I love the culture. I love the technology and I'm super passionate, super excited about it. And so, you know, previously I was CTO for one of our business groups and focused on a specific set of our products and services. But now, as the corporate CTO, I really am overseeing all of VMware R&D. In the sense of really trying to drive a whole bunch of core engineering transformations, right, where we've talked a lot about our shift toward becoming a SaaS company. So, you know, a cloud services company. And so there's a lot of changes we got to make internally. Technologies, platform services we need to build out, you know, the sort of culture aspects of it again. And so, you know, I'm kind of sitting at the center of that and, I'll be honest, it's big, there's a lot of stuff to go and do, but I am just super excited about it. Wake up every day, really excited to meet a whole bunch of new people across the organization and to learn all the cool things we're doing. Well, you know, I'll say it again, like the level of innovation happening inside VMware is just insane. And it's really cool now that I get kind of more of a front and center row to see everything that's happening. >> And when I was preparing for the interview with Raghu, you know, I've been following VMware for a long time, and I sort of noted that it's like the fourth, you know, wave of executive management and I sort of went back and said, okay, yes, we know it started with, you know, Workstation. Okay, fine. But then really quickly went into really changing the way in which we think about servers, and server utilization, and driving. I remember the first time I ever saw a demo, I said, "Wow, this is going to be completely game-changing." And then thought about the era of the software-defined data center, fine-tuning the cloud strategy, and then this explosion of innovation, whether it was this sort of NSX piece, the acquisitions you've made around security, again, more cloud expansion. And now you're laying out sort of this Switzerland from Multi-Cloud combined with, as you're pointing out, this as a service model. So when you think about the technical vision of the company transforming into a cloud and subscription model, what does that mean from a sort of architectural standpoint >> Yeah. >> Or a mindset perspective? >> Oh yeah. Both great questions and both sort of key focus areas for me, and by the way, it's something I've been thinking about for quite a while, right? Yeah, so you're right. Like we are on our third or fourth lap of the track depending on how you count. But I also think that this notion of getting into Multi-Cloud, of becoming a real cloud services company is going to be probably the biggest one for us. And the biggest transformation that we're going to have to make, you know, we did extend from core compute virtualization to network and storage with the software-defined data center. But now these things I think are a bit more fundamental. So, you know, how are we thinking about it? Well, we're thinking about it in a few different ways. I do think, as you mentioned, the mindset is definitely the most important thing. This notion that, you know, we no longer really have product teams purely, they should be thinking of themselves as service teams and the idea being that they are operating and accountable for the availability of their cloud service. And so this means we really needed to step up our game, and we have in terms of the types of tooling that we built, but really it's about getting these developers engaged with that, to know that, hey, like what matters most of all right now is that service availability, in addition to things like security, compliance, et cetera. But we have monitoring systems to tell you, hey, like there's a problem. And that you need to go jump on those things immediately. This is not like, you know, a normal bug that comes in, oh, I'll get to it tomorrow or whatever. It's like, no, no, you got to step up and really get there immediately. And so there is that big mindset shift and that's something we've been driving for the past few years, but we need to continue to push there. And as part of that, you know, what we've seen is that a lot of our individual teams have gone out and build like really great cloud services, but what we really want to build to enable us to accelerate that, is a platform, a true, you know, SaaS platform and leveraging all these great capabilities that we have to help all of our teams go faster. And so it gets to things like standardization and really raising the bar across the board to allow all these teams to focus on what makes their products or services unique and differentiated rather than, you know, just doing the basic blocking and tackling. So those are couple of things I'm really focused on. Both driving the mindset shift. You know, as I was taking on this role, I did a lot of reading on other CTOs and, you know, how do they view their roles within their companies? And one of the things I did hear there was that the CTO is kind of the, I don't know if the keeper is the right word, but the keeper of the engineering culture, right, that you want to really be a steward for that to help take it forward in the right sort of directions that aligned with the strategic direction of the business. And so that's a big aspect for what I'm thinking about. And the second one in the SaaS platform, one of the really interesting things about this reorg that we've done internally is, that traditionally CTO is kind of focused, you know, outbound, maybe a little bit inbound, but typically don't have large engineering organizations, but here, what we want to do, because the SaaS platform is so important to us. We did centralize it within the office of the CTO. And so now, you know, my customers, from an engineering standpoint, are all the internal business units. So a lot of really big changes inside VMware, but I think this is the sort of stuff we need to do to help us really accelerate toward the multi-cloud vision that we're painting. >> Well, VMware has always had a superstrong engineering culture, and I liked the way you phrase that, "The steward of the engineering culture," when you think about a product mindset, 'course correct me, if I'm off here, but when you're building a product and you're making that thing rock-solid, you know, Maritz used to talk about the hardened top. And so it seems to me that the services mindset expands the mind a little bit in terms of what other services can I integrate to make my service better, whether that's a machine, intelligence service, or a security service or, you know, the dozens of other services that you guys are now building, the combination of that innovation has like a step function and a lever on top of the sort of traditional product mindset. >> Yeah, I think you're absolutely right there's a ton of like really fundamental mental mindset shifts, right? That are a part of that. And the integration piece you mentioned, super critical, but I also think it's actually taking a step back and looking at the life cycle more holistically. When you're thinking about a product, you're thinking about, okay, I'ma get the bits together, I'm going to ship it out. But then it's really up to the customer to go deploy that, to operate it, to, you know, deal with problems and bugs that come up. And when you're delivering a cloud service, those are all problems that you, as the application creator, have to deal with. And so you've got to be on top of all those things. And, you know, if you design something in such a way that it becomes kind of hard to debug at runtime, well, that's going to directly impact your availability, that might have, you know, contractual obligations with an SLA impact to a customer. So there's some really big implications there that I think traditionally product teams didn't always fully think through, but now that they sort of have to with like a cloud service. The other point, I think that's really important there, is the notion of simplicity and ease of use. Experience is always important, right? Customer experience, user experience, but it gets even more magnified in a SaaS type of environment because the idea is that you shouldn't have to talk to anybody. You, as a user, should be able to go and call an API and start using this thing, right, and swipe a credit card and you're good to go. And so, you know, that sort of maniacal focus on how you just remove roadblocks, remove any unnecessary things between that customer and getting the value that they're looking for. So in general, the thing that I really love about SaaS and cloud services is that they really align incentives very well. What you want to do, as an application builder, as a solution builder, really aligns well with what customers are looking for. And you can get that feedback very, very rapidly, which allows for much quicker evolution of the underlying product and application. >> So one of the other things I learned from my interview with Raghu, and I couldn't go deep into it, I did a little bit with Sumit, but I wonder if I get your perspectives as well. I always talk about this abstraction layer across clouds, hybrid, multi-cloud, edge, abstracting, you know, the underlying complexity, and Raghu, it's nuance, but he said, "Okay, but the thing is, we're not trying to limit access to the primitives. We want to allow developers to go there to the extent." And my takeaway was okay, but the abstraction is you want to be that single management layer with access to the deep primitives and APIs of the respective clouds. But simplify, to your point, across those estates at the management layer, maybe you could add some color to that. >> Yeah, you know, it's a really interesting question. But let me tell you about how we think about it because you're right. In that, you know, the abstractions can sometimes find the underlying primitives and capabilities. And so Raghu getting at, hey, like we don't necessarily force you one way or the other. And here's the way to think about it, is that it's really about delivering optionality. And we do that through offering these abstractions at different layers. So to your point, Dave, like we have a management capabilities that can enable you to manage consistently across all types of clouds, public, private, edge, et cetera, irrespective of what that underlying infrastructure is. And so you'll look at things that are like our vRealize suite of products, or CloudHealth, or Tanzu, Tanzu Mission Control is really focused on that one as well. But then we also have our infrastructure layer. That's what we're doing with VMware Cloud. And this notion of delivering consistent infrastructure. Now, even though the core, sort of IIS layer, is more consistent, you still get great flexibility in terms of the higher-level services. If you want to use a database from one of the public clouds, or a messaging system, or streaming service, or, you know, AI, whatever it is, you still got that sort of optionality as well. And so the reason that we offer these different things is because customers are just in different places. As a matter of fact, a single customer may have all of those different use cases, right? They may have some apps where they're moving from on-prem into the cloud. They want to do that very quickly. So, boom, we can just do it really fast with VMware Cloud, consistent infrastructure. We can VMotion that thing up in the Cloud, great. But for other ones, maybe a modern app they're building, and maybe a team has chosen to use native AWS for that, but they want to leverage Kubernetes. So there you could put in a Tanzu Mission Control to give them that, you know, consistent management across sites, or leverage CloudHealth to understand costs and to really enable the application teams to manage costs on their own. So, you know, I always go back to that concept of optionality, like we offer sort of these different levels of abstraction, and it really depends on what the use case is because the reality is, especially for a complex enterprise, they're likely going to have all of those use cases. >> You know, I want to stay on optionality for a moment because you're essentially becoming a cloud company. I'm expanding the definition of cloud, which I think is appropriate 'cause the cloud is expanding. It's going on-prem, it's going out to the edge, there's hybrid connections, across clouds, et cetera. And when you look at the public cloud players, they all are deep into what I'll call data management. I'm not even sure what that term means anymore sometimes, but certainly they all own, own, databases, but they also offer databases from folks. I go back to something Maritz said with the software mainframe that we want to be able to run any workload, you know, anywhere and have high reliability, recovery, you know, lowest costs, et cetera. So you're going to run those workloads. Project Monterey is about supporting new workloads, but it doesn't seem like you have aspirations to own sort of the database layer, for example, what's your philosophy around that? >> Yeah. Not generally. I mean, we do have some solutions like Greenplum, for instance, that play in that space, more of a data warehouse solution, but generally speaking, you're absolutely right. You know, VMware success was built through tight partnerships. We have a very, very broad partner network. And of course, we see hyperscalers as great partners as well. And so, I think if we get back to like, what's the core of VMware, it really is providing those powerful abstractions in the right places, at the infrastructure level, at the management level, and so forth. But yeah, we're not trying to necessarily compete with everyone, reinvent the world. And by the way, if I just take a step back, when we talk to customers, what really drives them toward using multiple clouds is the fact that they want to get after these, what we call, best of breed cloud services, that many of the different public clouds offer databases and AI and ML systems. And for each app team, the exact one that perfectly meets their needs may be different, right? Maybe on one conference is another cloud. And so that is really the optionality that we want to optimize for when we talk to those customers. They want the easiest way of getting that app onto that cloud, so we can take advantage of that cloud service, but what they worry about is the lack of consistency there. And that goes across the board. You know, if something fails at 2:00 am, and you have to wake up and go fix it. Do you have like the right sort of tooling in place, if it's fails on one cloud versus another, do you have to like, you know, scramble to figure out which tools to go use, you know, which dashboard to look at? It's like, no, that you want kind of a consistent one. When you think about, from a security perspective, how do you drive a secure software supply chain? How do you prevent the types of attacks that we've seen in the past few years? Where people insert malicious code into your supply chain and now you're running with hack code out there. And if you have different teams doing different things across different clouds, well, that's going to just open up sort of a can of worm of different possibilities there for hackers to get in. So that's why this consistency is so important. And so, you know, I guess, if we refine the optionality a little bit, that point, it's about getting optionality around cloud services and then like those are the things that really differentiate. And so, you know, we're not trynna compete with that. We're saying, hey, like we want to bring customers to those and give them the best experience that they can, irrespective of whether that's in the public cloud, or on-prem, or even at the edge. >> And that's a huge technical challenge and amazing value for customers. I want to ask you, there's a lot of talk about ESG today. How does that fit into the CTO mindset? >> Yeah. >> Is it a bolt-on, is it a fundamental component? >> Yeah. Yeah, so ESG is talking about environment, sustainability, and governance. And so, you know, it's not an environment, excuse me, equity, (Kit chuckles) equity, sustainability, and governance. Getting my acronyms wrong, which as the technologist, really a faux pas, but any case, equity, sustainability, and governance. And the idea there is that if we look at the core values for VMware, this is something that's hugely important. And something that we've actually been focused on for quite a while. We now have a whole team focused on this, really being a force multiplier to help keep us honest across VMware, to help ensure equity, and in many different ways, that we have or continue to increase, for instance, the amount of female representation within our organization, or underrepresented minorities or communities, ensuring that, you know, pay is equal across the company. You know, these different sorts of things, but also around sustainability. They actually have a number of folks working very closely with our teams to drive sustainability into our products. You know, vSphere is great because it reduces the amount of physical servers you need. So by definition reduces the carbon footprint there. But now, you know, taking a step further. We have cloud partners that we're working with to ensure that they have net-zero carbon emissions, you know, using 100% renewables by 2030. And in fact, that's something that, we ourselves, have signed up for, you know, today we are carbon-neutral, but what we want to get to is to be net carbon zero by 2030, which is an absolutely huge lift. And that's, by the way, not just for VMware, our operations, our offices, but also for our supply chain as well. And so, you know, when you look across, you know, as well as efforts around diversity and inclusion, this is something that is very core to what we do as a company, but it's also a personal passion of mine. The ESG office actually lives within my organization. And it does that because what I view the office of the CTO as being is really a force multiplier, as I said before, like, yes, the team is located here, but their purview is across all of engineering. And in fact, all of VMware. So I think, you know, when we look at this, it's about getting the best talent we have, very diverse talent, increasing our ability to deliver innovative products, but also doing so in a way that's good for the planet, that is sustainable. And that is giving back to the community. >> You know, by the way, I don't think that was faux pas. (Kit laughs) 'Cause a lot of times, people use environmental, social, and governance, and your equity piece would fall into the S in that equation, the social responsibility, you know, components. So I think you've just done an interesting twist on the acronym. So no mistake there. (Dave chuckles) Just another way to look at it. >> Yup, yup, yup. >> So you're now deep into the CTO role. What should we look for in the, you know, coming months and years? How should we >> Hmm. >> Kind of evaluate progress? What are those sort of milestones that we should be looking at? >> Yeah, so about a month or so into the job now, and so still getting my arms wrapped around, but, you know, I'm looking at measuring success in a few different ways. First of all, as I said before, the ESG component and in diversity, equity inclusion in particular, in terms of our workforce, extraordinarily important to me and something we're going to be really pushing hard on, you know, as we all know, you know, women, underrepresented minorities, not very well represented, in general, in Silicon Valley. So something that we all need to step up on. And so we're going to be putting a lot of effort in there, and that will actually help drive, as I said before, all of these innovations, this fundamental shift in mindset, I mean, that requires diverse perspectives. It requires pushing us out of our comfort zone, but the net result of that, so that what you're going to see, is a much faster cadence of releases of innovation coming from VMware. So there's some just insanely exciting things (Kit laughs) that are happening in the labs right now that we're cooking up. But, you know, as we start making this shift, we're going to be delivering those faster and faster to our customers and our partners. >> You know, I'm interested to hear that it's a passion of yours. There was an article, I think it was last week, in "The Wall Street Journal," it was an insert section on "Women in the Workforce," and there was a stat in there, which I thought was pretty interesting. I'll run it by and you see what you think, you know, it was talking about COVID, and post COVID,and the stresses. And it's interesting to me because a lot of executives, and pfft, you know, I'm with them, said, "Hey, work from home. This a beautiful thing. It's good for business too, because, you know, everybody's more productive," but you have this perpetual workday now. It's like we never sleep. It bleeds in the weekends. And the stat from Qualtrics, which was published in the journal, I think it said, "30% of working women said that their mental health has declined since COVID." And that number was only 15% for working men, is still notable, but half. And so, you know, one has to question maybe that perpetual work week and, you know, maybe there's a benefit from business productivity, but then there's the other side of that as well. And a lot of women have left the workforce, a lot of previously working moms. And so there's an untapped labor pool there, and there's this huge labor shortage. And so these are important issues, but they're not easy ones to solve, are they? >> No, no, no. It's something we've been putting a lot of thought into at VMware. So we do have a flexible program that we're rolling out in terms of work. People can come into the office if they want to, of course, you know, where we have offices where it's safe to do so, where the government has allowed that, and people can have an actual desk there, or sometimes they can say, "Hey, I only want to come in once or twice a week." And then we say, "Okay, we'll have some floating desks that you can take." And others are saying, "I want to be fully remote." So we give people a pretty broad range in terms of how they want to address that. But I do think, to your point though, and this is something I've been really trying to do already is to create a more inclusive environment by doing a number of different things. And so it's being thoughtful around when you're sending emails. 'Cause like my sort of schedule is, I do tend to like fire off emails late at night after the kids are in bed, I get a little quiet time, some thinking time, but I make it very clear that I'm not expecting an immediate response. Don't worry about it. This is my work time. Doesn't have to be your work time. And so really setting those, I guess, boundaries, if you will, explicitly and kind of the expectations maybe is a better term, setting that explicitly, trying to schedule meetings, not at times where you're going to have to drop the kids off at school or pick them (indistinct) and to take over your life. And so we really try to emphasize boundaries and really setting those things appropriately. But honestly, it's something that we're still working on and I'm still learning. And so I'd love to get feedback from folks, but those are some of the early thinkings. But I would say that we at VMware are taking it very, very seriously and really supporting our employees in terms of navigating that work-life balance. >> Well Kit, congratulations on the new role and it's great to see you again. I hope next year we can be face-to-face, always a pleasure to have you on theCUBE. >> Thanks, Dave. Appreciated being here. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more right after this. (slow music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021, brought to you by EDB. >> Well, good day, everybody. John Walls here on theCUBE, and continuing our CUBE conversation as part of Postgres Vision 2021, sponsored by EDB, with EDB Chief Technology Officer, Mr. Mark Linster. Mark, good morning to you. How are you doing today? >> I'm doing very fine, very good, sir. >> Excellent. Excellent. Glad you could join us. And we appreciate the time, chance, to look at what's going on in this world of data, which, as you know, continues to evolve quite rapidly. So let's just take that 30,000-foot perspective here to begin with here, and let's talk about data, and management, and what Postgres is doing in terms of accelerating all these innovative techniques, and solutions, and services that we're seeing these days. >> Yeah, so I think it's really... It's a fantastic confluence of factors that we've seen in Postgres, or are seeing in Postgres today, where Postgres has really, really matured over the last couple of years, where things like high availability, parallel processing, use of very high core counts, et cetera, have come together with the drive towards digital transformation, the enormous amounts of data that businesses are dealing with today, so, and then the third factor's really the embracing of open source, right? I mean, Linux has shown the way, and has shown that this is really, really possible. And now we're seeing Postgres as, I think, the next big open source innovation, after Linux, achieving the same type of transformation. So it's really, it's a maturing, it's an acceptance, and the big drive towards dealing with a lot more data as part of digital transformation. >> You know, part of that acceptance that you talk about is about kind of accepting the fact that you have a legacy system that maybe, if you're not going to completely overhaul, you still have to integrate, right? You've got to compliment and start this kind of migration. So in your perspective, or from your perspective, what kind of progress is Postgres allowing in the mindset of CTOs among your client base, or whatever, that their legacy systems can function in this new environment, that all is not lost, and while there is some, perhaps, catching up to do, or some patching you have to do here and there, that it's not as arduous, or not as complex, as might appear to be on the face. >> Well, I think there's, the maturing of Postgres that has really really opened this up, right? Where we're seeing that Postgres can handle these workloads, right? And at the same time, there's a growing number of success cases where companies across all industries, financial services, insurance, manufacturing, retail are using Postgres. So, so you're no longer, you're no longer the first leader who's taken a higher risk, right? Like, five or 10 years ago, Postgres knowledge was not readily available. So if you want Postgres, it was really hard to find somebody who could support you, right? Or find an employee that you could hire who would be the Postgres expert. That's no longer the case. There's plenty of books about Postgres. There's lots of conferences about Postgres. It's a big meetup topic. So, getting know how and getting acceptance amongst your team to use Postgres has become a lot easier, right? At the same time, over 90% of all enterprises today use open source in one way or the other. Which basically means they have open source policies. They have ways to bring open source into the development stream. So that makes it possible, right? Whereas before it was really hard, you had to have an individual who would be evangelized to go, get open source, et cetera, now open source is something that almost everybody is using. You know, from government to financing services, open sources use all over the place, right? So, so now you have something that really matured, right? There's a lot of references out there and then you have the policies that make it possible, right? You have the success stories and now all the pieces have come together to deal with this onslaught of data, right? And then maybe the last thing that that really plays a big role is the cloud. Postgres runs everywhere, right? I mean, it runs from an Arduino to Amazon. Everywhere. And so, which basically means if you want to drive agile business transformation, you call Postgres because you don't have to decide today where it's going to run. You're not locking into a vendor. You're not locking into a limited support system. You can run this thing anywhere. It'll run on your laptop. It'll run on every cloud in the world. You can have it managed, you can have it hosted. You can add have every flavor you want and there's lots of good Postgres support companies out there. So all of these factors together is really what makes us so interesting, right? >> Kubernetes and this marriage, this complimentary, you know relationship right now with Kubernetes, what has that done? You think in terms of providing additional services or at least providing perhaps a new approach or new philosophies, new concepts in terms of database management? >> Well, it's maybe the most the most surprising thing or surprising from the outside. Probably not from the inside, but you think that that Postgres this now 25 year old, database twenty-five year old open source project would be kind of like completely, you know, incompatible with Kubernetes, with containers. But what really happens is Postgres in containers today is the number one database, after Engine X. It is the number two software that is being deployed in containers. So it's really become the workhorse of the whole microservices transformation, right? A 25 year old software, well, it has a very small footprint. It has a lot of interesting features like GIS, document processing, now graph capabilities, common table expressions all those things that are really like cool for developers. And that's probably what leads it to be the number one database in containers. So it's absolutely compatible with Kubernetes. And the whole transformation towards microservices is is like, you know, there's nothing better out there. It runs everywhere and has the most innovative technologies in it. And that's what we're seeing. Also, you go to the annual stack overflow survey of developers, right? It's been consistently number one or number two most loved and most used database, right? So, so what's amazing is that it's this relatively old technology that is, you know, beating everybody else in this digital transformation and then the adoption by developers. >> Just like old dog new tricks, right? It's still winning, right? >> Yeah, yeah, and, and, you know, the elephant is the symbol and this elephant does dance. >> Still dancing that's right. You know, and this is kind of a loaded question but there are a lot of databases out there, a lot of options, obviously from your perspective, you know, Postgres is winning, right? And, and, and from the size of the marketplace it is certainly leading RA leader. In your opinion, you know, what, what is this confluence of factors that have influenced this, this market position if you will, of Postgres or market acceptance of Postgres? >> It's, I mean, it's the, it's a maturing of the core. As I said before, that the transaction rates et cetera, Postgres can handle, are growing every year and are growing dramatic, right? So that's one thing. And then you have it, that Postgres is really, I think, the most reliable and relational database out there as what is my opinion, I'm biased, I guess. And, and it's, it's super quality code but then you add to that the innovation drive. I mean, it was the first one out there with good JSONB support, right? And now it's brought in JSON Path as as part of the new SQL standard. So now you can address JSON data inside your database and the same way you do it inside your browser. And that's pretty cool for developers. Then you combine that with PostGIS, right, which is, I think the most advanced GIS system out there in database. Now, now you got relations, asset compliant, GIS and document. You may say what's so cool about that. Well, what's cool about it is I can do absolutely reliable asset compliant transactions. I can have a fantastic personalization engine through JSONB, and then all my applications need to know where is the transaction? Where is the next store? How far away I'm a form of the parking spot? Right? So now I got a really really nice recipe to put the applications of the future together. You add onto that movements toward supporting graph and supporting other capabilities inside the database. So now you got, you got capability, you've got reliability and you got fantastic innovation. I mean, there's nothing better out there. >> Let's hit the security angle here, 'cause you talked about the asset test, and certainly, you know, those, that criteria is being met. No question about that, whether it's isolation, durability, consistency, whatever, but, but security, I don't have to tell you what a growing concern this is. It's already paramount, but we're seeing every day write stories about, about intrusions and and invasions, if you will. So in terms of providing that layer of security that everybody's looking for right now, you know, this this ultra impenetrable force, if you will, what in your mind, what's Postgres allowing for, in that respect in terms of security, peace of mind, and maybe a little additional comfort that everybody in your space is looking for these? >> So, so look at, look at security with a database like, like multiple layers, right? There's not just, you don't do security only one place. It's like when you go into a bank branch, right? I mean, they do lock the door, they have a camera, there is a gate in front of the safe, there's a safe door. And inside the safe, there is still, again safety deposit boxes with individual locks. The same applies to Postgres, right? Where let's say we start at the heart of it where we can secure and protect tables and data. We're using access control lists and groups and usernames, et cetera. Right? So that's, that's at the heart of it. But then outside of that, we can encrypt the data when on disk or when it's in transit on disk. Most people use the Linux disc encryption systems but there's also good partners out there, like like more metric or others that we work with, that that provide security on disk. And then you go out from there and then you have the securing of the database itself again through the log-ins and the groups. You go out from there and now you have the securing of the hosts that the database is sitting on. Then you'll look at securing the data on the networks through SSL and certificates, et cetera. So that basically there's a multi-layer security model layer that positions Postgres extremely well. And then maybe the last thing is to say it certainly integrates very well with ELDAP, active directory, Kerberos, all the usual suspects that you would use to secure technology inside the enterprise or in an open network, like where people work from home, et cetera. >> You talked about the history about this 25 year old technology, you know, founded back at Cal Berkeley, you know, probably almost some 30 years ago and certainly has evolved. And, and as you have pointed out now as a very mature technology, what do you see though in terms of growth from here? Like, where does it go from here in the next 18 months, 24 months, what what do you think is that next barrier, that challenge that that you think the technology and this open source community wants to take on? >> Well, I think there's there's the continuous effort of making it faster, right? That always happens, right? Every database wants to be faster do more transactions per second, et cetera. And there's a lot of work that has been done there. I mean, just in the last couple of years, Postgres performance has increased by over 50%. Right? So, so transactions per second and that kind of scalability that is going to continue to be, to be a focus, right? And then the other one is leading the implementation of the SQL standards, right? So there'd be the most advanced database, the most innovative database, because, remember for many years now, Postgres has come up with a new release on an annual basis. Other database vendors are now catching up to that, but Postgres has done that for years. So innovation has always been at the heart of it. So we started with JSONB, Key value pair came even before that, PostGis has been around for a long time, graph extensions are going to be the next thing, ingestion of time series data is going to, is going to happen. So there's going to be an ongoing stream of innovations happening. But one thing that I can say is because Postgres is a pure open source project. There's not a hard roadmap, like where it's going to go but where it's going to go is always driven by what people want to have, right? There is no product management department. There's no, there's no great visionary that says, "Oh, this is where we're going to go." No, no. What's going to happen is what people want to have, right? If companies or contributors want to have a certain feature because they need it, well, that's how it's going to happen. And that's really been at the heart of this since Mike Stonebraker, who's an advisor to EDB today, invented it. And then, you know, the open source project got created. This has always been the movement to only focus on things that people actually want to have because if nobody wants to have it, we're just not going to build it because nobody wants it. Right? So when you asked me for the roadmap I believe it's going to be, you know, faster, obviously, always faster, right? Everybody wants faster. And then there's going to be innovation features like making the document stored even better, graph ingestion of large time series, et cetera. That's really what I believe is going to drive it forward. >> Wow. Yeah, the market has spoken and as you point out the market will continue to speak and, and drive that bus. So Mark, thank you for the time today. We certainly appreciate that. And wish EDB continued success at Postgres vision 2021. And thanks for the time. >> Thanks John, it was a pleasure. >> You bet. Mark Linster, joining us, the CTO at EDB. I'm John Walls, you've been watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the cube with digital >>coverage of IBM >>Think 2021 brought to >>you by IBM. Welcome back everyone to the cube coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual um john for your host of the cube. Our next guest taylor Holloway. Chief technology officer at advent one. Tyler welcome to the cube from down under in Australia and we're in Palo alto California. How are you? >>Well thanks john thanks very much. Glad to be glad to be on here. >>Love love the virtual cube of the virtual events. We can get to talk to people really quickly with click um great conversation here around hybrid cloud, multi cloud and all things software enterprise before we get started. I wanna take a minute to explain what you guys do at advent one. What's the main focus? >>Yeah. So look we have a lot of customers in different verticals. Um so you know generally what we provide depends on the particular industry the customers in. But generally speaking we see a lot of demand for operational efficiency, helping our clients tackle cyber security risks, adopt cloud and set them up to modernize the applications. >>And this is this has been a big wave coming in for sure with, you know, cloud and scale. So I gotta ask you, what are the main challenges that you guys are solvent for your customers um and how are you helping them overcome come that way and transformative innovative way? >>Yeah, look, I think helping our clients um improve their security posture is a big one. We're finding as well that our customers are gaining a lot of operational efficiency by adopting sort of open source technology. Red Hearts, an important partner of ours is IBM um and we're seeing them sort of move away from some more proprietary solutions. Automation is a big focus for us as well. We've had some great outcomes with our clients or helping them automate um and you know deliver um, you know, the stand up and data operations of environments a lot quickly, a lot more easily. And uh and to be able to sort of apply some standards across multiple sort of areas of their estate. >>What are some of the solutions that you guys are doing with IBM's portfolio in the I. T. Infrastructure side? You got red hat, you got a lot of open source stuff to meet the needs of clients. What do you mean? What's that mean? >>Um Yeah, I think on the storage side will probably help our clients sort of tackle the expanding data in structured and particularly unstructured data they're trying to take control of so, you know, looking at spectrum scale and those type of products from an audio perspective for unstructured data is a good example. And so they're flash systems for more block storage and more run of the mill sort of sort of environments. We have helped our clients consolidate and modernize on IBM Power systems. Having Red Hat is both a UNIX operating system and having I can shift as a container platform really helps there. And Red Hat also provides management overlay, which has been great on what we do with IBM Power systems. We've been working on a few different sort of use cases on power in particular, sort of more recently. Um SAP Hana is a big one where we've had some success with our clients migrating Muhanna on to onto IBM power systems and we've also helped our customers, you know, improve some um some environments on the other end of the side, such as IBM I, we still have a large number of customers with with IBM I and and you know how do we help them? You know some of them are moving to cloud in one way or another others are consuming some kind of IRS and we can sort of wrap around a managed service to to help them through. >>So I gotta ask you the question, you know U. C. T. Oh you played a lot of technology actually kubernetes just become this lingua franca for this kind of like I'll call a middleware kind of orchestration layer uh containers. Obviously you're awesome but I gotta ask you when you walk into a client's environment you have to name names but you know usually you see kind of two pictures man, they need some serious help or they got their act together. So either way they're both opportunities for Hybrid cloud. How do you how do you how do you evaluate the environment when you go in, when you walk into those two scenarios? What goes through your mind? What some of the conversations that you guys have with those clients? Can you take me through a kind of day in the life of both scenarios? The ones that are like I can't get the job done, I'm so close in on the right team and the other ones, like we're grooving, we're kicking butt. >>Yeah. So look, let's start, well, I supposed to start off with you try and take somewhat of a technology agnostic view and just sort of sit down and listen to what they're trying to achieve, how they're going for customers who have got it. You know, as you say, all nailed down things are going really well. Um it's just really understanding what what can we do to help. Is there an opportunity for us to help at all like there? Um, you know, generally speaking, there's always going to be something and it may be, you know, we don't try and if someone is going really well, they might just want someone to help with a bespoke use case or something very specific where they need help. On the other end of the scale where a customer is sort of pretty early on and starting to struggle. We generally try and help them not boil the ocean at once. Just try and get some winds, pick some key use cases, you know, deliver some value back and then sort of growing from there rather than trying to go into a customer and trying to do everything at once tends to be a challenge. Just understand what the priorities are and help them get going. >>What's the impact been for red hat? Um, in your customer base, a lot of overlap. Some overlap, no overlap coming together. What's the general trend that you're seeing? What's the reaction been? >>Yeah I think it's been really good. Obviously IBM have a lot of focus on cloud packs where they're bringing their software on red hat open shift that will run on multiple clouds. So I think that's one that we'll see a lot more of overtime. Um Also helping customers automate their I. T. Operations with answerable is one we do quite a lot of um and there's some really bespoke use cases we've done with that as well as some standardized one. So helping with day two operations and all that sort of thing. But there's also some really sort of out there things customers have needed to automate. That's been a challenge for them and being able to use open source tools to do it has worked really well. We've had some good wins there, >>you know, I want to ask you about the architecture and I'm just some simplify it real just for the sake of devops, um you know, segmentation, you got hybrid clouds, take a programmable infrastructure and then you've got modern applications that need to have a I some have said, I've even said on the cube and other broadcasts that if you don't have a I you're gonna be at a handicap some machine learning, some data has to be in there. You can probably see aI and mostly everything as you go in and try to architect that out for customers um and help them get to a hybrid cloud infrastructure with real modern application front end with using data. What's what's the playbook, do you have any best practices or examples you can share or scenarios or visions that you see uh playing >>out? I think the yeah, the first one is obviously making sure customers data is in the right place. So if they might be wanting to use um some machine learning in one particular cloud provider and they've got a lot of their applications and data in another, you know, how do we help them make it mobile and able to move data from one cloud to another or back into court data center? So there's a lot of that. I think that we spend a lot of time with customers to try and get a right architecture and also how do we make sure it's secure from end to end. So if they're moving things from into multiple one or more public clouds as well as maybe in their own data center, making sure connectivity is all set up properly. All the security requirements are met. So I think we sort of look at it from a from a high level design point of view, we look at obviously what the target state is going to be versus the current state that really take into account security, performance, connectivity or those sort of things to make sure that they're going to have a good result. >>You know, one of the things you mentioned and this comes up a lot of my interviews with partners of IBM is they always comment about their credibility and all the other than the normal stuff. But one of the things that comes out a lot pretty much consistently is their experience in verticals. Uh just have such a track record in verticals and this is where AI and machine learning data has to be very much scoped in on the vertical. You can't generalize and have a general purpose data plane inside of vertically specialized kind of focus. How how do you see that evolving, how does IBM play there with this kind of the horizontally scalable mindset of a hybrid model, both on premise in the cloud, but that's still saying provide that that intimacy with the data to fuel the machine learning or NLP or power that AI, which seems to be critical. >>Yeah, I think there's a lot of services where, you know, public cloud providers are bringing out new services all the time and some of it is pre can and easy to consume. I think what IBM from what I've observed being really good at is handling some of those really bespoke use cases. So if you have a particular vertical with a challenge, um you know, there's going to be sort of things that are pre can that you can go and consume. But if you need to do something custom that could be quite challenging. How do they sort of build something that could be quite specific for a particular industry and then obviously being able to repeat that afterwards for us, that's obviously something we're very interested in. >>Yeah, taylor love chatting, whether you love getting the low down, also, people might not know your co author of a book performance guy with IBM Power Systems, so I gotta ask you, since I got you here and I don't mean to put you on the spot, but if you can just share your vision or any kind of anecdotal observation as people start to put together their architecture and again, you know, Beauty's in the eye of the beholder, every environment is different. But still, hybrid, distributed concept is distributed computing, Is there a KPI is there a best practice on as a manager or systems architect to kind of keep an eye on what what good is and how how good becomes better because the day to operations becomes a super important concept. We're seeing some called Ai ops where Okay, I'm provisioning stuff out on a hybrid Cloud operational environment. But now day two hits are things happen as more stuff entered into the equation. What's your vision on KPs and management? What to keep >>tracking? Yeah, I think obviously attention to detail is really important to be able to build things properly. A good KPI particularly managed service area that I'm curious that understanding is how often do you actually have to log into the systems that you're managing? So if you're logging in and recitation into servers and all this sort of stuff all the time, all of your automation and configuration management is not set up properly. So, really a good KPI an interesting one is how often do you log into things all the time if something went wrong, would you sooner go and build another one and shoot the one that failed or go and restore from backup? So thinking about how well things are automated. If things are immutable using infrastructure as code, those are things that I think are really important when you look at, how is something going to be scalable and easy to manage going forward. What I hate to see is where, you know, someone build something and automated all in the first place and they're too scared to run it again afterwards in case it breaks something. >>It's funny the next generation of leaders probably won't even know like, hey, yeah, taylor and john they had to log into systems back in the day. You know, I mean, I could be like a story they tell their kids. Uh but no, that's a good metric. This is this automation. So it's on the next level. Let's go the next level automation. Um what's the low hanging fruit for automation? Because you're getting at really the kind of the killer app there which is, you know, self healing systems, good networks that are programmable but automation will define more value. >>What's your take? I think the main thing is where you start to move from a model of being able to start small and automate individual things which could be patching or system provisioning or anything like that. But what you really want to get to is to be able to drive everything through. Get So instead of having a written up paper, change request, I'm going to change your system and all the rest of it. It really should be driven through a pull request and have things through it and and build pipelines to go and go and make a change running in development, make sure it's successful and then it goes and gets pushed into production. That's really where I think you want to get to and you can start to have a lot of people collaborating really well on this particular project or a customer that also have some sort of guard rails around what happens in some level of governance rather than being a free for >>all. Okay, final question. Where do you see event one headed? What's your future plans to continue to be a leader? I. T. Service by leader for this guy? BMS infrastructure portfolio? >>I think it comes down to people in the end, so really making sure that we partner with our clients and to be well positioned to understand what they want to achieve and and have the expertise in our team to bring to the table to help them do it. I think open source is a key enabler to help our clients adopt a hybrid cloud model to sort of touched on earlier as well as be able to make use of multiple clouds where it makes sense From a managed service perspective. I think everyone is really considering themselves next year managed service provider, but what that means for us is to provide a different, differentiated managed service and also have the strong technical expertise to back it up. >>Taylor Holloway, chief technology officer advent one remote videoing in from down under in Australia. I'm john ferrier and Palo alto with cube coverage of IBM thing. Taylor, thanks for joining me today from the cube. >>Thank you very much. >>Okay, cube coverage. Thanks for watching ever. Mhm

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by the VMworld and its ecosystem partners. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome back to theCUBES coverage of VMworld 2020, our 11th year doing this show, of course, the global virtual event. And what do we love talking about on theCUBE? We love talking to customers. It is a user conference, of course, so really happy to welcome to the program. From the University of Pisa, the Chief Technology Officer Maurizio Davini and joining him is Thierry Pellegrini, one of our theCUBE alumni. He's the vice president of worldwide, I'm sorry, Workload Solutions and HPC with Dell Technologies. Thierry, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks too. >> Thanks to you. >> Alright, so let, let's start. The University of Pisa, obviously, you know, everyone knows Pisa, one of the, you know, famous city iconic out there. I know, you know, we all know things in Europe are a little bit longer when you talk about, you know, some of the venerable institutions here in the United States, yeah. It's a, you know, it's a couple of hundred years, you know, how they're using technology and everything. I have to imagine the University of Pisa has a long storied history. So just, if you could start before we dig into all the tech, give us our audience a little bit, you know, if they were looking up on Wikipedia, what's the history of the university? >> So University of Pisa is one of the oldest in the world because there has been founded in 1343 by a pope. We were authorized to do a university teaching by a pope during the latest Middle Ages. So it's really one of the, is not the oldest of course, but the one of the oldest in the world. It has a long history, but as never stopped innovating. So anything in Pisa has always been good for innovating. So either for the teaching or now for the technology applied to a remote teaching or a calculation or scientific computing, So never stop innovating, never try to leverage new technologies and new kind of approach to science and teaching. >> You know, one of your historical teachers Galileo, you know, taught at the university. So, you know, phenomenal history help us understand, you know, you're the CTO there. What does that encompass? How, you know, how many students, you know, are there certain areas of research that are done today before we kind of get into the, you know, the specific use case today? >> So consider that the University of Pisa is a campus in the sense that the university faculties are spread all over the town. Medieval like Pisa poses a lot of problems from the infrastructural point of view. So, we have bought a lot in the past to try to adapt the Medieval town to the latest technologies advancement. Now, we have 50,000 students and consider that Pisa is a general partners university. So, we cover science, like we cover letters in engineering, medicine, and so on. So, during the, the latest 20 years, the university has done a lot of effort to build an infrastructure that was able to develop and deploy the latest technologies for the students. So for example, we have a private fiber network covering all the town, 65 kilometers of a dark fiber that belongs to the university, four data centers, one big and three little center connected today at 200 gigabit ethernet. We have a big data center, big for an Italian University, of course, and not Poland and U.S. university, where is, but also hold infrastructure for the enterprise services and the scientific computing. >> Yep, Maurizio, it's great that you've had that technology foundation. I have to imagine the global pandemic COVID-19 had an impact. What's it been? You know, how's the university dealing with things like work from home and then, you know, Thierry would love your commentary too. >> You know, we, of course we were not ready. So we were eaten by the pandemic and we have to adapt our service software to transform from imperson to remote services. So we did a lot of work, but we are able, thanks to the technology that we have chosen to serve almost a 100% of our curriculum studies program. We did a lot of work in the past to move to virtualization, to enable our users to work for remote, either for a workstation or DC or remote laboratories or remote calculation. So virtualization has designed in the past our services. And of course when we were eaten by the pandemic, we were almost ready to transform our service from in person to remote. >> Yeah, I think it's, it's true, like Maurizio said, nobody really was preparing for this pandemic. And even for, for Dell Technologies, it was an interesting transition. And as you can probably realize a lot of the way that we connect with customers is in person. And we've had to transition over to modes or digitally connecting with customers. We've also spent a lot of our energy trying to help the community HPC and AI community fight the COVID pandemic. We've made some of our own clusters that we use in our HPC and AI innovation center here in Austin available to genomic research or other companies that are fighting the the virus. And it's been an interesting transition. I can't believe that it's already been over six months now, but we've found a new normal. >> Detailed, let's get in specifically to how you're partnering with Dell. You've got a strong background in the HPC space, working with supercomputers. What is it that you're turning to Dell in their ecosystem to help the university with? >> So we are, we have a long history in HPC. Of course, like you can imagine not to the biggest HPC like is done in the U.S. so in the biggest supercomputer center in Europe. We have several system for doing HPC. Traditionally, HPC that are based on a Dell Technologies offer. We typically host all kind of technology's best, but now it's available, of course not in a big scale but in a small, medium scale that we are offering to our researcher, student. We have a strong relationship with Dell Technologies developing together solution to leverage the latest technologies, to the scientific computing, and this has a lot during the research that has been done during this pandemic. >> Yeah, and it's true. I mean, Maurizio is humble, but every time we have new technologies that are to be evaluated, of course we spend time evaluating in our labs, but we make it a point to share that technology with Maurizio and the team at the University of Pisa, That's how we find some of the better usage models for customers, help tuning some configurations, whether it's on the processor side, the GPU side, the storage and the interconnect. And then the topic of today, of course, with our partners at VMware, we've had some really great advancements Maurizio and the team are what we call a center of excellence. We have a few of them across the world where we have a unique relationship sharing technology and collaborating on advancement. And recently Maurizio and the team have even become one of the VMware certified centers. So it's a great marriage for this new world where virtual is becoming the norm. >> But well, Thierry, you and I had a conversation to talk earlier in the year when VMware was really geering their full kind of GPU suite and, you know, big topic in the keynote, you know, Jensen, the CEO of Nvidia was up on stage. VMware was talking a lot about AI solutions and how this is going to help. So help us bring us in you work with a lot of the customers theory. What is it that this enables for them and how to, you know, Dell and VMware bring, bring those solutions to bear? >> Yes, absolutely. It's one statistic I'll start with. Can you believe that only on average, 15 to 20% of GPU are fully utilized? So, when you think about the amount of technology that's are at our fingertips and especially in a world today where we need that technology to advance research and scientistic discoveries. Wouldn't it be fantastic to utilize those GPU's to the best of our ability? And it's not just GPU's , I think the industry has in the IT world, leverage virtualization to get to the maximum recycles for CPU's and storage and networking. Now you're bringing the GPU in the fold and you have a perfect utilization and also flexibility across all those resources. So what we've seen is that convergence between the IT world that was highly virtualized, and then this highly optimized world of HPC and AI because of the resources out there and researchers, but also data scientists and company want to be able to run their day to day activities on that infrastructure. But then when they have a big surge need for research or a data science use that same environment and then seamlessly move things around workload wise. >> Yeah, okay I do believe your stat. You know, the joke we always have is, you know, anybody from a networking background, there's no such thing as eliminating a bottleneck, you just move it. And if you talk about utilization, we've been playing the shell game for my entire career of, let's try to optimize one thing and then, oh, there's something else that we're not doing. So,you know, so important. Retail, I want to hear from your standpoint, you know, virtualization and HPC, you know, AI type of uses there. What value does this bring to you and, you know, and key learnings you've had in your organization? >> So, we as a university are a big users of the VMware technologies starting from the traditional enterprise workload and VPI. We started from there in the sense that we have an installation quite significant. But also almost all the services that the university gives to our internal users, either personnel or staff or students. At a certain point that we decided to try to understand the, if a VMware virtualization would be good also for scientific computing. Why? Because at the end of the day, their request that we have from our internal users is flexibility. Flexibility in the sense of be fast in deploying, be fast to reconfiguring, try to have the latest beats on the software side, especially on the AI research. At the end of the day we designed a VMware solution like you, I can say like a whiteboard. We have a whiteboard, and we are able to design a new solution of this whiteboard and to deploy as fast as possible. Okay, what we face as IT is not a request of the maximum performance. Our researchers ask us for flexibility then, and want to be able to have the maximum possible flexibility in configuring the systems. How can I say I, we can deploy as more test cluster on the visual infrastructure in minutes or we can use GPU inside the infrastructure tests, of test of new algorithm for deep learning. And we can use faster storage inside the virtualization to see how certain algorithm would vary with our internal developer can leverage the latest, the beat in storage like NVME, MVMS or so. And this is why at the certain point, we decided to try visualization as a base for HPC and scientific computing, and we are happy. >> Yeah, I think Maurizio described it it's flexibility. And of course, if you think optimal performance, you're looking at the bare medal, but in this day and age, as I stated at the beginning, there's so much technology, so much infrastructure available that flexibility at times trump the raw performance. So, when you have two different research departments, two different portions, two different parts of the company looking for an environment. No two environments are going to be exactly the same. So you have to be flexible in how you aggregate the different components of the infrastructure. And then think about today it's actually fantastic. Maurizio was sharing with me earlier this year, that at some point, as we all know, there was a lot down. You could really get into a data center and move different cables around or reconfigure servers to have the right ratio of memory, to CPU, to storage, to accelerators, and having been at the forefront of this enablement has really benefited University of Pisa and given them that flexibility that they really need. >> Wonderful, well, Maurizio my understanding, I believe you're giving a presentation as part of the activities this week. Give us a final glimpses to, you know, what you want your peers to be taking away from what you've done? >> What we have done that is something that is very simple in the sense that we adapt some open source software to our infrastructure in order to enable our system managers and users to deploy HPC and AI solution fastly and in an easy way to our VMware infrastructure. We started doing a sort of POC. We designed the test infrastructure early this year and then we go fastly to production because we had about the results. And so this is what we present in the sense that you can have a lot of way to deploy Vitola HPC, Barto. We went for a simple and open source solution. Also, thanks to our friends of Dell Technologies in some parts that enabled us to do the works and now to go in production. And that's theory told before you talked to has a lot during the pandemic due to the effect that stay at home >> Wonderful, Thierry, I'll let you have the final word. What things are you drawing customers to, to really dig in? Obviously there's a cost savings, or are there any other things that this unlocks for them? >> Yeah, I mean, cost savings. We talked about flexibility. We talked about utilization. You don't want to have a lot of infrastructure sitting there and just waiting for a job to come in once every two months. And then there's also the world we live in, and we all live our life here through a video conference, or at times through the interface of our phone and being able to have this web based interaction with a lot of infrastructure. And at times the best infrastructure in the world, makes things simpler, easier, and hopefully bring science at the finger tip of data scientists without having to worry about knowing every single detail on how to build up that infrastructure. And with the help of the University of Pisa, one of our centers of excellence in Europe, we've been innovating and everything that's been accomplished for, you know at Pisa can be accomplished by our customers and our partners around the world. >> Thierry, Maurizio, thank you much for so much for sharing and congratulations on all I know you've done building up that COE. >> Thanks to you. >> Thank you. >> Stay with us, lots more covered from VMworld 2020. I'm Stu Miniman as always. Thank you for watching the theCUBE. 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(upbeat music) >> Voiceover: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Data Automated. An event series brought to you by Io-Tahoe. >> Welcome everyone to the second episode in our Data Automated series made possible with support from Io-Tahoe. Today, we're going to drill into the data lifecycle. Meaning the sequence of stages that data travels through from creation to consumption to archive. The problem as we discussed in our last episode is that data pipelines are complicated, they're cumbersome, they're disjointed and they involve highly manual processes. A smart data lifecycle uses automation and metadata to improve agility, performance, data quality and governance. And ultimately, reduce costs and time to outcomes. Now, in today's session we'll define the data lifecycle in detail and provide perspectives on what makes a data lifecycle smart? And importantly, how to build smarts into your processes. In a moment we'll be back with Adam Worthington from Ethos to kick things off. And then, we'll go into an expert power panel to dig into the tech behind smart data lifecyles. And, then we'll hop into the crowd chat and give you a chance to ask questions. So, stay right there, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music) >> Voiceover: Innovation. Impact. Influence. Welcome to theCUBE. Disruptors. Developers. And, practitioners. Learn from the voices of leaders, who share their personal insights from the hottest digital events around the globe. Enjoy the best this community has to offer on theCUBE. Your global leader in high tech digital coverage. >> Okay, we're back with Adam Worthington. Adam, good to see you, how are things across the pond? >> Good thank you, I'm sure our weather's a little bit worse than yours is over the other side, but good. >> Hey, so let's set it up, tell us about yourself, what your role is as CTO and--- >> Yeah, Adam Worthington as you said, CTO and co-founder of Ethos. But, we're a pretty young company ourselves, so we're in our sixth year. And, we specialize in emerging disruptive technology. So, within the infrastructure data center kind of cloud space. And, my role is a technical lead, so I, it's kind of my job to be an expert in all of the technologies that we work with. Which can be a bit of a challenge if you have a huge portfolio. One of the reasons we got to deliberately focus on. And also, kind of pieces of technical validation and evaluation of new technologies. >> So, you guys are really technology experts, data experts, and probably also expert in process and delivering customer outcomes, right? >> That's a great word there Dave, outcomes. I mean, that's a lot of what I like to speak to customers about. >> Let's talk about smart data you know, when you throw out terms like this it kind of can feel buzz wordy but what are the critical aspects of so-called smart data? >> Cool, well typically I had to step back a little bit and set the scene a little bit more in terms of kind of where I came from. So, and the types of problems I've sorted out. So, I'm really an infrastructure or solution architect by trade. And, what I kind of, relatively organically, but over time my personal framework and approach. I focused on three core design principles. So, simplicity, flexibility and efficiency. So, whatever it was I was designing and obviously they need different things depending on what the technology area is that we're working with. So, that's for me a pretty good step. So, they're the kind of areas that a smart approach in data will directly address both reducing silos. So, that comes from simplifying. So, moving away from complexity of infrastructure. Reducing the amount of copies of data that we have across the infrastructure. And, reducing the amount of application environment for the need for different areas. So, the smarter we get with data it's in my eyes anyway, the further we move away from those traditional legacy. >> But, how does it work? I mean, how, in other words, what's involved in injecting smarts into your data lifecycle? >> I think one of my, well actually I didn't have this quote ready, but genuinely one of my favorite quotes is from the French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal and he says, if I get this right, "I'd have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time." So, there's real, I love that quote for lots of reasons. >> Dave: Alright. >> That's direct applications in terms of what we're talking about. In terms of, it's actually really complicated to develop a technology capability to make things simple. Be more directly meeting the needs of the business through tech. So, you provide self-service capability. And, I don't just mean self-driving, I mean making data and infrastructure make sense to the business users that are using it. >> Your job, correct me if I'm wrong, is to kind of put that all together in a solution. And then, help the customer you know, realize what we talked about earlier that business out. >> Yeah, and that's, it's sitting at both sides and understanding both sides. So, kind of key to us in our abilities to be able to deliver on exactly what you've just said, is being experts in the capabilities and new and better ways of doing things. But also, having the kind of, better business understanding to be able to ask the right questions to identify how can you better approach this 'cause it helps solve these issues. But, another area that I really like is the, with the platforms you can do more with less. And, that's not just about reducing data redundancy, that's about creating application environments that can service, an infrastructure to service different requirements that are able to do the random IO thing without getting too kind of low level tech. As well as the sequential. So, what that means is, that you don't necessarily have to move data from application environment A, do one thing with it, collate it and then move it to the application environment B, to application environment C, in terms of an analytics kind of left to right workload, you keep your data where it is, use it for different requirements within the infrastructure and again, do more with less. And, what that does, it's not just about simplicity and efficiency, it significantly reduces the times of value that that faces, as well. >> Do you have examples that you can share with us, even if they're anonymized of customers that you've worked with, that are maybe a little further down on the journey. Or, maybe not and--- >> Looking at the, you mentioned data protection earlier. So, another organization this is a project which is just coming nearing completion at the moment. Huge organization, that literally petabytes of data that was servicing their backup and archive. And, what they had is not just this reams of data. They had, I think I'm right in saying, five different backup applications that they had depending on the, what area of infrastructure they were backing up. So, whether it was virtualization, that was different to if they were backing up, different if they were backing up another data base environment they were using something else in the cloud. So, a consolidated approach that we recommended to work with them on. They were able to significantly reduce complexity and reduce the amount of time that it took them. So, what they were able to achieve and this was again, one of the key departments they had. They'd gone above the threshold of being able to backup all of them. >> Adam, give us the final thoughts, bring us home in this segment. >> Well, the final thoughts, so this is something, yeah we didn't particularly touch on. But, I think it's kind of slightly hidden, it isn't spoken about as much as I think it could be. Is the traditional approaches to infrastructure. We've already touched on that they can be complicated and there's a lack of efficiency. It impacts a user's ability to be agile. But, what you find with traditional approaches and we've already touched on some of the kind of benefits to new approaches there, is that they're often very prescriptive. They're designed for a particular firm. The infrastructure environment, the way that it's served up to the users in a kind of a packaged kind of way, means that they need to use it in that, whatever way it's been dictated. So, that kind of self-service aspect, as it comes in from a flexibility standpoint. But, these platforms and these platform approaches is the right way to address technology in my eyes. Enables the infrastructure to be used flexibly. So, the business users and the data users, what we find is that if we put in this capability into their hands. They start innovating the way that they use that data. And, the way that they bring benefits. And, if a platform is too prescriptive and they aren't able to do that, then what you're doing with these new approaches is get all of the metrics that we've touched on. It's fantastic from a cost standpoint, from an agility standpoint. But, what it means is that the innovators in the business, the ones that really understand what they're looking to achieve, they now have the tools to innovate with that. And, I think, and I've started to see that with projects that we've completed, if you do it in the right way, if you articulate the capability and you empower the business users in the right way. Then, they're in a significantly better position, these businesses to take advantages and really sort of match and significantly beat off their competition environment spaces. >> Super Adam, I mean a really exciting space. I mean we spent the last 10 years gathering all this data. You know, trying to slog through it and figure it out and now, with the tools that we have and the automation capabilities, it really is a new era of innovation and insight. So, Adam Worthington, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE and participating in this program. >> Yeah, exciting times and thank you very much Dave for inviting me, and yeah big pleasure. >> Now, we're going to go into the power panel and go deeper into the technologies that enable smart data lifecyles. And, stay right there, you're watching theCUBE. (light music) >> Voiceover: Are you interested in test-driving the Io-Tahoe platform? Kickstart the benefits of Data Automation for your business through the IoLabs program. A flexible, scalable, sandbox environment on the cloud of your choice. With setup, service and support provided by Io-Tahoe. Click on the link and connect with a data engineer to learn more and see Io-Tahoe in action. >> Welcome back everybody to the power panel, driving business performance with smart data lifecyles. Lester Waters is here, he's the Chief Technology Officer from Io-Tahoe. He's joined by Patrick Smith, who is field CTO from Pure Storage. And, Ezat Dayeh who is Assistant Engineering Manager at Cohesity. Gentlemen, good to see you, thanks so much for coming on this panel. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Yes. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Let's start with Lester, I wonder if each of you could just give us a quick overview of your role and what's the number one problem that you're focused on solving for your customers? Let's start with Lester, please. >> Ah yes, I'm Lester Waters, Chief Technology Officer for Io-Tahoe. And really, the number one problem that we are trying to solve for our customers is to help them understand what they have. 'Cause if they don't understand what they have in terms of their data, they can't manage it, they can't control it, they can't monitor it, they can't ensure compliance. So, really that's finding all that you can about your data that you have and building a catalog that can be readily consumed by the entire business is what we do. >> Patrick, field CTO in your title, that says to me you're talking to customers all the time so you've got a good perspective on it. Give us you know, your take on things here. >> Yeah absolutely, so my patch is in the air and talk to customers and prospects in lots of different verticals across the region. And, as they look at their environments and their data landscape, they're faced with massive growth in the data that they're trying to analyze. And, demands to be able to get inside are faster. And, to deliver business value faster than they've ever had to do in the past, so. >> Got it and then Ezat at Cohesity, you're like the new kid on the block. You guys are really growing rapidly. You created this whole notion of data management, backup and beyond, but from Assistant Engineering Manager what are you seeing from customers, your role and the number one problem that you're solving? >> Yeah sure, so the number one problem I see you know, time and again speaking with customers it's all around data fragmentation. So, due to things like organic growth you know, even maybe budgetary limitations, infrastructure has grown you know, over time, very piecemeal. And, it's highly distributed internally. And, just to be clear you know, when I say internally you know, that could be that it's on multiple platforms or silos within an on-prem infrastructure. But, that it also does extend to the cloud, as well. >> Right hey, cloud is cool, everybody wants to be in the cloud, right? So, you're right it creates maybe unattended consequences. So, let's start with the business outcome and kind of try to work backwards. I mean people you know, they want to get more insights from data, they want to have a more efficient data lifecyle. But, so Lester let me start with you, in thinking about like, the North Star, creating data driven cultures you know, what is the North Star for customers here? >> I think the North Star in a nutshell is driving value from your data. Without question, I mean we differentiate ourselves these days by even the nuances in our data. Now, underpinning that there's a lot of things that have to happen to make that work out well. You know for example, making sure you adequately protect your data. You know, do you have a good storage system? Do you have a good backup and recovery point objectives, recovering time objectives? Do you, are you fully compliant? Are you ensuring that you're ticking all the boxes? There's a lot of regulations these days in terms, with respect to compliance, data retention, data privacy and so fourth. Are you ticking those boxes? Are you being efficient with your data? You know, in other words I think there's a statistic that someone mentioned to me the other day that 53% of all businesses have between three and 15 copies of the same data. So you know, finding and eliminating those is part of the problems you need to chase. >> I like to think of you know, you're right. Lester, no doubt, business value and a lot of that comes from reducing the end to end cycle times. But, anything that you guys would add to that, Patrick and Ezat, maybe start with Patrick. >> Yeah, I think getting value from data really hits on, it hits on what everyone wants to achieve. But, I think there are a couple of key steps in doing that. First of all is getting access to the data. And that's, that really hits three big problems. Firstly, working out what you've got. Secondly, after working out what you've got, how to get access to it. Because, it's all very well knowing that you've got some data but if you can't get access to it. Either, because of privacy reasons, security reasons. Then, that's a big challenge. And then finally, once you've got access to the data, making sure that you can process that data in a timely manner. >> For me you know, it would be that an organization has got a really good global view of all of its data. It understands the data flow and dependencies within their infrastructure. Understands the precise legal and compliance requirements. And, has the ability to action changes or initiatives within their environment. Forgive the pun, but with a cloud like agility. You know, and that's no easy feat, right? That is hard work. >> Okay, so we've talked about the challenges and some of the objectives, but there's a lot of blockers out there and I want to understand how you guys are helping remove them? So, Lester what do you see as some of the big blockers in terms of people really leaning in to this smart data lifecycle. >> Yeah silos, is probably one of the biggest one I see in businesses. Yes, it's my data not your data. Lots of compartmentalization. And, breaking that down is one of the challenges. And, having the right tools to help you do that is only part of the solution. There's obviously a lot of cultural things that need to take place to break down those silos and work together. If you can identify where you have redundant data across your enterprise, you might be able to consolidate those. >> Yeah so, over to Patrick, so you know, one of the blockers that I see is legacy infrastructure, technical debt sucking all the budget. You got you know, too many people having to look after. >> As you look at the infrastructure that supports peoples data landscapes today. For primarily legacy reasons, the infrastructure itself is siloed. So, you have different technologies with different underlying hardware, different management methodologies that are there for good reason. Because, historically you had to have specific fitness for purpose for different data requirements. >> Dave: Ah-hm. >> And, that's one of the challenges that we tackled head on at Pure. With the flash plate technology and the concept of the data hub. A platform that can deliver in different characteristics for the different workloads. But, from a consistent data platform. >> Now, Ezat I want to go to you because you know, in the world, in your world which to me goes beyond backup and one of the challenges is you know, they say backup is one thing, recovery is everything. But as well, the CFO doesn't want to pay for just protection. Now, one of the things that I like about what you guys have done is you've broadened the perspective to get more value out of your what was once seen as an insurance policy. >> I do see one of the biggest blockers as the fact that the task at hand can you know, be overwhelming for customers. But, the key here is to remember that it's not an overnight change, it's not you know, the flick of the switch. It's something that can be tackled in a very piecemeal manner. And, absolutely like you've said you know, reduction in TCO and being able to leverage the data for other purposes is a key driver for this. So you know, this can be resolved. It can be very you know, pretty straightforward. It can be quite painless, as well. Same goes for unstructured data, which is very complex to manage. And you know, we've all heard the stats from the analysts, you know data obviously is growing at an extremely rapid rate. But, actually when you look at that you know, how is it actually growing? 80% of that growth is actually in unstructured data and only 20% of that growth is in structured data. So you know, these are quick win areas that the customers can realize immediate TCO improvement and increased agility, as well. >> Let's paint a picture of this guys, if I can bring up the lifecyle. You know what you can see here is you've got this cycle, the data lifecycle and what we're wanting to do is inject intelligence or smarts into this lifecyle. So, you can see you start with ingestion or creation of data. You're storing it, you've got to put it somewhere, right? You've got to classify it, you've got to protect it. And then, of course you want to you know, reduce the copies, make it you know, efficient. And then, you want to prepare it so that businesses can actually consume it and then you've got compliance and governance and privacy issues. And, I wonder if we could start with you Lester, this is you know, the picture of the lifecycle. What role does automation play in terms of injecting smarts into the lifecycle? >> Automation is key here, you know. Especially from the discover, catalog and classify perspective. I've seen companies where they go and we'll take and dump all of their data base schemes into a spreadsheet. So, that they can sit down and manually figure out what attribute 37 means for a column name. And, that's only the tip of the iceberg. So, being able to automatically detect what you have, automatically deduce where, what's consuming the data, you know upstream and downstream, being able to understand all of the things related to the lifecycle of your data backup, archive, deletion, it is key. And so, having good toolage areas is very important. >> So Patrick, obviously you participate in the store piece of this picture. So, I wondered if you could just talk more specifically about that, but I'm also interested in how you affect the whole system view, the end-to-end cycle time. >> Yeah, I think Lester kind of hit the nail on the head in terms of the importance of automation. Because, the data volumes are just so massive now that you can't effectively manage or understand or catalog your data without automation. Once you understand the data and the value of the data, then that's where you can work out where the data needs to be at any point in time. >> Right, so Pure and Cohesity obviously partnered to do that and of course, Ezat you guys are part of the protect, you're certainly part of the retain. But also, you provide data management capabilities and analytics, I wonder if you could add some color there? >> Yeah absolutely, so like you said you know, we focus pretty heavily on data protection as just one of our areas. And, that infrastructure it is just sitting there really can you know, the legacy infrastructure it's just sitting there you know, consuming power, space, cooling and pretty inefficient. And, automating that process is a key part of that. If I have a modern day platform such as you know, the Cohesity data platform I can actually do a lot of analytics on that through applications. So, we have a marketplace for apps. >> I wonder if we could talk about metadata. It's increasingly important you know, metadata is data about the data. But, Lester maybe explain why it's so important and what role it plays in terms of creating smart data lifecycle. >> A lot of people think it's just about the data itself. But, there's a lot of extended characteristics about your data. So, imagine if for my data lifecycle I can communicate with the backup system from Cohesity. And, find out when the last time that data was backed up or where it's backed up to. I can communicate, exchange data with Pure Storage and find out what tier it's on. Is the data at the right tier commencer with it's use level? If I could point it out. And, being able to share that metadata across systems. I think that's the direction that we're going in. Right now, we're at the stage we're just identifying the metadata and trying to bring it together and catalog it. The next stage will be okay, using the APIs and that we have between our systems. Can we communicate and share that data and build good solutions for customers to use? >> I think it's a huge point that you just made, I mean you know 10 years ago, automating classification was the big problem. And you know, with machine intelligence you know, we're obviously attacking that. But, your point about as machines start communicating to each other and you start you know, it's cloud to cloud. There's all kinds of metadata, kind of new metadata that's being created. I often joke that some day there's going to be more metadata than data. So, that brings us to cloud and Ezat, I'd like to start with you. >> You know, I do think that you know, having the cloud is a great thing. And, it has got its role to play and you can have many different you know, permutations and iterations of how you use it. And, you know, as I've may have sort of mentioned previously you know, I've seen customers go into the cloud very, very quickly and actually recently they're starting to remove workloads from the cloud. And, the reason why this happens is that you know, cloud has got its role to play but it's not right for absolutely everything. Especially in their current form, as well. A good analogy I like to use and this may sound a little bit clique but you know, when you compare clouds versus on premises data centers. You can use the analogies of houses and hotels. So, to give you an idea, so you know, when we look at hotels that's like the equivalent of a cloud, right? I can get everything I need from there. I can get my food, my water, my outdoor facilities, if I need to accommodate more people, I can rent some more rooms. I don't have to maintain the hotel, it's all done for me. When you look at houses the equivalent to you know, on premises infrastructure. I pretty much have to do everything myself, right? So, I have to purchase the house, I have to maintain it, I have buy my own food and water, eat it, I have to make improvements myself. But, then why do we all live in houses, not in hotels? And, the simple answer that I can only think of is, is that it's cheaper, right? It's cheaper to do it myself, but that's not to say that hotels haven't got their role to play. You know, so for example if I've got loads of visitors coming over for the weekend, I'm not going to go and build an extension to my house, just for them. I will burst into my hotel, into the cloud. And, you use it for you know, for things like that. So, what I'm really saying is the cloud is great for many things, but it can work out costlier for certain applications, while others are a perfect fit. >> That's an interesting analogy, I hadn't thought of that before. But, you're right, 'cause I was going to say well part of it is you want the cloud experience everywhere. But, you don't always want the cloud experience, especially you know, when you're with your family, you want certain privacy. I've not heard that before, Ezat. So, that's a new perspective, so thank you. But, Patrick I do want to come back to that cloud experience because in fact that's what's happening in a lot of cases. Organizations are extending the cloud properties of automation on-prem. >> Yeah, I thought Ezat brought up a really interesting point and a great analogy for the use of the public cloud. And, it really reinforces the importance of the Hybrid and the multicloud environment. Because, it gives you that flexibility to choose where is the optimal environment to run your business workloads. And, that's what it's all about. And, the flexibility to change which environment you're running in, either from one month to the next or from one year to the next. Because, workloads change and the characteristics that are available in the cloud change. The Hybrid cloud is something that we've lived with ourselves at Pure. So, our Pure management technology actually sits in a Hybrid cloud environment. We started off entirely cloud native but now, we use the public cloud for compute and we use our own technology at the end of a high performance network link to support our data platform. So, we're getting the best of both worlds. I think that's where a lot of our customers are trying to get to. >> All right, I want to come back in a moment there. But before we do, Lester I wonder if we could talk a little bit about compliance and governance and privacy. I think the Brits on this panel, we're still in the EU for now but the EU are looking at new rules, new regulations going beyond GDPR. Where does sort of privacy, governance, compliance fit in for the data lifecycle. And Ezat, I want your thought on this as well? >> Ah yeah, this is a very important point because the landscape for compliance around data privacy and data retention is changing very rapidly. And, being able to keep up with those changing regulations in an automated fashion is the only way you're going to be able to do it. Even, I think there's a some sort of a maybe ruling coming out today or tomorrow with a change to GDPR. So, this is, these are all very key points and being able to codify those rules into some software whether you know, Io-Tahoe or your storage system or Cohesity, it'll help you be compliant is crucial. >> Yeah, Ezat anything you can add there, I mean this really is your wheel house? >> Yeah, absolutely, so you know, I think anybody who's watching this probably has gotten the message that you know, less silos is better. And, it absolutely it also applies to data in the cloud, as well. So you know, by aiming to consolidate into you know, fewer platforms customers can realize a lot better control over their data. And, the natural affect of this is that it makes meeting compliance and governance a lot easier. So, when it's consolidated you can start to confidently understand who's accessing your data, how frequently are they accessing the data. You can also do things like you know, detecting an ominous file access activities and quickly identify potential threats. >> Okay Patrick, we were talking, you talked earlier about storage optimization. We talked to Adam Worthington about the business case, you've got the sort numerator which is the business value and then a denominator which is the cost. And, what's unique about Pure in this regard? >> Yeah, and I think there are multiple dimensions to that. Firstly, if you look at the difference between legacy storage platforms, they used to take up racks or aisles of space in a data center. With flash technology that underpins flash played we effectively switch out racks for rack units. And, it has a big play in terms of data center footprint and the environmentals associated with a data center. If you look at extending out storage efficiencies and the benefits it brings. Just the performance has a direct effect on staff. Whether that's you know, the staff and the simplicity of the platform so that it's easy and efficient to manage. Or, whether it's the efficiency you get from your data scientists who are using the outcomes from the platform and making them more efficient. If you look at some of our customers in the financial space their time to results are improved by 10 or 20 x by switching to our technology. From legacy technologies for their analytics platforms. >> So guys, we've been running you know, CUBE interviews in our studios remotely for the last 120 days. This is probably the first interview I've done where I haven't started off talking about COVID. Lester, I wondered if you could talk about smart data lifecycle and how it fits into this isolation economy and hopefully what will soon be a post-isolation economy? >> Yeah, COVID has dramatically accelerated the data economy. I think you know, first and foremost we've all learned to work at home. I you know, we've all had that experience where you know, people would hum and har about being able to work at home just a couple of days a week. And, here we are working five days a week. That's had a knock on impact to infrastructure to be able to support that. But, going further than that you know, the data economy is all about how a business can leverage their data to compete in this new world order that we are now in. COVID has really been a forcing function to you know, it's probably one of the few good things that have come out of COVID is that we've been forced to adapt. And, it's been an interesting journey and it continues to be so. >> Like Lester said you know, we're seeing huge impact here. You know, working from home has pretty much become the norm now. You know, companies have been forced into making it work. If you look at online retail, that's accelerated dramatically, as well. Unified communications and video conferencing. So, really you know, that the point here is that, yes absolutely we've compressed you know, in the past maybe four months what probably would have taken maybe even five years, maybe 10 years or so. >> We've got to wrap, but so Lester let me ask you, sort of paint a picture of the sort of journey the maturity model that people have to take. You know, if they want to get into it, where do they start and where are they going? Give us that view. >> Yeah, I think first is knowing what you have. If you don't know what you have you can't manage it, you can't control it, you can't secure it, you can't ensure it's compliant. So, that's first and foremost. The second is really you know, ensuring that you're compliant once you know what you have, are you securing it? Are you following the regulatory, the regulations? Are you able to evidence that? How are you storing your data? Are you archiving it? Are you storing it effectively and efficiently? You know, have you, nirvana from my perspective is really getting to a point where you've consolidated your data, you've broken down the silos and you have a virtually self-service environment by which the business can consume and build upon their data. And, really at the end of the day as we said at the beginning, it's all about driving value out of your data. And, automation is key to this journey. >> That's awesome and you've just described like sort of a winning data culture. Lester, Patrick, Ezat, thanks so much for participating in this power panel. >> Thank you, David. >> Thank you. >> All right, so great overview of the steps in the data lifecyle and how to inject smarts into the processes, really to drive business outcomes. Now, it's your turn, hop into the crowd chat. Please log in with Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook, ask questions, answer questions and engage with the community. Let's crowd chat! (bright music)

from around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat welcome back this is the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 of course the event happening digitally we're bringing in the guests from where they are around the globe happy to welcome back to the program and he's one of the keynotes because he's also many times cube alumni chris wright is the senior vice president and chief technology officer at Red Hat chris it is great to see you and we've got almost matching hats you have a real red hat fedora I've got one that the you know kubernetes Red Hat team OpenShift team gives out in Europe so in case anybody in the Red Hat community goes yes I've been a longtime member of the community I got you know I think my original Red Hat baseball cap probably 15 years ago but the Hat that I had is not one of the nice felt one it is they're pretty good to see here all right so we've gotta wait a little bit to get your keynote but so many topics I want to get to with you but you know of course as I mentioned me open and it's pretty obvious everyone's remote right now is kind of you know special times we are living in so bring us inside a little bit you know your your organization your group or community you know what what this means and how's everybody doing well I mean it'd be hard not to sort of acknowledge that there's a major global event happening right now and and kovetz really changing how we operate how we work from a RedHat perspective our number one priority is just employee safety and employ health and so we we were quick to send our folks home and have everybody to work from home and so what's interesting from a RedHat point of view I think and then even if you broaden that out to open-source communities the the distributed nature of open-source development and and specifically the engineering teams Red Hatter are pretty distributed kind of mirroring those open-source communities that we participate in so in the one hand you can kind of say well things haven't changed substantially in the sense of how do we how do we operate in upstream communities but on the other hand people working from home is it's a whole new set of challenges I mean my kids are 12 and 14 but you know say you have toddlers that's a real distraction or you have a working environment at home that's crowded with multiple people I mean it can really change how you approach your daily your your your daily work life um so creating that balance has been really important and for our teams we talk a lot about just think empathy think about how you're supporting one another and again when you broaden that out to the larger communities I think probably a really important aspect of open-source development is crossing corporate boundaries and being inclusive of such a broad set of contributors that there's a built-in resiliency associated with open source communities which i think is fantastic and then when you add to that sort of the the enthusiasm around just doing great things there's a lot of interesting activities that are collaborative in nature that are community based that are trying to address the Kovach crisis whether it's 3d printing of supplies or whether it's contact tracing applications that help people understand where they become across kovat or anything like that I mean a lot of cool stuff happening that's inspired by a real challenge to the entire globe yeah okay Chris one of my favorite things the last few years that summit has you know talk and he's cut talking to companies that are going through their journey of you know what we usually call digital transformation what we have always said from the research side is what separates you know people that have successfully gone through this is that data and they become data-driven and data is such an important piece of what they're doing well I think everyone has been getting a real crash course on data because not only businesses but you know governments and you know the entire globe now is you know watching the daily data trying to understand data sources you know bring us inside is to you know really the importance of data and you know where that intersects with everything that red hat is well the those are great examples I mean it's sometimes a little depressing but the the notion that data is a critical part of decision-making and access to quality data in real time is what helps us make better decisions more effective decisions and more efficient decisions and so when you when you look at the amount of data being produced it just keeps growing you know it's sort of on the exponential growth curve and when you look at the commensurate amount of compute power associated with all of that data it's also growing which is maybe an obvious statement what it says is we are gathering more and more data and the degree to which we can pull meaningful insights out of that data is really how much we can impact our companies you know value and differentiation and in the context of something like Cova that means vaccine discoveries and you know shortening times to field trials in in a more business context it's talking about how quickly you can respond to your customers needs and we see a really dynamic shift and the work force all working from home that puts a real strain on the infrastructure we're here supporting infrastructure builders and the amount of data that they can collect to efficiently operate infrastructure is critical at a time when people are distributed and getting access into the lab environments is challenging and so it you know I think there's a lot to be said for the amount of data that's being produced and then how we analyze it we think of it in terms of bringing data to applications and historically they kind of lived in separate I'd call them silos bringing the data sources and data processing and model development all onto a common platform is a really powerful thing that's happening in the industry today which is which is exciting so you know we were bringing data to be a central actors how I like to describe it yeah well look I'm really glad how you connected that discussion of data to the applications we as you know my background really is on the infrastructure side and the concern I have a lot of times as infrastructure people you know we talk about the bits and bytes we talk about the infrastructure but the only reason we have infrastructure is to run those applications and you know deal with that data it was hoping you can connect the dots for us the key note that all gave one of the main things he's talking about it where's the open hybrid cloud and I had a great discussion with him on the cube so with that setup of applications and data you know how does that intersect you know with what Red Hat calls the open hybrid cloud and what differentiates Red Hat's position there from some of the other discussions that we hear in the industry about cloud whether the open hybrid cloud is is a platform I think that's the best way to think of it and that platform it's a it's a platform that spans different types of infrastructures so that's public clouds that's on-premises data centers you know the enterprise zones themselves and I think important increasingly out to the edge so the notion of where you deploy isn't also coupled to what platform do I have to develop to in order to do that deployment and you know when we talk about the edge extending out to the edge that means you're getting closer to those data sources so bringing the data in doing the Associated inference and making decisions close to that data where latency really can matter is a big part of what that open hybrid cloud platform brings to to the market or to our customers and when you think about an application developer typically an application developer is trying to in a you know enable some some behavior or feature or functionality and the more we can drive use data to drive the behavior or drive the functionality the more personalized and application is the more intelligent the application is and so the connection between data the data sources the data processing the data science behind data cleansing and model generation and the associated models that can be easily accessed by applications that's the real power that's the real value that works to help develop for our customers so they can change their business we actually do this internally it's how we operate you know we collect data we use data to make decisions we use data in our product release process and the platform that we've created is a data processing and analytics and machine learning platform that we use internally and we also make that externally available as an open source project the open data hub so open and data and hybrid cloud are all intertwined at this point yeah one of the things that really has been highlighted to me at Summit this year is that connection you know we always knew Red Hat had you know strong developer community out there but you know you think back to Linux Linux has eyes directly into the application you look across the portfolio and it's not the app dev team over here and the infrastructure team over here and you know how do we operate all of these various pieces you know ansible you know has connections into all the various roles so what want you to just comment you know with kind of your you know CTO role and you you look over the entire portfolio but that discussion of you know how roles are changing how organization and make sure that they're not a bunch of various functions that aren't in sync but you know we're really coming together to help respond to the business needs and move forward in the speed that is needed in today's world well I think the the early stages of that were well captured with the DevOps phrase so bringing developers and operations closer together it's not always clear what that means and in some cases that the the notion of a of a platform and the notion of operating an application and then who operates the platform I think there there's been some question in the industry about exactly what that means we're thinking of it today to sort of stick with the buzzwords in the dev sac ops context and even what I would call AI dead set cops so in data and intelligence infused obses cops and the idea is developers are just trying to move rapidly so the degree to which the underlying infrastructure is just there to support application development is the operations teams need yeah that's what the operation seems trying to provide developers need at the same time access to tooling to consistency from test environments through to production environments and also access to those data models that I was talking about earlier so bringing that all together I think on the DevOps side or the dev Sackhoff side it's how can you build a platform that gives the right business specific guidelines and sort of guardrails that allow developers to move as quickly as possible without getting themselves into trouble and you know inadvertently creating a security vulnerability by pulling in an old dependency as a concrete example so bringing these things together I think is what's really important and it's a big part of what we're focused on the so operational side being infused with intelligence that's data in telemetry you're gathering from at the platform level and using models to inform how you operate the system and then if you go up a level to the application development sort of CIC deep pipeline where can you make intelligent recommendations to developers as they're pulling in dependencies or even writing code and then give easy access to the data science workflow to intercept so that what you're delivering is a well integrated model with an application that you know has a lifecycle and a maintenance that is well understood yeah so so Chris you know we've watched this is the seventh year we've had the cubit at Red Hat summit of course Red Hat itself has a large portfolio but not only Red Hat but you know the open source communities there are so many you know countless projects out there and you have a huge partner ecosystem you were just talking a bunch about DevOps you know I've got sitting at my desk you know one of those charts that shows you know DevOps tooling and it here's some of the platforms and here's all the various pieces and it's like you know I think there's only you know 50 or 80 different rules on that but how's Red Hat and the community overall how are you helping customers you know deal with this you know challeng world is you know we've got the paradox in place out there on it you know we understand that you know everybody's needs something a little bit different but how are we helping to give a little bit of structure and guidance in the the ever-changing world well I think it's one of the values of pulling content together if you think of a set of components being brought together as curation then we're helping curate the content and assembling pieces together it turns out is a is a lot of work especially when you want a lifecycle manage those components together so one basic thing that we're doing is bringing together an entire distribution of content so it's not just a single it's not just Linux it's not just kubernetes it's Linux and kubernetes engineered together with a set of supporting tooling for logging and monitoring and CI pipelines and all of that we bring together in a context that we opinionated or prescriptive what we also focus on is understanding that every Enterprise has a as its own legacy and history and set of investments that they've made so that process where we bring together an opinionated stack also needs to incorporate the flexibility so where can we plug in a CI pipeline that your your enterprise already has or where can we plug in your monitoring logging tools so that kind of flexibility allows us to bring together some best-of-breed components that we're finding in the open-source communities with flexibility to bring a whole set of ecosystem partners and if we go back to that open data have conversation there are a lot of data centric tools that we put in the open data have open source project we have commercial partners that can support things like say spark as a concrete example or tensorflow and so you know combine those those are open source projects but they're not coming from Red Hat they're coming from our ecosystem partners combine that all together into something that's engineered to work together and you're taking a lot of the friction out of the system so that developers can just move quickly all right so Chris give us a little bit of preview what what are people gonna see in the keynote and you know there's some people that are going to be watching this interview live but others will be efforts though I believe edge is one of the pieces we'll be touching on in the keynote but give us a little bit of what will we can expect well whatever you'll have to come to the keynote to really get the full full experience but what we're trying to to talk through is how data is really fundamentally changing business and if and we talk through that that's sort of story line starting with how it impacts red hats but you know at one level we're an enterprise we have our own business needs we use data to drive how we operate we also see that the platforms that we're building are really helpful for our customers to harness the value of data and change their own business and in the context of doing that we get to take a look at some ways where those business changes have industry-wide effects you know that we talk about things like 5g and artificial intelligence and where these things come together especially in edge computing really interesting space for these things all kind of converge and you know so kind of that that broad broad story line of data something that we use to change how we operate something that we build is from a platform point of view of our customers change how they operate and ultimately those changes have major impacts across the industry which is was which is pretty exciting pretty cool yeah I'm curious Chris you know I think back a few years ago I would have been interviewing you about like NFB and many of the themes it feels like we were talking about there we're really setting the table for the discussion we've been having for 5b is is that you know do you agree with that you know what would what's kind of the same and different from what we might have been looking at five years ago this it's very much and I love that question because it touches on something I think is really important it's very much an evolution and so in the tech world we talked so much about disruption and I think we overplay disruption I think what's interesting is technology evolution just consistently changing and moving forward gives rise at points in time to really interesting convergence of change that can be disruptive so as a concrete example NFV historically was about really improving the operational efficiencies of the service providers building networks and helping them move more rapidly so they could introduce new services most of that was focused on 4G most of that was focused on the core of the network today we're introducing 5g across the industry the discussions are moving technology wise into where do containers fit into this new world and the discussion at the network level is not only in the core but all the way out to the edge and then when you look at the edge where you have a portion of the network operating as software you have a platform like open ship that can also host enterprise or consumer facing education so this is really all of those early stages of NFV are culminating in this in a place today where the technology supports total software infrastructure for the network and utilizing that same cloud that you're running using to run the network to power enterprise or consumer facing applications that's pretty far away from where we were in the early days of NFB very much in evolution and then if you take it one step further and say orgy smart devices and cloud computing gave rise to a set of disruptive businesses ten years ago those businesses did not exist today we can't imagine life without them 5g device proliferations and not just smartphones but a whole set of new devices and edge computing are the ingredients that give rise to that same next wave of innovation where 10 years from now we can't really imagine what are the businesses that in 10 years we won't be able to imagine our lives without so we're at a really interesting inflection point and it's it's partially through this evolution of technology I think it's really exciting all right Chris last question for you there's always so many different pieces going on you know red hats really striking a nice balance there's not really as much of the habla and announcements but you know so much you know everything that does is built on open source so you know there's always things I run across it's like oh I need to you know look down the rabbit hole a little bit and what was that Farkas thing I think I'd heard that word before where all of the projects at the CN CF where you know Red Hat's involved in so you know in the last minute he or give us you know any areas where people said hey you know go google this go look up this you know project other cool things that you know you and your team are working on that you want to make sure to highlight well you you've mentioned one which is Korkis and not often time we talk about infrastructure I think it's a really cool project that is developer focus it's it's in the Java space and it's really bringing Java from an enterprise development platform into a modern language that can be used to build cloud native applications or even serverless functions I think serverless is a critical space so we've been talking for quite some time about all the ways serverless can be impactful we're in a place now where K native as a project is maturing and the the kind of world around it is getting more sophisticated so we have a serverless offer and as part of part of the open shift platform so you know making sure you're paying attention to what's happening in the K native space I think is is really important there's a whole new set of management challenges that will be in the security and a multi cluster space we're bringing those we're bringing technology to bear in this space and as RedHat we will bring those out as open source projects so looking for the open source communities around where you hear things like ECM or advanced container management or multi cluster managed environments which are the norm at this point you know those are some examples of things I think are important and then there's a world of stuff that's data focused there's all of the data science tools you know too many to really enumerate but that I think is an example where open-source is leading the space leading the industry in terms of where all where all those tools are developed and how the coverage and access developers have to data science tools all right well thank you so much Chris right always a pleasure to catch up with you and definitely looking forward to your your you know alright thank you all right lots more coverage check out the cube dotnet you can see all the interviews after they've gone out live they will be on demand all those projects Chris mentioned I've had deep dives on all of them so also hit up Chris square myself on Twitter if you have any follow up always love to hear the feedback I'm Stu minimun and as always thank you for watching the cube [Music]

from around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat welcome back this is the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 I'm Stu minimun and it's our seventh year doing the cube this year of course it is a digital event which means we are reaching all the community members where they are around the globe really excited to bring program first time guests and a first time to redhead summit Vachon Vora he's the chief technology officer of Vodafone idea joining me from Mumbai India bhishan nice to see you take so much for joining us it's a pleasure to be here as >> I'm looking forward to this interaction all right so as I said I've been at Red Hat show for many years the the telecommunications space you know service providers are some of the you know more interesting in the technology space you talk about scale you talk about change you talk about you know software eating the world all of those discussions are ones I've had for many years but you know I think many people know Vodafone may be a vote a fun idea escape for us you know the organisation and of course you've got the CTO at so you know what that means inside your organization sure so what a fun idea is a company that came came to acclaim as a result of a merger about 18 months ago so the number two and number three operators in India which was Vodafone an idea came together to create a telco serving over 300 million subscribers and we've been integrating the the networks over the last 18 months and consolidating and doing one of the largest integration in the world of two networks comprising over 200 thousand sites and carrying you know more than 50 billion MB of traffic per hour per day serving more than 40 million voltaic customers and we have been duplicating the network very very busy with her and we taken down so far almost a hundred thousand base stations which is equivalent to the size of a large operator in us so that's about the carnahan that is about the scale of the the operator that word of an idea is and what we've been busy with for the last day yeah well well Besant of course the reason we're doing this event online is because right now with the global pandemic the vast majority of the population they're at home so you know healthcare of course you know one of the major concerns I actually have done interviews with some of the power and energy companies critically important at this time but you know telecommunications you know what one of the top of the list you know in normal times for what people need but today it's the the only way that we can all connect it so tell us a little bit about do you know what the current situation you know the impact and importance this really highlights of your business yeah so just as the rest of the world India is also in a lockdown and India actually has one of the largest the largest lockdown in the world putting all 1.3 billion people in a lockdown yeah across the entire country so within that context the telecom network is crucial to make sure that the life goes on the essential services are delivered the industry continues to still operate as the best it can and all of that is made possible because of a stable and reliable network that we offer so a huge huge impact on the society always has been but in in this current context it is even more more critical and crucial so what we do is we make sure that we are the invisible layer you talked about health healthcare workers and emergency services well we are the invisible essential service that probably many people don't see but we are the ones who are really helping this country survive this this crisis and so far we have seen 25 30% increase in traffic in a single day in one week we experienced the same amount of traffic growth we would have experienced in the entire year so we we scalability is very very critical in our network and we've been able to keep up with that kind of a growth and continue to serve the communities and in this crucial juncture and all this dude large extent has been made possible because of a large-scale deployment of cloud technologies that we have done over the last 18 months which has really helped us scale up a large lot of our capabilities in the back yeah I'd love if you could explain a little bit more on that it you know challenging times you know I'm curious the amount of people that are using your services probably haven't changed but the demand and how much they're using it as change a lot so cloud obviously gives you scalability but you know are there concerns about what this does the profitability how you maintain things how much of this is a temporary change and how much will this be you know I know in the United States there's a lot of talk about how much work from home will become more of a standard than it had been before this pandemic so you know short term what's the impact on your business and what are you and other telecommunication companies thinking about what long-term impact this will have >> I think that's a very very interesting question I think even for me and my organization what we have been able to do working from home is amazing I never would have thought that it was possible to do as much as we've been able to do just staying young with most of the work for staying at home and that has really I think happened across industries across the entire country I think many organizations have now realized that work from home or work from anywhere which is the other term he's gonna become quite possible and prevalent going forward because people have realized that you can just get you can get just as much productivity out you can get so many things done working from home and it gives so much more personal flexibility to the individuals so I see when I look back at our organizational experience I see our productivity has been actually quite good actually better then haha where probably even in the office days so I think that is definitely one thing that is gonna come out as a global change across all industries I think the second thing that is gonna happen is data analytics I think there is going to be far more analysis of data to understand patterns and understand trends and how to take advantage of that I think of course the immediate application is in the healthcare and the spread of the pandemic but I think this will spur a lot of other analytics I think the third thing is going to do is the adoption of digital as the primary mode digital was already something that most companies are working on as is a top priority but I think going outward is gonna become very evident to people that it is actually essential just talking about my business I can tell you today you know all the stores all the shops every place that we used to check our cell or recharge vouchers are closed so the only place we are able to get any revenue from is our digital channel and on end only place where customers have been able to recharge their prepaid subscriptions etc has all been through digital I think digital we will also become a massive massive requirement so in that context I think telecom will be seen as a critical critical backbone I think to a large extent it has been seen by many in the past is more of an essential commodity but I think many organizations will realise that this is actually a value creator so I think it's a great exciting opportunity for us to take advantage of those new business opportunities that will come and at the same time be a very very important player in the digital economy that every nation around the world is gonna press you know for Sean said it really appreciates some really good commentary there you know we've been talking for years about customers going through their digital transformation it's really about the data and how they leverage that and if you're data-driven then you really have gone through that transformation and you kind of described what we call the new innovation cocktail you're leveraging cloud that there's data you put those all together as to how you drive your company and you can drive innovation oftentimes when we think about what results we're going to get from deploying cloud and using these types of new technologies we think we know what we're gonna get but the reality of how your company is dealing with things today of course you know proves what you were hoping that build for here help us understand you know what we're talking here is part of red hat summit this week you know what's red hats role in this piece and you know how did the reality of rolling this out and then how it has helped you in the current global situation impacted your business sure oh so I would say actually the three words that I used digital cloud and analytics to me they're actually inseparable cuz I do not believe that you can have a digital business that is not based on cloud or that is not good at data analytics I think if you want to really have a successful cloud offering it implies that automatically that you are a digital business and you're gonna do extensive modern data and analytics and build those capabilities I think those are three inseparable terms now speaking specifically about a red head I would say that red head has been a very very critical partner for us right from the beginning 18 months ago when the two companies too came together to create this network we knew that we had to do several things number one was actually to have a completely rationalized structure which was around extracting the synergies from the from the merger but beyond that we needed to build a telco of the future technology company of the future which will let us transform the business and create capabilities that will give us a step ahead a leapfrog ahead of our competition and cloud was a very very essential part of the journey and we knew we needed to build a cloud based on open systems because we did not want to get into a proprietary logins with anybody and we are a very large business we have suffered a sufficiently large scale to really be able to build a very large cloud so we started working with Red Hat about two years ago and it in the last two years we have deployed 80 plus cloud locations distributed cloud locations across the country and these all of these clouds our vision is to orchestrate them as a single cloud our vision is to build a cloud there is a universal cloud actually that is the word there is a word we use when we talk about cloud it's a universal cloud what does that mean that means that cloud will carry not only the traditional telco workloads but it will also carry IT workloads it will also carry lot of the enterprise offerings we have so - for the end-user for our enterprise clients and all of those capabilities out to be accommodated with a platform that is versatile that is scalable and that is gonna give me in enormous amount of flexibility and control as a organization so Red Hat has been a very important part of the journey and on the red head OpenStack cloud today I have a Daffy's working from any major supplier you can think of I have any enemies working from Nokia Ericsson Huawei ziti even some smaller players like Marvin here so we have demonstrated that this is possible we've been able to break the lock in that the traditional naps have had on their cloud offerings which were really more of a virtualized offerings rather than a cloud computer is a truly universal cloud on the back of the technology provided by a red well that's that's fantastic congratulations on that I love the the result of what you're calling Universal Cloud is the promise that we talked about for a number of years you know is that nitty gritty networking piece it was like you know network functions virtualization and if be sitting an open stack and everybody's like well OpenStack am I trying to build a cloud to compete against the public cloud providers it was like no what you said exactly there's services that you want to be able to deliver and it's not just about oh we're getting away from hardware appliances it's you know just like most people today they're used to whatever smart device they're doing I want to be able to turn on channels and access new things that's your now you know reducing that barrier to Vodafone idea to deliver that to your users have I captured that properly that is correct as a matter of fact I'll just give you one proof point my water phone app is the app that we we have for our consumers and that app is currently running on my telco clock what used to be called the telco cloud so on that platform we are running my packet or actually there are about 40 and FB is for virtualized traditional calculations running alongside with an IT application a digital application okay so one of the things I you know I would like to understand there that what you've deployed there over the last couple of years sounds like a significant shift so you know you're talking about apps you're talking more of a developer type of environment bring us inside a little organizationally you know what new skills have new people had to learn has there been new people added to the organization have there been in a restructures what what is this this this whole initiative to get to universal cloud meant for your organization sure so I look after both the network and IT pieces of the part of parts of the company and you know we traditionally were in the past legacy we have had a IT cloud and we have heard indigo cloud what we are now creating is a single universal cloud what either of the two workloads are gonna be facilitated so for that actually the two organization the two parts of the organization need to come together and start to really work as one now it is very important that the telco guys understand the scale and the 99-year the five nines required in a running a network but at the same time IT guys also understand very much what all of the the flexibility that the business requires and the responsiveness required for the for the enterprise so bringing those two talents together I think in infusing that to create a single organization is one of the biggest challenges I think any telco has we also face it that is one aspect of it the second aspect of it is that there just aren't too many cloud experts in the world and we have been struggling with that I think skill shortage is a clear challenge for us now we try to address it using variety of means we of course try to upscale rescale lot of the traditional network core engineers that we have had we also try to use talent available or from consultants and then we also try to use our vendors so one of the concepts we've been working with our vendors is a concept of a resident engineer so we try to actually get them to second some of their engineers to work with us and at the same time we've been now working with both IBM and redhead to create a program to really go out and create a community around us of developers who can really work with this cloud and therefore we will have enough of skills available to leverage all of the potential benefits there are then the platform but can only be unleashed if I have the right skills and right people you touched on a very important issue it is a challenge but we are working our way through it and so far we've been a bit we make good all right well if it's shot I can't let a CTO go without looking a little bit into the future so want to help understand we talked about some of the technologies talked about transformation of what's happening your business what's happening your organization and there's some big waves coming week you know cloud is still in early days 5g of course you know is expected to have massive impact on on everyone's environment for this so what is the winning formula for the the telecoms going forward well I think Phi G is an exciting world we are a 4G network today the Phi G spectrum hasn't been auctioned in India but what we are building today is what I call a 4G plus network which means the lot of the architectural principles of PI G we have already applied in my core networks today and in my transport network in that world I think IOT is gonna play a very very big role and if you want to do things like IOT and if you want to do things like blockchain now I think telco cloud has a huge role to play because we are the telcos are traditionally the only ones in a country anywhere in the world who have experiences experience in operating in very far front powerful places dealing with lot of the infrastructure challenges especially if you're in a developing country you know that you have to work with a poor power availability poor transport etc I do not see any of the big guys the the big cloud players really having those capabilities today I think telcos are gonna play a very big role in enabling that pi g io t work and it is going to be an exciting journey for telcos I think telcos will very soon be called tech companies that is one thing that I strongly believe in I think also many of the things that depend on blockchain will require the kind of cloud that telcos will create because a telco cloud is far more demanding than a traditional IT application in many ways for example latency or for example throughputs now all those things aren't very important in blockchain apple type of applications I think that's another exciting opportunity for telcos really is to get into that and of course there are discussions about smart cities smart government government and because of Kovach kharkova crisis I think many governments are gonna explore new ways of organizing Society's new ways of governing economic activities and the backbone for a lot of those things is gonna be our telecom networks and the cloud distributed clouds to the edge that we create so I think it'll create many many exciting business opportunities as a consequence of some of those technological innovation yeah Shanta I can't remember who said it as they said don't waste a crisis but Vasant Bora CTO of Vodafone idea pleasure talking with you thank you so much for joining us hope you enjoy the Red Hat event as it is distributed this year and definitely look to be able to meet you sometime at a future physical event back when we have those in the future Thank You Stu it's been a pleasure meeting you virtually and look forward to these all right lots more coverage from the cubes Red Hat summit at 20/20 activity I'm Stu minimun and thanks as always for watching [Music]

>> from Bahrain. It's the Q covering AWS Public sector Bahrain brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> love Run. Welcome back. This two cubes coverage here for a diverse Emmet. We're in by rain in the Middle East Cloud Computing Changing the game telling all the top stories Cloud computing decreasing now being offered Amazons Regions now operational. Our next guest is a maze. Rihan, Chief Technology Officer Arum X, Big global provider of logistics and transportation. Service is welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you, John. Thank you for having me. >> So you're on a panel this morning? We powertech. It's a women in tech panel graduations. But you're also the CTO of a really big logistics and transportation company. Going to the cloud? Yes. Tell us a story. >> So s O. I work for Allah mix, and Adam makes is a global leader in transportation logistics. Uh, we have we're proud to have a diverse culture, and we have 30% of our management's are females. So, uh, it's only natural to have ah female city. Or but for amex, uh, the whole dish transformation journey and the cloud adoption it started. Ah, like all other enterprises with the whole cloud we've started and we found ourselves competing with corporate, But, uh, not competing with the classical competitors for from the logistic industry but rather competing with innovators are are on companies that are really consuming the best out of the cloud in terms of speed and agility. So we had to transform on there. We created this transformation Lord map on. We fired multiple problems on, uh, this is how it started on. Now we're proud to have Ah, big Italy on AWS on dhe removed a lot of our business processes. Did I from from our machine learning logic that's there. We're modernizing our landscape and moving. >> So you guys are big logistics. A lot of compute powers needed a lot of I t now moving to AWS, which also religious expensive things, a lot of packages around of their business, a lot of compute, a lot of storage lot of I t. Why the shift to the cloud? What was the reason? >> Agility is the most important thing and being able to to create M v P's for for all the ideas that were might have what that we might have to support the business but also ah furthermore, because we needed ah ah, massive computer power. Because whenever you're in the service sector, the number of transactions that you process and the speed of processing Boston's action needs to be a tremendous. And that's the power of the cloud scaling up by then, at the end of the month, when you want to invoice voices with 100 K items, this is what we were looking >> for. So digital transformations complex for you. You have I t. You have your back office, you have a huge organization. I o t must be a big part of it, too, because you've got to keep track of everything. How big is the I O. T or industrial? I ot component of it? >> Well, for our industrial city is very, very relevant. It's going to be transformational on the shipment tracking, handling, uh, and it will shift the way we do business. The one of the main drivers off Beating our big date on AWS was the fact that we want to feed Ah, i ot findings and sensors reading to the club. This is something that we're very serious about, where we're actually I wouldn't I wouldn't say that way. Haven't seen most of the innovations that are related to that. Andi, I think we had some success stories, but for certain sectors, like pharmaceuticals and so on. But the minute those sensors would be commercialized and visible enough to be attached to each and every package, we will be the first. You >> know, we love talking about about two point. Oh, a whole new generation is coming. Yeah, you have compute, you got storage. It's either on premise or it's gonna be in the cloud Network now is important because we've got five g and other you know, radio frequency capabilities, tracking real time data. Do you move? Compute to the data. So an entire paradigm of computing is shifting. >> Yeah, we know it shifting from from the traditional way of doing things where you have your own data centers on the whole communication and work networking setup is built to service. Ah, this architecture off local data centers introducing the cloud. Uh, it would be a challenge. How do you connect both of them? But the way we did it because we were very serious about the cloud moves we prepared right from the beginning So we knew the locations that we selected for our data centers on how close and how we're going to connect him with our own that the centers for for the hybrid set up when we're on both. We were We took it very seriously, and we changed the whole ecosystem that comes around. >> So you got your data lake now? So analytics are important. >> Yes. The lake. We moved our data lake and remove our B I as well. Reporting toe aws on, we created a layer off logic that science logic to derive business processes like your last month delivery G, according address prediction, as well as the understanding, market trends and everything. >> So how's it going with Amazon so far? Good. >> It's going doing very, very well. We've had this data for so long. And Andi. It's a wealth of knowledge of the Indus specific. All our industry. We want to bring the best out of it. Andi could do that. >> And you have in house developers. You talk a little bit. The damage is it? Mostly you've had that for a while, right? Mostly developers. >> Yes, we do have for years. Actually, we've been an in House Development Company. We were building our own applications, like on a very wide range with very good on strict Ah, production and Dev Ops processes. Ah, well, now we're shifting our development towards the clog. We're very open toe to start developing, uh, aws and to adopt even local platforms. Whatever makes us move faster and more flexible. Way. >> Mays, You're on the panel with the Powertech. Limited tech promote diversity. How is diversity changed with the technology innovation? >> Actually, the diversity within the workplace is ah very significant and important driver for innovation on dhe, we at ceramics were very proud on. Did you consider it a differentiator and dynamics edge toe To be a diverse culture, we have more than 80. Nationality is 30%. I told you off our management team are females. Ah, that that gives you a lot off knowledge on also allows you to bring in different age groups off different formats of thinking acknowledge on backgrounds that that really makes change management easier on. You don't really feel any resistance to progress. >> Well, you're an inspiration. What advice would you give women out there watching young girls to professional women looking at their careers. What's your advice? >> Everything. Is this doable? We understand that you come from a region where there there has been a cultural challenges. However, I don't see them anymore, Especially when you work with big enterprises. If you create a balance at home and gender balance will review within your family, then you're OK. >> You do that. You do anything you can tell my wife or kids she could be CEO. Thank you so much for coming on such an insight. Great stuff. Think reporting here in by range. The Cube coverage on John Ferrier. Thanks for watching. We'll be back with more coverage at this rate break.

(soft music) - [Narrator] Live CUBE coverage at VMworld 2018 continues in a moment. Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. - Hello everyone, and welcome to back to theCUBE, live coverage here in Las Vegas with VMworld 2018. This is our three days of exclusive wall-to-wall coverage, two sets, it's our ninth year covering VMworld, when Dave and I started theCUBE nine years ago, Paul Maritz was the CEO, he actually got referenced on stage by Pat Gelsinger. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, our next guest Ray O'Farrel, CTO, Chief Technology Officer at VMware, keynote today on stage with Pat; great to see you again, thanks for coming on. - Really good to see you guys again. - So, reaction from the keynote was very positive. Probably, from a content standpoint, probably one of the most meatiest content pieces I've seen, mega news, serious announcement with Amazon, with Andy Jassy coming on stage releasing the Relational Database Service, RDS, on VMware, on-premises. Monster news. That is like, I don't think the world has yet felt the reverb for this thing yet. - But that was only one of the many stories. - [John] That was just one, that was just like (makes explosion noise). And then the CloudHealth acquisition, and you had tons of demos, pretty intense. - [Ray] Well, it's been- - Summarize what you did (laughs) in ten seconds. - Summarize all of that. So, you know, the key thing that we wanted to achieve with the keynote was obviously to make sure Pat drives the the vision that VMware has and, a lot of focus on that was focused on multi-cloud, this view of the world that you've now got multiple clouds emerging. And you know one of our key rules is to make sure that enterprises are able to work across all of those, networking, how we do management, how we work across all of these, and CloudHealth is a key part of that, making it easier to use cloud, in particular multi-cloud. You know as the CTO I get the fun part of tryna you know let our customers know all the cool work that the engineering teams are doing, so one of the things we want to do is make sure we put a lot of good demos in there. The feedback we get from our customers at VMworld over and over again is they want to see demos, they want to know that stuff is real. You can take a look for instance at the hands on labs. I came in here on Saturday night, walked down there about 6:30 am on Sunday morning, and there was people lining up to go in there and use those labs. So what did we talk through? Broadly speaking we spoke to how you can use VMC on AWS, and the easy way it is to migrate vSphere applications onto vSphere on AWS; we had some new features there around live migration. The next thing we spoke about was around RDS itself and what this project is about. Broadly speaking, at its most basic, it allows you to take the RDS components from Amazon but run them in your data center. With all of the implications of that in terms of how your developers work and they build those applications. We spoke about Project Dimension, which is also around a now delivery as a service, a cloud experience, but again, at your infrastructure, whether it's at the edge or whether it's your data center. And, you know we spoke about what we're doing in blockchain, some opensource components that we're doing over there. New features of Workspace ONE, particularly around the relationship with Dell, and how that will now be combined with some of their laptops And, oh and of course, what we did with some of the Nvidia GPUs, demonstrating the ability to be able to run the most sophisticated AI workloads on a vSphere environment. And I suspect I forgot something in that list, but- - [John] You're going to have to hit the pillow tonight and have a good nap, and crash. - [Dave] Project Magma. - [Ray] Project Magma which is a very future looking concept around basically where we think AI and ML is going to be used to drive a lot of the automation moving forward. - [Dave] Self-driving data center, - Self-driving data center. - [Dave] I think you'd call it (John laughs) Are they coinin' a new term there? - No it's great, we can reuse an old term, and you know rebrand it. - Auto pilot. Put your data center on auto pilot. I want to just drill down on one, on the Amazon relationship, because that was obviously the height, big news in there what you're talking about is the depth of the relationship is deep on the partnership side. I want to, and you guys, you pointed that out, I want to amplify that, but I also want to ask you around the RDS demand. You know, talkin' to some of the Amazon sources, they tell me that the demand for this was very strong, over multiple years. So, first on the RDS, the demand, some of the customer feedback, this is not just you guys in a room goin' hey, let's just do this; it makes sense, but it's customer driven. - Yeah, when you look at what VMC on AWS actually is, it's creating this bridge between the on-prem and the private cloud, sorry, and the public cloud on Amazon. But, initially most of that is really an I as relationship, yes we can move workloads, yes we can move VMs, yes we can manage networking, but one of the key things you want from a public cloud or from cloud in general is access to services. So, as we went down that first part of saying we'll give you this basic infrastructure, very quickly customers began to ask for some other things, some other aspects of that, and that of course was services. So after lots of discussions around what are services, one, that are appropriate to be able to put into this new type environment, but which had to demand RDS certainly rode very quickly to the top of that. In the end almost everybody has some form of database in their application, and so it's a very likely start for us to make them. - So I remember when customers first started wanting to run, to virtualize Oracle, with of course VMware; and Oracle, didn't really embrace that early on. They would say things, their sales guys would scare the customers, we're not going to certify it, but then some of the customers said "Dam the torpedoes, we're going to do it." it actually worked great. - [Ray] Right. - Now, I don't know if that's 'cause, just that's the inherent nature of VMware, or you guys had to do some work, so my question is: two fold, was that just the inherent nature of VMware, and what did you have to do or will you have to do to get RDS running the way that customers want it, trust it on AWS, I mean on VMware? - So, in the case of the Oracle situation, we didn't have to do a whole lot to make that happen, we were virtualizing in x86, Oracle runs on x86, and so you got that basic pattern and mix. In the case of RDS, the actual database that you're running on your VMware infrastructure, our database is such as my SQL, we run an enormous amount of those databases already, so that core aspect of getting the database running is not something that's fundamentally difficult for us to do The challenging part is, how do bridge all the management aspects of that? The RDS components, the APIs, that a developer wants to use, and which are used to using over on, with RDS on AWS, so that's where the work is involved. Now by the way, you're implying that maybe this is a future thing, right? A lot of that work has already occurred, in fact, you know the demo you're seeing is not based on this is what we could do at some possible time in the future, it is actually tied to some very close future releases. - [Dave] So recovery, I'm going to be co-, that's future release of recovery and all the things, if something goes wrong, I'm going to be comfortable as a customer that - [Ray] Correct, correct. - You're going to be backed. - Some of those things we still need to work true, because there's tons of features that you can begin to add onto this, disaster recovery, backup, all of those sort of things, and they're not all going to be there on day one, but you can expect us to continue to add all of that. - [Dave] And you'll have all of those? - Correct. - Now the other question I got to ask you is about migration. When I hear the term migration I go, ugh, you know IT practitioners they tighten up, but what I heard on stage today is we're going to make this really easy. But moving data, help me square that circle, Ray, because, you know data, people say data has gravity, speed of light, network bandwidth, proximity. What's the secret sauce that enables you guys to solve those problems? - So the core secret sauce there is if you're virtualized on VMware on-premise, and you're using VMC on AWS, the basic unit of execution is still that virtual machine, and that virtual machine encapsulates the storage, the networking, everything associated with that box, right? So virtual machines have that very core strength of encapsulating not just the application, or some aspect of the, even some aspect of a minimal piece of the operating system, it encapsulates everything which is tied into that box almost on a physical level. So when you say I'm going to move a virtual machine, you're moving the disk, you're moving the storage, you're doing all of those things. So now think of a database running in a virtual machine, it might not even be the applications, just the database, we're able to capture that and represent that as we moved the virtual machine, you're moving all of that as well. Now there's two aspects of that, one of them is moving the underlying storage, the disk, which might well be even a a virtual disk on NFS or something like that, that's slower task, and that's why we leverage vSphere replication for that. And then the final live part which is, it's always the cool part, but is in fact in this stage maybe not the most difficult part, and what we're describing here is moving the actual memory contents of a given VM and flipping it over to VMC on AWS. - [Dave] Okay, so the key there, you've got the replication piece, and then you just unhook the original and then you're up and running. - Correct. Traditional vMotion relies that both servers access the same disk, so I don't need to move the disk, in this case I need to actually move the disk, and that's what the replication does. - [John] Ray, I want to ask you about something that Pat Gelsinger kind of cheesed out on the keynote. You could tell he had so much confidence, he wanted to expand on this one section but he got a couple digs in on it but, he did point out that the telco piece was very big; and only, he had a percent, I think 10% or 20% is virtualized when enterprises are like 80, I forget what now, I forget the exact numbers but his point was: huge opportunity in telco. What was he referring to there? - So, broadly speaking, if you look across most of you know where workloads run, you look at your IT infrastructure, you look at most of the public clouds and private clouds, they're virtualized to an enormous extent. Now when you go into the telco side of things and begin to look at what's happening at the edge, what's happening in the large telco infrastructure, both, a little bit from a cloud point of view, but also from everything to do from all the services and so on that the run; much of that is not virtualized. Now we actually made a very distinct focus on that over the last few years, we created a, basically a product line and a mini business unit, focused on telco, and that's where you see products like the virtual network functions, all of those technologies coming from. But actually the key product from that area is actually VIO, VMware Incubated Openstack, that's because the telco providers, to a large degree, attempted to leverage Openstack, had some challenges of getting the reliability, the stability you need on that, so what we did was merged the hypervisor, the infrastructure of VMware, with the Openstack management APIs, produced VMware Incubated Openstack, and the telco providers are very aggressively taking that on - [Dave] Now, I got to ask ya, whaddya got against capex? (Dave and Ray laugh) Pat said "You should never spend capex for DR again." it was basically- - [Ray] Yep. So I mean, I think the key part of that solution is it is now so, I will use the word easy, the technology behind it is not easy, but it easy for an end user to be able to say: "I can connect my application from a private infrastructure to a public infrastructure, in a way which is very highly connected using NSX, which is easily replicated, which is easily moved; therefore, I now have a ready ability to be able to create DR scenarios leveraging the public cloud." It is easier than it's ever been before, so instead of building another data center to do that, leverage VMC on AWS, leverage those type of technologies to be able to do that. - Ray, can you clarify, or amplify the VMware Cloud Foundations, how does, trials and tribulations over the years has evolved, it's now front and center in the conversation. How has that evolved from a product standpoint, tech, is it integration layer, how are you guys looking at that, what is the role of VMware Cloud Foundation, and what does it mean for your partners and customers? - Yeah, so I think that, your comments about it having a a kind of an early mixed reaction or so on is actually partially because a naming challenge that we called right? VMware Cloud Foundation is a unified story where we basically take the core elements of the SDDC and we combine in management infrastructure with that, which is actually called SDDC Manager, we don't necessarily spell that out but it's combined into that. But that's the key aspect of this, and then we build architectures based on that; so VxRack is based on VMware Cloud Foundation. The infrastructure which runs in Amazon which we manage as part of the VMC on AWS is built on VMware Cloud Foundation. So it's an architectural and, it's an architectural statement as opposed to a product statement. Where the confusion arises, we also have products that people call VMware Cloud Foundation. One of the ones they're with now as an instance of that is for instance VxRack, right? Which is basically a rack of infrastructure, think of it as a really big VxRail, but it's got all of this management software combined with it as well. And actually, you know your comment about that having some mixed reaction, some of that is because of our renaming that - [John] Renaming. - we've done along the way. But that is actually growing, and quite successful product at this stage, so. - It's been getting a lot of good buzz. - It's getting a lot of good buzz, yes. - [John] And the value is what? Times in market on, on solution building, or pull out, what's the main value? - In some way it goes back to the core value of hyper-converged infrastructure, somebody else is taking care of making sure that the software components all blend together; somebody else is making sure that there's any easy way to update and manage all of these things together, and in many cases, making sure it's well integrated with underlying hardware. So it's all around making it easy to get that basic SDDC up and running. - [Dave] So I got to question on your architecture, and I honestly don't even know how to ask it, but, maybe you can help me as a technologist; you've got, you know the VMware architecture which was developed initially decades ago, and now you've got all this microservices, and Kubernetes, and containers comin' into the fore, and you see the quote unquote modern architectures, speed of deployment, software release is much faster, much more cloud-like, cloud first. How do you go from you know the historical architecture to that level, how do you bridge the two worlds? - So, as with any company, as these transitions have taken place, we've had to be able to make sure we invest in those new techniques and new technologies as well. So you see for instance VMC on AWS, you see for instance Project Tango the cloud-based VR realms product. All of those are cloud-based infrastructure using, you know those more, well I guess they're described new or modern ways of developing applications, microservices, containerized, leveraging Kubernetes and so on in the mix. So just like the rest of the industry, we've been doing the same as part of that broader sorry, that broader industry momentum. There isn't a conflict that you, I think might think is there. The bottom line is our primary purpose is to deliver enterprise software which is solid, stable, secure, easily connected to the rest of the infrastructure. And that might sound a little bit boring, but it is the thing that keeps most of the data centers running and safe. VMware's ESX architecture, VMware's VC architecture has been at the very heart of that. And while they've matured over the years, right, they're still at the very heart of that virtualization part of what we do, but all of these other things we do, what we do in terms of cloud monitoring, what we do in terms of Wavefront, what we do in terms of VMC on AWS, they're new code, new architectures, broadly expanding that story, leveraging microservices and the things you would expect in that space. - Well, and VMware has proven to the gold standard in that regard. Maybe it is boring, but it's super important. - [John] So you got some compliments on theCUBE today, for the work you guys are doing, Andy Bechtolsheim was on earlier, a well-documented career he's had he knows a thing or two about networks. He said "VMware as NSX is ..." this is a quote from today, "... is the best solution that's available today that I can use for a use case of the large numbers I have between smooth connection between on-premise and off-premise public cloud, into the future, to edge, and telco, and all other things cloud." - Yeah, I'm not going to argue with that quote. (laughs) - [John] So, instant testimonial. Okay, NSX has become really this, and Pat was giddy about this last year, he's all like, you watch more NSX, you know more goodness coming; it seems to be the center piece to the a lot of the VMware's connection strategies to cloud and other things including manageability. What's the big thing about NSX, what should people know about NSX? - I think the single biggest thing is software-defined networking had a promise, and the promise is this highly flexible, easily configured, and in many ways, automated, or policy-driven in some cases; networking infrastructure. So it's all around that flexibility and fluidity of software-defined networking. The key strength that NSX does, it delivers on that promise, so it's easy to say software-defined networking, it's not easy to build it, right? And that's where I think NSX is proving all of its strength, it is a very strong implementation; I would argue, obviously, the best implementation of software-defined networking. So that testimonial is an echo of that, it's delivering on all the things you expect from a software-defined network. - [John] And what is NSX enabling? - In terms of the cloud connectivity story which you just described a second ago, what it enables is, really in some ways, because it is not tied to a specific infrastructure, I'm able to run NSX on a public cloud infrastructure and on a private cloud infrastructure, or on a hyper-converged infrastructure, but it's essentially the same NSX. It's the same control plane, it's managed in the same way, all of those different instances know how to interoperate with each other. So what it's enabling is this massive ability to have these networks very quickly brought up, connect to each other, and reliably communicate with each other, and be managed in a unified fashion. - [John] And it's targeting one of the hardest things people are working on which is interoperability. - [Ray] Correct, it's also targeting security. I mean one of the things when we think about networking that you should never forget is this key aspect of security, and NSX is clearly targeting that as well. So some of the things, even the features you see around app defense, a combination of app defense and NSX gives you enormous power. Pat's made a good presentation today where he was talkin' about the adaptive micro-segmentation. You can only do that because you have a great NSX underlying that network. - What's interesting about the NSX, just want to get your reaction to is that that the people are talking about here on theCUBE and also in the industry is that by having the security at the application portion of it, when NSX plays, takes the pressure of the network teams; security teams can have comfort in their piece, and then, (laughs) you don't intertwine them. Is that true, or is that ...? - So I'm reluctant to say it's true because the bottom line is, everybody needs to be paranoid, right? (John laughs) So- - Well from a segmentation standpoint, form a cohesiveness, not this finger pointings, there's not a lot of, it's not thorny. - [Ray] Because it moves the networking layer up a level, and that level is closer to the application. But, when I really I looked at, I think the key strength there is because it's software-defined, because it's flexible, where you get a lot of the problems is when applications change, there's a new version of the application, or we're now popping up a new instance of the application; now because NSX is this software layer beneath that, it is able to react to that. So instead of, you know the finger pointing back to the security or networking person saying you didn't reconfigure the network to deal with my new application; instead, the application and the network are intimately bound together. Actually Pat used some phrase today where he said "I think the app is the network" and so, or something like that, he was talking a little bit differently about it, but broadly speaking that's what's going on there. It's all around the flexibility and the fluidity that you get from NSX. - [John] The application is a network! - [Ray] Correct, that's what he said, yes. - Was his word. - [Ray] Yep, yep. - Which I love, to think he's right on the money. Complex and if some services evolve, the service measure are right around the corner. - [Ray] Yeah, highly interconnected, you know what app, think of any application on your iPhone or your Android device, which doesn't rely on about 20 other applications or databases or cloud services. - [John] Well, Ray, we'll have to get you on a white board sometime, and have you do a deeper dive, love this conversation, congratulations. Final word I'm going to ask you, what is this VMworld all about on stage, if you could knot down the technical engineering successes that you've had this year, what's it about this year, what's the scene from your perspective? - So I think one of the key things is, we've got a lot of products, a lot of technologies under development for the last few years, a lot of them are now starting to see fruition and the light of day; you know, you know you spoke about NSX, NSX is now reaching a real strength right? But that's work we've had to start two and three and four years ago. So to me, that's probably the strongest thing here, products, ideas, research that we've done over the years, development we've done over the years is now becoming real, is getting out and making available to customers; and in the end, that's what we're about, tryna get those technologies to hand to customers. - [John] And we're going to do our job to share that, and we're going to be tracking the successes; and also thank you for inviting us to your radio event where you had your top scientists. - Oh yeah it was great, very good to see you guys there, thank you. - [John] Great to see the energy, and the engineering prowess of VMware continuing strong, technical team, community, and customer base. This is theCUBE, bringing you our hardcore tech coverage here at VMworld 2018, three days, we're in day one, stay with us for more after this short break. (bubbly music)