>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. (smooth music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to this special exclusive presentation from theCUBE. We're digging into Pensando and their Future Proof Your Enterprise event. To help kick things off, welcoming in a friend of the program, Scott Raynovich. He is the principal analyst at Futuriom coming to us from Montana. I believe first time we've had a guest on the program in the state of Montana, so Scott, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks, Stu, happy to be here. >> All right, so we're going to dig a lot into Pensando. They've got their announcement with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Might help if we give a little bit of background, and definitely I want Scott and I to talk a little bit about where things are in the industry, especially what's happening in networking, and how some of the startups are helping to impact what's happening on the market. So for those that aren't familiar with Pensando, if you followed networking I'm sure you are familiar with the team that started them, so they are known, for those of us that watch the industry, as MPLS, which are four people, not to be confused with the protocol MPLS, but they had very successfully done multiple spin-ins for Cisco, Andiamo, Nuova and Insieme, which created Fibre Channel switches, the Cisco UCS, and the ACI product line, so multiple generations to the Nexus, and Pensando is their company. They talk about Future Proof Your Enterprise is the proof point that they have today talking about the new edge. John Chambers, the former CEO of Cisco, is the chairman of Pensando. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is not only an investor, but also a customer in OEM piece of this solution, and so very interesting piece, and Scott, I want to pull you into the discussion. The waves of technology, I think, the last 10, 15 years in networking, a lot it has been can Cisco be disrupted? So software-defined networking was let's get away from hardware and drive towards more software. Lots of things happening. So I'd love your commentary. Just some of the macro trends you're seeing, Cisco's position in the marketplace, how the startups are impacting them. >> Sure, Stu. I think it's very exciting times right now in networking, because we're just at the point where we kind of have this long battle of software-defined networking, like you said, really pushed by the startups, and there's been a lot of skepticism along the way, but you're starting to see some success, and the way I describe it is we're really on the third generation of software-defined networking. You have the first generation, which was really one company, Nicira, which VMware bought and turned into their successful NSX product, which is a virtualized networking solution, if you will, and then you had another round of startups, people like Big Switch and Cumulus Networks, all of which were acquired in the last year. Big Switch went to Arista, and Cumulus just got purchased by... Who were they purchased by, Stu? >> Purchased by Nvidia, who interestingly enough, they just picked up Mellanox, so watching Nvidia build out their stack. >> Sorry, I was having a senior moment. It happens to us analysts. (chuckling) But yeah, so Nvidia's kind of rolling up these data center and networking plays, which is interesting because Nvidia is not a traditional networking hardware vendor. It's a chip company. So what you're seeing is kind of this vision of what they call in the industry disaggregation. Having the different components sold separately, and then of course Cisco announced the plan to roll out their own chip, and so that disaggregated from the network as well. When Cisco did that, they acknowledged that this is successful, basically. They acknowledged that disaggregation is happening. It was originally driven by the large public cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon, which started the whole disaggregation trend by acquiring different components and then melding it all together with software. So it's definitely the future, and so there's a lot of startups in this area to watch. I'm watching many of them. They include ArcOS, which is a exciting new routing vendor. DriveNets, which is another virtualized routing vendor. This company Alkira, which is going to do routing fully in the cloud, multi-cloud networking. Aviatrix, which is doing multi-cloud networking. All these are basically software companies. They're not pitching hardware as part of their value add, or their integrated package, if you will. So it's a different business model, and it's going to be super interesting to watch, because I think the third generation is the one that's really going to break this all apart. >> Yeah, you brought up a lot of really interesting points there, Scott. That disaggregation, and some of the changing landscape. Of course that more than $1 billion acquisition of Nicira by VMware caused a lot of tension between VMware and Cisco. Interesting. I think back when to Cisco created the UCS platform it created a ripple effect in the networking world also. HP was a huge partner of Cisco's before UCS launched, and not long after UCS launched HP stopped selling Cisco gear. They got heavier into the networking component, and then here many years later we see who does the MPLS team partner with when they're no longer part of Cisco, and Chambers is no longer the CEO? Well, it's HPE front and center there. You're going to see John Chambers at HPE Discover, so it was a long relationship and change. And from the chip companies, Intel, of course, has built a sizeable networking business. We talked a bit about Mellanox and the acquisitions they've done. One you didn't mention but caused a huge impact in the industry, and something that Pensando's responding to is Amazon, but Annapurna Labs, and Annapurna Labs, a small Israeli company, and really driving a lot of the innovation when it comes to compute and networking at Amazon. The Graviton, Compute, and Nitro is what powers their Outposts solutions, so if you look at Amazon, they buy lots of pieces. It's that mixture of hardware and software. In early days people thought that they just bought kind of off-the-shelf white boxes and did it cheap, but really we see Amazon really hyper optimizes what they're doing. So Scott, let's talk a little bit about Pensando if we can. Amazon with the Nitro solutions built to Outposts, which is their hybrid solution, so the same stack that they put in Amazon they can now put in customers' data center. What Pensando's positioning is well, other cloud providers and enterprise, rather than having to buy something from Amazon, we're going to enable that. So what do you think about what you've seen and heard from Pensando, and what's that need in the market for these type of solutions? >> Yes, okay. So I'm glad you brought up Outposts, because I should've mentioned this next trend. We have, if you will, the disaggregated open software-based networking which is going on. It started in the public cloud, but then you have another trend taking hold, which is the so-called edge of the network, which is going to be driven by the emergence of 5G, and the technology called CBRS, and different wireless technologies that are emerging at the so-called edge of the network, and the purpose of the edge, remember, is to get closer to the customer, get larger bandwidth, and compute, and storage closer to the customer, and there's a lot of people excited about this, including the public cloud providers, Amazon's building out their Outposts, Microsoft has an Edge stack, the Azure Edge Stack that they've built. They've acquired a couple companies for $1 billion. They acquired Metaswitch, they acquired Affirmed Networks, and so all these public cloud providers are pushing their cloud out to the edge with this infrastructure, a combination of software and hardware, and that's the opportunity that Pensando is going after with this Outposts theme, and it's very interesting, Stu, because the coopetition is very tenuous. A lot of players are trying to occupy this edge. If you think about what Amazon did with public cloud, they sucked up all of this IT compute power and services applications, and everything moved from these enterprise private clouds to the public cloud, and Amazon's market cap exploded, right, because they were basically sucking up all the money for IT spending. So now if this moves to the edge, we have this arms race of people that want to be on the edge. The way to visualize it is a mini cloud. Whether this mini cloud is at the edge of Costco, so that when Stu's shopping at Costco there's AI that follows you in the store, knows everything you're going to do, and predicts you're going to buy this cereal and "We're going to give you a deal today. "Here's a coupon." This kind of big brother-ish AI tracking thing, which is happening whether you like it or not. Or autonomous vehicles that need to connect to the edge, and have self-driving, and have very low latency services very close to them, whether that's on the edge of the highway or wherever you're going in the car. You might not have time to go back to the public cloud to get the data, so it's about pushing these compute and data services closer to the customers at the edge, and having very low latency, and having lots of resources there, compute, storage, and networking. And that's the opportunity that Pensando's going after, and of course HPE is going after that, too, and HPE, as we know, is competing with its other big mega competitors, primarily Dell, the Dell/VMware combo, and the Cisco... The Cisco machine. At the same time, the service providers are interested as well. By the way, they have infrastructure. They have central offices all over the world, so they are thinking that can be an edge. Then you have the data center people, the Equinixes of the world, who also own real estate and data centers that are closer to the customers in the metro areas, so you really have this very interesting dynamic of all these big players going after this opportunity, putting in money, resources, and trying to acquire the right technology. Pensando is right in the middle of this. They're going after this opportunity using the P4 networking language, and a specialized ASIC, and a NIC that they think is going to accelerate processing and networking of the edge. >> Yeah, you've laid out a lot of really good pieces there, Scott. As you said, the first incarnation of this, it's a NIC, and boy, I think back to years ago. It's like, well, we tried to make the NIC really simple, or do we build intelligence in it? How much? The hardware versus software discussion. What I found interesting is if you look at this team, they were really good, they made a chip. It's a switch, it's an ASIC, it became compute, and if you look at the technology available now, they're building a lot of your networking just in a really small form factor. You talked about P4. It's highly programmable, so the theme of Future Proof Your Enterprise. With anything you say, "Ah, what is it?" It's a piece of hardware. Well, it's highly programmable, so today they position it for security, telemetry, observability, but if there's other services that I need to get to edge, so you laid out really well a couple of those edge use cases and if something comes up and I need that in the future, well, just like we've been talking about for years with software-defined networking, and network function virtualization, I don't want a dedicated appliance. It's going to be in software, and a form factor like Pensando does, I can put that in lots of places. They're positioning they have a cloud business, which they sell direct, and expect to have a couple of the cloud providers using this solution here in 2020, and then the enterprise business, and obviously a huge opportunity with HPE's position in the marketplace to take that to a broad customer base. So interesting opportunity, so many different pieces. Flexibility of software, as you relayed, Scott. It's a complicated coopetition out there, so I guess what would you want to see from the market, and what is success from Pensando and HPE, if they make this generally available this month, it's available on ProLiant, it's available on GreenLake. What would you want to be hearing from customers or from the market for you to say further down the road that this has been highly successful? >> Well, I want to see that it works, and I want to see that people are buying it. So it's not that complicated. I mean I'm being a little superficial there. It's hard sometimes to look in these technologies. They're very sophisticated, and sometimes it comes down to whether they perform, they deliver on the expectation, but I think there are also questions about the edge, the pace of investment. We're obviously in a recession, and we're in a very strange environment with the pandemic, which has accelerated spending in some areas, but also throttled back spending in other areas, and 5G is one of the areas that it appears to have been throttled back a little bit, this big explosion of technology at the edge. Nobody's quite sure how it's going to play out, when it's going to play out. Also who's going to buy this stuff? Personally, I think it's going to be big enterprises. It's going to start with the big box retailers, the Walmarts, the Costcos of the world. By the way, Walmart's in a big competition with Amazon, and I think one of the news items you've seen in the pandemic is all these online digital ecommerce sales have skyrocketed, obviously, because people are staying at home more. They need that intelligence at the edge. They need that infrastructure. And one of the things that I've heard is the thing that's held it back so far is the price. They don't know how much it's going to cost. We actually ran a survey recently targeting enterprises buying 5G, and that was one of the number one concerns. How much does this infrastructure cost? So I don't actually know how much Pensando costs, but they're going to have to deliver the right ROI. If it's a very expensive proprietary NIC, who pays for that, and does it deliver the ROI that they need? So we're going to have to see that in the marketplace, and by the way, Cisco's going to have the same challenge, and Dell's going to have the same challenge. They're all racing to supply this edge stack, if you will, packaged with hardware, but it's going to come down to how is it priced, what's the ROI, and are these customers going to justify the investment is the trick. >> Absolutely, Scott. Really good points there, too. Of course the HPE announcement, big move for Pensando. Doesn't mean that they can't work with the other server vendors. They absolutely are talking to all of them, and we will see if there are alternatives to Pensando that come up, or if they end up singing with them. All right, so what we have here is I've actually got quite a few interviews with the Pensando team, starting with I talked about MPLS. We have Prem, Jane, and Sony Giandoni, who are the P and the S in MPLS as part of it. Both co-founders, Prem is the CEO. We have Silvano Guy who, anybody that followed this group, you know writes the book on it. If you watched all the way this far and want to learn even more about it, I actually have a few copies of Silvano's book, so if you reach out to me, easiest way is on Twitter. Just hit me up at @Stu. I've got a few copies of the book about Pensando, which you can go through all those details about how it works, the programmability, what changes and everything like that. We've also, of course, got Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and while we don't have any customers for this segment, Scott mentioned many of the retail ones. Goldman Sachs is kind of the marquee early customer, so did talk with them. I have Randy Pond, who's the CFO, talking about they've actually seen an increase beyond what they expected at this point of being out of stealth, only a little over six months, even more, which is important considering that it's tough times for many startups coming out in the middle of a pandemic. So watch those interviews. Please hit us up with any other questions. Scott Raynovich, thank you so much for joining us to help talk about the industry, and this Pensando partnership extending with HPE. >> Thanks, Stu. Always a pleasure to join theCUBE team. >> All right, check out thecube.net for all the upcoming, as well as if you just search "Pensando" on there, you can see everything we had on there. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. 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>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California It is a cute conversation. >> Welcome to this Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. At the Cube Studios. I'm John for a host of the Cube. We're here for a company profile coming called De Monte. Here. Tom Barton, CEO. As V M World approaches a lot of stuff is going to be talked about kubernetes applications. Micro Service's will be the top conversation, Certainly in the underlying infrastructure to power that Tom Barton is the CEO of De Monte, which is in that business. Tom, we've known each other for a few years. You've done a lot of great successful ventures. Thehe Monty's new one. Your got on your plate here right now? >> Yes, sir. And I'm happy to be here, so I've been with the Amante GIs for about a year or so. Um, I found out about the company through a head turner. Andi, I have to admit I had not heard of the company before. Um, but I was a huge believer in containers and kubernetes. So has already sold on that. And so I had a friend of mine. His name is Brian Walden. He had done some massive kubernetes cloud based deployments for us at Planet Labs, a company that I was out for a little over three years. So I had him do technical due diligence. Brian was also the number three guy, a core OS, um, and so deeply steeped in all of the core technologies around kubernetes, including things like that CD and other elements of the technology. So he looked at it, came back and gave me two thumbs up. Um, he liked it so much that I then hired him. So he is now our VP of product management. And the the cool thing about the Amanti is essentially were a purpose built solution for running container based workloads in kubernetes on premises and then hooking that in with the cloud. So we believe that's very much gonna be a hybrid cloud world where for the major corporations that we serve Fortune 500 companies like banks like energy and utilities and so forth Ah, lot of their workload will maintain and be maintained on premises. They still want to be cloud compatible. So you need a purpose built platform to sort of manage both environments >> Yeah, we certainly you guys have compelling on radar, but I was really curious to see when you came in and took over at the helm of the CEO. Because your entrepreneurial career really has been unique. You're unique. Executive. Both lost their lands. And as an operator you have an open source and software background. And also you have to come very successful companies and exits there as well as in the hardware side with trackable you took. That company went public. So you got me. It's a unique and open source software, open source and large hardware. Large data center departments at scale, which is essentially the hybrid cloud market right now. So you kind of got the unique. You have seen the view from all the different sides, and I think now more than ever, with Public Cloud certainly being validated. Everyone knows Amazon of your greenfield. You started the cloud, but the reality is hybrid. Cloud is the operating model of the genesis. Next generation of companies drive for the next 20 to 30 years, and this is the biggest conversation. The most important story in tech. You're in the middle of it with a hot start up with a name that probably no one's ever heard of, >> right? We hope to change that. >> Wassily. Why did you join this company? What got your attention? What was the key thing once you dug in there? What was the secret sauce was what Got your attention? Yes. So to >> me again, the market environment. I'm a huge believer that if you look at the history of the last 15 years, we went from an environment that was 0% virtualized too. 95% virtualized with, you know, Vienna based technologies from VM Wear and others. I think that fundamentally, containers in kubernetes are equally as important. They're going to be equally as transformative going forward and how people manage their workloads both on premises and in the clouds. Right? And the fact that all three public cloud providers have anointed kubernetes as the way of the future and the doctor image format and run time as the wave of the future means, you know, good things were gonna happen there. What I thought was unique about the company was for the first time, you know, surprisingly, none of the exit is sick. Senders, um, in companies like Nutanix that have hyper converse solutions. They really didn't have anything that was purpose built for native container support. And so the founders all came from Cisco UCS. They had a lot of familiarity with the underpinnings of hyper converged architectures in the X 86 server landscape and networking, subsistence and storage subsystems. But they wanted to build it using the latest technologies, things like envy and me based Flash. Um, and they wanted to do it with a software stack that was native containers in Kubernetes. And today we support two flavors of that one that's fully open source around upstream kubernetes in another that supports our partner Red hat with open shift. >> I think you're really onto something pretty big here because one of things that day Volonte and Mine's too many men and our team had been looking at is we're calling a cloud to point over the lack of a better word kind of riff on the Web to point out concept. But cloud one daughter was Amazon. Okay, Dev ops agile, Great. Check the box. They move on with life. It's always a great resource, is never gonna stop. But cloud 2.0, is about networking. It's about securities but data. And if you look at all the innovation startups, we'll have one characteristic. They're all playing in this hyper converged hardware meat software stack with data and agility, kind of to make the original Dev ops monocle better. The one daughter which was storage and compute, which were virtualization planes. So So you're seeing that pattern and it's wide ranging at security is data everything else So So that's kind of what we call the Cloud two point game. So if you look at V m World, you look at what's going on the conversations around micro service red. It's an application centric conversation in an infrastructure show. So do you see that same vision? And if so, how do you guys see you enabling the customer at this saying, Hey, you know what? I have all this legacy. I got full scale data centers. I need to go full scale cloud and I need zero and disruption to my developer. Yeah, so >> this is the beauty of containers and kubernetes, which is they know it'll run on the premises they know will run in the cloud, right? Um and it's it is all about micro service is so whether they're trying to adopt them on our database, something like manga TB or Maria de B or Crunchy Post Grey's, whether it's on the operational side to enable sort of more frequent and incremental change, or whether it's on a developer side to take advantage of new ways of developing and delivering APS with C I. C. D. Tools and so forth. It's pretty much what people want to do because it's future proofing your software development effort, right? So there's sort of two streams of demand. One is re factoring legacy applications that are insufficiently kind of granule, arised on, behave and fail in a monolithic way. Um, as well as trying to adopt modern, modern, cloud based native, you know, solutions for things like databases, right? And so that the good news is that customers don't have to re factor everything. There are logical break points in their applications stack where they can say, Okay, maybe I don't have the time and energy and resource is too totally re factor a legacy consumer banking application. But at least I can re factor the data based here and serve up you know container in Kubernetes based service is, as Micro Service's database is, a service to be consumed by. >> They don't need to show the old to bring in the new right. It's used containers in our orchestration, Layla Kubernetes, and still be positioned for whether it's service measures or other things. Floor That piece of the shirt and everything else could run, as is >> right, and there are multiple deployments scenarios. Four containers. You can run containers, bare metal. Most of our customers choose to do that. You can also run containers on top of virtual machines, and you can actually run virtual machines on top of containers. So one of our major media customers actually run Splunk on top of K B M on top of containers. So there's a lot of different deployment scenarios. And really, a lot of the genius of our architecture was to make it easy for people that are coming from traditional virtualized environments to remap system. Resource is from the bm toe to a container at a native level or through Vienna. >> You mentioned the history lesson there around virtualization. How 15 years ago there was no virtualization now, but everything's virtualized we agree with you that containers and compares what is gonna change that game for the next 15 years? But what's it about VM? Where would made them successful was they could add virtualization without requiring code modification, right? And they did it kind of under the covers. And that's a concern Customs have. I have developers out there. They're building stacks. The building code. I got preexisting legacy. They don't really want to change their code, right? Do you guys fit into that narrative? >> We d'oh, right, So every customer makes their own choice about something like that. At the end of the day, I mentioned Splunk. So at the time that we supported this media customer on Splunk, Splunk had not yet provided a container based version for their application. Now they do have that, but at the time they supported K B M, but not native containers and so unmodified Splunk unmodified application. We took them from a batch job that ran for 23 hours down the one hour based on accelerating and on our perfect converged appliance and running unmodified code on unmodified K B m on our gear. Right, So some customers will choose to do that. But there are also other customers, particularly at scale for transaction the intensive applications like databases and messaging and analytics, where they say, You know, we could we could preserve our legacy virtualized infrastructure. But let's try it as a pair a metal container approach. And they they discovered that there's actually some savings from both a business standpoint and a technology tax standpoint or an overhead standpoint. And so, as I mentioned most of our customers, actually really. Deficiencies >> in the match is a great example sticking to the product technology differentiate. What's the big secret sauce describe the product? Why are you winning in accounts? What's the lift in your business right now? You guys were getting some traction from what I'm hearing. Yeah, >> sure. So look at the at the highest level of value Proposition is simplicity. There is no other purpose built, you know, complete hardware software stack that delivers coup bernetti coproduction kubernetes environment up and running in 15 minutes. Right. The X 86 server guys don't really have it. Nutanix doesn't really have it. The software companies that are active in this space don't really have it. So everything that you need that? The hardware platform, the storage infrastructure, the actual distribution of the operating system sent the West, for example. We distribute we actually distributed kubernetes distribution upstream and unmodified. And then, very importantly, in the combinations landscape, you have to have a storage subsystem in a networking subsystem using something called C s I container storage interface in C N I. Container networking interface. So we've got that full stack solution. No one else has that. The second thing is the performance. So we do a certain amount of hardware offload. Um, and I would say, Amazons purchase of Annapurna so Amazon about a company called Annapurna its basis of their nitro technology and its little known. But the reality is more than 50% of all new instances at E. C to our hardware assisted with the technology that they thought were offloaded. Yeah, exactly. So we actually offload storage and network processing via to P C I. D cards that can go into any industry server. Right? So today we ship on until whites, >> your hyper converge containers >> were African verge containers. Yeah, exactly. >> So you're selling a box. We sell a box with software that's the >> with software. But increasingly, our customers are asking us to unbundle it. So not dissimilar from the sort of journey that Nutanix went through. If a customer wants to buy and l will support Del customer wants to buy a Lenovo will support Lenovo and we'll just sell >> it. Or have you unbundled? Yetta, you're on bundling. >> We are actively taking orders for on bundling at the present time in this quarter, we have validated Del and Lenovo as alternate platforms, toothy intel >> and subscription revenue. On that, we >> do not yet. But that's the golden mask >> Titanic struggle with. So, yeah, and then they had to take their medicine. >> They did. But, you know, they had to do that as a public company. We're still a private company, so we can do that outside the limelight of the public >> markets. So, um, I'm expecting that you guys gonna get pretty much, um I won't say picked off, but certainly I think your doors are gonna be knocked on by the big guys. Certainly. Delic Deli and see, for instance, I think it's dirty. And you said yes. You're doing business with del name. See, >> um, we are doing as a channel partner and as an OM partner with them at the present time there, I wouldn't call them a customer. >> How do you look at V M were actually there in the V M, where business impact Gelsinger's on the record. It'll be on the Cube, he said. You know Cu Bernays the dial tone of the Internet, they're investing their doubling down on it. They bought Hep D O for half a billion dollars. They're big and cloud native. We expect to see a V M World tons of cloud Native conversation. Yes, good, bad for you. What's the take? The way >> legitimizes what we're doing right? And so obviously, VM, where is a large and successful company? That kind of, you know, legacy and presence in the data center isn't gonna go anywhere overnight. There's a huge set of tooling an infrastructure that bm where has developed in offers to their customers. But that said, I think they've recognized in their acquisition of Hep Theo is is indicative of the fact that they know that the world's moving this way. I think that at the end of the day, it's gonna be up to the customer right. The customer is going to say, Do I want to run containers inside? Of'em? Do I want to run on bare metal? Um, but importantly, I think because of, you know, the impact of the cloud providers in particular. If you think of the lingua franca of cloud Native, it's gonna be around Dr Image format. It's gonna be around kubernetes. It's not necessarily gonna be around V M, d K and BMX and E s X right. So these are all very good technologies, but I think increasingly, you know, the open standard and open source community >> people kubernetes on switches directly is no. No need, Right. Have anything else there? So I gotta ask you on the customer equation. You mentioned you, you get so you're taking orders. How you guys doing business today? Where you guys winning, given example of of why people while you're winning And then for anyone watching, how would they know if they should be a customer of yours? What's is there like? Is there any smoke signs and signals? Inside the enterprise? They mentioned batch to one hour. That's just music. Just a lot of financial service is used, for instance, you know they have timetables, and whether they're pulling back ups back are doing all the kinds of things. Timing's critical. What's the profile customer? Why would someone call you? What's the situation? The >> profile is heavy duty production requirements to run in both the developer context and an operating contact container in kubernetes based workloads on premises. They're compatible with the cloud right so increasingly are controlled. Plane makes it easy to manage workloads not just on premises but also back and forth to the public cloud. So I would argue that essentially all Fortune 500 companies Global 1000 companies are all wrestling with what's the right way to implement industry standard X 86 based hardware on site that supports containers and kubernetes in his cloud compatible Right? So that that is the number one question then, >> so I can buy a box and or software put it on my data center. Yes, and then have that operate with Amazon? Absolutely. Or Google, >> which is the beauty of the kubernetes standards, right? As long as you are kubernetes certified, which we are, you can develop and run any workload on our gear on the cloud on anyone else that's carbonated certified, etcetera. So you know that there isn't >> given example the workload that would be indicative. >> So Well, I'll cite one customer, Right. So, um, the reason that I feel confident actually saying the name is that they actually sort of went public with us at the recent Gardner conference a week or so ago when the customer is Duke Energy. So very typical trajectory of journey for a customer like this, which is? A couple years ago, they decided that they wanted re factor some legacy applications to make them more resilient to things like hurricanes and weather events and spikes in demand that are associated with that. And so they said, What's the right thing to do? And immediately they pick containers and kubernetes. And then he went out and they looked at five different vendors, and we were the only vendor that got their POC up and running in the required time frame and hit all five use case scenarios that they wanted to do right. So they ended up a re factoring core applications for how they manage power outages using containers and kubernetes, >> a real production were real. Production were developing standout, absolutely in a sandbox, pushing into production, working Absolutely. So you sounds like you guys were positioned to handle any workload. >> We can handle any workload, but I would say that where we shine is things that transaction the intensive because we have the hardware assist in the I o off load for the storage and the networking. You know, the most demanding applications, things like databases, things like analytics, things like messaging, Kafka and so forth are where we're really gonna >> large flow data, absolutely transactional data. >> We have customers that are doing simpler things like C I. C D. Which at the end of the day involves compiling things right and in managing code bases. But so we certainly have customers in less performance intensive applications, but where nobody can really touch us in morning. What I mean is literally sort of 10 to 30 times faster than something that Nutanix could do, for example, is just So >> you're saying you're 30 times faster Nutanix >> absolutely in trans actually intensive applications >> just when you sell a prescription not to dig into this small little bit. But does the customer get the hardware assist on that as well >> it is. To date, we've always bundled everything together. So the customers have automatically got in the heart >> of the finest on the hard on box. Yes. If I buy the software, I got a loaded on a machine. That's right. But that machine Give me the hardware. >> You will not unless you have R two p C I. D. Cards. Right? And so this is how you know we're just in the very early stages of negotiating with companies like Dell to make it easy for them to integrate her to P. C. I. D cards into their server platform. >> So the preferred flagship is the is the device. It's a think if they want the hardware sit, that they still need to software meeting at that intensive. It's right. If they don't need to have 30 times faster than Nutanix, they can just get the software >> right, right. And that will involve RCS. I plug in RCN I plug in our OS distribution are kubernetes distribution, and the control plane that manages kubernetes clusters >> has been great to get the feature on new company, um, give a quick plug for the company. What's your objectives? Were you trying to do. I'll see. Probably hiring. Get some financing, Any news, Any kind of Yeah, we share >> will be. And we will be announcing some news about financing. I'm not prepared to announce that today, but we're in very good shape with respected being funded for our growth. Um, and consequently, so we're now in growth mode. So today we're 55 people. I want to double back over the course of the next 4/4 and increasingly just sort of build out our sales force. Right? We didn't have a big enough sales force in North America. We've gotta establish a beachhead in India. We do have one large commercial banking customer in Europe right now. Um, we also have a large automotive manufacturer in a pack. But, um, you know, the total sales and marketing reach has been too low. And so a huge focus of what I'm doing now is building out our go to market model and, um, sort of 10 Xing the >> standing up, a lot of field going, going to market. How about on the biz, Dev side? I might imagine that you mentioned delicate. Imagine that there's a a large appetite for the hardware offload >> absolution? Absolutely. So something is. Deb boils down to striking partnerships with the cloud providers really on two fronts, both with respect the hardware offload and assist, but also supporting their on premises strategy. So Google, for example, is announced. Antos. This is their approach to supporting, you know, on premises, kubernetes workloads and how they interact with cool cloud. Right. As you can imagine, Microsoft and Amazon also have on premises aspirations and strategies, and we want to support those as well. This goes well beyond something like Amazon Outpost, which is really a narrow use case in point solution for certain markets. So cloud provider partnerships are very important. Exit E six server vendor partnership. They're very important. And then major, I s V. So we've announced some things with red hat. We were at the Red Hat Open summit in Boston a few months ago and announced our open ship project and product. Um, that is now G a. Also working with eyes, he's like Maria de be Mondo di B Splunk and others to >> the solid texting product team. You guys are solid. You feel good on the product. I feel very good about the product. What aboutthe skeptics are out there? Just to put the hard question to use? Man, it's crowded field. How do you gonna compete? What do you chances? How do you like your chances known? That's a very crowded field. You're going to rely on your fastballs, they say. And on the speed, what's the what's What's your thinking? Well, it's unique. >> And so part of the way or approve point that I would cite There is the channel, right? So when you go to the channel and channel is afraid that you're gonna piss off Del or E M. C or Net app or Nutanix or somebody you know, then they're not gonna promote you. But our channel partners air promoting us and talking about companies like Life Boat at the distribution level. Talking about companies like CD W S H. I, um, you know, W W t these these major North American distributors and resellers have basically said, Look, we have to put you in our line car because you're unique. There is no other purpose built >> and why that, like they get more service is around that they wrap service's around it. >> They want to kill the murder where they want to. Wrap service's around it, absolutely, and they want to do migrations from legacy environments towards Micro Service's etcetera. >> Great to have you on share the company update. Just don't get personal. If you don't mind personal perspective. You've been on the hardware side. You've seen the large scale data centers from racquetball and that experience you'll spit on the software side. Open source. What's your take on the industry right now? Because you're seeing, um, I talked a lot of sea cells around the security space and, you know, they all say, Oh, multi clouds a bunch of B s because I'm not going to split my development team between four clouds. I need to have my people building software stacks for my AP eyes, and then I go to the vendors. They support my AP eyes where you can't be a supplier. Now that's on the sea suicide. But the big mega trend is there's software stacks being built inside the premise of the enterprise. Yes, that not mean they had developers before building. You know, Kobol, lapse in the old days, mainframes to client server wraps. But now you're seeing a Renaissance of developers building a stack for the domain specific applications that they need. I think that requires that they have to run on premise hyper scale like environment. What's your take on it >> might take is it's absolutely right. There is more software based innovation going on, so customers are deciding to write their own software in areas where they could differentiate right. They're not gonna do it in areas that they could get commodities solutions from a sass standpoint or from other kinds of on Prem standpoint. But increasingly they are doing software development, but they're all 99% of the time now. They're choosing doctor and containers and kubernetes as the way in which they're going to do that, because it will run either on Prem or in the Cloud. I do think that multi cloud management or a multi multi cloud is not a reality. Are our primary modality that we see our customers chooses tons of on premises? Resource is, that's gonna continue for the foreseeable future one preferred cloud provider, because it's simply too difficult to to do more than one. But at the same time they want an environment that will not allow themselves to be locked into that cloud bender. Right? So they want a potentially experiment with the second public cloud provider, or just make sure that they adhere to standards like kubernetes that are universally shared so that they can't be held hostage. But in practice, people don't. >> Or if they do have a militant side, it might be applications. Like if you're running office 3 65 right, That's Microsoft. It >> could be Yes, exactly. On one >> particular domain specific cloud, but not core cloud. Have a backup use kubernetes as the bridge. Right that you see that. Do you see that? I mean, I would agree with by the way we agreed to you on that. But the question we always ask is, we think you Bernays is gonna be that interoperability layer the way T c p I. P was with an I p Networks where you had this interoperability model. We think that there will be a future state of some point us where I could connect to Google and use that Microsoft and use Amazon. That's right together, but not >> this right. And so nobody's really doing that today, But I believe and we believe that there is, ah, a future world where a vendor neutral vendor, neutral with respect to public cloud providers, can can offer a hybrid cloud control plane that manages and brokers workloads for both production, as well as data protection and disaster recovery across any arbitrary cloud vendor that you want to use. Um, and so it's got to be an independent third party. So you know you're never going to trust Amazon to broker a workload to Google. You're never going to trust Google to broker a workload of Microsoft. So it's not gonna be one of the big three. And if you look at who could it be? It could be VM where pivotal. Now it's getting interesting. Appertaining. Cisco's got an interesting opportunity. Red hats got an interesting opportunity, but there is actually, you know, it's less than the number of companies could be counted on one hand that have the technical capability to develop hybrid cloud abstraction that that spans both on premises and all three. And >> it's super early. Had to peg the inning on this one first inning, obviously first inning really early. >> Yeah, we like our odds, though, because the disruption, the fundamental disruption here is containers and kubernetes and the interest that they're generating and the desire on the part of customers to go to micro service is so a ton of application re factoring in a ton of cloud native application development is going on. And so, you know, with that kind of disruption, you could say >> you're targeting opening application re factoring that needs to run on a cloud operating >> model on premise in public. That's correct. In a sense, dont really brings the cloud to theon premises environment, right? So, for example, we're the only company that has the concept of on premises availability zones. We have synchronous replication where you can have multiple clusters that air synchronously replicated. So if one fails the other one, you have no service disruption or loss of data, even for a state full application, right? So it's cloud like service is that we're bringing on Prem and then providing the links, you know, for both d. R and D P and production workloads to the public Cloud >> block locked Unpack with you guys. You might want to keep track of humaneness. Stateville date. It's a whole nother topic, as stateless data is easy to manage with AP Eyes and Service's wouldn't GET state. That's when it gets interesting. Com Part in the CEO. The new chief executive officer. Demonte Day How long you guys been around before you took over? >> About five years. Four years before me about been on board about a year. >> I'm looking forward to tracking your progress. We'll see ya next week and seven of'em Real Tom Barton, Sea of de Amante Here inside the Cube Hot startup. I'm John Ferrier. >> Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live U.S. 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and my name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host Stu Miniman and Lisa Martin is also in the house. This is day three of our coverage, Danny Allan is here. He's the Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam and one of the key thought leaders at the company, one of the main figures at VeeamON, which we were just doing three weeks ago. Danny, great to see you again. >> Wonderful to be here with you. >> That was a really fun show VeeamON, it always is. You guys got a cool vibe. >> You chose the Fontainebleau Hotel this year in Miami, in Miami Beach which is just a great location. Many thousands of customers and you guys hit some milestones recently. You talked about a billion dollars in revenue, it's been something you're going after for a while, you've seen that happen. Of course things change, right? All the subscription stuff started to happen. That slowed you down a little bit but that's awesome that you guys finally hit that, so congratulations. Raised a big pile of dough and you just keep moving that ball forward. Give us the update on Veeam. >> So as you said, Veeam has a great culture, right? There's a passionate green army out there that loves us and we're thankful for that. We hit one billion in bookings for the trailing 12 months, we have 350,000 customers and the business is going well. One of the interesting things about Veeam is because we're private, we actually have the opportunity to decide when and how we do things like switch from perpetual to subscription type bookings. But business is doing great, we love it, we're glad to be here. >> One of the things that you talked about at VeeamON was kind of getting back to the basics. You talked a lot about look, it starts with backup. There's a lot of noise in the market today. You hear a lot about, you know, data management. We talk a lot about date assurance but at the end of the day, it starts with backup. That's something that you gave a lot of thought to. I mentioned that you were one of the thought leaders at Veeam. Double click on that, add some color. What were you thinking in terms of that being the starting point and that really driving a lot of your messaging at VeeamON? >> Yeah, I always say it's three things, right? This is a journey that we're on and I get excited about the end stages of that journey. But how many people actually have a budget for machine learning or blockchain or artificial intelligence? No one has a budget for that. What they have a budget for is backup and so we believe A, it's a journey, B, it does start with backup. There's a budget for that and the key thing is choose a partner for this journey and we believe Veeam is the right partner obviously to choose for that but we really wanted to go back to who is spending money to buy the products and for that, it's the technical decision maker who has the budget for backup today. >> Yeah, all right. So Danny, we talk about the Cisco relationship and budgets like you were talking about there. Cisco UCS was from day one a heavily virtualized environment and therefore had strong affinity with Veeam there. But you've got some great visibility into where UCS is going, what CI and HCI solutions are really starting to gain traction. So talk a little bit about that partnership and which ones of those Cisco solutions are really starting to, you know, kick in the market. >> We have a great partnership with Cisco, first of all and really in two areas, if you're talking infrastructure. So on the HyperFlex, the Converged Infrastructure but also on just the S3260 for example, a storage dense system and we have a target this year, this is public information, we have a target, a joint target of $100 million. We're actually at 80% of that right now. Business has been doing really well. In fact, we've been on the Global Price List now for 18 months and in 18 months, we've actually closed over 350 transactions. Like it's been going really, really well and here's what's exciting about that. Those customers that are spending money on Cisco gear with Veeam software, they might start in the drag, these are quantifiable numbers, it's about five to one. So every dollar they spend on Veeam, it's about $5 on Cisco. But over 35% of those customers within twelve months come back and buy more Cisco gear and actually if you look at the actual drag, quantifiable drag that we're bring for Cisco, it's 11 to one. So for every dollar they spend with Veeam, they're spending $11 in Cisco HyperFlex or S3260. So it's been a great partnership both for us obviously because we're on their resell list but also for them. >> And you said you're 80% of the way there. We're talking a calendar year or is that a fiscal year? >> That is their fiscal year, so that's ending in August or July. I should know the date but I know we're 80%. We're on track to hit that $100 million. >> What do you think is driving that? I mean obviously this is a partnership, which takes time. >> Yes. >> This is not just a press release partnership. What else have you done to really facilitate this? >> Well I would say two things. One is their infrastructure is great. In fact we have one of our Veeam cloud service providers that is protecting over a million VMs right now. So these are massive scale, are using S3260s in the backend as a repository, so their hardware actually works. But I would say the other thing that really resonates is, so they have this Hyper FEX Solution and on top of that they have Intersite and that concept of a cloud management plain that can roll out the hardware, can update it not only at the infrastructure but also the Veeam software is really critical and that resonates with customers. It's again, good for them but it's also good for us. >> Let's see. The last couple years you guys have had a big emphasis on the enterprise and then again we're hearing this theme of kind of back to basics. I mean you heard at VeeamON, it starts with backup. You talk to people at VeeamON, the customers. It's the, you know, a lot of medium sized customers, a lot of smaller customers. Do you feel like you over-rotated to the enterprise or do you feel like hey, we could get there just by slow and steady and still putting the accelerator on our core business? Can you just add some color to that and explain? >> Yeah, so if you back three years, our focus was very much on the small and medium enterprise where we said we wanted to capture the major enterprise and that by the way has worked. If you look, since January of 2017 we've done over a billion just in enterprise, enterprise being 1,000 employees or above. So focusing on the enterprise for a few years was the right thing to do. However, that was all on the messaging side and we had this core constituent that has been with us for over decade now and we didn't want to pivot away from them. So in the last six months, nine months, what you've seen is pivoting back towards the center. So we do a third of our business with SMB, a third with commercial and a third with enterprise. So we believe we're right there on the fairway now and it's a perfect alignment of that messaging. >> Well I mean history would show that the disruptors oftentimes come from, you know, down below and move up. I mean you certainly saw that with Microsoft in the 80s and there are many other examples. Is that part of the philosophy, that you guys just can keep adding value that will appeal to the enterprise customers? It sounds like with a 30 year business, you're actually already there in terms of functionality. Is there a functionality gap though still that you need to close in your opinion? >> I don't think so. We announced as you know probably v10 a few years ago and what we've done is we've introduced that over the years and so the final check box if you will for v10 is coming in our next release later this year. But that really covers off the gambit of everything that needs to be done and that's been resonating really strongly. We believe we have a portfolio that addresses everything from the smallest customer to the largest customer. >> Yeah and you don't live and die, we heard this from Radmere, you don't live and die by your long term product development roadmap. You tend to be very tactical and listen to customers and-- >> We're very agile, so we keep a backlog of all the things that we want to do but we will pivot on a dime if we believe hey, this is really strategic for our customer base. We'll change something that, you know, we had planned for year out and do something else in the interim. >> Dave: Pretty judicious about how you decide there. >> Yeah so Danny, bring us inside some of the customer conversations you're having here to show, you know, when I watch the keynotes, many of the messages about multi-cloud sound like the same kind of things that I've been hearing at VeeamON for the last couple of years. What are you hearing from the customers at this? >> Well, definitely cloud date management is top of mind. I ate dinner last night with an enterprise customer. They're rolling this out across about 100 different locations around the world and they very much wanted a local repository of data but they also wanted to tier that data into the HyperScale public cloud, so that is clearly an enterprise-centric message. But that same capability goes down to the SMB. But if you asked me what is the conversation on everyone's, on the tip of their tongue, it is cloud. How are you addressing cloud? And we've done that a number of ways. One is we take the backup data, we'll tier it into cloud. We'll recover workloads in cloud. It's not so much a lift and shift. You know what's interesting is the cloud is not a charity. If you just take what you had on premises and move it into the cloud, there's merge-in layered in there, right? But for some use cases, disaster recovery, business continuity, you want to be able to turn it on in cloud and then after it's in cloud of course, then you need to protect it. And so we've been addressing all of those capabilities within the Veeam portfolio. >> Do you think there's going to be a backlash? I mean you don't see it in the numbers. You see, you know, AWS's growth and I'm not talking about repatriation but the cloud as a target is just another piece of infrastructure, even though it's kind of virtual, that I have to manage. I mean it does add complexity in that sense. So do you think there'll be, there's maybe somewhat over-enthusiasm now or do you see this as an unstoppable trend? >> I believe that cloud is a tool in the toolbox and it's both the smallest, most precise tool and also the largest tool and everything in between. What I mean by that is this isn't just a lift and shift and move it over to the cloud. It's how do I leverage the cloud to extend my data center? I actually, a lot of people talk about multi-cloud, I actually think that the era is really hybrid cloud. It's how do I extend what I have on premises into the cloud? And we're only now really being pragmatic about how to leverage it. The people that jumped in, all in and said, "I'm going all to cloud," those are the ones that you're seeing a bit of buyers remorse but those that are a lot more pragmatic, they're now saying, "How do I deliver business outcomes?" Because it's not about cloud, it's actually about business outcomes, right? Focus on the services. How do I deliver business outcomes that are improved by leveraging aspects of the cloud? >> Yes. So Danny, I know you've talked to our team. You know, we look at the environment and customers today, they have multi-cloud. But the strategy has been well, I've got some stuff here and I use that service here and wait, I need to spin that stuff over here. We've almost remade multi-vendor into multi-cloud. >> Yes. >> So the goal we've been looking for is the solution should be more than just the sum of the parts. Veeam sits in an interesting layer to help customers leverage that and get value out of their data across all of those environments. So you know, do we see that as a viable future that is not just the state that we're in but be able to get more value out of those pieces in the near future? >> Yeah, so I'm obviously biased 'cause I work for Veeam but I think we sit at the intersection of all of this because what we do is we take services, we take workloads and we make them portable. I can take something from on premises, I can put it in cloud A, I can put it in cloud B, I can take it back on premises, I can move it to a private cloud provider. So we have the ability to be completely flexible and agnostic as to where it lands and the reason why that's important, people don't go out and say "I'm going to put 50% "of my workload in this cloud or this cloud." They say, "I need a data center in this geography" or "I need a data center that has this kind of service." So the reason they end up in multi-cloud is not because of a multi-cloud strategy but because they have a business need that is met by that infrastructure and we allow the portability, the flexibility to move the workloads as the business needs. >> So we have some data here. I want to dig into it a little bit. Can you share with us some of the fun facts? Like when, maybe the timeline of your relationship with Cisco, some of the things you've done. Walk us through that, Danny. >> So, we partnered with, we've had a longstanding relationship with Cisco. Officially we went on their Global Price List like I said, 18 months ago. Since then, 300 and, earlier this week, 359 transactions. But almost a transact, two transactions every three days and we have a great go-to-market program with them right now, so we do a lot of joint activities, both in the channel as well as between. We fund heads with them and vice versa. >> Who's your favorite partner? No, you don't have to answer that. >> We have, we have a lot of partners. They're all of my favorite children. >> So we're hearing kind of this land and expand strategy. We've heard that from many other companies. But it's actually happening inside of or within the Veeam ecosystem and what I heard here was you're selling with Cisco and then people are coming back and buying more Cisco. So that's part of land and expand but another dimension of land and expand is you sell it to an organization. Not only do they buy more but other parts of the organization, you sort of fan out horizontally. How much of that is happening? >> It's happening quite a bit. I would say the most significant expansion right now is actually at a line of business level and so you'll have multiple lines of business and then they will begin to coalesce together and say "Okay, let's supply a central policy to that." So that's what we're seeing. What we do know is that 35% of Cisco customers that are joint Veeam and Cisco customers, they'll come back within the next 12 months and they'll buy more Veeam and more Cisco gear. >> Okay last question, why Veeam? You got a lot of competitors obviously in this market. You and I have talked about that a lot. You got, Cisco has made an investment in one of them. Why Veeam? >> So, simple, reliable, flexible and the flexible is probably the key to all of this because we don't lock people in. We don't lock them into our hardware, we don't lock them into a specific cloud, we don't lock them into any one of our children if you will, we love them all equally and that flexibility, future proofing the organization is a huge deciding point for the organizations. Because they don't know what the landscape's going to look like two, three years from now. Is this still going to be your partner or is it not? So having an organization that will partner with you, that will be flexible in, and this isn't just flexibility at a technology level, it's also at a business level. Licensing, for example. Flexibility to move licenses from physical systems to virtual systems to cloud systems to back again. They want to partner with someone that has that flexibility. >> Danny, great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, always a pleasure. >> Yes, likewise. >> Okay, Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin from Cisco Live in San Diego 2019. You're watching theCUBE, we'll be right back. (upbeat electronic tones)

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage. Day two of Cisco Live from San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin. Dave Vellante is my esteemed cohost. And we're pleased to welcome one of Cisco and Cohesity's customers from Quantium, Craig Tayler, Executive Manager at Business Technology and Platforms. Craig, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> Great seeing you. >> So, we love talking with customers. We love talking about data. Tell our audience a little bit about Quantium. I know you guys have expertise in two core domains, data science, AI, two really sexy topics that we talk about on theCUBE at every event. But give our audience a little bit of the flavor of who you guys are. >> Yeah, so Quantium's been around for 16 years, founded and headquartered in Sydney, Australia. And really, they are like you mentioned, the two main aspects of our business. So when you think of data science more as human intelligence, and then the AI side is how we can augment that with computers as much as possible. So, on the human intelligence side, we're looking at things like data curation, how can we work with a company to understand their data, perhaps monetize their data. And then on the AI side, we're more looking at things like, how do we do predictive modeling or predictive analytics, and how can we get that in front of maybe say a supply chain solution, or working with grocery stores around actually predicting how much fresh food they need. So we think of these things like, wouldn't it be great if we had a better idea of how much we needed? Less waste, less cost, everything else. So that's really how we kind of split the two sides of the company. >> You guys provide this as a service, is that right? >> Yeah, that's correct. So, with those two arms we focus on, whether it be a consulting engagement with a company, where that's a one-off, or an ongoing thing, and we have a range of products that we sell as well, with the idea that any of these companies, whether it be a bank or a retailer, can plug these tools into their existing solutions to give them some real data, some real impact, as opposed to the thoughts, or the feels, or the gut instincts, that we've been working on for so long, all right. >> So paint a picture of your environment. I mean, what does it look like? Cloud, not cloud, apps. >> Yeah. It's certainly a variety. So, if we think, on-premise is really where we do a lot of our work. And this is around, a lot of companies still feel a little bit sensitive around where their data is going, and they like that security of knowing physically where it's located. So on-premise stack we have a bit over 300 servers running a Hadoop cluster, that's where we do the majority of our AI work. And then what we augment that with is, and what we use the cloud a lot for, as we're doing work globally, we're doing a lot of work in North America, it's not feasible to bring all that data back to Sydney, process it, and send it all back, so then really, what we use the cloud for is to take our technology, take our analytics, to the data. So if we're working with a customer, West Coast, East Coast, and they're in Azure we'll deploy in Azure. If they're in GCP, we can deploy in GCP. And that's really how we use cloud is to offer our service, as much as we can, around the world. >> So you said, you got 300 servers, did I hear you right, in a Hadoop cluster, right? >> Yeah, correct. >> What's your distribution? >> We use MapR at the moment. I know there's certainly been a bit of news about them. >> I was going to ask you, well, all three of them. (Craig laughs) Well I guess Hortonworks now folded in, but-- >> Yeah, correct. Cloud has certainly shaken up that marketplace quite a bit. >> Dave: I'm sure, yeah. >> It's been something that we've been keeping a close eye on for quite a while. What's the future there? Is it another distribution? Will someone pick up MapR? Will they get through it? So it is interesting, it's certainly a challenge, but when you're playing in a more emerging space, these are some of the risks you take, but we've always felt that they're worth it. We've had many great years of that and we don't really see any reason that we're not going to get more great years out of that Hadoop environment. >> Yeah, I mean, the IP's going to survive, and it sounds like you guys were early on into it, you got a lot of value out of it. If you had to do it again, you'd probably do the same thing. >> Yeah, that's certainly true. I think, what we've built, there are cloud options on the hyperscale providers that you can use, but look, out of the box, they're not really capable of what we were trying to do. So if we had our time again, we probably would still build the same solution. We'd build it a little bit quicker, obviously, because it's a little bit more in the marketplace, it's not such an emerging technology, but I think we would do the same thing again. >> Dave: Right, and MapR was always ahead of the game with their approach. >> Correct. >> So, obvious question is, how do you protect that data? You're a Cohesity customer, but talk about the data protection aspect of that. >> Yeah, so this is where Cohesity really had a lot of synergies with us, was centralizing a whole raft of datasets into one location. And that's what we do with Hadoop. We take a lot of different datasets and we put it all there. We aggregate it there. So on the secondary data side we had the same problem. Silo datasets all over the environment. Things like, the protection aspect, the compliance aspect, it's not impossible, but it's very hard to manage. So what we really wanted to do was, what do we do with the data when we're not using it anymore? So we might still want to use it in the future, we have to hold onto it. And we needed a better solution for how we manage that. So, having Cohesity, which, to us, being a hyper-converged solution, it's very similar to how Hadoop works. It's a lot of data, a lot of compute, and that's how you deploy it. So we found that actually having all of that, the secondary kind of data that we still needed to keep, combined into one location, for us, it matched on a technology level. And then being able to have all that data in one space, you can do some analytics on it. How often are we using it? What is the data? How many copies of it do we have? So there are a lot of synergies from the data science aspect, and also the technology aspect, which has worked really well for us. >> So what was profound about Hadoop was the idea of bringing five megabytes of code to a petabyte of data, leaving the data where it is, highly distributed environment, obviously challenge protecting that. Help us understand. You're saying that Cohesity architecture is well-suited for that type of environment? >> Yeah, it certainly is. I mean, it augments it quite well, is how I'd say. So at the moment we keep the environments quite separate, but the way we manage them is very similar. So there's great audit login, great security controls that you can place on both environments. So the way that we structure Hadoop with role-based access, who can perform what action, the same thing applies in Cohesity. So now we sort of see that the way that we manage primary is the same way that we can manage secondary. So, it's easier for the staff, when we come to things like compliance or legislation, or, we value data, it's our lifeblood, so we have to be very careful with it. So if we want to do any audit reports or anything like this, we can do 'em the same way. Who has access, what they've done. >> So, Hadoop's been around a lot longer than Cohesity. So, what were you doing before Cohesity, and what were some of those challenges? >> Yeah, what we were doing was a lot. And that was really the only option we had. So we had four or five different solutions that had kind of organically grown over time, whether that was some secondary storage, multiple different backup products, throw a couple of NASes in there, just for good measure. >> Just in case. >> Yeah, just in case. And then really, what we were doing, and how we managed that, is we had close to one FTE dedicated to that environment. It's not great for that person, it's not really the funnest of jobs. And then obviously, the management of it becomes quite difficult. And so that was how we did it. We got by. But it certainly could have been a lot better. >> So that was one FTE dedicated to the backup? >> Just dedicated to the backup. >> Dedicated to data protection? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Okay. So then you bring in Cohesity, you do the business case, say oh wow, and part of that was we can free up this person to do other things, I presume, right? >> Yeah, yeah, definitely. That was actually certainly one of the key business cases. So, IT is a cost center. We certainly, we work for the business, we support the business, there's no doubt about that. But we are, at the end of the day, a cost center. So getting extra headcount or getting equipment, there has to be a really good business case behind this. And so we found that, so we freed up about 80% of time that we're spending on this, and so actually the two biggest things that we've seen as a benefit of that, staff engagement is actually a lot higher, right, because we don't have someone just dedicated to turning the screws on this old solution all the time. So they get to spend more time on newer tech, which is great, and obviously, if their time's freed-up, value-added activities. What can they be focusing on. >> So how's it work? Is it a self-service platform now? Or somebody, this individual, sets the overall policy, and then people apply it as they see fit, the application guys? >> Yeah, so we have a range. So our infrastructure team holds the overall management of it, and we have that one person who kind of, say rules it, so to speak, but the way we've done with this role-based access, we can give the service desk permission to search backups, so if someone needs a restore, or maybe legal and the compliance team want to know who was accessing what, we can give a lot more self-service to these teams. So the service desk, if they're dealing with an end-user that wants a restore, within 30 seconds, we can tell them, okay, here is the backup we have. Here are the dates that we have it. Which one do you want? Previously, that's a week-and-a-half turnaround. Escalate a ticket, spend three days doing restores and searching through it-- >> Dave: Working weekends. >> Right. Working weekends, and if you even do have the data. Typically what happens, by the time you've restored it, the customer has said, "Look, well I don't need it anymore." It's too late. >> So let's talk about some of the customer benefits. You've only deployed this about six months ago. >> Yeah, correct. >> You talked about a number of the benefits from a time perspective, allowing valuable FTEs to not only be reallocated for other projects, but also from a job satisfaction perspective-- >> Yeah definitely. >> Which is all the way up to the top end of the business. But in terms of helping customers extract more value from their data, monetizing their data, that example that you just gave of where it took too long to recover data before and the customer, the time has passed, what are some of the impacts that your customers are achieving so far? >> Yeah, so I think the biggest area of this that I think we actually look at the most, is that, like I mentioned earlier, we will do, say a piece of work with a customer, and then we'll keep that data. We might need it in the future, but there's not an ongoing engagement. What are we going to do with that? And so we tend to sort of put it aside. If a customer wants any further work done, or perhaps they want to come back with clarification, or anything like this, it then takes us quite a bit of time to find that data, get it back into production, get it back to the state that we were previously using it in. So, one of the biggest things that we've seen is actually now having all of that data always available on Cohesity, and being a hyper-converged platform, it has a lot of compute on it as well, so we can actually run some simple analytics on that data. So if a customer comes back and wants to query just a couple of small items, or perhaps we want to recheck a couple of things, super easy now for us to do that. And so we talk about time to market, or anything like this, is really big for us, and customer responsiveness. So if a customer is asking us a question and the answer is a five-minute answer, they don't want it in four days. So if we can turn that answer around a lot quicker, then obviously everyone's happier. >> And you've already been able to start achieving that? >> Yeah, we have been able to start achieving that already. Whether that be from a customer perspective, and certainly from a compliance perspective, if we have a customer that actually wants to know, where is our data, who has accessed it, everything else, we can turn that around straightaway. So obviously, when we talk about customer satisfaction, or that relationship, they feel a lot more comfortable that we're doing the right thing with their data, and that is obviously hugely invaluable for us as a business. >> And just another infrastructure question. These 300 servers, it's mostly UCS, is that right? Or a lot of UCS? >> Yeah, so we use Cisco for pretty much everything. We certainly are heavy, heavy users of UCS, and so, when we are looking at, I mean, implementing anything to the environment, you don't want it to be a lengthy process, because your return on investment is going to be hit. If you're spending three months installing something, you've already paid, you're getting no benefit out if it, it's now three months old before it's even implemented. So having this kit on Cisco UCS has been great for us, and we were having issues with our previous backup solution and we actually managed to implement the Cohesity solution on UCS and start using it before repairing our existing solution. So it's phenomenal how quickly, through UCS, we were able to bring it in. >> Dave: What kind of issues were you having? Just integration issues, or? >> Yeah, so with our previous backup solution, being a fragmented solution that we had stitched together, we had something as simple as a RAID controller failure caused a whole bunch of data corruption across multiple areas, and so, how the NAS saw the data corruption was different to how the SANDS saw it, and trying to re-index everything, we were struggling to understand what was going on. And whilst we were working through that, we actually had some other members of the team implement Cohesity and get it into the environment quicker than we could repair our existing solution. That's the power of Cisco UCS, really. >> Looking at this massive transformation that Cisco has been undergoing for a while, from a traditional network appliance vendor to now hardware, software, what are your thoughts on how that transformation, which is, in part, you could say, accelerated by DevNet, how is it going to enable businesses like yours to be able to start getting value even faster from the technology? >> Yeah, that's a very good question, and that's something, I think, a few of us in the industry, if we go back two, three, four, five years, was Cisco going to reinvent itself? What was that place? With hyperscale cloud, all these kind of things. I think quite a few people had some questions around what was going to happen in that space. They weren't always the quickest to market. They had great products, but there was a bit of speed issues there. And what we've seen as they've reinvented themselves is, Cisco has this great name for really being ahead of the curve, or leading industry, and this is, I think, what they were built on, really. And so it's been great from our perspective to see them, say, almost getting back to their roots a little bit, in this regard, and so for us, we are a technology business, we are fast-moving, our customers want things to be fast-moving, and so being able to rely on a technology partner like Cisco, and knowing that they're looking for the latest and greatest even quicker than ourselves, I think that's probably where we start to see the biggest impact. In the past, we might have a challenge that we need to solve, you talk to some vendors, and you might hear something like, oh, we're working on that. Maybe in 12 to 18 months we'll have it in the marketplace. Well we need it now. We don't need it in 18 months, it's a today problem. And that's not what we're seeing anymore with Cisco. Typically, any conversation we have with our account reps around here are some of the challenges, here are what our customers want to do, more frequently than not, our Cisco account reps will say, I think we have a solution for that. And that really, being able to partner with players like that in the industry, that makes some of the biggest differences for us as a company, because we need to partner with all these people to do what we do. >> Exactly. So, with all the momentum that you guys have achieved in just six short months, what's next? >> Yeah, Quantium is certainly a fast-moving company, like I mentioned, and what we wanted, we always like to run close to the leading edge, we're similar with Hadoop, we like to be early adopters. We like technology to grow with us. And this is what we saw in Cohesity. So, they haven't been around for long, and they're already doing everything we need. So we think, well this is a great mix. If we've got someone who's already solving everything that we need, this question of what next is great. And so as we move more towards your hyperscale cloud, being able to run Cohesity across all those environments to manage all of that data across all of it, that's certainly a big one that we're investigating. Like I mentioned, we keep pretty much all of our data, and so actually being able to use cloud as an archive solution, it sounds great, but then it's another silo to manage, it's another solution that you need to implement, but Cohesity will manage all that for us. So, the what next, I think, is we'll see the scale out of the solution as our data requirement grows, we will see it expand into the cloud environments that we're going to start building, so we really see it growing with us from that aspect. And then we see a great idea of being able to repurpose a lot of our on-premise hardware by archiving out to the cloud as well. >> What about SaaS? Do you see a need to use a Cohesity to protect your SaaS data, or are you kind of not there yet? >> Yeah, I think it certainly has a play there, it's still something that I think we're exploring a little bit more to make sure that it's a right fit. But certainly, there is an opportunity there to be explored, yeah. >> Always opportunities. Well Craig, we appreciate you stopping by theCUBE-- >> Thank you for having me. >> And sharing how Quantium is leveraging your partnerships with Cisco, with Cohesity, to drive those core business drivers of data science and AI. >> Thank you. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Cisco Live, in San Diego. (light music)

>> Voiceover: Live from San Diego, California. It's the CUBE, covering Cisco Live U.S. 2019, brought to you by Cisco, and its EcoSystem Partners. >> Welcome back to San Diego, day two here, of Cisco Live 2019, I'm Dave Villante with my co-host Stu Miniman, Lisa Martin is also here. You're watching the Cube, the leader live tech coverage, we're here in the DevNet zone, which is a very happenin' place, and all the action is here the CCIE folks are getting trained up on how to do Infrastructure as Code. Terry Ramos is here, he's the Vice President of Alliances, at Cohesity, hot company, achieving escape velocity. Terry great to have you on. Good to see you again. >> Great to be here, really enjoy it. >> So Cisco is a big partner of yours, perhaps the biggest I know you don't like to say that, you love all your partners like you love your kids, but clearly a lot of good action going on with you guys. Talk about the partnership, where it started, how it's evolved. >> Sure so first off a little bit about Cohesity, I think would be helpful right, we're in the data management space, really helping customers with their data management, and how do they deal with the problem of mass data fragmentation, right if you think about the traditional data silos that enterprises have, we really take and level that out into one platform, our platform, and really allows customers to get the most out of their data. If we talk about the partnership with Cisco, it's actually a really good partnership. They have been an investor with us, both series C and D rounds. We recently, about three months ago announced that we were on the price book, so now a customer has the ability to go buy a Cisco UCS, Hyperflex, and Cohesity, as a cohesive bundle to solve their problems, right, to really help them grow. And then we are working on some new things, like Cisco Solutions Plus Support, where customers has a single call place, where they get all their support needs addressed. >> That's huge Stu, I remember when the, remember the Vblock when it first came out. It's a V support, I forget how many VMs, like thousands and thousands of VMs, and I just have one question, how do you back it up? And they went, and they were staring at their feet, so the fact that now you're bundled in to UCS HyperFlex, and that's part of the SKU, or its a different SKU or? >> Terry: Yeah they're all different SKUs, but it is bundled together. >> Yeah, so it's all integrated? It's a check box item, right okay? >> What we did was came up with the CVD, validated design so customers can get a validated design that says HyerFlex, UCS, Cohesity, here's how to deploy it, here's the best use cases, and they can actually go buy that, then it's a bundled solution. >> Terry brings us inside a little bit that go to market, because it's one thing to be partnered with CBDs, they're great but Cisco as you know hundred of these, if not more, but you know when you've got access to that Cisco channel out there, people that are transforming data centers, they talked about conversion infrastructure, hyper conversion infrastructure, Cisco UCS, tip of the spear for Cisco in that Data Center world, what does it mean to be that oh hey you know that whole channel, they are going to help get paid on that not just say oh yeah yeah that works. >> Yeah, I think that there's a few things for the channel for us, one is just Cisco's team themselves right, they don't have a backup solution so we are really the next gen backup and that's really helped them out. When we talk about Channel as well Channel partners are looking for a solution that differentiates them from everybody else. So we are a high touch sales team, but we are a hundred percent channel so working with the channel, giving them new ways actually to go out a sell the solution. >> So lets talk a little bit about backup, data protection, data insurance you know sort of we're trying to pass between, all right, what's the marketing and what's the reality for customers, so we remember the VM where Ascendancy days, it caused people to really have to rethink their backup and their data protection. What's driving it now? Why are so many customers kind of reassessing their backup approach and their overall data protection and data management? >> Yeah, I think it's the best analogy to last one is data management right, everybody has thought of data protection, it's just protecting your data. Backup and recovery. What we've done is really looked at it as it's data, you should be able to use your data however you want to. So, yeah we made do data protection on the platform, but then we do tests that, we do file shares, we do things like that, and we make it this cohesive data management platform, where customers get various use cases, but then they can look at their entire dataset, and that is really the key anymore. And when you talk about the data protection as it was, it was very silo. You data protect one set of systems, and data protect the next, and data protect the next. They never talked you couldn't do management across them. >> Dave: Okay so. >> Yeah yeah Terry. So I love when you're talking about the silos there, back in Barcelona we heard Cisco talking about HyperFlex anywhere, and some of the concerns of us have is, is multi-cloud the new multi vendor, and oh my gosh have I just created a whole bunch of silos that are just outside of my data center, like I used to do inside my data center. How's Cohesity helping to solve that solution for people from your. >> Yeah I think that's a interesting one. Cloud is really come along, right? Everybody thought we'll see what cloud does, it's really come a long way and people are using multi-cloud, so they are doing cloud on prem. Then they're archiving out to public cloud providers, and they're archiving out to other silos where they, or other data services where they have it, and that's really been the approach lately, is you can't just have your data in one location, you're going to move it out to the Cloud, you're going to store it on UCS and HyperFlex, and Cohesity. And again its how do you use that data, so that's the key is really that. But it is a cloud world for sure, where you're doing On-prem Cloud and Public Cloud. >> So today a lot of that focus, correct me it I am wrong, is infrastructure as a service? >> Yes >> Whether it's AWS, Google, you know Azure. Do you, have you started to think about, or are customers and partners asking you to think about, all the protecting all the data in SAS, is that something that's sort of on the road map are you hearing that for customers, or to is it still early for that? >> No I think that actually a great use case, if you talk about I'll just pick on one, Office 365 right, if you think about what they really provide it's availability right it's not backup so, if you need to back a year and get that critical email that you need for whatever reason, that's really not what they're doing. They're making sure it's up and running, and available to the users. So data protection for SAS apps is actually a new use case that I think is enormous. >> Okay so take Office 365 as an example, is that something you can protect today, or is that kind on the road map? >> That's something we can do today. >> So explain to our audience, why if I am using Office 365 which is in the Cloud, isn't Microsoft going to take care of that for me, why do I need Cohesity explain? >> Yeah, I think it is really comes down to that, it's they're really providing availability, yeah they have some backup services, but even if they do it's not tying into your overall data management solution. And so backing up O-365 gives you access to all that data as well, so you can do algorithms on it, analytics all those things once it's part of the bigger platform. >> And you probably have more facile recovery, which is, backup is one thing, recovery Stu. >> Is a everything. >> There you go. >> It is. (laugh) >> Terry talk to us about your customers, how about any big you know Cisco joint customers that you can talk about but would love to hear some of the latest from your customers? >> Yeah I think when we started this partnership awhile ago, what we really focused on Cohesity on UCS, and we got some traction there. When we went on the price sheet that really changed, things because the customers are now able to buy on a single price sheet. When you talk about the large customers it's been incredible the last three, four months, the numbers of joint customers that we've been in, and Cisco's been in, and its enterprise customers, it's the fortune five hundred customers that we're going after. A customer that's here later today, Quantium is a great use case. They're data analytics, they're AI, and they're providing a lot of information to customers on supply chain. And he's here later today on the CUBE, and it's a really great use case to what they are doing with it. >> Yeah we're excited to talk to him so lets do a little prep for him, what, tell us about Quantium, what do you know about them so we, gives us the bumper sticker so we're ready for the interview. >> Craig will do a much better job of it, but my understanding is they're looking at data, supply chain data, when to get customers in, when they should have product there, propensity to buy, all of those things, and they are doing all that for very large enterprise customers, and then they're using us to data protect all that they do. >> So, so the reason I asked that is I wanted to double click on that, because you've been stressing Terry, that it's not just backup. It's this notion of data management. You can do Analytics, you can do other things. So when you, lets generalize and lets not make it specific to Quantium, we'll talk to them later, but what specifically are customers doing beyond backup? What kind of analytics are they doing? How is affecting their business? What kind of outcomes are they trying to drive? >> Yeah I think it's a great question, we did something about four months ago, where we replaced released the market place. So now we've gotten all this data from data protection, file shares, test-dev, cloud as we talked about. So we've got this platform with all this data on top of it, and now partners can come in and write apps on top to do all sorts of things with that data. So think of being able to spin up a VM in our platform, do some Analytics on it, looking at it for any number of things, and then destroy it right, destroy the backup copy not the backup the copy that's made, and then be able to go to the next one, and really get deep into what data is on there, how can I use that data, how can I use that data across various applications? >> Are you seeing, I've sort have always thought the corpus, the backup corpus could be used in a security context, not you know, not to compete with Palo Alto Networks but specifically to assess exposure to things like Ransomware. If you see some anomalous behavior 'cause stuff when it goes bad it goes bad quickly these days, so are you seeing those types of use cases emerging? >> Absolutely, ransomware is actually a really big use case for us right now, where customers are wanting data protection to ensure Ransomware's not happening, and if they do get hit how do we make sure to restart quickly. Give you another example is we have a ClamAV so we can spin up a VM and check it for anitivirus. Right in their data protection mode so not without, not touching the production systems but touching the systems that are already backed up. >> I think you guys recently made an acquisition of a Manas Data which if I recall correctly was a specialized, sort of data protection company focused on things like, NoSQL and maybe Hadoop and so forth, so that's cool. We had those guys on in New York City last fall. And then, so I like that, building out the portfolio. My question is around containers, and all this cloud native stuff going on we're in the DevNet zone so a lot DevOps action, data protection for containers are you, your customers and your partners are they sort of pushing you in that direction, how are you responding? >> Yeah I think when you talk about cloud in general right, there's been a huge amount of VMs that are there, containers are there as well so yeah customers are absolutely talking about containers. Our market place is a container based market place, so containers are absolutely a big thing for us. >> So what else can you share with us about you know conversations that you're having with customers and partners at the show? What are the, what's the narrative like? What are some of the big concerns, maybe that again either customers or partners have? >> Yeah I don't want to sound like a broken record but I think the biggest thing we hear always is the data silos, right? It's really breaking down those silos, getting rid of the old legacy silos where you can't use the data how you want to, where you can't run analytics across the data. That is the number one talk track that customers tell us. >> So how does that fit in, you know the old buzz word of digital transformation, but we always say the difference between a business and a digital business is how they use data. And if you think about how a traditional business looks at it's data, well that data's all in silos as you pointed out and there's something in the middle like a business process or a bottling plant or... >> That's right. >> manufacturing facility, but the data's all dispersed in silos, are you seeing people, as at least as part of their digital transformation, leveraging you guys to put that data in at least in a logical place that they can do those analytics and maybe you could add some color to that scenario. >> Yeah, for sure, I mean the data from I'll give you a great example. The CBD we just did with Cisco, the updated one has Edge. So now when you're talking about plants and branch offices and those things, now we can bring that data back in to the central core as well, do analytics on it, and then push it to other offices for updated information. So absolutely, it is a big use case of, it's not just looking at that core central data center. How do you get that data from your other offices, from your retail locations, from your manufacturing plants. >> Final thoughts. San Diego, good venue you know great weather. >> Beautiful. >> Cisco Live. >> Yeah. >> Dave: Put a bumper sticker on it. >> I'm impressed with Cisco Live. I haven't been here in several years. It's an impressive show, 26 thousand people, great, beautiful weather, great convention center. Just a great place to be right now. >> All right and we're bring it all to you live from the CUBE. Thank you Terry for coming on. Dave Villante, for Stu Miniman, Lisa Martin is also here. Day two, Cisco Live, 2019. You're watching the CUBE, we'll be right back. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from San Diego, California It's the queue covering Sisqo Live US 2019 Tio by Cisco and its ecosystem barkers. >> Welcome back. It's the Cube here at Cisco Live, San Diego 2019 times. Two minute My co host is Day Volante. First, I want to welcome back custom dos Katie, who is the vice president. Product management with Cisco Compute. We talked with him a lot about Piper Flex anywhere in Barcelona. Wanna welcome to the program of first time guests Laura Crone, who's the vice president of sales and marketing group in NSG sales and marketing at Intel. Laura, thanks so much for joining us, All right, So since Katie has been our program, let let's start with you. You know, we know, you know. We've watched, you know, Cisco UCS and that compute, you know, since it rolled out for about a decade ago. Now on DH, you know Intel always up on stage with Cisco talking about the latest enhancements everywhere I go this year, people are talking about obtained and how technologies like envy me are baking in tow. The environment storage class memories, you know, coming there. So you know, let's start with kind of intel. What's happening in your world and you know your activities. Francisco live >> great. So I'm glad to hear you've heard a lot about octane because I have some marketing of my organization. So obtain is the first new memory architecture er in over 25 years. And it is different than Nanda, right? It is you, Khun, right? Data to the silicon that is programs faster and has greater endurance. So when you think of obtain its fast like D ram But it's persistent, like nay on three D now. And it has some industry leading combinations of capabilities such a cz high throughput, high endurance, high quality of service and low latent see. And for a storage device, what could be better than having fast performance and hi consistency. Oh, >> Laura's you say? Yeah, but 25 years since this move. You know, I remember when I when I started working with Dave, it was, you know, how do we get out of you know, the horrible, scuzzy stack is what we had lived on for decades there. And finally, Now it feels like we're coming through the clearing and there is just going to be wave after wave of new technologies that air free to get us high performance low latent c on the like. >> Yeah, And I think the other big part of that which is part of Cisco's hyper flex all in Vienna, is the envy me standards. So, you know, we've lived in a world of legacy satya controllers, which created a lot of bottlenecks and the performance Now that the industry is moving toe envy me, that even opens up it. Mohr And so, as we were developing, obtain, we knew we had Teo go move the industry to a new protocol. Otherwise, that pairing was not going to be very successful. >> Alright, so Katie all envy me, tell more. >> So we come here and we talk about all the cool innovations we do within the company. And then sometimes you come here and we talk about all the cool innovation we do with our partners, our technology partner, that intel being a fantastic technology partner, obviously being the server business, you've got a partner with intel on. We've really going away that across the walls ofthe two organizations to bring, uh, just do to life, right? So Cisco 80 I hyper flex is one of the products >> we >> talked about in the past. Hyper Flex, all in Miami that uses Intel's obtain technology is, well, it's Intel's three demand all envy me devices to power really the fastest workloads that customers want to put on this device. So you talked about free envy me. Pricing is getting to a point where it becomes that much more accessible to youth, ese for powering databases for par like those those work clothes required that leyton see characteristics and acquire those I ops on DH. That's what we've enabled with Cisco Hyper Flex collaborating with Intel of Envy Me portfolio. >> Remember when I started in the business, somebody was sharing with me to educate me on the head? A pyramid? Think of the period is a storage hierarchy. And at the top of it, was it actually an Intel solid state device, which back then was not It was volatile, right? So you had to put, you know, backup power supplies on it. Uh, so but any rate and then with all this memory architecture coming and flash towards people have been saying, well, it's going to flatten that pyramid. But now, with obtain. You're seeing the reemergence of that periods of that pyramid. So help us understand, sort of where it fits from a supplier standpoint and a no yam and ultimate customer. Because if I understand it, so obtain is faster than NAND, but it's going to be more expensive, but it's slower than D Ram, but it's cheaper, right? So where does it fit? What, the use cases? Where does it fit in that hierarchy? Maybe. >> Yeah. So if you think about the hierarchy at the very top is D RAM, which is going to be your fastest lowest Leighton see product. But right below that is obtained. Persistent memory, the dims and you get greater density because that's one of the challenges with the Ram is they're not dense enough, nor are they affordable enough, right? And so you get that creates a new tear in the store tire curry. Go below that and you have obtain assist ease, which bring even mohr density. So we go up to a 1.5 terabyte in a obtain sst, uh, and you that now get performance for your storage and memory expansion. Then you have three Dean and and then even below that, you have three thing and Q l c, which gives you cost effective, high density capacity. And then below that is the old fashioned hard disk drive. And then magnet. Yeah, you start inserting all these tears that give architects and both hardware and software an opportunity. Teo rethink how they wantto do storage. >> So the demand for this granularity obviously coming from your your buyers, your direct bars and your customers. So what does it do for you and specifically your customers? >> Yeah. So the name of the game is performance and the ability to have in a land where things are not very predictable, the ability to support any thing that the your end customers may throw at you if you're a 90 department. That may mean a bur internal of, uh, data scientist team are traditional architect off a traditional application. Now, what Intel and Cisco can do together is truly unique because we control all parts of the stack, everything from the sober itself to the to the storage devices to the distributed file system that sits on top ofit. So, for example, in Etienne, hyper flecks were using obtain as a cashing here on because we write the distributed file system. We can speak in a balance between what we put in the cash in care how it moved out data to the non cashing 3 90 year, as as Intel came out with their latest processors that support memory class torched last memory. We support that now we can engineer this whole system and to end so that we can deliver to customers the innovation that Intel is bringing to the table in a way that's consumable by their, uh, one more thing I'll throw out there. So technology is great, but it needs to be resilient because I D departments will occasionally yank out the wrong wire. They are barely yank out the wrong drive. One of the things that we work together with Intel What? How do we court rise into this? How to be with reliability, availability, serviceability? How do we prevent against accidental removal or accidental insertion on DH? Some of those go innovations have let Teo asked, getting out in the market a hyper flecked system that uses these technologies in a way that's really usable by teens in our customs. I'd >> love to double click on that in the context of envy. Envy? What you guys were talking about, You mentioned horrible storage deck. I think he called it the horrible, scuzzy stack. And Laura, you were talking about the You know, the cheap and deep now is a spinning disk. So my understanding is that you've got a lot of overhead in the traditional scuzzy protocol, but nobody ever noticed because you had this mechanical device. Now, with flash storage, it all becomes exposed. And VM e allows just a like a bat phone. Right? Okay, so correct me where I got that wrong, But maybe you could give us the perspective. You know what? Why Envy Emmy is important from your standpoint. And how are you guys using it? >> Yeah, I think envy and me is just a much faster protocol. And you're absolutely right. We have a graph that we show of the old world and how much overhead there is all the way down to when you have obtained in a dim solution with no overhead octane assist. E still has a tiny bit, but there's a graph that shows all of that Leyton C is removed when you deploy, obtain so envy me gives you much greater band with right. The CPU is not bottlenecked, and you get greater CPU efficiency when you have a faster interface like and >> and like hyper flexes taking advantage of this house. Oh, >> yeah? Let me give you a couple of examples. So anything performance, the first thing that comes to mind is databases. So for those kinds of workloads, this system gets about 25% better performance. Next thing that comes to mind is people really don't know what they're gonna put on the system. So sometimes they put databases, sometimes put mixed workloads. So when we look at mixed workloads way get about 65% or so better I ops, we get 37% better lately sees. So even in a mixed I opened Wyman wherever have databases you may have a Web theory may have other things. This thing is definite resilient to handle the workload. So it's it just opens up the splatter abuse cases. >> So any other questions I had was specific to obtain. D ram has consumer applications, as does Flash Anand was obtained. Have similar consumer applications can achieve that volume so that the prices, you can come down, not free, but continue to sort of drive the curves. >> Eso When we look at the overall tam, we see the tam growing out over time. I don't know exactly when it crosses. Over the volume are the bits of the ram, but we absolutely see it growing over time. And as a technology ramps, it'll have a you know, it costs ramping curves. Well, >> it'll follow that curve. Okay, good. >> Yeah, Just Katie. Give us a little bit. Broad view of hyper flex here. Att? The show, people, you know, play any labs with the brand new obtained pieces or what? What other highlights that you and the team have this week? >> Yeah, absolutely. So in in Barcelona, we talked about high, perfect for all that is live today. So in the show floor, people can look at the hyper flex at the edge combined with S t one. How do you control How did deploy thousands of edge locations from a centralized location to the part of the inner side which cloud based management too? So that whole experience is unable. Now, at the other end of the spectrum is how do we drive even more performance. So we were always, always the performance leader. Now we're comparing ourselves to ourselves to behavior 35% better than our previous all flash. With the innovation Intel is bringing to the table, some of the other pieces are actually use cases. So there's a big hospital chain where my kids go toe goto, get treated and look and see the doctor. There are lots of medical use cases which require epic the medical software company to power it, whether it is the end terminals or it is the back and database. So that epic hyperspace and happy cachet those have been out be invalidated on hyper flex, using the technology that we just talked about around update on doll in via me that can get me there is that much more power. That means that when my my doctor and the nurse pulls off, the records don't show up fast. But all the medical records, all of those other high performance seeking applications also run that much more streamlined, so I would encourage people little water solution. We've got a tremendous set off demos out there to go up there and check us out >> and there's a great white paper out on this, right? That e g s >> e g is made one of the a company that I've seen benchmarking Ah, a hyper flex. >> So whatever Elaborate where they do a lab report or >> it's what they do is they bench around different hyper converge infrastructure vendors. So they did this first time around and they and they said, Well, we could pack that much more We EMS on a on a hyper flex with rotating drives. And then they did it again And I said, Well, now that you got all flash Well, deacon, you got now the performance and the ladies see leadership and then they did it again and they said, Well, hang on, you you've kind of left the competition that does that. That's not going to make a pretty chart to show when we compare your all in Miami against your hyper so many. When you get that good, you compare against yourselves. We've been the performance theater on the estate has been doing the >> data obtained. The next generation added up, >> and this is what a database workload. OK, nowyou bringing obtain a little toast to the latest report >> has that measures >> measures obtain against are all flash report and then also ship or measure across vendors. So >> where can I get this? Is at some party or website or >> it's off all of this. All of this is off off the Cisco Hyper Flex website on artist go dot com. But F is the companies that want to go directly to their about getting a more >> I guess final final question for you is you know, I think back the early is ucs. It was the memory enhancements that they had that allowed the dentist virtual ization in the industry back when it started. It sounds like we're just taking that to the next level with this next generation of solutions. What what else would you out about? The relationship with Cisco and Intel? >> Eso, Intel and Cisco worked together for years right innovation around the CPU and the platform, and it's super exciting to be expanding our relationship to storage. And I'm even more excited that the Cisco hyper flex solution is endorsing Intel obtain and three thing and and we're seeing great examples of really use workloads where are in customers can benefit from this technology. >> Katie Laura. Thanks so much for the update. Congratulations on the progress that you've made so far for David Dante on Student, and we'll be back with more coverage here. It's just go live 2019 in San Diego. Thanks for watching the cue >> theme.

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cue covering Sisqo. Live Europe, Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, Everybody watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Valentin here with my co host Student events. Do Myself and John for Be here all week. Eric Hurt, Saugus Here Long time Cuba Long friend. Great to see you again. He's the CMO of IBM IBM Storage division. He's joined by James Amy's, who's the head of networks at advance. The service provider Guys, Welcome to the Cube. Good to see again. >> Great. Thanks for having us loved being on the cute. >> So we love having you So, James, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about advanced to want to dig into some of the networking trends. We're hearing a lot about it here. It's just go live. >> Yeah, I think so. Advanced are a manage service provider software software company based in the UK, one of the largest software companies in the UK, providing interim solutions for lots of different Marchal market verticals, including healthcare, local government, regional government, national infrastructure projects we've got involved with as well as charity sector legal sector. A lot of education work we do is real diverse portfolio of products we offer on with the manage services piece. We also offer complete outsourcing. So this is desktop support. Telephony support, printer support all the >> way back into integration with public cloud platforms and private cloud platforms, the majority of >> which is our in. >> So so Eric advanced are both a customer and a partner, right? Right, right. And so you love you. Love versus Stack. These guys are presumed versus stack customers. Well >> stacked customer in the Versace tack, as you know, Integrate. Cisco, UCS, Cisco Networking Infrastructure, IBM Storage of all types entry products up into the fastest all flash raise with our software spectrum virtualized spectrum, Accelerate Family and James's company is using versus tax is part of their infrastructure, which they then offer, as you know, to a service toe and uses. James just described. >> So let's talk about some of the big trends that you guys are seeing and how you're both responding to customers and you're responding to your customer. So we're seeing two hearing today. Lot about multi cloud. We've been hearing that for a while the network is flattening your network expert love to get your your thoughts on that. Security, obviously, is a huge topic. End end management, another big topic, something that IBM is focused on. So so James, what 1 of the big mega trends that you're seeing that a driving your business decisions and your customer's activity? One >> of the big changes we're seeing is a change from large scare enterprise scale deployments off a particular type of technology on customers are now choosing because they're informed the best fit for a particular application or particular service on that may be coming to a service provider like ourselves to offer our services products to them. Uh, or they're looking for us to run in infrastructure service for them or integrate with a public cloud offering. So the competition of the public cloud for service providers is key on DH. I think people were looking around a few years ago thinking, How do we compete to this well, with partnerships that we have in our Francisco? It gives us a very compelling competitive offering. But we can turn around and say, Well, we can give you a like for like, but we can give you a slightly better service because we could give you guaranteed availability. We give you guaranteed price point on, and this is all backed with key vendor certified designs. So we're not talking about going out on developing a solution that takes maybe eighteen months to take to market. This is understanding a requirement for a quick, you know, Q and A with a customer a line that, too a reference architecture that we can literally just pick up off the shelf, deploy into our data centers using the standard building rocks that we use across the business. So Nexus nine K seven k's or our standard bread and butter inside the data center environment. As Eric pointed out, Cisco UCS is our our key Intel computer platform that we used on DH. The store wise IBM product has been a real true success story for us. So we started off being a a mixed then the house where we would align storage requirement paste with what we could find in the market. That was, that was a good fit. But the store was products is basically just allowed us to standardize on the speed of deployment is one of the key things. So we started out with a very lengthy lead time tio service ready, which is when we start charging for revenue on if we want a ninety day build. Well, we've got a lot of special service time, A lot of engineering time getting that ready Teo, Teo and take to the customer and then we turn it on. We can start seeing revenue from that platform with versus Stack. This enabled us to accelerate how quickly we can turn that on. And we've seen that drop, too. They're literally days through standardisation elements of automation as well. Many of our environments are bespoke because we have such a wide arrange off different types of customers with different needs, but it allows us to take those standing building blocks, align them to their needs and deliver that service. >> James James, we found the peas are often in the middle of those discussions that customers are having on multi clouds. You talked a lot about the services you build. Are they also coming to you? If if you tie into the public Cloud services or yes, maybe you can help explain a little bit on how that worked Five years ago, it was the public loud there are going to kill them and service providers. And what we see is customers can't sort out half of what's going on. They've got to be able to turn two partners like you to be able to figure this out. >> Yeah, that's a fantastic question. I think three years ago we'd be talking to our customers and they were I am going to this public cloud or I am going to build this infrastructure. Where is now? They're They're making Mohr informed select decisions based on the drive to the hosted office and voice platforms offered by Microsoft. There's a big driving. Many of our customers are going in that direction, but it's how we integrate that with legacy applications. Some of the solutions that some of our customers use have have have had millions of pounds of investment into them, and that's not something I can just turn off the water away from overnight. So it is how we're integrating that. We're doing that at the network level, so it's how we're appearing with different service providers, bringing that in integrating that, I'm offering it to them as a solution. What we try tio, we try to try position ourselves is really it's the same experience, regardless of where we're placing it. Consumption. Workload doesn't know whether it's inside our data centers, whether we're talking one of the public cloud platforms or even on premise. So we have quite a few customers that still have significant presence on premises because that's right for their business, depending on on what they're doing, especially some of the research scientists. >> So you've got to deliver flexibility in your architecture, and you talk a lot about software to find you guys made a big move to software to find, you know, a couple years ago, actually, maybe discuss how that fits in to how you're servicing advanced another client? >> Sure. So you know, IBM Storage has embraced multi Cloud for several years. So our solutions. While, of course, they work with IBM, Cloud and IBM cloud private work with Amazon. They work with azure Google Cloud and in fact, some are products. For example, the versus stack not only is advanced using it, but we've got pry forty or fifty public, small, medium sized cloud providers that our public references for the vs Tag and Spectrum Protect you Know which is our backup product Number one in the Enterprise. Back up space Expect from detectives Got at least three hundred cloud providers. Medium, small and big. Who offered the engine underneath for their backup is a service is spectrum protect, So we make sure that weather PR transparent cloud tearing our cyber resiliency technology. What we doing? Backup archive object storage works with essentially all cloud providers. That way, someone like James A. CSP MSP can leverage our products. And we, like I said, we have tons of public records around versus Stack for that, but so can an enterprise. And in fact, I saw survey recently that it was done in Europe and in North America that when you look at a roughly two billion US size revenue and up the average company of that sizing up, we use five different public cloud riders at one time. Where that it be due to legal reasons whether that be procurement. You know, the Web is really the Internet. And, yeah, Cloud is really just It's been around for twenty some years. So in bigger accounts, guess what is now involved Procurement Well, we love that you did that deal with IBM club, but you are going to get a competitive quote now from Amazon and Microsoft, right? So that's driven it legal's driven it. Certain countries, right? The data needs to stay in that country, even if your cloud if eyeing it, it's so to speak. So if the clap water doesn't have a data center there, guess what? Another geographer used different. And then you, of course, still have some large entities that still allow regional buying pattern so they'll have three or four different cloud providers that air quote certified by corporate. And then you could use whichever one you want, so we make sure that we could take advantage of that. Wade and IBM. We ride the wave, We don't fight the way. >> So you've got in that situation. You these multi cloud you got different AP eyes, You get different frameworks potty, you abstract all that complexity you got, Francisco coming at it from a networking standpoint, I b m. Now with Red Hat is good. Be a big player in that that world. VM where What do you guys do? James, in terms of of simplifying all that multi cloud complexity >> for people. I think some of it is actually the mystifying on its engaging with our partners to understand what the proposition is on, how we can develop that on a line, that to mind your own business, but more importantly, to the needs of our customers. We've got some really, really talented technicians worked within within advance, and we've got a number of different forums that allow them to feed back their ideas. But we've got the alignments between those partners and and some of those communities, so that we can have an open discussion on drive. Some of that thinking forward about ultimately see engaging with customers. So the customers feedback is key on how we shape and deliver no need service to them, but also to the service to other customers. We have a number of customers that are very similar, but they may work in different spaces, some somewhere even competitive. So we have to tread that line very safe, very carefully and safely. But it is. It's a good one to one relationship between the client service managers, technical technicians. We have inside business having that to complete three sixty communication is key, but that's that's that's really the bottom takes. Its creation >> came like youto dig into security for us a little bit. You know, I think we surpassed a couple of years ago. I'm not going to go to the cloud to it because it's not secure to Oh, I understand it's time for me to least reevaluate meant security and, most likely, you know, manage service fighters. Public clouds are probably more secure than what I had in my data center, but if I've got multiple environment, there's a lot of complexity there. So how do you traverse that? Make sure that you've got a comprehensive security practice, not just all these point solutions for security all over the place. >> Ah, so that's that comes onto visibility. So its visibility understanding where all the control points are within a given infrastructure on how the landscape looks. So we were working quite closely with a number actually of key Cisco and IBM partners, as well as IBM and Cisco themselves directly tohave a comprehensive offering that allows us to position to our customers. You used to once upon a time you had one game, right? So we need it is from good security on your Internet. Facing viable For now, you might have a ten. Twenty, thirty of those. We need tohave consistent policies across those. We need to understand how they're performing, but also potentially, if there's any attempt attack vector on one of them. How that how someone is trying to looking to compromise that so centralized intelligence on That's where we start to look at my eye operations to gather all that information. The long gone are the days where you have twenty people sharing a room just reading streams. Those twenty people now need thio. See reams and reams of information instantly. Something needs to be called up to them. They could make a decision quickly on Active planet on DH. That's really where we we're positioning ourselves in the market to differentiate. I'm working with key part, Mr >> Never talk about your announcement cadence. Good idea as a big show. Think coming up in a couple weeks cubes gonna be there. Of course. What can we expect from from you guys? >> So we're actually gonna announce on the fifth before things way, want to drive end users and our business partners to storage campus, which is one of the largest campuses at IBM, think we'll have over fifteen pedestals of demo and actually multiple demos because we have such a broad portfolio, from the all flash arrays to our versus stack offering to a whole set of modern data protection management control for storage, which manages in control storage, that's not ours, right? Our competitors storage as well, and, of course, our software to find storage. So we're going to do a big announcement. The focus of that will be around our storage solutions. These air solutions blueprints reference architectures is Jane, you mentioned that use our software and our storage systems that allow reseller or end user to configure systems easily. Think of it as the ultimate wrestling recipe for that German chocolate cake. But it's the perfect recipe. It's tried. It's true, it's tested. It's been on the Food Channel twenty seven times and everybody loves it. That's what we do with our our solutions. Blueprints. We'll have some announcements around modern data protection, and obviously a big focus of IBM. Storage is been in the space. So both storage as an Aye aye platform for aye aye, applications are workloads but also the incorporation of technology into our own storage systems and software. So be having announcements around that on February fifth going into think, which will then be the week after in San Francisco. >> Great. So I'm here and trusted data protection plays into that. Aye, aye. Intelligence machine intelligence. And I'm also hearing header of Geneti multiple platforms. Whether it's your storage, you said our competitors now does that also include sort of the clouds? Fear we're not announcing anything. But you guys have you know, you've seen your pictures. That's azure itt's a w a s. I mean, that continues >> so absolutely so. Whether it be what we do from backup in archive, right, let's take the easy one. So we support not only the protocol of IBM clad object storage which we acquired and allows you to have object storage either on premise or in a cloud in stance e ation. But we also support the s three protocol. So, for example, our spectrum scale software giant scale out. In fact, the two fastest supercomputers world you spectrum scale over four hundred fifty petabytes running on spectrum scale, and they continue their to an object store that supports us three. Or it can tear toe IBM clad object stories through that IBM clad object storage customer. That's great for using the S three protocol. You, Khun, Tear to that as well. That's just one example. Same thing we do for cyber resiliency. So from a cyber resents me perspective, we could do things with any cloud vendor oven air cat air gap, right? And so you could do that, eh? With tape. But you could also do that with the clouds. So if your cloud is your backup archive replication repository, then you can always roll back to a known good copy. You don't have to pay the ransom writer. When you clean up the malware, you can roll back to a known good copy, and we provide that across all of the platforms in a number of ways. Our protect family, our new products, a safeguard copy for the main friend that we announced October. So all that allows us to be multi cloud resiliency as well as how do we connect a multi cloud backup archive automated tearing all kinds of clouds, whether the IBM cloud and, of course, I'm a shareholder. So I love that, but at the same time were realistic. Lots of people use Amazon Google Azar. And like I said, there's thousands of mid two small cloud providers all over the world, and we support them, too. We engage with everyone. >> What about SAS? You know, that's one of the questions we've been trying to squint through and understand is because when you talk about five cloud providers is obviously infrastructures of service. And then there's their service providers like like Advanced. And then there's like a gazillion SAS Companies >> write a lot of data >> in there and a lot of data in there. How should we think about, you know, protecting that data? Securing that data is that sort of up to the SAS vendor, and thou shalt not touch. Or should that be part of the scope of AH, storage company? Well, so what we do >> is we engage with the SAS vendor, so we have a number of different sass coming is, in fact, one of them was on the Cube two years ago with us. They were startup in the cyber security space and all of its delivered over SAS. So what they do is in that case, the use our flash system product line, they get the performance they need to deliver south. They want no bottlenecks because obviously you have to go over the network when you're doing SAS Andi. Also, what they do is data encryption at rest. So when the data is brought in because we have on our flash arrays capability and most of our product line especially the flash systems to have no performance hit on encrypt their decrypt because its hardware embedded, they're able to have the data at rest encrypted for all their customers. That gives them a level of security when it's at rest on their site. At the same time, we've given the right performance. They need tohave soft reserve, so we engage with all we pry have three hundred, four hundred different SAS companies who are the actual software vendor and their deployment model. This software's interest, by the way, we do that as well as I mentioned, over three hundred cloud providers today have a backup is a service and the engine ease their spectrum. Protect or spectrum protect. Plus, but they may call it something else. In fact, we just had a public reference out from Silver String, which is out in the UK, and all they do is cyber resiliency. Backup in archive. That's their service. They have their own product, but then spectrum Protect and Spectrum Check plus is the engine underneath their Prada. So that's an example. In this case, the backup is a service, which, I would argue is not infrastructure, but more of an application. But then true what you call real application providers like cyber security vendors, we have a vendor who in fact, does something for all of the universities and colleges. United States. They have about eight thousand of them, including the junior colleges, and they run all their bookstores. So when you place an order, all their air NPR, everything they do is from this SAS vendor that's based in there in the Northeast. And they've got, like I said, about a thousand colleges and universities in the U. S. And Canada, and they offer this if you will bookstore as a sass service and the students use it. University uses it. And, of course, the bookstores are designed to, you know, make a little money for the university, and they all use that so that's another example. And they use are flash systems as well. And then they back up that data internally with spectrum protectors. They obviously it's the financial data as well as the inventory of all of these book stores all over the United States at the collegiate >> level right now. James Way gotta wrap, but just sort of give you the final word. UK specialist, right? So Brexit really doesn't affect you. Is that a fair statement? >> Uh, we'll do? Yes. >> How so? >> I think it's too early to tell. No one really knows. I think that's all the debates are about. AJ's trying to understand that on DH for us. We're just watching and observing. >> Staying focused on your customers, obviously. So no predictions as to what's going to happen. I was not from a weeks ago. I got hurt both sides. You know, it's definitely gonna happen, All right, Not happen, but okay, again give you the last word. You know? What's your focus? Over the next twelve eighteen months? >> Eso all our focus is really about visibility, So they they they've touched on that. We're talking about security for customers. Understanding whether data is whether exposure point saw. That's our keep. Keep focusing on DH versus stack on dh thie IBM store wise product underpin all of those offerings that we have on. That will continue to be to be so forward. >> Guys. Great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube and our pleasure hosting you. Thanks. Appreciate, Really welcome. Alright, Keep right, everybody. We'll be back. Day Volante was stew Minutemen from Cisco live in Barcelona. >> No.

>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-hosts. Stu Miniman, John Furrier has been here all week. Day three coverage of Cisco Live!, Barcelona. Cisco Live EMEA, and R. We learned the other day, add R for Russia. Kaustubh Das is back. KD is the vice president of product management for data center at Cisco and he's joined by Kevin Egan who is the director of the computer systems group for data center. Also from Cisco, gents, good to see you, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> KD, Data center was a real focus of the announcements this week. The data center is exploding to a lot of different places. What's going on in the group? >> It's been a terrific weekend, you're right. Data center was a core of a lot of the announcements this week, and as we kicked off the key note with this concept that the data center is no longer centered. It's really, the data moves to the edges, the data center is moving to the edges. We had a lot of announcements around Hyperflex, Hyperflex anywhere, this product that we've been innovating on like monsters. Within a very short time, gone from a brand-new product on the market to a magic quarter liter with Gartner, and really kind of doing a lot of industry firsts with that. That's been a big focus. We had a lot of announcements with our technology partners, because we not only innovate within Cisco, but we work with Pure and NetApp and Citrix and Intel Optane and Nvidia to bring products to the market that get the richness of their innovation and our innovation together. The other big focus has been all about programmability. As the world becomes much more programmable, focus devops automation, it's been around Intersight and programmability and taking that to the next level. >> Interesting. So of course we always talk about shipping five megabytes of code as opposed to shipping petabytes through a straw into the god box. But so Kevin, programmability's a key theme here, of course we're in the devnet zone. We had Susie Wee on yesterday and she was just talking about the evolution of Cisco infrastructure and how early on you guys made the decision. Let's make all this stuff programmable. And that was sort of a game changer, your thoughts. >> Yeah, no it's been amazing. The growth of just Cisco devnet right? We've got half a million developers now developing against our SDKs, our devops, our opportunities all across our Cisco platforms. We've got thousands of Cisco resources doing work on that, producing those libraries, producing that, those sample sets of code and contributing to the communities. And today our customers are using it in a way that they've never really done. Previously it was a sort of a fix because vendor tools weren't getting it done. And now they're using these automation tools to really do every day tasks out to the mass, to reduce the complexity for their teams and reduce the burden. And then of course to have that repeatability and that security and that compliance aspect and it's been amazing the explosion. >> Yeah. The simplicity reminds me back you know the earliest days of UCS, you know UCS was built for that wave of virtualization and as KD has talked with us this week already about some of the partnerships that you've built. The wave of converged infrastructure, UCS really dominated in that marketplace, but here now we talk about AI with some of your partners, you talk about programmability, it's like that's not the Cisco UCS that I remember launching. So maybe give us the updates specifically that was announced this week. Where the platform has gone in more recent days. >> So I can start maybe, >> Yeah, absolutely. >> UCS came up with this concept of everything needs to be programmable, everything needs to be an API. And maybe we were a little ahead of our time, we conceived of this in 2007, got the product out in 09 and really from the very genesis of the program, of the UCS program, it's been a programmable platform, it's been everything's an API. The UI makes calls to the API, our SDKs make calls to the APIs. So that's been the core platform and in some ways it feels like the industry is coming to where we thought it would come to a little bit earlier. So they, this whole concept of infrastructure's code, softly defined what do we want to call it, this was core and germane to the product itself. What we've done lately is, it's taken that policy that we're encapsulated and taken out all of the silver into the fabric for scalability, we've taken that now into the cloud. And what that does is it leads to that velocity of innovation becoming even higher, the ability to create new and unique use cases becomes higher, the ability to conceive it becomes higher. And all of that coupled with where IT is going, which is becoming much more devops, much more around automation. I think those forces are coupling together to create some really unique use cases. >> You said, you gestured take it into the cloud, which is interesting, pointing. What does that mean? Taking it into the cloud? >> So let's speed back a little bit. So what we start off with was listen, a silver's a box, we need to abstract the silver, the personality of the silver out of that box into policy, put it in the fabric. And that allows us to really scale that and give the box different personalities depending upon the workload. What we've done is, we've launched a product called Intersight. Intersight takes that policy and makes it a SAS service, management of the service we want to call it. So now as data moves everywhere, as data centers move everywhere, as our applications no longer become monolithic but become these combinations of little applications communicating across data centers, it allows us to have a centralized dashboard for our infrastructure that we can access, because it's in the cloud, from anywhere. And because it's in the cloud it can kind of get, get that innovation wheel turning much faster. It's just been game changing, and obviously there's other things that can happen once you do that. You can have proactive guidance coming down from the cloud, you can have golden images come down from the cloud, you can do workload specific settings. So there's a lot of new areas that it opens up once you, >> Analytics, right? >> Analytics. >> Machine intelligence. >> So we've got the takeover happening in the devnet zone right now, so focus on the data center, everybody's got t shirts and I think it says Hyperflex on them, big announcement this week about Hyperflex anywhere. Kevin you know I think that when people heard HCI, they often picture a box, or it's a group of boxes it's in a rack, it's all that and everything, and the thing is as an analyst I was poking at it, it's like "well we virtualized a lot of the stuff "and we put it in a new form factor." That's great to modernize the platform but how do we make it cloud native, how does it fit into a hybrid and multi cloud world, and it feels like we're reaching that point now. So help us connect the dots as to how, what HCI was fits into this hybrid and multi cloud world today. >> Absolutely. I mean, HCI when it came out was an alternative to SAN, I mean it was an alternative and it was touting simplicity, touting you know grow with your applications. But really now, with the multi cloud instances that our customers are looking at, they have to have a way to deploy those, a way to connect to those remotely, manage those, monitor those, actually connect that back to the core so that you can take advantage of the analytics that are running at the core and make real time recommendations, make real time adjustments for services and those type of, you know that connectivity is really what we mean by Hyperflex anywhere. It's the evolution of how you deploy, how you manage, and then of course that day two, day five, day one hundred where you're actually making that experience simple for the customers. >> Help us understand exactly, is this, do I just have the backup image in a public cloud, do I actually have similar software stacks, what's the expanse? >> Let me try to unpack that a little bit. I think it's three different vectors that we're doing. So we want as we modernize, and as our customers modernize, they're looking for a much more cloud-like limber, elastic platform. That's the first vector, that's what HCI has done, that's what we've done. And we've actually done it on steroids because we've taken that code-designed hardware and software much like the public cloud guys are doing, but we control that and we can give that to our enterprise customers and our enterprise grade resilient infrastructure. The first thing is that, the second piece of it is what our customers and really our developers and the customers are wanting to do, is to create in one place and deploy in another. So create on the private cloud, deploy in the public cloud, or create in the public cloud, deploy in the private cloud, or actually have an application that bridges the two. So having a homogenous development environment whether it's, and a lot of this is around the container frameworks, whether it's on the public cloud, private cloud. That's key, and what we've done with Hyperflex, and the integrations we've got with our container platform, with open shift, with cloud center, which was again a big announcement this week. That's that second vector, is being able to port applications, develop one place, deploy any place. And the third piece is what we've been talking about all through this segment, which is the ability to now have the cloud drive your infrastructure. Everything's connected, everything's analyzed in the cloud, there's telemetry, there's proactive guidance, there's a common dashboard there's centralized monitoring, there's the ability to deploy, like we did in the key note demonstrating in the key note, multiple different sides spread out across the world, from a cental location. I think that's game changing. >> I'd like to get your take on differentiation. Obviously you guys are biased. Cisco's different, it's better. But I want to hear why. So relative to other infrastructure players, are you, in your words, however you want to describe it more cloud like more programmable, where's the differentiation? >> Go ahead and I'll later on. >> Yeah sure. So basically we started with a foundation of UCS and that foundation, virtualize compute bare metal compute, and of course now hyper-converge, and the reason that it allows us to do things, allows us to Hyperflex anywhere, allows us to have that cloud-based model is because we built that infrastructure around the API from day one. When we started this, that programmatic infrastructure, we were talking to customers, it was stateless it was desired state config, they didn't know what we were talking about. I mean, they had no idea when this came out. But that's the foundation that really allows us to drive the API integrations to our app layers, which is what KD was talking about, and then of course from there to our multi cloud integrations and that's really the foundation that laid, that we laid early on. And that's why all of our UCS platform really enables this cloud integration. >> Yeah, I mean the way I look at it is nobody else has a fully API driven infrastructure. Everything's an API for us, we don't expose APIs after the fact, it is built around, it's an API first infrastructure. And everything is built around them. Whether it's our STKs, our integrations with you know Pop and then Ansible, and those kind of tool sets, our integration with other tool sets that people use. It's all driven through that. The second thing that is different is, we have an emulator, so we can allow our customers to really time travel through the whole process of deployment. I mean, our customers can deploy the infrastructure before the infrastructure hits the loading dock because they can download the UCS emulator. They can actually configure, deploy, build the whole policy on our management platform, test it out, do the what ifs on the emulator. When the equipment shows up, we're ready to go, we are in business, nobody else can do that. And the final thing which is, aside from all of the cloud connected pieces I've talked about, the breadth of Cisco's portfolio spanning from all of our networking assets, our SD WAN assets, our security assets, our collaboration assets, our cloud assets, that breadth gets us to implement use cases for our customers that are just, it's just impossible for anybody else to do. >> We've heard lots of proof points here in the devnote zone specifically from programmability and the automation. I've talked to some service providers here at the show, we've also heard about the journey that enterprise customers are going through to kind of understand that space and learn places here like this. Kevin, I'm sure you're talking to a lot of customers here, maybe if you have examples as to you know the exemplars of who're doing this well, and what people can learn from customers like that. >> Yeah, I mean it's amazing right. In just devnet alone we've got sessions on UCS with Python, STKs, UCS with Powertool, how to integrate with Ansible, these are just becoming common terms, common household terms for our customers. As you go up to enterprise customers, service provider customers, they're using these tools in a day to day manner to do the automation on top of, to really deploy and manage their apps, right, and the way that, I mean, it's exciting, we have customers from all segments of all industry, and they really they use these programmatic, KD's simple example of platform emulator, you don't realize how powerful that is, where you can set that same exact state machine that's in your UCS, you can put it on your laptop, set up all your policies, and then when that gear hits the dock, you are up in hours. Literally we have very large e-commerce sites, they do this, thousands of servers hit it, and in a matter of hours, they've applied those policies and they're up and running. Python, we've got Python, Ruby, Powertool, software developer kits, we've got devops that sit on those, and Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and these are just the automation so if you want to do it yourself, we've got the world class API, nobody else gives you that programmatic API. That's how we built our foundation. If you want Cisco to call those APIs, we have Intersight and we'll make those calls for you. If you just want to do some simple scripting, Powertool. You can automate certain processes, it doesn't have to be the whole end to end. You know you can use all these, it's basically choice to really, what your applications are demanding and what your customers are demanding. >> That's a strong story, one of breadth and depth. We're out of time, but KD I wonder if you could sort of put a bow on Cisco Live! Europe this year, big takeaways from your point of view. >> Listen, we've been innovating like monsters and it's such a terrific week for us to come here, to really touch and feel and listen to our customers and see the delight on their faces as we show them what we've been doing. And this part of the show, day three the devnet takeover, this is where it gets really really real, because now we get to go down to the depths of looking at those APIs, looking at those use cases, getting people to play around with them. So it's just been terrific, I love it. >> I love it too, we're the interview monsters this week. So guys thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Cicso Live! In Barcelona. Be right back. (upbeat electronic outro)

[Narrator] Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live teach coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. Stu, myself, and John Fur will be here all week. Eric Herzog is here, long time Cube alumn friend, great to see you again. He's the CMO of IBM storage division. he's joined by James Amies who's the head of networks at Advanced, the service provider guys. Welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you again. >> Great thanks for having us. Love being on theCUBE. >> So we love having you. So James let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about Advanced, do you want to dig into some of the networking trends? We're hearing a lot about it here at Cisco Live. >> Yeah thanks, Advanced are a manage service provider, software company based in the UK, one of the largest software companies in the UK, providing entrance solutions for lots of different market verticals, including healthcare, local government, regional government, national infrastructure projects we get involved with, as well charity sector, legal sector, a lot of education work that we do. And it's just real diverse portfolio products that we offer. And with the manage services piece, we also offer complete IT outsourcing. So this is desktop support, telephony support, printer support, all the way back into integration with public cloud platforms and private cloud platforms. The majority of which is our own. >> So Eric, Advanced are both a customer and a partner. >> Right >> Right and so you love Versastack, These guys are I presume are Versastack customers as well? >> Yes Versastack customer in the Versastack as you know integrates Cisco UCS Cisco networking infrastructure, IBM storage of all types, entry products up into the fastest off flash rays with our software spectrum virtualizer, spectrum accelerate family, and James' company is using Versastacks as part of their infrastructure. Which they then offer as a service to end users as James just described. >> So let's talk about some of the big trends that guys are seeing and how you're both responding to customers, and you're responding to your customers. So we're seeing here today, a lot about multi-cloud. We've been hearing that for a while. The network is flattening, you're a network expert, love to get your thoughts on that. Security obviously is a huge topic. End to end management, another big topic, something that IBM is focused on. So James what are the big mega trends that you're seeing that are driving your business decisions and your customers' activities. >> So I think one of the big changes we're seeing is a change from large enterprise scale deployments of a particular type of technology and customers are now choosing because they're informed, the best fit for a particular application or a particular service, and that may be coming to a service provider like ourselves, or for our service product to them, or they're looking for us to run an infrastructure service for them, or integrate with a public cloud offering. So the competition of the public cloud for service providers is key. And I think people were looking around a few years ago, thinking how do we compete to this. Well with the partnerships that we have with IBM and Cisco, it gives us a very compelling, competitive offering where we can turn around and say, well we can give you a like for like, but we can give you a slightly better service, because we can give you guaranteed availability. We can give you guaranteed price points, and we this is all backed with key vendor certified designs, so we're not talking about going out and developing a solution that takes as maybe 18 months, to take to market, this is understanding a requirement for a quick Q and A with a customer, align that to a reference architecture, that we can literally just pick up off the shelf, deploy into our data centers using the standard building blocks that we use across the business. So Nexus, nine K seven K's, or our standard` bread and butter inside the data center environment, as Eric pointed out, Cisco UCS is our key intel compute platform that we use. And the storewise IBM product has been a real true success story for us. So we started off being a mixed vendor house, where we would align storage requirement based with what we could find in the market that was a good fit. But the storewise products just basically just allowed us to standardize, and the speed of deployment is one of the key things. So we started out with a very lengthy lead time to serve as ready. Which is when we start charging for revenue. And if we want a 90 day build, well we've got a lot of professional service time, a lot of engineering time getting that ready to go and take to the customer, and then we turn it on, and then we can start seeing revenue from that platform. With Versastack, it's enabled us to accelerate how quickly we can turn that on. And we've seen that drop to literally days through standardization, elements of automation as well. Many of our environments are bespoke because we have such a wide range of different types of customers with different needs. But it allows us to take those standard building blocks, algin them to their needs, and deliver that service. >> James we found the MSP's are often in the middle of those discussions that customers are having on multi-cloud, so you talked a lot about the services you build. Are they also coming to you? Do you tie into the public cloud services? >> Yes. >> Maybe you can help expand a little bit on how that works. Five years ago it was, the public clouds were all going to kill the manage service providers, and what we see is customers can't sort out half of what's going on. They've got to be able to turn to partners like you to be able to figure this out. >> Yeah that's a fantastic question. Because I think three years ago, we'd be talking to our customers, and they were "I am going to this public cloud" or " I am going to build this infrastructure." Whereas now they're making more informed select decisions based on (mumbles) The drive to the hosted office and voice platforms, often by microsoft, is a big drive in many of our ITO customers are going in that direction. But it's how we integrate that with their legacy applications. Some of the ERP solutions that some of our customers use have had millions of pounds of investment into them. And that's not something that I can just turn off and walk away from overnight. So it's how we're integrating that, and we're doing that at the network level, so it's how we're pairing with different service providers, bringing that and integrating that, and offering it to them as a solution. And what we try to position ourselves is really, the same experience regardless of where we're placing IT consumption workload. It doesn't matter if it's inside our data centers, whether we're talking on one of the public cloud platforms, or even on premise, we have quite a few customers that still have significant presence on premise. Because that's right for their business, depending on what they're doing. Especially with some of the research scientists. >> So you've got to deliver flexibility in your architecture. I know you talk a lot about software define, you guys made a big move to software define a couple years ago actually. Maybe discuss how that fits into how you're servicing Advanced and other clients. >> Sure so IBM storage has embraced multi-cloud for several years now. So our solutions, well of course they work with IBM cloud, and IBM cloud private work with Amazon. They work with Azure, Google Cloud. And in fact, some of our products for example, the Versastack not only is Advanced using it, but we've got probably 40 or 50 public small medium sized cloud providers, that are public references for the Versastack, and spectrum protect, which is our back-up product, number one in the enterprise back-up space, spectrum protect has got at least 300 cloud providers, medium, small, and big who offer the engine underneath, for their backup as a service, is spectrum protect. So we make sure that whether it be our transparent cloud tiering, our cyber resiliency technology, what we do in back up archive. Object storage works with essentially, all cloud providers, that way someone like James, a CSP, MSP, can leverage our products, and we like I said, we got tons of public references around Versastack for that. But so can an enterprise, and in fact I saw a survey recently, and it was done in Europe, and in North American, that when you look at a roughly, the two billion US size revenue and up, the average company of that sizing up, will use five different public cloud providers at one time, whether that be due to legal reasons, whether that procurement, the web is really the internet. And the cloud is really just, it's been around for 20 some years. So in bigger accounts, guess who is now involved? Procurement, well we love that you did that deal with IBM cloud, but you are going to get a competitive quote now from Amazon and Microsoft right. So that's driven it, legal's driven it, certain countries right the data needs to stay in that country, even if you're cloudafying it, so to speak. So If the cloud provider doesn't have a data center there, guess what, another GI use different, and then you of course still have some large entities that still allow regional buying patterns, so they'll have three or four different cloud providers, that are quote, certified by corporate, and then you can use whichever one you want. So we make sure that we can take advantage of that wave. At IBM we ride the wave. We don't fight the wave. >> So you've got in that situation, you've got these multi clouds, you've got different API's. You've got different frameworks. How do you abstract all that complexity, you got Cisco coming at it from a networking standpoint, IBM now with red hat is good. They'd be a big player in that, that world VM ware. What do you guys do James, in terms of simplifying all that multi cloud complexity for people? >> I think with some of it, is actually demystifying and it's engaging with our partners to understand what the proposition is, and how we can develop that and align that to, not only in your own business, but more importantly to the needs of our customers. We've got some really really talented technicians work within Advanced. We've got a number of different forums that allow them to feedback their ideas. And we've got the alignments between those partners, and some of those communities, so that we can have an open discussion, and drive some of that thinking forward. But ultimately it's engaging with the customers. So the customers' feedback is key on how we shape and deliver, not only the service to them, but also to the service to other customers. We have a number of customers that are very similar, but they may work in different spaces. Some are even competitive, so we have to tread that line very carefully and safely. But it's a good one to one relationship between the client service managers, the technicians we have inside the business, having that complete 360 communication is key. And that's really the bottom too, is communication. >> James I'd like you to dig into security a little bit. I think we surpassed a couple years ago. I'm not going to go to the cloud because it's not secured to, oh I understand, it's time for me to at least re-evaluate my security, and most likely manage service providers, public clouds are probably more secure than what I had in my data center. But if I've got multiple environments, there's a lot of complexity there, so how do you traverse that, make sure that you've got a comprehensive security practice, not sure all these point solutions, all over the place? >> Yeah so that comes down to visibility. So it's visibility, understanding where all the control points are, within a given infrastructure. And how the landscape looks, so we're working quite closely with a number actually of key Cisco and IBM partners, as well as IBM and Cisco themselves directly. To have a comprehensive offering that allows us to position to our customers, you used to once upon a time. You had one gate. So all we needed is good security on your internet fighting firewall. But now you may have a 10, 20, 30 of those, we need to have consistent policies across those. We need to understand how they're performing, but also potentially if there's any attack vector on one of them, how somebody's trying to look into compromise that. So it's centralized intelligence, and that's where we're starting to look at AI operations to gather all our information. Long gone are the days where you have 20 people sitting in a room just reading screens. Those 20 people now need to see reams and reams of information instantly. Something needs to be caught up to them, so they can make their decision quickly, and access upon it. And that's really where we're positioning ourselves in the market to differentiate. I'm working with few partners to be able to do that. >> Eric talk about your announcement cadence. IBM has big show, Think, coming up in a couple weeks, Cube's going to be there of course. What can we expect from you guys? >> So we're actually going to announce on the fifth before Think. We want to drive end users and our business partners to the storage campus, which probably one of the largest campuses at IBM Think. We'll have over 15 pedestals of demo. And actually multiple demos because we have such a broad portfolio from the all flash arrays to our Versastack offering, to a whole set of modern day protection, management and control for storage. Which manage is going to control storage that's not ours right, our competitor's storage as well. And of course our software Defined storage. So we're going to do a big announcement. The focus of that will be around our storage solutions. These are solutions, blueprints, references, architectures, Jame you mentioned that use our software, and our storage systems that allow reseller or end user to configure systems easily. Think of it as the ultimate recipe for the german chocolate cake, but it's the perfect recipe. It's tried it's true it's tested, it's been on the food channel 27 times and everybody loves it. That's what we do with our solutions blueprints. We'll all have some announcements around modern data protection and obviously a big focus of IBM storage is been in the AI space. So both storage as an AI platform for AI applications workloads, but also the incorporation of AI technology into our own storage systems and software. So we'll be having announcements around that on February fifth, going into Think, which will be the week after in San Francisco. >> Great so I'm hearing trusted, data protection plays into that. Ai intelligence, machine intelligence and I'm also hearing heterogeneity, multiple platforms whether it's your storage you said, or competitor's storage. Now does that also include the cloud sphere? Without announcing anything, but you guys have -- >> Yeah. >> I've seen your pictures ads Azure. It's AWS, I mean that continues yes? >> Absolutely so whether it be what we do from back up in archive right. Let's take the easy one, so we support not only the protocol of IBM cloud object storage, which we acquired, and allows you to have object storage either on premise or in a cloud instantiation. But we also support the S3 protocol, so for example our spectrum scale software, giant scale out in fact, the two fastest super computers in the world, use spectrum scale. Over 450 petabytes running on spectrum scale. And they can tier to an object store that supports S3. Or it can tier to IBM cloud and object storage. So we have IBM storage customer that's great. If you're using the S3 protocol, you can tier to that at well. So that's just one example. Same thing we do for cyber resiliency, so for a cyber resiliency perspective, we can do things with any cloud vendor of an air gap right. And so you can do that, A with tape, but you can also do that with the cloud. So if your cloud is your backup archive replication repository, then you can always roll back to a known good copy. You don't have to pay the ransom right. Or when you clean up the malware, you can roll back to a known good copy, and we provide that across all of the platforms in a number of different ways, our protect family, our new product safe guard copy for the main frame that we announced it on October. So all that allows us to be multi-cloud resiliency, as well as how do we connect to multi-cloud, back up archive automated tiering to all kinds of clouds, whether it be IBM cloud, and of course I'm a share holder, so I love that. But at the same time we're realistic. Lots of people us Amazon, Google, Azure, and like I said there's thousands of mid to small cloud providers all over the world. And we support them too. We engage with everyone. >> What about SAS, one of the questions we've been trying to squint through, and understand is, because when you talk about five cloud providers, there's obviously infrastructures of service, and then there's service providers like Advanced, and then there's like a Gazillion SAS companies. >> Right. >> Lot of data in there. >> And a lot of Data in there. How should we think about protecting that data, securing that data? Is that up to the SAS vendor, and thou shalt not touch or should that be part of the scope of a storage company? >> Well so what we do is we engage with the SAS vendor, so we have a number of different SAS companies in fact, one was on theCUBE two years ago with us. They were a start up in the cybersecurity space, and all of it's delivered over SAS. What they do is in that case, they use our flash system product line, they get the performance they need to deliver SAS. They want no bottle necks. Because obviously you have to go over the network when you're doing SAS. And then also what they do is data encryption at rest. So when the data is brought it because we have on our flash arrays, the capability in most of our product line, especially the flash systems, to have no performance suit on encrypt or decrypt because it's hardware embedded, they're able to have the data at rest encrypted for all their customers that gives them a level of security when it's at rest on their site. At the same time we give them the right performance they need to have softwares and service. So we probably have 300,400 different SAS companies who are the actual software vendor and their deployment model is softwares and service, by the way we do that as well. As I mentioned over 300 cloud providers today have a backup as a service and the engine needs a spectrum protect or spectrum protect plus, but they may call it something else. In fact we just had a public reference out from Silver String, which is out in the UK. And all they do is Cyber resiliency backup and archive, that's their service. They have their own product, but then spectrum protect, and spectrum protect plus is the engine underneath their product. So that's an example, in this case, of back up as a service, which I would argue is not infrastructure. But more of an application. But then true what you call real application providers like cybersecurity vendors. We have a vendor who in fact, does something for all of the universities and colleges in the United States. They have about 8,000 of them, including the junior colleges. And they run all of their bookstores, so when you place an order all their AR and PR, everything they do is from this SAS vendor. They're in the northeast and they've got like I said, about 8,000 colleges and universities in the US and Canada. And they offer this, if you will, bookstore as a SAS service. And the students use it, the university uses it. And of course the bookstores are designed to at least make a little money for the University. And they all use that. So that's another example, and they use our flash systems as well. And then they back up that data internally with spectrum protect because they obviously it's the financial data as well as the inventory of all of these bookstores all over the United States at the colligate level. >> Right. >> Now James we got to wrap, but just to give you the final word, UK specialist right, so Brexit really doesn't affect you. Is that a fair statement or? >> It will do yes. >> How so? >> I think it's too early to tell. And no one really knows. I think that's what all the debates are about, is trying to understand that. And for us, I think we're just watching and observing. >> And staying focused on your customers obviously >> Yeah. >> So no predictions as to what's going to happen. When I was in the UK-- >> Not from me. a few weeks ago I heard both sides. You know oh it's definitely going to happen, oh it might not happen. But okay, again give you the last word. What's your focus over the next 12, 18 months? >> Our focus is really about visibility so Dave touched on that when we were talking about the security. For customers understanding where their data is, where their exposure points are. That's our key focus. And Versastack and the IBM storewise products underpin all of those offerings that we have. And that will continue to be so moving forward. >> Guys great to see you. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. And our pleasure hosting you. >> Great thank you really appreciate it. >> You're really welcome, alright keep it right there everybody. We'll be back. Dave Velante with Stu Minamin from Cisco live in Barcelona. (electronic music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cue covering Sisqo Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Barcelona. This is Cisco Live. I'm Dave a lot with stew Mina, man. And you're watching the Cube. The leader >> in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Dr. Thomas Shearer's here is the chief architect of tle Indus looks onboard and David Cope is back. He's a senior director of marketing development for the Cisco Cloud Platform and Solutions Group. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Thanks. So you're very welcome. So tell Indus. Tell us about Delinda. >> So Telindus, we are actually an integrator, a cloud operator, and a tech company. And we're partnering over the years with Cisco, with all the products that they have notably, and lately we are moving also into the public cloud. We have private cloud offering, but we see our first appetite coming up with our customers in the public cloud, which are heavily regulated industries. And there we are working notably with the team off Dave to have an offering there that enables them to move into the clouds. >> So these guys are a customer or a partner? >> Well, you know, what's special about them. They're actually both. So they're a big customer of Cisco offerings, Cloud Center and other offerings. The Cisco Container Platform. But they also use those to provide services to their customers. Expect so there are a great sounding board about what the market needs and how our products are working. >> So Thomas telling has been around since. If I saw right. Nineteen seventy nine. So you know, we weren't talking multi cloud back then, but it is a big discussion point here at the show. You said private public, you're using Cloud Center, maybe explain to us what multi cloud means to you and your customers today. >> I would say most customers that we have a large organizations we manage the IT infrastructure. We're also doing integration projects, but those customers they are normally not really technology companies, you know, they are searching to work with us because we deal with the good part off their IT operations. So at these companies they come from a private infrastructure, they have there these days. They're VMWare installation their private clouds and I think also, it will stay like this for for a good amount of time. So there's no good reason to just go into the cloud because it's fancy or because there is something that you cannot have certainly there is. But that's stable progress that they are following. So what we need is actually to catch the low hanging fruits that exist in a public cloud for our customers. But in such a way that it satisfies their day today IT operations and sometimes it's our IT operations who is doing that since we are managing this. So for us, actually, hyper cloud, to say short, is actually the standard, or multicloud. >> So I wonder we're almost two years into GDP, are one year into the owner's finds. How has GDP are affected? You and your customers and What's it like out there these days? >> GDPR is for me not the main reason for public, private, multicloud installations for us and that involves GDPR is the regulation that we are in, so our customers are notably from the financial sector, and they're very strict on conservative security. rules for good because their main business is they're selling trust. There is not much more business where you trust that much than a bank. They know everything about you, and that's something they cannot sacrifice. Now, in Europe, we have the advantage. Data is that strict regulation which puts kind of standards. And that involves obviously also the GDPR thing. But if I look into that standards, that regulation imposes its very technical, they say. For example, please make sure if you move into the clouds then avoid a lock-in, be confident on what will be your exit cost. What will be your transition cost, and don't get married to anyone. And that's where Dave's team comes into the game because that they provide that solution, actually. >> I mean, that's music to your ears, I would think. I mean, I have to be honest. If I were a public cloud provider, I'd say no, don't do multi cloud. We have one cloud, does it all, But no customer speaks like that. >> You're right. And I think to me what I love about Linda's in the way they use the product is they work in such a highly regulated environment, where policies managing common policies across very different environments becomes critical. So how do I manage access control and security profiles and placement policies all across very different multiplied environments? That's hard, and that's been one of the cornerstones that we've focused on in Cloud Centre. >> Yeah, so look, double click on that. We're talking Teo, a guest earlier, and I was asking them, sort of poking it. There's >> a lot of people who want that business because it's a huge >> business opportunity. It's, um, some big, well established companies. Cisco's coming at it from a position of strength, which course? Network, But I'll ask you the same question. What gives you confidence that Cisco is in the best position for customers? Two urn, right? Tio manage their multi cloud data environment? >> I think it's I think it's a great question. I mean, for my perspective and I love our customers perspective. But if you think about Cisco's heritage around the network and security, I think most people would agree. They're very strong there. It's a very natural extension to have Cisco be a leader and multicloud because after all, it's how do I securely connect very diverse environments together. And now a little further. Now, how do I help customers manage workloads, whether they be existing or new cloud native workloads, So we find it's a very natural extension to our core strength and through both development and acquisition Cisco's got a very, very broad and deep portfolio to do that. >>So your thoughts on that? >> Yes, Cisco is coming from a network in history. But if your now look into the components there is, actually, yeah, the Networking Foundation, there is CUCS, which we have, for example, in our infrastructure, there is hyperflex there are then solutions like CCP that you can run a DevOps organization can combine it with Cloud Center to make it hybrid. And just today I learned a new thing, which is Kubeflow. I just recognized Cisco is the first one that is coming up with a platform as a service enabled Private Cloud. So if you go private Cloud usually talk about running VM's. But now with With With a CCP and it's open source projects Kubeflow which I think will be very interesting to see in conjunction with CCPN I heard that it's going to happen. You're actually Cisco is the first one delivering such a solution to the markets. So it's growth that just have >> a thing for the cnc es eso que >> bernetti slow way Don't have to send a cease and desist letter, right? >> CCP that Francisco Container platform Ryan out sad Some while ago on Prim Cooper. Nettie Stack. Right. >> So, Thomas, you know, with the update on Cloud Center suite now containerized, You got micro services. It's built with communities underneath and using cube flow. I'm guessing that's meaningful to you. There's a lot of things in this announcement that it's like, Okay, it sounds good, but in the real world, you know what? What do you super excited for? The container ization? You know, I would think things like the action orchestrator and the cost Optimizer would have value, but, you know, police tell us yourself >> The CloudCenter was already valuable before, you know, we a did investigation about what kind of cloud brokering and cloud orchestrations solutions exist back in those days when it was called CliQr CloudCenter and me and my colleagues know that CliQr team back then as well as now at Cisco we appreciated that they they became one family now. For me, CloudCenter fulfills certain requirements that I simply have to fulfill for our customer. And it's a mandatory effect that I have to feel for them, like being able to ensure and guarantee portability. Implementing policies, segregation of duties were necessary, things like that. I have to say now that it becomes containerized. That's a lot of ease in managing CloudCenter as a solution by itself, and also you have the flexibility to have it better. Also, migratable. It's an important key point that CloudCloud eyes a non cloud centric product that you can run it on-prem that your orchestration that you don't have to log in on the orchestration there and have it on-prem but now can easily move it on things such a GKE because it's it's a container based solution. But I think also there's a SaaS option available so you can just subscribe to it. So you have full range of flexibilities so that a day to day management work flow engine doesn't become a day to day management thing by itself. >> So I wonder if you could paint a picture for us of your environment around since nineteen seventy nine. So you must have a lot of a lot of stuff, a lot of it that you've developed over the years. But you mentioned that you're starting to look a public clouds. You just mentioned your customer base, largely financial services. So they're highly regulated and maybe a little nervous about the cloud. But so paint a picture of your Maybe not for certain workloads. Paint a picture of your environment tunnel where you want to go from. From an architecture and an infrastructure perspective. >> We have our own what we call private managed cloud. That's a product we call U-flex which is  FlexPod reference architecture that's Cisco was networking NetApp storage. Cisco UCS in conjunction with the ember, as a compute. This we use since many years and as I already have said, the regulated market started opening up towards public cloud. So what does it mean? European Banking Authority. So EBA, who's the umbrella organization on European level. They send out a recommendation. Dear countries, please, your financial institution. If they go into the cloud that have to do ABC. The countries I have put in place those regulations they have put in place those controls and for them, they are mostly now in that let's investigate what its influence in the public they come from their private infrastructure. They are in our infrastructure, which is like private infrastructure virtualized and managed by us, mainly VM based. And now the news things on top that they investigate are things like big data, artificial intelligence and things like that which you mostly don't have in private infrastructure. So in that combination is what we have to provide to our customers but their mostly in and investigative mode. >> and okay. And and Cisco is your policy engine management engine across all those clouds, is that right? >> Yes we are able to manage those workloards with CloudCenter. Sometimes it depends also on the operating model. The customer himself is the one using CloudCenter, you know, so it depends, since we are in integrator, cloud operator and also offer our services in the public cloud. It's always the question about who has to manage what. >> One of the things, if I could just add on that we see people providing our products as a service. We're just talking about Kubernetes. Customers today are starting to move Kubernetes just from being like development now into production. And what we're seeing is that these new Kubernetes based applications have non containerized dependencies reach out to another traditional app, reach out to PaaS, a database. And what we try to do is to say, how do you give your customers the ability to get the new and the old working together? Because it'll be that way for quite some time. And that's a part of sort of the new cloud center capabilities also. >> That's that's a valid reason. So you have those legacy services and you don't want just to You cannot just replace them now. Now let's go all in. Let's be cloud native. So you have always thes interoperability things to handle and yeah, that's true. Actually, you can build quite some migration path using containerization. >> Yeah, I mean, you can't customer can't just over rotate to all the new fun buzz words. They got a business to run. Yeah, so this >> And how do I apply security policies and access control and to this very mixed environment now, common policies and that becomes challenging. >> But it's also part of our business. Yes, there have there, for example, financial institution than not a nineteen company. That's where we come in as a for Vita Toe. It's such an industry daddy, via highly value the partnership with Cisco Heavy Cat build new services together. We had that early adopters program, for example, regarding CCP. So Cisco is bringing a service provider into the loop to build what's just right for the customer for them on their behalf. Yes, you describe that is very challenging, is it's In some cases, it's chaos. But that's the opportunity I heard this morning that you guys are going after pretty hard. >> No, it's right. And you've got one set of desires for developers, but now we move into production. Now I t cops gets involved, the sea so gets involved. And how do we have then well thought out integrations into security and network management? Those air all of the things that we're trying to really focus on. >> Well, anywhere the definite zone. So you you were surrounded by infrastructures code. Is there a fits and club? Guys, Thanks so much for coming to Cuba and telling your story. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Enjoyed. Thank you. Alright, Keep it right there, buddy. Stupid him and Dave. Alon. Today we're live from Cisco Live Barcelona. You watching the cube right back?

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Ciscolive! Europe brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our first day of three days of coverage for Cisco live for Europe. Lynn Lucas is here, she's the chief marketing officer for Cohesity. Lynn, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you here in Europe. >> We were just saying it's the first time that we've done this on the continent so, another first. >> Yeah, another first. >> So pleased to be in the US with you guys at multiple shows, and now we're here in Barcelona. >> So it's a great venue. We've actually done you know, a number of shows here and again, it's a pleasure having you on. Let's see, let's get right to it. What's going on with you guys in Cisco? You got some news? Let's talk about it. >> Absolutely. >> As you know, we don't stop innovating, continuous innovation at Cohesity, and a number of new things. So, last week we announced a new Cisco validated design with HyperFlex, and Cohesity integrating for Snapshot. Integration for backup, and of course, instant recovery of that critical data center infrastructure and we're calling it HyperSquared. So you get full hyperconvergence for your primary and of course, your backup and other secondary applications. >> And those guys this morning talked about HyperFlex anywhere Stu so, it's like infinitive hype and infinity HyperFlex. >> HyperSquared. >> So, HyperSquared, love it. So you guys will, how's that work? Obviously you want to be the provider of data protection provider for multi-cloud. That's a huge opportunity for you guys. >> Absolutely. >> So how do you do that? You'll plug into whatever framework the customer wants, presumably a lot of customers want the Cisco framework, how does that all- >> No, absolutely, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, Cisco, obviously one of the most respected IT leaders in the world. Tens of thousands of customers globally depend on them. I'm a Cisco Alum, love being back here at the old stomping grounds. And Cisco's been an investor in Cohesity now since our Series C, so they really saw the promise and the benefit of what Cohesity offers with hyperconverge solutions for modern backup, recovery, and two year point to the cloud. You know Cisco's talking a lot about multi-cloud here and Cohesity with our native cloud integration helps customers protect those backups on, or those applications on HyperFlex. And then instantly move them to a cloud of choice and then as you've mentioned, Cisco has so many fantastic relationships that they're a very strong go to market partner with us. When customers want to buy a solution, they can get the whole solution from Cisco, including Cohesity. >> Yeah Lynn, glad we have you on. >> Because connecting the dots between something like hyperconverge, which we've been talking about for a number of years now and how that fits into multi-cloud is, it's a little clunky sometimes because like, when I've got my data center am I just doing backup to the cloud? Cause what we know is customers at Cisco says their data is, you know, kind of de-centered. It's no longer in the data center, it's all over the place. Companies like Cohesity can give you that centralized data protection no matter where your environment is. Walk us through what you're hearing from your customers, how they look at their data center versus the multicloud environment and data production. >> Yeah so, I think it's you know, customers are now understanding that its not either or, right? There was a time when people thought "wow I'm going to move everything to the cloud" and I really think there's a maturing of an understanding of what's going to work well for me in this cloud first world, what do I want to put there and then what am I going to keep on premises. So that's one of the things that Cohesity innovated; our core technology, a distributed webscale file system, spanning file system which spans the data center and the cloud world seamlessly. And what we're seeing is customers are really using the cloud for archiving, getting off of tape because then they get that search capability very easy when they need to. Tiering and then most importantly, disaster recovery you know, in the event of something man made or natural. Many many organizations moving to the cloud for their second site and with Cohesity, it's very easy to make that transfer happen in a very seamless way with our capabilities set. So I think what we're seeing is this real maturing of how customers look at it as a real holistic environment. And so Cisco calling it data centered, but we call this mass data fragmentation and then with our spanning file system being able to really consolidate that now. >> Yeah, another thing that needs that kind of holistic view is security. >> I know its something that's in your product, there was a ransomware announcement that you made last week. Tell us how security fits into this world. >> Yeah well I think that we all hate to say it, but that old phrase the new normal, unfortunately ransomware and malware has become the new normal for organizations of all sizes. Here in Europe we had that awful situation with the NHS and the UK last year, and it's happening everywhere. So one element that these attackers are taking is looking at how to disable backups. And so this is really important that as a part of a holistic security strategy, that organizations take a look at that attack vector. So what Cohesity has introduced is really unique. It's three steps. It's detect, prevent, and then recover. So detect in terms of capabilities to see if there are nefarious changes being happened to the file system right? And then prevent with Helios automatically detecting and with our smart assistant providing that notification. And then if need be, recover with our instant mass restore capability going back to any point in time with no performance issue. This is not taking time for the rehydration, the spanning file system doing this instantly, and allowing an organization to basically say "sorry, not today attackers", we don't need to pay you because we can instantly restore back to a safe point in time. >> So let's unpack those a little bit if we could. The detect piece, I presume there's an analytics component to that? You're observing the behavior of the backup corpus, is that right? Which is a logical place because it's got all the corporate data in there. >> That's correct. >> So, last year we introduced Helios, which is our global sass space management system. It has machine learning capability in it. And that's providing that machine learning based monitoring to see what kinds of anomalies may be happening that is then proactively alerted to the IT team. >> And then the recovery piece as well like you said, its got to be fast. You got to have high performance, high performance data movement, and that's fundamental to your file system is that what I'm hearing or the architecture? >> That's correct. >> That's one of the differences of our modern backup. Solution versus some of the non-hyperconverge architectures is the distributed web file system which our CEO, Mohit Aron, he was formerly at Google, helped with developing their file system, has what's called instant ability to go back into any point in time and recover not just one VM. At Vmware a couple years ago we demonstrated thousands of VMs at a time and the reason for that is this web scale file system, which is really unique to Cohesity. And that's what allows an IT organization to not be held hostage because they can not have to potentially spend not just hours, but even days with the old legacy systems trying to rehydrate, you know, these backups. If they have to go back potentially many months in time because you don't know that that ransomware may have been introduced not say yesterday, but it might have been several months ago. And that's one of the key advantages of this instant mass restore. >> I mean, this is super important right Stu? Cause we're talking about very granular levels of being able to dial up, dial down, you can tune it by application. A high value application, you can have much greater granularity. Some of the craplications, maybe not as important. So the flexibility is key there. How about customers? Any new customers that you can talk about? >> Absolutely. >> So one of the ones since we're here at Ciscolive! So Cisco along with Cohesity, we've been working with one of the largest global manufactures of semiconductors and other electronic equipment. Tokyo Electron based in Tokyo, but also here in the UK on the continent. They had one of those older backup solutions and were challenged with the time it was taking them to backup, the restores not being predictable. So they've gone with Cohesity, running on Cisco UCS because we're a software defined platform. We offer our software on our customers choice of certified solutions and of Cisco UCS. So they've started with backup but they're now moving very quickly into archiving to the cloud, helping reduce their costs and get off of tape, and to disaster recovery ultimately. So, super excited that together with Cisco, we can help this customer modernize their data center and accelerate their hybrid cloud strategy at the same time. >> Awesome. And then you guys are also protecting the Cisco live network here? Tell us about that. >> Yeah so you know, Cisco builds an amazing network here I mean, you've seen the operation center, a huge team of people. But as we all know, things can go wrong potentially. And so, we are protecting the critical services that Cisco's providing to all of the Ciscolive! Attendees here so should something happen, which I'm sure won't, Cohesity will be used to instantly recover and bring back up critical services like DNS and other areas that they're depending on to serve all of the thousands of show goers here. >> So, super hot space, we talked about this at VMworld. Actually last couple of years just how much activity and interest there is and the whole parlance is changing and I wonder if you could comment. It used to be backup when the world was tape. Now you're talking about data protection, data management, which could mean a lot of things to a lot of people. To us storage folks its pretty specific but you're seeing a massive evolution of the space, cloud clearly is the underpinning of the tailwind, and it requires you guys to respond as an industry. And Cohesity specifically as a company. So I wonder if you could talk about some of those major trends and how you guys are responding and how you're leading. >> Yeah. Yeah I think, you know, folks have been a little bit surprised like wait a minute, what's this kind of sleepy industry? Why is it getting all this funding? I mean our own Series D funding, middle of last year 250 million dollars, Softbank banked along with Sequoia of course. But really the trend is being talked about here at Ciscolive! Is data is, I don't want to say the new oil, but its the water of the world right? I mean, it's absolutely crucial to any business these days. Other than your talent, it's your most important business asset and the pressure on the board and the CEO and the CIO in turn to be agile, to do more with that data, to know what you have, because here we are in Europe, GDPR increasing regulations, is super important. And so, you know, this has really brought forth the need to create holistic ways to organize and manage and have visibility to all of that data. And it's massively fragmented. We put out that research last year, massive data fragmentation, and most of that data has been kind of under the water line in most peoples minds, you know. You think about your primary applications in data that's really only 20% and the other 80% in testev and analytics and backup, has been pretty fragmented and siloed and it hasn't yet had that vision of how can we consolidate that and move it into a modern space until folks like Mohit Aron you know, founded Cohesity and applied those same hyperconverge techniques that he did at Nutanix. So I think this investment just further validates the fact that data is the most important business asset and people are really in need of new solutions to manage it, protect it, and then ultimately do more with it. Gain insights out of it. >> You know, just a couple comments on that. >> One is you know, we always joke about data is the new oil, its even more valuable because you can use data in multiple places, you can only put oil in your car once. And so, companies are beginning to realize that. How valuable it is, trying to understand that value, how to protect that, and then GDPR. It's interesting, its really the fines went into effect in Europe last May. But its become a template, a framework globally. People, you know, US companies are saying alright we got to prepare for GDPR, and then local jurisdictions are now saying well that's a decent starting point. And so its not just confined to Europe. It's really on everybody's mind. >> It is. >> You brought up the cloud before, and you know the cloud is a new way for people to be agile and they're getting a lot of value out of it. But it also continues to fragment their data and the visibility in talking to a large CIO of Fortune 100, a large organization, he actually has less visibility in many ways in the cloud because of the ease of proliferation of testev, and that is creating more stress I would say in the system, and need for solutions to both provide and enhance that agility, move data to the cloud easily, move it out when you need to, but also with regulation be able to identify and delete as you know, with GDPR if needed, the information that your customer may ask you to remove from your systems. >> Yeah well, I love this conversation. >> I love following Cohesity because you guys are up leveling the entire game. I've been following the data protection space for decades now and the problem with data protection is there's always been a bolt on. And companies like Cohesity, both with the funding, your vision, you're really forcing the industry to kind of rethink data protection. Not as a bolt on but as a fundamental component of digital strategies and data strategies. So it's fun watching you guys. Congratulations on all the growth. I know you've got more to go. So thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and its always a pleasure to see you. >> Always a pleasure to be here with you guys. Thanks very much. >> You're very welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody. Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante from Ciscolive! Barcelona. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cue covering Sisqo Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You watching the Cube? The leader in live tech coverage is the first day of three days of coverage for Sisqo. Live for Europe. Lin Lucas is here. She's the chief marketing officer for Kohi City. Lend great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you here in Europe. >> We were just saying it's the first time that we've done this on the continent. So another >> first? Yeah. Another first. Been s so pleased to be in the U. S with you guys, that multiple shows. And now we were here in Barcelona, >> so it's a great venue. We've actually done a number of shows here. Then again, it's a pleasure having you on. Let's see, Let's get right to it. What's going on with you guys and Cisco? You got got some news. Let's talk about >> Absolutely. As you know, we don't stop innovating continuous innovation at Cohesity and a number of new things. So last week we announced a new Cisco validated design with hyper flex and Cohesity integrating for snapshot integration for backup and, of course, instant recovery of that critical data center infrastructure. And we're calling it hyper squared. So you get full hyper convergence for your primary and, of course, your backup. Another secondary application. >> And those guys just want to talk about hype reflects anywhere. Still, so it's like infinitive hype. Infinity, hyper flex, >> hyper square, >> so hyper squared. Love it. So you guys will. How does that work? You'll obviously you want to be the provider of data protection provider from Multi Cloud. That's a huge opportunity. So how do you do that? You'll you'll plug into whatever framework that customer wants. Presumably, a lot of customers wanted the Cisco framework out. Is that all? >> Oh, absolutely. Hit the nail on the head. I mean, Cisco, obviously, one of the most respected leaders in the world, tens of thousands of customers globally depend on them. I'm Francisco alum love being back here at the old stomping grounds and Cisco's been an investor in cohesive he now, since our serious sees. So, they really saw the promise in the benefit of what Kohi City offers with hybrid converge solutions for modern backup recovery. And to your point to the cloud. You know, Cisco's talking a lot about multi cloud here and cohesive E with our native cloud integration helps customers protect those backups on or those applications on hyper flex, and then instantly move them to a cloud of choice. And then, as you've mentioned, Cisco has so many fantastic relationships that there are very strong go to market partner with us. And when customers wanted by solution, they could get the whole solution from Cisco, including Cohesive >> Yulin. We're glad we have you on because connecting the dots between something like hyper converge, which we've been talking about for a number of years now, and how that fits into multi cloud. To some, it's a little clunky sometimes goods like. But I've got my data center. Or am I just doing backup to the cloud? Because what we know is customers, a. Cisco says their data is, you know, kind of de centred. It's no longer in the in the data center of all over the place. Companies like Kohi City can give you that centralized data protection. No matter where your environment is, walk us through what you're hearing from your customers. How they look at kind of their data center versus the multi cloud environment and data protection. >> Yeah, so I think it's Ah, you know, I think customers air now understanding that it's not either or right. There was a time when people thought, Wow, I'm going to move everything to the cloud And I really think there's a maturing of an understanding of what's going to work well for me in this cloud First world, what do I want to put there? And then what am I going to keep on premises? So that's one of the things that Cohee City innovated our core technology. A distributed Web scale file system spanning file system, which spans the data center and the cloud world seamlessly. And what we're seeing is customers air really using the cloud for archiving, getting off of tape because then they get that search capability very easy when they need Teo tearing and then, most importantly, disaster recovery. You know, in the event of something man made or natural, many, many organizations moving to the clouds for their second sight. And with Kohi City, that's very easy to make. That transfer happened in a very seamless way with our capability set. So I think what we're seeing is this really maturing of how customers look at it as a really holistic environment. And so Cisco calling it data centered. But we call this, you know, mass data fragmentation. And then with our spanning file system being able to really consolidate that now >> yeah, another thing that needs that kind of holistic view is security. I know it's something that's in your product. There was a random where announcement that you made last week tells how security fits into this world. >> Yeah, well, you know, I think we all hate to say it, but you know that old phrase, the new normal unfortunately ran somewhere, and malware has become the new normal for organizations of all sizes. You know, here in Europe, we have that off the situation with the N HS in the UK last year. Andi, it's happening everywhere. So you know one element that the's attackers air taking is looking at how to disable backups. And so this is really important that as a part of a holistic security strategy that organizations take a look at that attack vector. So what cohesive he's introduced is really unique. It's three steps. It's prevent its detect, prevent and then recover. So detect in terms of capabilities to see if there are nefarious changes being happened to the file system right, and then prevent with Helios automatically detecting and with our smart assistant providing that notification and then, if need be, recover with our instant mass restore capability, going back to any point in time with no performance issue. This is not taking time for the rehydration spanning file system doing this instantly and allowing an organization to basically say, Sorry, not today, attackers. We don't need to pay you because we can instantly restore back to a safe point in time. >> So let's unpack those a little bit. If we could detect piece, I presume there's an analytics component to that. You're you're observing the the behavior of the of the backup corpus is that right there, Which is a logical place because it's got all the corporate data in there >> that that's correct. So last year we introduced Helios, which is our global SAS space management system, as machine learning capability in it. And that's providing that machine learning based monitoring to see what kinds of anomalies may be happening that is then proactively alerted to the team >> and then the recovery piece, a ce Well, like you said, it's it's got to be fast. Gotta have high performance, high performance data movement, and that's fundamental to your file system. Is that what I'm hearing >> that architecture that's correct. That's one of the differences of our modern backup solution. Versus some of the non hyper converge architectures is the distributed Web file system, which our CEO Motorin, he was formally at Google, helped with developing their file system has what's called instant ability to go back into any point in time and recover not just one of'em, but actually at a v M wear. A couple years ago, we demonstrated thousands of'em is at a time, and the reason for that is this Web scale file system, which is really unique to Kohi City. And that's what allows a nightie organization to not be held hostage because they can not have two potentially spend not just ours, but even days with the old legacy systems trying to rehydrate. You know these backups if they have to go back potentially many months in time because you don't know that that ran somewhere may have been introduced, not say yesterday, but might have been several months ago, and that's one of the key advantages of this instant master store. >> I mean, this is super important rights, too, because we're talking about very granular levels of being able to dial up dial down. You could tune it by application of high value applications. You can. You have much greater granularity some of the crap locations that not, maybe not. It's important. So flexibility is key there. How about customers, any new customers that you can talk about? >> Absolutely. So one of the ones since we're here, it's just go live. So Cisco, along with Kohi City, we've been working with one of the largest global manufacturers of semiconductors and other electronic equipment, Tokyo Electron, based in Tokyo but also here in the U. K. On the continent. And they had one of those older backup solutions and were challenged with time. It was taking them to back up the restores not being predictable. So they've gone with Cohesive e running on Cisco UCS. Because we're a software to find platform. We offer our software on our customers, you know, choice of Certified Solutions and Cisco UCS. And so they've started with backup, but they're now moving very quickly into archiving to the cloud, helping reduce their costs and get off of tape and to disaster recovery. Ultimately, so super excited that together with Cisco, we could help this customer modernized their data center and, you know, accelerate their hybrid clouds strategy at the same time. >> Awesome. And then you guys were also protecting the Sisqo Live network here. What? Tell us about that? >> Yes. Oh, you know, Cisco builds an amazing network here. I mean, you've seen the operations center, a huge team of people. But as we all know, things could go wrong. Potentially. And so we are protecting the critical services that Cisco's providing to all of this is go live attendees here. So should something happen, which I'm sure won't. Kohi City will be used to instantly recover and bring backup critical services like DNA and other areas that they're depending on to serve. All of the thousands of showgoers here. >> So super hot space. We talked about this at PM World. Actually, last couple of years. Just how much activity and interest there is and the whole parlance is changing land on one of you could come and I used to be you back up when the world was tape. Now you're talking about data protection data management, which could mean a lot of things to a lot of people to a storage folks. It's, you know, it's pretty specific, but you're seeing a massive evolution of the space cloud. Clearly is the underpinning of the tailwind on it requires you guy's toe. To respond is an industry and cohesive, specifically is a company. So I wanted to talk about some of those major trends and how you guys are responding and you're leading. And, >> yeah, I think you know, folks have been a little bit surprised, like, Wait a minute. What's this kind of sleepy industry? Why is it getting all this funding? I mean, our own Siri's de funding. Middle of last year, two hundred fifty million dollars. Softbank banked along with Sequoia, of course. But really, the trend, as is being talked about Francisco Live, is data is. I don't want to say the new oil, but it's the water of the world, right? I mean, it's absolutely crucial to any business, the's days other than your talent. It's your most important business asset. >> And >> the pressure on the board and the CEO and the CEO and turn to be agile to do more with that data to know what you have because here we are in Europe, GDP are increasing, regulations is super important. And so you know, this has really brought for be need to create holistic ways to organize and manage and have visibility toe all of that data, and it's massively fragmented. We put out that research last year, massive data fragmentation and most of that data has been kind of under the water line in most people's minds. You know, you think about your primary applications and data that's really only twenty percent, and the other eighty percent in test Evan Analytics and Backup has been pretty fragmented in Siloed, and it hasn't yet had that vision of How could we consolidate that and move it into a modern space until folks like Mode Erin, you know, founded Cohesive E and applied those same hyper converge techniques that he did at new tonics. So I think that this investment just further validates the fact that data is the most important business asset, and people are really in need of new solutions to manage it, protected and then ultimately do Mohr with it gain insights out of it. >> You know, just a couple comments on that one is, you know, data. We always joke about data's the new oil. It's even more valuable because you can use data in multiple places. You can only put oil in your car once. And so so companies of being in and to realize that how valuable it is trying to understand that value, how to protect that and the GPR. It's interesting. It's it's really. The fines went into effect in Europe last May, but it's become a template, a framework globally. People, you know us. Compensate. All right, we gotta prepare for GPR. And then local jurisdictions announced thing. Well, that's a decent starting point. And so it's not just confined to Europe. It's really on everybody's mind. >> It is, and you brought up the cloud before. And you know the cloud is a new way for people to be agile, and they're getting a lot of value out of it. But it also continues to fragment their data and the visibility. No. In talking Teo Large CIA O of, ah, Fortune one hundred large organisation. He's actually has less visibility in many ways in the cloud because of the ease of proliferation of test ever. And that is creating Mohr. You know, stress, I would say in the system and need for solutions to both provide an enhanced set agility. Move data to the cloud, easily move it out when you need to. But also with regulation, be able to identify and delete. As you know, with GPR if needed, the information that you know your customer may ask you to remove from your systems. >> Yeah, well, I love this conversation a little following cohesively because you guys are up leveling the entire game. I've been following the data protection space for decades now, and the problem with data protection is has always been a bolt on, and companies like, oh, he city both with the funding your your vision. He really forcing the industry. They're kind of re think data protection, not as a bolt on what is a fundamental component of digital strategies and data strategy. So it's fun watching you guys. Congratulations on all the growth. I know you got more to go. So thanks so much for coming in the Cuban and always a pleasure to see you. >> All of always a pleasure to be here with you guys. Thanks very much. >> You're very welcome. All right. Keep it right there, buddy. Stew Minimum and David Lantz from Cisco Live. Barcelona. You watching the Cube?

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Ciscolive! Europe brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our first day of three days of coverage for Cisco live for Europe. Lynn Lucas is here, she's the chief marketing officer for Cohesity. Lynn, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you here in Europe. >> We were just saying it's the first time that we've done this on the continent so, another first. >> Yeah, another first. >> So pleased to be in the US with you guys at multiple shows, and now we're here in Barcelona. >> So it's a great venue. >> We've actually done you know, a number of shows here and again, it's a pleasure having you on. Let's see, let's get right to it. What's going on with you guys in Cisco? You got some news? Let's talk about it. >> Absolutely. >> As you know, we don't stop innovating, continuous innovation at Cohesity, and a number of new things. So, last week we announced a new Cisco validated design with HyperFlex, and Cohesity integrating for Snapshot. Integration for backup, and of course, instant recovery of that critical data center infrastructure and we're calling it HyperSquared. So you get full hyperconvergence for your primary and of course, your backup and other secondary applications. >> And those guys this morning talked about HyperFlex anywhere Stu so, it's like infinitive hype and infinity HyperFlex. >> HyperSquared. >> So, HyperSquared, love it. So you guys will, how's that work? Obviously you want to be the provider of data protection provider for multi-cloud. That's a huge opportunity for you guys. >> Absolutely. >> So how do you do that? You'll plug into whatever framework the customer wants, presumably a lot of customers want the Cisco framework, how does that all- >> No, absolutely, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, Cisco, obviously one of the most respected IT leaders in the world. Tens of thousands of customers globally depend on them. I'm a Cisco Alum, love being back here at the old stomping grounds. And Cisco's been an investor in Cohesity now since our Series C, so they really saw the promise and the benefit of what Cohesity offers with hyperconverge solutions for modern backup, recovery, and two year point to the cloud. You know Cisco's talking a lot about multi-cloud here and Cohesity with our native cloud integration helps customers protect those backups on, or those applications on HyperFlex. And then instantly move them to a cloud of choice and then as you've mentioned, Cisco has so many fantastic relationships that they're a very strong go to market partner with us. When customers want to buy a solution, they can get the whole solution from Cisco, including Cohesity. >> Yeah Lynn, glad we have you on. >> Because connecting the dots between something like hyperconverge, which we've been talking about for a number of years now and how that fits into multi-cloud is, it's a little clunky sometimes because like, when I've got my data center am I just doing backup to the cloud? Cause what we know is customers at Cisco says their data is, you know, kind of de-centered. It's no longer in the data center, it's all over the place. Companies like Cohesity can give you that centralized data protection no matter where your environment is. Walk us through what you're hearing from your customers, how they look at their data center versus the multicloud environment and data production. >> Yeah so, I think it's you know, customers are now understanding that its not either or, right? There was a time when people thought "wow I'm going to move everything to the cloud" and I really think there's a maturing of an understanding of what's going to work well for me in this cloud first world, what do I want to put there and then what am I going to keep on premises. So that's one of the things that Cohesity innovated; our core technology, a distributed webscale file system, spanning file system which spans the data center and the cloud world seamlessly. And what we're seeing is customers are really using the cloud for archiving, getting off of tape because then they get that search capability very easy when they need to. Tiering and then most importantly, disaster recovery you know, in the event of something man made or natural. Many many organizations moving to the cloud for their second site and with Cohesity, it's very easy to make that transfer happen in a very seamless way with our capabilities set. So I think what we're seeing is this real maturing of how customers look at it as a real holistic environment. And so Cisco calling it data centered, but we call this mass data fragmentation and then with our spanning file system being able to really consolidate that now. >> Yeah, another thing that needs that kind of holistic view is security. >> I know its something that's in your product, there was a ransomware announcement that you made last week. Tell us how security fits into this world. >> Yeah well I think that we all hate to say it, but that old phrase the new normal, unfortunately ransomware and malware has become the new normal for organizations of all sizes. Here in Europe we had that awful situation with the NHS and the UK last year, and it's happening everywhere. So one element that these attackers are taking is looking at how to disable backups. And so this is really important that as a part of a holistic security strategy, that organizations take a look at that attack vector. So what Cohesity has introduced is really unique. It's three steps. It's detect, prevent, and then recover. So detect in terms of capabilities to see if there are nefarious changes being happened to the file system right? And then prevent with Helios automatically detecting and with our smart assistant providing that notification. And then if need be, recover with our instant mass restore capability going back to any point in time with no performance issue. This is not taking time for the rehydration, the spanning file system doing this instantly, and allowing an organization to basically say "sorry, not today attackers", we don't need to pay you because we can instantly restore back to a safe point in time. >> So let's unpack those a little bit if we could. The detect piece, I presume there's an analytics component to that? You're observing the behavior of the backup corpus, is that right? Which is a logical place because it's got all the corporate data in there. >> That's correct. >> So, last year we introduced Helios, which is our global sass space management system. It has machine learning capability in it. And that's providing that machine learning based monitoring to see what kinds of anomalies may be happening that is then proactively alerted to the IT team. >> And then the recovery piece as well like you said, its got to be fast. You got to have high performance, high performance data movement, and that's fundamental to your file system is that what I'm hearing or the architecture? >> That's correct. >> That's one of the differences of our modern backup. Solution versus some of the non-hyperconverge architectures is the distributed web file system which our CEO, Mohit Aron, he was formerly at Google, helped with developing their file system, has what's called instant ability to go back into any point in time and recover not just one VM. At Vmware a couple years ago we demonstrated thousands of VMs at a time and the reason for that is this web scale file system, which is really unique to Cohesity. And that's what allows an IT organization to not be held hostage because they can not have to potentially spend not just hours, but even days with the old legacy systems trying to rehydrate, you know, these backups. If they have to go back potentially many months in time because you don't know that that ransomware may have been introduced not say yesterday, but it might have been several months ago. And that's one of the key advantages of this instant mass restore. >> I mean, this is super important right Stu? Cause we're talking about very granular levels of being able to dial up, dial down, you can tune it by application. A high value application, you can have much greater granularity. Some of the craplications, maybe not as important. So the flexibility is key there. How about customers? Any new customers that you can talk about? >> Absolutely. >> So one of the ones since we're here at Ciscolive! So Cisco along with Cohesity, we've been working with one of the largest global manufactures of semiconductors and other electronic equipment. Tokyo Electron based in Tokyo, but also here in the UK on the continent. They had one of those older backup solutions and were challenged with the time it was taking them to backup, the restores not being predictable. So they've gone with Cohesity, running on Cisco UCS because we're a software defined platform. We offer our software on our customers choice of certified solutions and of Cisco UCS. So they've started with backup but they're now moving very quickly into archiving to the cloud, helping reduce their costs and get off of tape, and to disaster recovery ultimately. So, super excited that together with Cisco, we can help this customer modernize their data center and accelerate their hybrid cloud strategy at the same time. >> Awesome. And then you guys are also protecting the Cisco live network here? Tell us about that. >> Yeah so you know, Cisco builds an amazing network here I mean, you've seen the operation center, a huge team of people. But as we all know, things can go wrong potentially. And so, we are protecting the critical services that Cisco's providing to all of the Ciscolive! Attendees here so should something happen, which I'm sure won't, Cohesity will be used to instantly recover and bring back up critical services like DNS and other areas that they're depending on to serve all of the thousands of show goers here. >> So, super hot space, we talked about this at VMworld. Actually last couple of years just how much activity and interest there is and the whole parlance is changing and I wonder if you could comment. It used to be backup when the world was tape. Now you're talking about data protection, data management, which could mean a lot of things to a lot of people. To us storage folks its pretty specific but you're seeing a massive evolution of the space, cloud clearly is the underpinning of the tailwind, and it requires you guys to respond as an industry. And Cohesity specifically as a company. So I wonder if you could talk about some of those major trends and how you guys are responding and how you're leading. >> Yeah. Yeah I think, you know, folks have been a little bit surprised like wait a minute, what's this kind of sleepy industry? Why is it getting all this funding? I mean our own Series D funding, middle of last year 250 million dollars, Softbank banked along with Sequoia of course. But really the trend is being talked about here at Ciscolive! Is data is, I don't want to say the new oil, but its the water of the world right? I mean, it's absolutely crucial to any business these days. Other than your talent, it's your most important business asset and the pressure on the board and the CEO and the CIO in turn to be agile, to do more with that data, to know what you have, because here we are in Europe, GDPR increasing regulations, is super important. And so, you know, this has really brought forth the need to create holistic ways to organize and manage and have visibility to all of that data. And it's massively fragmented. We put out that research last year, massive data fragmentation, and most of that data has been kind of under the water line in most peoples minds, you know. You think about your primary applications in data that's really only 20% and the other 80% in testev and analytics and backup, has been pretty fragmented and siloed and it hasn't yet had that vision of how can we consolidate that and move it into a modern space until folks like Mohit Aron you know, founded Cohesity and applied those same hyperconverge techniques that he did at Nutanix. So I think this investment just further validates the fact that data is the most important business asset and people are really in need of new solutions to manage it, protect it, and then ultimately do more with it. Gain insights out of it. >> You know, just a couple comments on that. >> One is you know, we always joke about data is the new oil, its even more valuable because you can use data in multiple places, you can only put oil in your car once. And so, companies are beginning to realize that. How valuable it is, trying to understand that value, how to protect that, and then GDPR. It's interesting, its really the fines went into effect in Europe last May. But its become a template, a framework globally. People, you know, US companies are saying alright we got to prepare for GDPR, and then local jurisdictions are now saying well that's a decent starting point. And so its not just confined to Europe. It's really on everybody's mind. >> It is. >> You brought up the cloud before, and you know the cloud is a new way for people to be agile and they're getting a lot of value out of it. But it also continues to fragment their data and the visibility in talking to a large CIO of Fortune 100, a large organization, he actually has less visibility in many ways in the cloud because of the ease of proliferation of testev, and that is creating more stress I would say in the system, and need for solutions to both provide and enhance that agility, move data to the cloud easily, move it out when you need to, but also with regulation be able to identify and delete as you know, with GDPR if needed, the information that your customer may ask you to remove from your systems. >> Yeah well, I love this conversation. >> I love following Cohesity because you guys are up leveling the entire game. I've been following the data protection space for decades now and the problem with data protection is there's always been a bolt on. And companies like Cohesity, both with the funding, your vision, you're really forcing the industry to kind of rethink data protection. Not as a bolt on but as a fundamental component of digital strategies and data strategies. So it's fun watching you guys. Congratulations on all the growth. I know you've got more to go. So thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and its always a pleasure to see you. >> Always a pleasure to be here with you guys. Thanks very much. >> You're very welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody. Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante from Ciscolive! Barcelona. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE! Covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Day Two of VeeamON 2018 in Chicago. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Dante Orsini is here. He's the Senior Vice President of Biz Dev at iland. CUBE alum. Good friend of theCUBE. Great to see you again. >> Great to see ya. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> What's happening with iland these days, in the world of cloud service providers? >> Well Dave, it's been insane for us. Obviously Veeam's a huge partner of ours. We've been working together for what, seven years now I think. And it's just amazing to see the growth of this company. Right? We've integrated Veeam -- our relationship. We started off basically providing managed backup many, many moons ago. But six years ago we started to build our own platform, on top of Veeam, on top of Cisco, on top of HPE. Customers really wanted to see more control. They wanted greater levels of security. They really wanted a true enterprise cloud. To do that we had to enhance the VMware stack. We had chose to take Veeam and integrate them via their API. Today if somebody deploys anything in the world with iland, it's automatically backed up by Veeam. If you fast forward a bit, as you see what Veeam's done to innovate with cloud and multi cloud, they've really helped build our business. >> Dante, if you go and look back before the whole cloud wave, the typical service provider. They would have one of everything. You'd walk down the aisles and there'd be whatever it was. An EMC box. A digital box. Whatever it was. Did virtualization change that? Were you able to consolidate? Create a platform. Create a simpler environment to manage. Or is there still a lot of bespoke infrastructure lying around? >> Yeah, that's a great question. For us, I'd love to tell you we hit it right the first time twelve years ago. But no. Just like you said. There's all sorts of different technologies right? But I think what we've done is we quickly standardized. We leverage Cisco UCS from a compute perspective. We leverage some of their storage platforms for the things that we do with Veeam Cloud Connect Backup. We actually help them drive the validation of that product before it came to market. We operate at scale with them. Same thing with Veeam. We're their the largest cloud provider in the world right now. As far as leveraging Veeam technologies. In addition to that on the storage front, we also because of the demands of the environment, we really want to deliver a secure cloud service. Encryption is table stakes, and has been for years. HPE Nimble plays a critical role for us there. That's really our stack. Cisco from a network and a compute perspective, VMware with the hypervisor, and HPE from a storage perspective. >> It's sounds like you've taken some very cost effective platforms. Nimble, Veeam, etc. And then architected an enterprise class solution. You guys are adding value around that as an integrator and obviously a service provider. >> Yup, correct. And I think the market is demanding more and more from a cloud provider. People want true transparency. They want control over the infrastructure. For us it's like, how can we develop an API? So we can make this platform extensible. And then still work with the customers that are struggling with the promise of cloud. And Stu, you see this all the time, right? >> Yeah, and Dante, one of the things we're discussing here is it's a very hybrid world. As Veeam said, customers are doing lots of SAAS. They're using service providers. They have their own data centers. They're using a few public clouds. One of the things I've been watching real closely is companies like iland and the other cloud service providers Amazon and Microsoft aren't the enemy anymore. It's, well we actually have to partner with them on some services. We do some things locally. Maybe give us your viewpoint on how that's changed in the last couple of years. >> Yeah, great question. I would tell you that we're not quite there yet, Stu. From my perspective. You guys know, we're known best for providing disaster recovery as a service. That's where we've made a name in the space. But the irony is we've really focused on building this cloud infrastructure. So an I as platform. And ironically that's the majority of our revenue. When we look at public, clearly it is a hybrid world. Where we spend a lot of time, is investing in how can we highly automate the integration? Because we know that people are going to have workloads everywhere. The idea is, think about it from a recovery perspective. If I'm protecting your traditional workloads. And you've got a dev team that's using various different services that are proprietary to a public cloud, that stuff's got to talk to each other in a true resiliency capacity. We wanted to make sure that people could actually highly automate and orchestrate a failover to us, a test to us. But also integrate the connectivity portion of that. Right? Making sure that all these things can talk together is important. You understand as well as I do, as these cloud architectures change, become more modern, and they're more service driven. The traditional, I'm going to move from point A to point B is no longer in play. It's how can I have more diversity amongst my vendor base? If I'm using containers. You've got a globally distributed architecture. If I can deploy some of that with iland, and some of that maybe using Kubernetes, that gives me diversity for recovery. >> Dante, you've hit one of the key things we've been as an industry struggling with. That pace of change is just so rapid. How do you internally deal with that pace of change? As to I architected something today, and tomorrow there's something new. Tell us what you're hearing from your customers as to how they make their decisions and sort through this constantly changing Rubrik? >> Well it's definitely insane. We see all sorts of various different use cases, depending on the industry. And that pressure to innovate at the speed of light is, really people struggle with it. I think from our perspective, there's a couple things that we're doing. One, we actually wrote our own assessment application. We call it iland Catalyst. This was really designed to help both our customers as well as our partners. Cause we go to market through a lot of partners as well, to help streamline this pre-sales process for a customer. Again, we focus squarely on the VMware infrastructure stack. Being able to pull an inventory of what somebody has in their environment. And then go through and select resource pools and VM's, for whatever the purpose. Whether they're looking to work and shift workloads. Or whether they're looking to protect them from a backup or DR perspective, we're able to mitigate all the challenges associated with that. To your point. As people are looking at cloud, it's like okay. Is this cloud thing real? And how's it apply to my business? What can I really do with this? And by the way, I got to deal with my budget also. What's this stuff cost? We've got some really smart people. But you can't scale our smartest people globally. We wanted to really drive that into an application. It's really helped get people to outcomes much quicker. So do it right first. >> Dante, if you reverse back a few years ago, VMware was calling Amazon a book seller. Amazon was calling guys like VMware the old guard. The old way. They kissed and hugged last year. You must've loved that first of all. Because it was like, great, VMware specialist. We'll just drive truck through that opportunity, because we get service provision, cloud, VMware stack, boom. Now fast forward. They've got this little kumbaya thing going on. How do you now differentiate from that? >> Yeah, that's a great question. First of all, VMware, obviously a very strategic partner. I think they've got a long road ahead of them. On some of the things that they're doing. I think the promise of where they're going is great. But I still think there's a lot of folks that struggle with the idea. Think about co-mingling my traditional workloads. And then trying to integrate cloud native services on top of it. I think it's a tall order. We'll see where it goes. We're keeping a close eye on it. But in the interim for us, we continue to see folks that are saying, look I want to get out of the data center business. I've built my data center on VMware. I need to have much greater levels of control and visibility. And you need to make this easy on me. From that perspective, we've been able to do really, really well. We work with a lot of service providers that are looking for that level of a consultative approach. But also want to realize the benefits of a cloud. The point being is, I want a great cloud but it needs to be enterprise class. And I also need to know that I might need help architecting that migration. >> Well that's the key, right? You're not going to get that from an Amazon. They're not going to come into your shop. They're not going to hold your hand through it. They're not going to help you build the architecture route. And help you manage it on an ongoing basis. >> Dante, it's May 2018, so I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about GDPR. >> Hey Stu, I love you man! This is great. You guys know we operate globally, and have for over a decade. GDPR we were way out in front of this. I'm not sure if you follow, The BSI just came out with a new standard. 10012, I believe. I think our Compliance and DPO Officer would be pretty proud of me for remembering that one. >> Dave: I'm proud of ya. >> It's tailor made for GDPR. We've been pre-certified, one of four companies that did it. We do a ton in the security side and the compliance side. And I know they go hand in hand. We went through a global audit last year. On the back of some of the ISO work we do with the CSA, the Cloud Security Alliance. And actually came out with a gold star certification. Sounds juvenile, right? A gold star, woo hoo! But it's a big deal. Only iland and Microsoft have actually achieved that level of certification. Yeah. On the compliance side we're way out in front of GDPR. We're doing a lot from a thought leadership perspective in educating both the partners and the marketplace. I think it's going to see what happens with Brexit also. I think you'll see the rest of the world kind of find their way to their own type of regulation. >> What do all those acronyms mean for your customers in terms of GDPR compliance? How does that turn into value for them, and make their life easier? Can you explain? >> I think right now the whole market's been in my opinion has been ill prepared for this. You see a lot of people scrambling. Being able to identify what data is going to fall under that regulation. How you treat the data. How you're able to account for the data. And also destroy the data. And validate that. Is frankly I see some of the biggest sweeping change in marketing. I see marketing people really scrambling. Because they have to make sure that they double-opt in. Cause the fines for breaching this are unbelievable. I think you're going to see the regulators make an example out of certain people. >> No doubt. >> Quickly. >> There's going to be some examples. They're going to go after the guys with deep pockets first. But the fines are... What are the fines? Four, is it 10% of the turnover? No, 4% of turnover. >> 4% of your previous year's turnover. >> Which is insane. >> Yep, yep. >> That's going to hurt. >> Or something like 20 million pounds, something like that. >> Which ever is greater. >> Which ever is greater. Yes! Yes, exactly. Yup. >> It's pretty onerous. Dante, VeeamON 2018, we'll give you closing thoughts. >> Fantastic event, right. Just super appreciative for our relationship with Veeam. They've been behind us. They've been behind this whole cloud provider community. I mean guys, you know this. Raat Mere and team had the ability to go take this stuff to a public cloud many moons ago. They chose to enable a managed cloud provider market first. We are very grateful for that. >> Awesome. Hey thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Great to see you. >> My pleasure. >> As always. >> Yup, go Yankees! >> Oh whoa, time out. >> Go Yankees. >> While we're on the topic. Listen, you can't beat the Red Sox in April. Okay, you know that, right? >> Yeah, here we go. >> So it's going to be interesting to see. I mean I have predicted the Yankees take the east, and they go to the World Series. But you got to be excited as a Yankees fan. >> Could be a good year. >> I've always liked Brian Cashman. I think he's one of the best GM's in the business. Watch his moves at the trading deadline. He's going to beef up the bullpen. I hope the Sox can hang tough with him because anything can happen. >> It's true, anything can happen. >> Hey, great to see ya. >> Great to see you guys, thank you. >> Go Sox. >> Dig it. >> Keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to day three of Dell Technologies World, the inaugural Dell Technologies World. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our kickoff of day three, we got a little analyst roundtable, Keith Townsend is with me, Stu Miniman, Peter Burris, the co-host, tri-hosts, quad-hosts of this show, long-time Dell EMC watchers and guys, let's unpack what's going on here. We're a couple years in now, the merger between Dell and EMC. I've said all along this was inevitable because of the pressures of cloud. It's very clear that Michael Dell is taking control of this company, it's the Dell brand, Dell Technologies, Dell Technologies World, EMC is sort of fading into the past, we'll talk about that Stu, we'll talk about the culture and the implications there, but I want to start with you Keith, let's talk about the customer perspective. What are you hearing from customers? What are the challenges that they're facing? Some of the concerns they may have with Dell and some of the positives? >> So one of the challenges, customers were worried that Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, would just be another HPE too big to solve their challenges, just how do you find solutions in the company with such a large portfolio? In reality, customers are pleasantly surprised that Dell Technologies has been able to surface up solutions, and not just focus on solutions, and also partner with their existing ecosystem of vendors, which is a surprise. One of the things I challenged Michael on as a customer, was hey you know what, this deal with Nutanix, this deal with XE, what are you leaning with from a hyperconverged solution perspective? Dell has been able to walk that line extremely well, We had a Datrium customer on day one, couldn't be happier with the relationship, then we talked to a couple of folks from the product team, 62% of the client meetings this week has been about VxRail, VxRack. Talked to another Fortune 500 customer that's all in on VxRail VxRack, not just for standard workloads, for SAP HANA which is not even certified for VxRail VxRack, so customers really happy with the overall ability of Dell to bring solutions to the table. I've seen, though we still have some time to tell if they'll be able to keep that momentum as they grow, as they continue to partner, and if they can continue to find solutions to challenges. >> Keith, if I can actually just follow up on one thing there, it's very clear that Dell will streamline the portfolio. Had Michael Dell, Jeff Clark, people from the marketing organization said absolutely, and we're telegraphing to customers as soon as we've sorted everything out we're gonna communicate it. Is there any concern from the customers? Michael said, we won't leave any customer behind, but absolutely the past of what EMC had with so many storage products they couldn't figure it out, there will be a lot less of them by the time we get to next year. >> So I think one of the things that you hit on when you talk about culture, I think customers still are very happy with the EMC brand, I think Dell did a really great job of not just getting rid of the EMC brand, customers still very much trust EMC. EMC had an extremely capable support organization, there's question about whether that support, that white glove support that we've gotten in the past from EMC will exist going forward. You know, Dell got rid of EMC cold, they brought Scale IO to a hardware-only solution versus the open ecosystem, so there's questions around where the cost-cutting will impact customer operations and support, but overall customers are happy with the progression. >> Peter Burris, one of the questions that Stu asked both Michael Dell and Clark yesterday is look you've got some of your bigger hardware competitors like IBM, like HP and HPE running away from head-to-head and I think Jeff Clark said "well I don't know how you can do end-to-end without both heads." So from your standpoint, from a customer perspective, is there an advantage to that head-to-head? We certainly heard it over the years, we used to hear it from HP a lot, we used to hear it from IBM a lot, they've retreated from that, Dell's sort of banging that end-to-end drum, does it matter from a customer perspective? >> Well of course, but it matters not just for what the customer wants but also the applications required. So, look, the biggest challenge, the most obvious, best end-to-end solution, if you take a very narrow view, it's gonna be AWS, Azure, some of these others. But the question is, is all of your data going to be in that public cloud? So the fundamental engineering challenge that every enterprise is gonna have is where am I gonna put my data? Some of the data is naturally gonna go to the public cloud, some of the data is not. What Dell needs to do over the course of the next couple of years is pick up on that as aggressively as they possibly can, try to not just convince people, but to show them that their organization of their digital business increasingly is going to be defined in terms of where their data assets are located, the practical realities of what that means, and therefore what types of fundamental support are they going to have to bring to bear on it? Keith, you said something interesting about HPE. The reason why Dell was not HPE, a little bit less so on IBM, is that Dell, Dell EMC have over the past 10, 15 years have made good bets, HP did not make good bets. You want to understand the history of HP over the last 10 years and why they're not the same, it's because HP gyrated all over the place to try to buy companies that were kind of at that moment a good price, let's just go for scale as best as we can, and Dell hasn't done that. Well Michael and his team have stayed relatively close to a simple vision of what types of engagement model they want, they've delivered on that vision, and they've got the assets that they can put into play now, but they just have to convince the enterprise that the play is where do you put your data, because you're gonna put your processing close to your data, and you're not gonna put it all in one place, right customer? And that's not going to be an easy, that's going to be a very challenging set of conversations over the next few years. We think how it's gonna play out is that Dell EMC is gonna be just fine because the enterprises are not gonna want to give all of their data up, and they can't give all their data up, so we'll see what happens. >> Well Stu let's talk about that, I mean Dell's cloud strategy is pretty clear, they want to be an arms dealer to the cloud. HPE, that's really their only choice, obviously IBM owns a cloud so it's a little different there, Oracle owns its own cloud, and they have software, that's a whole different ballgame. Dell clearly is comfortable being a high-volume, lower margin supplier, throwing off cashflow, throwing off profits. What's your take on the lack of a public cloud and are there issues there? >> Yeah, well you know Peter talked a little bit end-to-end and you see what Azure and AWS are doing. One of the surprising things for me is to see pieces of the public cloud and how the Dell Technologies portfolio are fitting into it. So being we're a native US, we absolutely understood. There's actually an isilon with Google cloud, a solution that I had an interesting discussion with Manuvir Das on day one here, really explained that you know scale out architecture, really get into the cloud. IBM cloud, there's a booth for them, they're here on the expo floor, so we've seen that maturation as hybrid cloud is not that transferring state that people thought but as that pits out we know data and applications are going to live lots of places and a company like Dell needs to be able to live in many of those environments. Edge of course, IOT, a hot issue that they're talking about, but they have portfolio products that will live in many of those places, so good maturation, public cloud is not enemy number one but of course they are a little bit more toward the private cloud, they highlight a bunch that if you go all in your prices are gonna be bad, we're gonna pull it back, Keith mentioned the EMC code team kind of got killed. A bunch of them are actually over at VMware now with an enhanced team, so it's still, we're not at the steady state of where the shift from my data center to public cloud is but it is definitely matured and nuanced and Dell has a lot of good partnerships that are growing. >> Well and selling servers to tier one cloud guys is not a great business, HP exited the business, Dell's in the business but it can't be a high market, it's not a great business I mean we know that. But, you know, nonetheless there's a lot of non-tier one clouds up there. You had a point to make, Pete? >> Yeah really quickly, the thing I was gonna say is, and we've talked about this in the past, and if we think about two things about Dell's portfolio, first off if we look back at what happened with the minicomputer business, and everybody says "oh the microprocessor killed it" well that probably contributed, but what really killed the minicomputer business was TCPIP and CISCO, that's what killed the minicomputer business because before a Dell or a Deck executive or a DG executive would walk into a shop with stuff all over the shop floor and the customer would say "I want to integrate this, you know, bridge it" and CISCO said, flatten the whole thing, bring TCPIP, and all those minicomputer companies went away. There is a gem in this portfolio which is NSX, and the degree to which Vmware, NSX can in fact become that technology for flattening the cloud network, cause that, to me, that's what the next big play in this industry is gonna be. AWS is gonna have its approach, Azure is gonna have its approach, you're gonna have bunch of on-premise stuff, the question is are you gonna be able to flatten those networks and really achieve that end-to-end? And if there's one good option on the table right now in the industry, it's VMware NSX for doing that. The second thing that I would say is, and I had a couple conversations with some folks about this this morning, we're talking about end-to-end, we're talking about greater conversions, hyperconversions, etc, yet Dell is still organized by server, storage, network, and it's going to be interesting to see how that evolves over the course of the next few years as customers increasingly do want a leverage that's end-to-end, diminish the distinctions and take advantage of convergence and whether or not we see Dell have a series of inter-nexian warfares about where that ends up. Because we know Dell does not wanna be RCA, right? >> Well that's really interesting because some of near-term moves that they've made are basically to take some of that converged stuff and put it in- >> That's right. So I love that now the TCPIP and NSX completely agree with you, the one thing that Dell is definitely missing from a customer perspective is the control plane glue they want to lead with the VMware story, you know any workload any cloud, I'm not gonna take my VMware approach to Google, I'm not gonna take that to Azure. So this any workload, any cloud thing, I'm not buying. I don't think customers are buying that. HPE is leading I think with a pretty good message on offering cloud services. It's a really, really difficult problem. >> The Oncenter story, you're talking about. >> The Onecenter story. It's a very difficult problem, enterprise customers want a single solution to consume all files, they want that TCPIP set of protocols, standards- >> They want the cloud to be flat. >> They want the cloud to be flat. NSX flattens it from a networking perspective but from a controlled plane API perspective the industry is a long way before that and I don't think Dell even has any plans for it. >> So, Stu, you know well when people were talking about you know, Michael's gonna sell VMware, you were very vocal about it, "no he's not, only an idiot would think that, I mean there's no way that's gonna happen." I mean, what a gem, in the portfolio, talk about end-to-end. The other thing I wanted to bring up is if you look at Dell's business, about half is the client business, it's doing better than expected so it's throwing off more cash than expected, especially with the storage business being soft, Dell's been pretty transparent about that, well I guess it has to be, but nonetheless there's upside there, but VMware is about 10% of the revenues, it throws off half of the operating cash, so why would you get rid of that, right? It's such a strategic asset 500,000 customers, a key part of the end-to-end, and it just makes this such a more interesting business. >> Yeah I mean Dave, I know you love teasing apart this complex, the tracking stock, all the things there, one of the interesting nuggets out of the Michael Dell interview was oh he said "the tax changes really had no impact, you know that's not it." You know, people really misunderstand, they understand these finances, it's not that they're hurting for cash, they can't make cash positions. >> So with my senses it's probably a slight negative but with the tax legislation, you're right, it's basically a net neutral for these guys. It's way overblown. >> Yeah, but you know, what's changed, we knew, when Dell went private, there were a bunch of changes in-company, I knew a lot of people that left the company for different things. The EMC acquisition, it's been a lot of change in the last 18 to 24 months, it'll still be rolling out there, you know, I live right in the heart of the old EMC country and there's some changes there, who's running it, you see a lot of former Dell executives, legacy Dell executives, there's still some strong people from the EMC side but Jeff Clark, very strong engineering culture, actually the more I've gotten to know him the more he reminds me of what EMC was 10 or 15 years ago in a good way, sharp, technical, getting on it. So I think the EMC brand, by the time we come here next year will be gone, but it doesn't mean the EMC people or products like the powermac are gonna be going anywhere. >> Well let me push at that a little bit, cause one of the things that Jeff Clark is doing is he's simplifying the portfolio, and Joe did the opposite, he complexified the portfolio because he said overlaps are better than gaps. And Jeff Clark's taking a different approach, is there a concern for customers? Wow, I might be left behind. They've got to be a little bit careful with that message, don't they? >> Yeah, but I mean we've touched on it a little bit, Dave, there's still some of the core product, you know powermac comes out there, this is the legacy of b macs, still supports the mainframe, you know, there's a business for this, and they're not gonna leave their customers behind. But what we said, Dave, when they put this portfolio together they need to turn the crank a little bit to get the operating margins where they need to be, not be overlapping so much with marketing and some of these other places. So, they're going to be very smart in how they do this, they say they're going to overcommunicate to not only their customers but their partner. I've talked to a bunch of (inaudible) partners, pretty happy. You know, there were a little bit of bumps over the last 18 to 24 months as to "oh wait I had this account rep and now they brought in this overlay and then they flopped who owned it." So it's been interesting to watch some of those and- >> Well look. >> It's a people business, and some of that changed- >> At the end of the day, Dell's portfolio can all be placed in service to the customer with relevance and competency today. That's a much better problem to have than a company that has either been building a bunch of stuff that's not gonna matter or has bought a bunch of stuff that's not gonna matter. It means if they can sustain a degree of focus that allows them to pay down their debt and do the financial engineering and Tom Sweet's a stud, the CFO's a stud, it means that they can listen to customers and continue to service what the customer needs because their portfolio is easily applied to customer problems unlike a lot of other companies. That's a pretty decent position. They can pursue all of these things because the portfolio is relevant. Now, are there gonna be some challenges? Well, one of the reasons why EMC complexified the portfolio was because they had salespeople who were deeply engaged in their accounts and they used that as an advantage, and so the salespeople said "I need something" and so Dell EMC, like CISCO did for years, went off, or EMC, went off and found it. Dell still has a different channel organization and a different channel approach, much more partnership-oriented, if there's tension in the model, I don't know what you think about this, Keith If there's tension in the model it's we're going through a major transformation in the industry right now. How close do you have to be to the customer, is this going to be a partner-led transformation or are you gonna want your people handling the transformation? EMC's approach was your people led the complex portfolio. Dell's approach, simplify the portfolio, are you making the relationships more complex as a result? >> That's a great point, we touched on this with Marius, because essentially, in Marius' organization you have an overlay EMC salesforce which is used to belly-to-belly, and he said "look we're working it out" and it requires great leadership. >> It's gotta be somewhere, is it gonna be in the portfolio or the engagement model? >> And from the engagement model, just look at the Dell Technologies family themselves. When I was a EMC VMware customer, I didn't have combined meetings with EMC and VMware, two belly-to-belly relationships. When that Dell EMC merger took place, Dell came in and flexed the muscle, you know desktops, laptops, end-to-end vision, VMware became, you know, you could sense the tension in the room. I just talked to another big Dell EMC VMware customer and they'll say you know what at VMworld, Dell Technologies World, the messaging here has been incredible. You get in the real world, you talk to your Dell Technologies or Dell EMC rep, one set of products, you talk to the VMware rep, a completely different set of products. >> And then you talk to partners, and what are they saying? So where's the complexity gonna be? EMC said the complexity's gonna be in the portfolio, the engagement model is gonna be simple. Dell's saying the portfolio is gonna be more simple, but what's gonna happen to the engagement model? Because customers, this transformation stuff we're talking about is hard. >> Let's break down, we've got a couple minutes left, let's break down the competitive landscape, the horses in the track as we like to say. We obviously got AWS, you know the megatrend factor sucking up a lot of demand. Everybody says that people are coming back on prem, more people are going to the cloud. 49% growth. So that's clear, but you got traditional server competitors which really is I guess HPE and Lenovo, right? We're gonna focus on the enterprise stuff because that's kind of our wheelhouse. You've got the storage guys, you know that app seems to be back, Pure is continuing to do its thing, small in the grand scheme of 80 billion dollars. >> Their best friend will be Nutanix. >> Right, yeah right, and you got that funky relationship, you got an interesting CISCO relationship going on, so how do you describe the competitive landscape? Start with you, Stu. >> Yeah, it's a little bit complicated. Listen to what Peter was saying there, EMC was pretty cut and dry, you know. Storage, that's where we're gonna live, and everything else, we're gonna partner, even all the server companies that need to sell storage, they have great partnerships with IBM and HP and everything like that with the first one you had to partner with EMC because they were dominant in that space. Dell at the core of it, server company still so it was interesting, one of the interviews I did, it was, you know, VxRail, if you're not in hyperconverted space, if you don't own the server, you're not in the right thing. And I'm like, we got Datrium and Nutanix and all these other partners that are here in the ecosystem that are living on top of the Dell platform, so there's a little bit of that give and take, it's more coopatition than I used to see, you used to go to Dell World, they'd have that rack of OEMs with all those different vessels out there, so you know, where does Dell want to go? How do they maximize, you know, the investment that they made in the biggest merger in tech history? So it's still playing out, I hear relatively good things from the partners, and the customers at least aren't getting stuck in the middle. You know, with CISCO sometimes it was really a punch in the face and if we're not 100% on board we're not gonna let you have it and then the channel would just sort it out themselves. >> I mean AWS and the cloud, it is what it is. The VMware partnership, you know good move, gives them some near-term maybe even mid-term runway, we'll see what happens long-term. In the server business it's HBE, right? Is the main competitor. What do you guys think? >> We got IBM. >> Yeah, IBM for sure, yeah. >> The powermacs that just got announced, when that comes out the second half of this year, that goes right after CISCO UCS. Not a lot of talk about CISCO, the VxBlock business is a three to four billion dollar business between the Dell family and the CISCO family and this is gonna put them at loggerheads really soon. >> Yeah I talked to customers, they love the Dell EMC certainly, powermacs has been one of the top conversations, they can't wait to connect their powermacs to their HPE blades, that's gonna be awesome. Which is good. The other piece of that is the NetApp story. NetApp did a great job of talking about data fabric and being a data copy, I don't know if they're there yet, did a great job talking about it. Dell EMC- >> Good investments, they hired great people, so they're on that path. >> Two men in my peer community, a man and woman said NetApp's cloud story is legit, they're good. >> They're a software company. >> They're a software company. Dell EMC's cloud story, specifically around storage, you know, the isilon announcement was a partnership but you know I think customers are really looking at that again, that API is about the data and how do I move my data on-prem, off-prem, I don't know if Dell EMC has their story yet and they have the product portfolio to back it. >> So, here's what I'd say Dave. At the end of the day, there's a whole bunch of transformations and I'll try to be as succinct as I can. First off, data has to be acknowledged as an asset. Number one. That's a transition in itself. Number two. Investment in technology has to be regarded as an investment in improving the value of that data asset which means that ultimately the money in this industry is gonna follow the value of the data, that's the simplest most straightforward way of thinking about this. So, when we think about, for example, the server business, we're saying "you're not gonna put all your data up in a public cloud because the data's not gonna allow you to do that." Well, what's the difference between saying you're not going to put all your data in a public cloud and saying oh you're going to move all of your data to some server somewhere? There's, yeah it's a little bit more approximate, but it's still not, you're gonna move your data closer to more intelligent storage, more intelligent networks, and they'll go find the compute that they need. And that's not how Dell is set up today. That's just not how they're set up today. So if we think about five to ten years, we're talking about a whole bunch of processing power being moved closer and closer and closer to the data in the form of, you know, routines that are being run right there at the storage machine. We're talking about much more programmable control planes, data-driven data-first control planes, that are being in the network and defined by what the network can do, and the compute is increasingly gonna be regarded as important, not unimportant, but it's gonna be an increasingly distributed world where you can't have your cake and eat it too, you can't say don't go up to the public cloud but go up to our big honking server. There's something that doesn't quite watch there. >> Well, great analysis Peter, and to your point organizational structures really matter and I think today Dell's organization is really optimized for the continued integration, streamlining that piece, getting that right, making sure the processes are there, and then we'll see how it goes over time. Alright, thanks you guys. That was awesome. Good kickoff for day three. Okay, this is day three, you're watching theCUBE, keep it right there we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone and welcome back. This is theCUBE live here in Barcelona for Cisco Live Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE, with Stu Miniman analyst at Wikibon, covering networking storage and all infrastructure cloud. Stu Miniman, Stu. Our next guest is Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer at IBM Storage Systems. Eric, CUBE alumni, he's been on so many times I can't even count. You get the special VIP badge. We're here breaking down all the top stories at Cisco Live in Europe, kicking off 2018. Although it's the European show, not the big show, certainly kicking off the year with a lot of new concepts that aren't necessarily new, but they're innovative. Eric, welcome to theCUBE again. >> Well, thank you. We always love participating in theCUBE. IBM is a strong supporter of theCUBE and all the things you do for us, so thank you very much for having us again. >> A lot of great thought leadership from IBM, really appreciate you guys' support over the years. But now we're in a sea change. IBM had their first quarter of great results, and that will be well-reported on SiliconANGLE, but the sea change is happening. You've been living this generation, you've seen couple cycles in the past. Cisco putting forth a vision of the future, which is pretty right on. They were right on Internet of Things ten years ago, they had it all right, but they're a networking company that's transformed up the stack over the years. Now on the front lines of no perimeter, okay, more security challenges, cloud big whales with no networking and storage. You're in the middle of it. Break it down. Why is Cisco Live so important now than ever before? >> Well, for us it's very important because one, we have a strategic relationship with Cisco, the Storage Division does a product with Cisco called the VersaStack, converged infrastructure, and in fact one of our key constituents for the VersaStack are MSPs and CSPs, which is a key constituent of Cisco, especially with their emphasis on the cloud. Second thing for us is IBM storage has gone heavily cloud. So going heavily cloud with our software, in addition to what we do with our solutions as a foundation for CSPs and MSPs. Just what we've integrated into our software-defined storage for cloud makes Cisco Live an ideal venue for us, and Cisco an ideal partner. >> So I've got to ask you, we've had conversations on theCUBE before, they're all on youtube.com/siliconangle, just search Eric Herzog, you'll find them. But I want to recycle this one point and get your comments and reaction here in Barcelona. You guys have transformed with software at IBM big-time with storage. Okay, you're positioned well for the cloud. What's the most important thing that companies have to do, like IBM and Cisco, to play an innovator role in the cloud game as we have software at the center of the value proposition? >> Well I think the key thing is, when you look at cloud infrastructure, first of all, the cloud's got to run on something. So you need some sort of structural, infrastructure foundation. Servers, networking, and compute. So at IBM and with Cisco, we're positioning ourselves as the ideal rock-solid foundation for the cloud building, if you will. So that's item number one. Item number two, our software in particular can survive, not only on premises, but can bridge and go from on-premise to a public cloud, creating a hybrid infrastructure, and that allows us to also run cloud instantiation. Several of our products are available from IBM Cloud Division, Amazon offers some of the IBM storage software, over three hundred cloud service providers, smaller ones, offer IBM Spectrum Protect as a back-up service. So we've already morphed into storage software, either A, bridging the cloud in a hybrid config, or being used by cloud providers as some of their storage offerings for end-users and businesses. >> Eric, wanted to get to, one of the partnership areas that you've talked about with Cisco is VersaStack. We've talked with you a number of times about converged infrastructure, that partnership, Cisco UCS taking all the virtualization. The buzz in the market, there's a lot of discussion, oh it's hyper-converged, it's cloud. Why is converged infrastructure still relevant today? >> Well, when you look at the analysts that track the numbers, you can see that the overall converged market is growing and hyper-converged is viewed as a subset. When you look at those numbers, this year close to 17 billion US, about 75% of it is still standard converged versus hyper-converged. One of the other differences, it's the right tool for the right job. So customers need to go in eyes open. So when you do a hyper-converged infrastructure, by the way IBM offers a hyper-converged infrastructure currently with Nutanix, so we actually have both, the Nutanix partnership offering hyper-converged and a partnership with Cisco on standard converged. It's really, how do you size the right tool for the right job? And one of the negatives of hyper-converged, very easy to deploy, that's great, but one of the negatives is every time you need more storage, you have to add more server. Every time you need more server, you add more storage. With this traditional converged infrastructure, you can add servers only, or networking only, or storage only. So I think when you're in certain configurations, workloads, and applications, hyper-converged is the right solution, IBM's got a solution. In other situations, particularly as your middle-sized and bigger apps, regular converged is better 'cause you can basically parse and size up or down compute, networking, and the storage independent of each other, whereas in hyper-converged you have to do it at the same time. And that's a negative where you're either over-buying your storage when you don't need it, or you're over-buying your compute when you don't need it. With standard converged, you don't have that issue. You buy what you need when you need it. But I think most big companies, for sure, have certain workloads that are best with hyper-converged, and we've got that, and other workloads that are best with converged, and we have that as well. >> Okay, the other big growth area in storage for the last bunch of years has been flash. IBM's got a strong position in all-flash arrays. What's new there, how are some of the technologies changing? Any impact on the network that we should be really understanding at this show? >> Sure, so couple things. So first of all, we just brought out some very high-density all-flash arrays in Q4. We can put 220 terabytes in two rack U, which is a building block that we use in several different of our all-flash configurations, including our all-flash VersaStack. The other thing we do is we embed software-defined storage on our, software-defined storage actually on our physical all-flash arrays. Most companies don't do that, so they've got an all-flash offering and if they have a software-defined offering it's actually a different piece of software. For us it's the same, so it's easier to deploy, it's easier to train, it's easier to license, it's easier for a reseller to sell if you happen to be using a reseller. And the other thing is it's battle-hardened, because it's not only standalone software, but it's actually on the arrays as well. So from a test infrastructure quality issue, versus other vendors that have certain software that goes on their all-flash array, and then a different set of software for all software-defined. It doesn't make logical sense when you can cover it with one thing. So that's an important difference for us, and a big innovator. I think the last thing you're going to see that does impact networking is the rise of NVMe over fabrics. IBM did a statement of direction last May outlining what we're doing. We did a public demonstration of an InfiniBand fabric at the AI summit in New York in December, and we will be having an announcement around NVMe fabrics on the 20th of February. So stay tuned to hear us then. We'll be launching some more NVMe with fabric infrastructure at that time. >> Eric, I just, people that have been watching, there's been a lot of discussion about NVMe for a number of years, and NVMe over fabric more recently. How big a deal is this for the industry? You've seen many of these waves. Is this transformational or is it, you know, every storage company I talk to is working on this, so how's it going to be differentiated? What should users be looking to be able to, who do they partner with, how do they choose that solution, and when's it going to be ready? >> So first of all, I view it as an evolution, okay. If you take storage in general, arrays, you know we used to do punch cards. I'm old enough I remember using punch cards at the University of California. Then, it all went to tape. And if you look at old Schwarzenegger movies from the 80s, I love Schwarzenegger spy movies, what's there? IBM systems with big IBM tape, and not for back-up, for primary storage. Then in the late-80s, early-90s, IBM and a few other vendors came out with hard drive-based arrays that got hooked up to mainframes and then obviously into minis and to the rise of the LAN. Those have given away to all-flash arrays. From a connectivity perspective, you've had SCSI, you had ultra SCSI, you had ultra fast SCSI, ultra fast wide SCSI. Then you had fiber channel. So now as an infrastructure both in an array, as a connectivity between storage and the CPUs used in an array system, will be NVMe, and then you're going to have NVMe running over fabrics. So I view this as an evolution, right? >> John: What's the driver, performance or flexibility? >> A little bit of both. So from the in-box perspective, inside of an array solution, the major chip manufacturers are putting NVMe to increase the speed from storage going into the CPUs. So that will benefit the performance to the end-user for applications, workloads, and use cases. Then what they've done is Intel has pushed, with all the industry, IBM's a member of the NVMe consortium as well, has pushed using the NVMe protocol over fabrics, which also gives some added performance over fabric networks as well. So you've got it, but again I view this again as evolution, because punch cards, tape was faster, hard drive arrays were faster than tape, then flash arrays are faster, now you're going to have NVMe in the flash array, and also NVMe over fabric with connecting all-flash array. >> So I have to ask you the real question that's on everyone's mind that's out there, because storage is one of those areas that you never see it stopping. There's always venture back start-ups, you see new hot start-ups coming out of the woodwork, and there's been some failures lately and some blame NVMe's innovation to kind of killing some start-ups, I won't name names. But the real issue is the lines that were once blurred are now forming, and there's the wrong side of history and the right side of history. So I've got to ask you, what's going to be the right side of history in the storage architecture that people need to get onto to win in the future? >> So, there's a couple key points. One, all storage infrastructure and storage software needs to interface with cloud infrastructure. Got to be hybrid, if you have a software play like we do, where the software, such as our Spectrum Scale or our Spectrum Protect or Spectrum Protect Plus, can exist as a cloud service through a service rider, that's where you want to be. You don't want to have just a standard array and that's all you sell. So you want to have an array business, you want to make sure that's highly performant, you want to make sure that's the position, and the infrastructure underneath clouds, which means not only very fast, but also incredibly resilient. And that includes both cloud configs and AI. If you're going to do real-time AI, if you're going to do dark trading on Wall Street using AI instead of human beings, A, if the storage isn't really fast you're going to miss a 10 million dollar, hundred million dollar transaction. Second thing, if it's not resilient and always available, you're really in trouble. And god forbid when they bring AI to healthcare, and I mean AI in the operating room, boy if that storage fails when I'm on the table, wow. That's not going to be good. So those are the things you got to integrate with in the future. AI and cloud, whether it's software-defined in the array space, or if you're like IBM in both markets. >> John: Performance and resilient. >> Performance and resiliency is critical. >> All right, so Eric I have a non-storage question for you. >> Eric: Absolutely. >> So you've got the CMO hat for a division of IBM. You've been CMO of a start-up, you've been in this industry for a while. What's the changing role of the CMO in today's digital world? >> So I think the key thing is digital is a critical method of the overall marketing mix. And everything needs to reinforce everything. So let's take an example. One of the large storage websites and magazines recently announced that IBM is a finalist for four product-of-the-year awards. Two for all-flash arrays and two for software-defined storage. So guess what we've done? We've amplified it over LinkedIn, over IBM Facebook, through our Twitter handle, we leverage that. We use it at trade shows. So digital is A, the first foray, right? People look on your website and look at what you're doing socially before they even decide, should I really call them up, or should I really go to their booth a trade show? >> So discovery and learning is happening online. >> Discovery and learning, but even progression. We just, I just happened to tweet and LinkedIn this morning, Clarinet, a large European cloud MSP and CSP, just selected IBM all-flash arrays, IBM Spectrum Protect, and IBM Spectrum Virtualize for their cloud infrastructure. And obviously their target, they sell to end-users and companies, right? But the key thing is we tweeted it, we linked it in, we're going to use it here at the show, we're going to use it in PR efforts. So digital is a critical element of the marketing mix, it's not a fad. It also can be a lead dog. So if you're going to a trade show, you should tweet about it and link it in, just the way you guys do. We all knew you were coming to this show, we know you're going to IBM Think, we know you're going to VM World and Oracle, all these great shows. How do we find out? We follow you on social media and on the digital market space, so it's critical. >> And video, video a big role in - >> Video is critical. We use your videos all the time, obviously. I always tweet them and link them in once I'm posted. >> Clip and stick is the new buzzword. Clip 'em and stick 'em. Our new clipper tool, you've seen that. >> (laughs) Yes, I have. So it's really critical, though, that, you can, and remember, I'm like one of the oldest guys in the storage business, I'm 60 years old, I've been doing this 32 years, seven start-ups, EMC, IBM twice, Mac store Seagate, so I've done big and small. This is a sea change transformation in marketing. The key thing is you have to make it not stand on its own, integrate everything. PR, analyst relations, digital in everything you do, digital with shows and how you integrate the whole buyer's journey, and put it together. And people are using digital more and more, in fact I saw a survey from a biz school, 75% of people are looking at you digitally before they ever even call you up or call one of your resellers if you use the channel, to talk about your products. That's a sea change. >> You guys do a great job with content marketing, hats off to you guys. All right, final question for you, take a minute to just quickly explain the relationship that IBM has with Cisco and the importance of it, specifically what you guys are doing with them, how you guys go on to market to customers, and what's the impact to the customer. >> So, first of all, we have a very broad relationship with Cisco, Obviously I'm the CMO of the Storage Division, so I focus on storage, but several other divisions of IBM have powerful relationships. The IoT group, the Collaboration group. Cisco's one of our valued partners. We don't have networking products, so our Global Technology Services Division is one of the largest resellers of Cisco in the world, whether it be networking, servers, converge, what-have-you, so it's a strong, powerful relationship. From an end-user perspective, the importance is they know that the two companies are working together hand-in-glove. Sometimes you have two companies where you buy solutions from the A and B, and A and B don't even talk to each other, and yes they both go to the PlugFest or the Compatibility Lab, but they don't really work together, and their technology doesn't work together. IBM and Cisco have gone well beyond that to make sure that we work closely together in all of the divisions, including the storage division, with our Cisco-validated designs. And then lastly, whether it's delivered through the direct sales model or through the valued business partners that IBM and Cisco share, it's critical the end-user know, and the partners know, they're getting something that works together and doesn't just have the works option. It's tightly-honed and finely-integrated, whether it be storage or the IoT Division, the Collaboration Division, Cisco is a heavy proponent of IBM Security Division. >> Product teams work together? >> Yeah, all the product teams work together, trade APIs back and forth, not just doing the, and let's go do a test, compatibility test. Which everybody does that, but we go well beyond that with IBM and Cisco together. >> And it's a key relationship for you guys? >> Key relationship for the Storage Division, as well as for many of the other divisions of IBM, it's a critical relationship with Cisco. >> All right, Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer for the Storage Systems group at IBM. It's theCUBE live coverage in Barcelona, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more from Barcelona Cisco Live Europe after this short break. (upbeat techno music)