>>From Miami beach, Florida. It's the queue covering a Chronis global cyber summit 2019 brought to you by Acronis. >>Okay. Welcome back to the cubes coverage. Everyone two days here in Miami beach at the fountain blue hotel for kronas cyber global cyber summit 2019. I'm John furrier, our next guest, Phil, she founder of structured research, do an industry analyst firm doing analysis of what's going on here. And the big story is cyber protect as a category emerging from data protection, but a lot of infrastructure going on under the knee. Phil, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. So they got this platform, but underneath the platform they got a hyper converged stack. A lot of stories, lot of networking involved, abstraction layer, platform layer to enable Cisco services. ISV is whatnot. Um, pretty compelling. And you're seeing with cloud computing, cloud 2.0 modernization. These kind of white spaces can become categories. So I kinda like the cyber protection angle. We'll see how it's kind of developed, but you got to make it work under the hood. >>What's your take of their infrastructure, the platform, what's underneath? What's, what's going on there in your opinion? >> Yeah, I mean, I look at the world from the angle of service providers or infrastructure service providers. They come in all shapes and sizes. Uh, typically the crowd here is probably what most would classify as small to mid size. And those kinds of organizations are typically challenged when it comes to resources you have, they have, uh, you know, smaller staffs, you know, less resources to acquire development talent. And so when it comes to approaching, you know, innovative products and services to drive their business, you know, they often have to look to a third party like Acronis, >> they'll talk about them. The evolution of service providers, the deputies has changed over the decades, right? I mean, Cisco Sarvis targeted service providers, what does that means and tell goats what's a, you know, MSP, managed service providers. >>So the word service providers kind of evolving as these platforms start to become more relevant. How do you, how do you, how do you shape the market? How would you talk about the evolution of what a service provider is? >> Yeah, I mean I like to think of it as infrastructure providers, infrastructure service providers. So those that are managing third party infrastructure that lives, uh, typically in some kind of off premise, not on premise environment. Uh, that's certainly a big chunk of the audience here. Uh, those people will run data centers or they'll run multiple data centers. They might run some of their own data sets and they might run some stuff on the public cloud. Uh, and then they manage that for an end user, which could be a small business, mid size enterprise or large enterprise. >> What are the top stories in that market dynamic that you're seeing involved? >>Is it IOT? Is it the SLA, is the required for latency? What are some of the dynamics going on and then that serves provided market? I mean, I think the big thing today is a boil it all down is the impact of hyperscale and what that does to market that these service providers playing. So you have hyperscale just grabbing huge chunks of the infrastructure and it real estate out there. And how that affects MSPs or service providers is that Hey, there's probably a little less market than you would have, like pre hyperscale. And so what that forces them to do is to do two things, I think, uh, which is a specialized focus, uh, and try to drive value from the infrastructure you do get to host or manage or run on, on the public cloud. So that brings the punchline here to be, you know, it's all about value add. >>What is the value add? Well, you know, this is how kind of a kronas came there. They understood that, you know, organizations that are a little more specialized like to work with service providers, they need to backup up infrastructure. They have security requirements, they have compliance requirements, and then, uh, they have to deliver that to the customer. Uh, and being able to do all that is sometimes can be difficult. But if you work with a third party like, what they've done is, you know, package that for you, hence the cyber platform so that people can basically, you know, turn the key and be able to deliver those kinds of services. And get back to focusing on what they're good at, managing customers and dealing with them. What's been the reaction, your opinion on what's happening with the crunch value proposition? Because again, like you said, these they want to differentiate ed services to around it seems like a good opportunity. >>Is it resonating well with um, infrastructure service providers? No, no, I think so because of where, as I mentioned where we are in the marketplace, you know, hyper scale is maybe 10, the public cloud, maybe 10, 12 years old. Uh, and you know, it took some time for, you know, to MSP server the feel it, uh, and now they're reacting, right? The market is changing, customer requirements, becoming more sophisticated and they're saying, Hey, listen, we've got to get out there and do something. So absolutely anything that drives value add on top of, let's call it commodity. Come on. I don't want to use that word. Plain vanilla infrastructure infrastructure. Uh, yeah, anything above value add. I mean, we saw the global service providers like Assensure and these guys doing the same thing because their days were numbered on the consultant and they're building their own sets of services. >>Why wouldn't they? I mean, it's a whole nother cloud expansion opportunity for people with expertise. Why wouldn't they want to increase their gross profits would deliver services on top of something like this. So, so I've got to ask you, um, on the, on the research section, how big is the Tam and you're in this market that, that's in there? I mean, what's it, what's a size? Is it changing? Is it shifting or is it more than saying no, it's definitely, I like to think of, you know, the world, like there's many ways to look at it. Uh, you know, some people throw around the word, sorry, the number $1 trillion a night to spending. Um, but what I like to do is look at, at least for a lot of the guys here, what they're doing is they're managing infrastructure or hosting infrastructure on a third party basis. >>And that means the customer, the end user letting go, not running it themselves in house, in server closets and their own it, their own data centers. Yeah. Uh, and in terms of going from that model, which is a traditional model to outsource infrastructure and all its flavors, you know, we're still not, you know, we use the baseball analogy. Uh, you know, we're not, we used to say that we're in the first or second any further along now, but we definitely haven't hit the seventh inning stretch. So we're middle innings, we're like middle innings of this game. I would argue maybe only the third or fourth. Anyway. Yeah. Um, and not only that, if you think so you can think of that as, Hey, if you put a number on the total value and we're only 30% of the way there, there's still all that addressable market left. >>But you also have to think about all the new workloads, content applications that are being built and created. They are invariably moving to either the public cloud or something that an MSP or a third party or third party provider would touch. So it's a big one. Yeah, it's a big market and the, and, and this channel businesses are very efficient. I was talking earlier with, with the sales guys here who runs growth, it's like they don't mess around. Like they're pretty efficient and if it works they can take it and they run with it doesn't as feedback comes back pretty quick. Yeah. So I can see MSPs liking this kind of approach. The question that I have is that, you know, the adding tier at this show, one of the top stories is they're opening up API APIs. They are doing some developer reaction questions. >>Does that develop our action translate down into like say storage and these other areas? What's your take on the ecosystem and developers specifically opportunity cause ecosystems. The nice to Acronis they have some success there. Now they have a developer piece to it. What's your assessment of that developer angle? No, absolutely. It's important, uh, because they need everybody to get together. They need the ecosystem come together to try to innovate. Uh, if you're looking at, if you're managing infrastructure, you're competing against some pretty innovative platforms. And, and we know the names of those, uh, and the resources they can put at, they can throw it that are just, they're, they're unbelievable. So smaller providers have to team up, they have to work together, they have to work in an ecosystem, you have to encourage each other. And what Kronos I think is doing a great job of is creating a venue and a platform for them to say, Hey you guys, you can be part of this channel. >>You can also work. We're going to open up our platform so that you can innovate and build cool tools that we haven't thought of of building that are specific maybe to your use case and maybe another provider can use them as well. Platforms are hard to figure out and hard to, easy to say, hard to do. But I think one of the validations that I always look for for platforms is, is there an enabling technology angle? Is there a disruptive enable that's gonna create some enablement and then true, what's the valuation value validation from an ecosystem. So I can talk platform, it's like a dance floor. How many people are on the dance floor, you know, if the music is good here, the platform's good, the ecosystem rises up and you can see it. Absolutely. That's a key thing. Feel. Take a minute to talk about the structure research. >>Okay. What do you guys do and what's your, what's your focus, um, how long you've been doing it and what do you see evolve and give a quick plug for what you're working on. Yeah, we're a eight year old firm. We were founded in 2012. Uh, we're based in Toronto. Uh, we yourself as a smaller focused, uh, boutique research firm. Uh, so we cover, uh, we don't cover multiple sectors. We covered infrastructure services, what some people call internet infrastructure, uh, but we live and breathe on a daily basis. The life of the service provider and that service provider could be one, you know, a 10 man shop that's walking around here. There are many of those all the way up to, to a Rackspace, uh, to, uh, the hyperscale clouds as well as the underlying data center infrastructure, uh, encompassing real estate facilities. You guys are laser focused absolutely. >>Service rider is what we all the vote. You know, we have six man analyst team. So yeah we only have time to focus on this. I mean, yeah, what we do is what we've taken with it is try to take a, a global approach to, so we're, we're based in North America. Uh, but we uh, we, we do a lot of research and food just feels to me, I mean I'm not in the, in the weeds of details that you guys are, cause you're laser focused on that. But Dave a lot and I always talk on the Q about how the rich are getting richer, the bigger getting bigger and it's really been sucking in the like that title waves of the beach wave from South and there's a tsunami of, of the hyperscalers dominating. But it's interesting that with the IOT opportunity you start to see him with machine learning and AI kind of really out front you seeing a Renaissance of what I call domain specific apps and services. >>And we think that this is going to create a massive innovation around what I call tier one be or two clouds. Why not build on Google, Amazon or Azure and create a unique service provider model for something that's very domain specific. I mean, that's seems like a great business opportunity. Why? I mean, it's a been a part of the space and I think more so we're headed there faster. And, and you know, to your earlier question, you know, where the impact of hyperscale cloud, how it's taken out certain parts of the more commodity parts of the business and then it's driven service riders who go to pockets of value. You know, we did a panel earlier on, you know, that featured for service providers that had decided to take a vertically focused strategy. So get into areas where their specific expertise with certain platforms or certain software packages, uh, you know, targeted that. >>And then the kind of customers they use, those have specific security and compliance requirements, certain backup NDR requirements that obviously Acronis is more than happy to enable and then these service miters deliver that. So yeah, you absolutely could see, you know, people popping up. Yeah. Doing kind of have an entire business focused on just serving the specific requirements on financial services, uh, for even the dental sector. Uh, and yeah, and they can run on, on private infrastructure, but they also can run on the public cloud. There's a lot of marketplaces popping up too. I had the Ingram micro on Amazon's got a market Wade's, Google's gonna have one. They ever going to have these marketplaces for their clouds. How does multi-cloud fit into your world? First of all, I think multicloud is just BS. Me personally, but I think everyone has multiple cloud providers. If you've upgraded with office three 65 you technically have Azure. >>It doesn't mean that you're using Azure. That's like you might have an Amazon and Google, but know people might have multiple clouds, but hybrid seems to be the operating model. How does hybrid and this hype around multi-cloud impact your research area in any way or? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, we care about how people deploy their infrastructure and we closely track how, you know, the way they do it and how those patterns change. You know, I would say I would slightly disagree. I think multicloud they starting, I would probably agree that it's not very pervasive. Yeah, it's not, it's not very pervasive, but it is a model we've tracked, uh, and sorry and uses. We've seen, uh, I have definitely, you know, taken a liking to that or at least are putting that on the roadmap and saying, Hey, listen, you know, if we're going to build, you know, most of the architectures that are being built are hybrid. >>Uh, but how w I think the question is in what way? Or how are they hybrid? Does that mean I'm running exclusively on the public cloud and running on AWS and Google for other stuff? Am I running private infrastructure on premise? And then in a private cloud and on backing that up to say the public cloud, there's so many different ways to do it. So, you know, it's interesting. Fill your brain. First of all. I agree. Well, we could debate, I love to have debates, but to me, I think you're right. I look at multicloud in terms of the hype. Hype is good, but you've always gotta be careful of it. Not over, you know, overplay their card on that. But yeah, I would see that multi-cloud basically to me is multi-vendor. I've got I got it. So as that shakes out, that's going to be an operational dynamic. >>And I think that's going to be interesting to see how a company will operationalize their tech stacks to deal with the multi-vendor or multi-cloud case because the workload shouldn't care. Ideally, if it's true multi-cloud, none of my workload, I mean she should run right. And so I haven't seen a lot of that across multiple clouds and some peoples have use case analytics. I get that. But like running a workload on any cloud, probably not there yet. Not there yet. All right. What's the coolest, coolest thing that you're covering right now that you think is important for folks to know that in your space, what's the top burning issues of your sector? Yeah, I mean, I would say that, you know, just the global build out of the cloud, the hyperscale clouds, you know, that short list of very big platforms. He's going, you know, global at a rapid speed. >>Uh, and also just the pace at which they are expanding is just incredible. And that's not just the infrastructure but also just the product and service development. Just the tool sets have gone from dozens to hundreds to probably thousands. You know, as we're speaking right now, just the pace at which this is growing is just, you know, pretty tough to comprehend and it's tough to comprehend because not that long ago we were debating, you know, what is the cloud? Or yeah, running, I as, yeah, I'm running a few things on the cloud, but now people are making much bigger bets. There are businesses now out there that you use on your phone that are run completely on the cloud. I mean, that's, that's big. And I mean, just go back with the, has been around for 10 years riding this wave and covering it. Remember OpenStack? Yeah, of course. >>Hold up a second. Just a hyperscaler just blew that away, just, and then found his place. No, that's just crazy. Great time. Yeah. And I think it's, it's, it's the, you're right, the, the pace at which things are changing is incredible. And we're, the other thing, you know, to answer my second part to the question was not only going to, we're following the global buildup, but at the same time almost kind of paradoxically, like we're talking now and I think it's a really exciting part of RV searches. He's the edge. So the decentralization, you know, everything is building out really rapidly into the, you know, compute as an it infrastructure is consolidate around centralized locations, you know, but now how do we hit mobile eyeballs are eyeballs in kind of more distant locations. And so yeah, edge infrastructure or the decentralization, uh, is we're really excited about, I think edge is beautiful thing. >>It's gonna open up. And by the way, we were talking last night, bunch of the sales guys here, I always like to debate them. Their edge is a box, but there's the deeper edge. There's also deep edge or outer edge, right? This human's right. So there's edge edge, so it's just so many surface points now. It's just manageable challenge. Yeah, there's edge on a kind of like on a geographic basis and then there's edge, you know, how close to the user's device can you get. And that device may not be static. Right. They'll be moving around. So yeah. Well, Phil, thanks for the great insight of structured research. Is there a URL for your site? Yes. Structure research.net structured research.net check it out. Hyper focused on service providers and infrastructure. Super important area as the clouds continue to grow as hybrid multicloud. Certainly IOT is going industrial IOT from national security and physical security to digital security. All big a part of it. Data as the pay is going to be there. Storage and compute. Phil, thanks for coming. I appreciate it. Thanks for having coverage here. Miami beach. I'm John furrier back with more coverage after this short break.