>> Narrator: "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (intro music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to "theCUBE's" day three coverage of MWC23. Lisa Martin here in Spain, Barcelona, Spain with Dave Nicholson. We're going to have a really interesting conversation next. We're going to really dig into MWC, it's history, where it's going, some of the controversy here. Please welcome our guests. We have Jim Harris, International Best Selling Author of "Blindsided." And Carolina Milanese is here, President and Principle Analyst of creative strategies. Welcome to "theCUBE" guys. Thank you. >> Thanks. So great to be here. >> So this is day three. 80,000 people or so. You guys have a a lot of history up at this event. Caroline, I want to start with you. Talk a little bit about that. This obviously the biggest one in, in quite a few years. People are ready to be back, but there's been some, a lot of news here, but some controversy going on. Give us the history, and your perspective on some of the news that's coming out from this week's event. >> It feels like a very different show. I don't know if I would say growing up show, because we are still talking about networks and mobility, but there's so much more now around what the networks actually empower, versus the network themselves. And a little bit of maybe that's where some of the controversy is coming from, carriers still trying to find their identity, right, of, of what their role is in all there is to do with a connected world. I go back a long way. I go back to when Mobile World Congress was called, was actually called GSM, and it was in Khan. So, you know, we went from France to Spain. But just looking at the last full Mobile World Congress here in Barcelona, in pre-pandemic to now, very different show. We went from a show that was very much focused on mobility and smartphones, to a show that was all about cars. You know, we had cars everywhere, 'cause we were talking about smart cities and connected cars, to now a show this year that is very much focused on B2B. And so a lot of companies that are here to either work with the carriers, or also talk about sustainability for instance, or enable what is the next future evolution of computing with XR and VR. >> So Jim, talk to us a little bit about your background. You, I was doing a little sleuthing on you. You're really focusing on disruptive innovation. We talk about disruption a lot in different industries. We're seeing a lot of disruption in telco. We're seeing a lot of frenemies going on. Give us your thoughts about what you're seeing at this year's event. >> Well, there's some really exciting things. I listened to the keynote from Orange's CEO, and she was complaining that 55% of the traffic on her network is from five companies. And then the CEO of Deutsche Telecom got up, and he was complaining that 60% of the traffic on his network is from six entities. So do you think they coordinated pre, pre-show? But really what they're saying is, these OTT, you know, Netflix and YouTube, they should be paying us for access. Now, this is killer funny. The front page today of the show, "Daily," the CO-CEO of Netflix says, "Hey, we make less profit than the telcos, "so you should be paying us, "not the other way around." You know, we spend half of the money we make just on developing content. So, this is really interesting. The orange CEO said, "We're not challenging net neutrality. "We don't want more taxes." But boom. So this is disruptive. Huge pressure. 67% of all mobile traffic is video, right? So it's a big hog bandwidth wise. So how are they going to do this? Now, I look at it, and the business model for the, the telcos, is really selling sim cards and smartphones. But for every dollar of revenue there, there's five plus dollars in apps, and consulting and everything else. So really, but look at how they're structured. They can't, you know, take somebody who talks to the public and sells sim cards, and turn 'em in, turn 'em in to an app developer. So how are they going to square this circle? So I see some, they're being disrupted because they're sticking to what they've historically done. >> But it's interesting because at the end of the day, the conversation that we are having right now is the conversation that we had 10 years ago, where carriers don't want to just be a dumb pipe, right? And that's what they are now returning to. They tried to be media as well, but that didn't work out for most carriers, right? It is a little bit better in the US. We've seen, you know, some success there. But, but here has been more difficult. And I think that's the, the concern, that even for the next, you know, evolution, that's the, their role. >> So how do they, how do they balance this dumb pipe idea, with the fact that if you make the toll high enough, being a dumb pipe is actually a pretty good job. You know, sit back, collect check, go to the beach, right? So where, where, where, where does this end up? >> Well, I think what's going to happen is, if you see five to 15 X the revenue on top of a pipe, you know, the hyperscalers are going to start going after the business. The consulting companies like PWC, McKinsey, the app developers, they're... So how do you engage those communities as a telco to get more revenue? I think this is a question that they really need to look at. But we tend to stick within our existing business model. I'll just give you one stat that blows me away. Uber is worth more than every taxi cab company in North America added together. And so the taxi industry owns billions in assets in cars and limousines. Uber doesn't own a single vehicle. So having a widely distributed app, is a huge multiplier on valuation. And I look to a company like Safari in Kenya, which developed M-Pesa, which Pesa means mo, it's mobile money in Swahili. And 25% of the country's GDP is facilitated by M-Pesa. And that's not even on smartphones. They're feature phones, Nokia phones. I call them dumb phones, but Nokia would call them "feature phones." >> Yeah. >> So think about that. Like 25, now transactions are very small, and the cut is tiny. But when you're facilitating 25% of a country's GDP, >> Yeah. >> Tiny, over billions of transactions is huge. But that's not the way telcos have historically thought or worked. And so M-Pesa and Safari shows the way forward. What do you think on that? >> I, I think that the experience, and what they can layer on top from a services perspective, especially in the private sector, is also important. I don't, I never believe that a carrier, given how they operate, is the best media company in the world, right? It is a very different world. But I do think that there's opportunity, first of all, to, to actually tell their story in a different way. If you're thinking about everything that a network actually empowers, there's a, there's a lot there. There's a lot that is good for us as, as society. There's a lot that is good for business. What can they do to start talking about differently about their services, and then layer on top of what they offer? A better way to actually bring together private and public network. It's not all about cellular, wifi and cellular coming together. We're talking a lot about satellite here as well. So, there's definitely more there about quality of service. Is, is there though, almost a biological inevitability that prevents companies from being able to navigate that divide? >> Hmm. >> Look at, look at when, when, when we went from high definition 720P, very exciting, 1080P, 4K. Everybody ran out and got a 4K TV. Well where was the, where was the best 4K content coming from? It wasn't, it wasn't the networks, it wasn't your cable operator, it was YouTube. It was YouTube. If you had suggested that 10 years before, that that would happen, people would think that you were crazy. Is it possible for folks who are now leading their companies, getting up on stage, and daring to say, "This content's coming over, "and I want to charge you more "for using my pipes." It's like, "Really? Is that your vision? "That's the vision that you want to share with us here?" I hear the sound of dead people walking- (laughing) when I hear comments like that. And so, you know, my students at Wharton in the CTO program, who are constantly looking at this concept of disruption, would hear that and go, "Ooh, gee, did the board hear what that person said?" I, you know, am I being too critical of people who could crush me like a bug? (laughing) >> I mean, it's better that they ask the people with money than not consumers to pay, right? 'Cause we've been through a phase where the carriers were actually asking for more money depending on critical things. Like for instance, if you're doing business email, then were going to charge you more than if you were a consumer. Or if you were watching video, they would charge you more for that. Then they understood that a consumer would walk away and go somewhere else. So they stopped doing that. But to your point, I think, and, and very much to what you focus from a disruption perspective, look at what Chat GTP and what Microsoft has been doing. Not much talk about this here at the show, which is interesting, but the idea that now as a consumer, I can ask new Bing to get me the 10 best restaurants in Barcelona, and I no longer go to Yelp, or all the other businesses where I was going to before, to get their recommendation, what happens to them? You're, you're moving away, and you're taking eyeballs away from those websites. And, and I think that, that you know, your point is exactly right. That it's, it's about how, from a revenue perspective, you are spending a lot of money to facilitate somebody else, and what's in it for you? >> Yeah. And to be clear, consumers pay for everything. >> Always. Always. (laughs) >> Taxpayers and consumers always pay for everything. So there is no, "Well, we're going to make them pay, so you don't have to pay." >> And if you are not paying, you are the product. Exactly. >> Yes. (laughing) >> Carolina, talk a little bit about what you're seeing at the event from some of the infrastructure players, the hyperscalers, obviously a lot of enterprise focus here at this event. What are some of the things that you're seeing? Are you impressed with, with their focus in telco, their focus to partner, build an ecosystem? What are you seeing? >> I'm seeing also talk about sustainability, and enabling telco to be more sustainable. You know, there, there's a couple of things that are a little bit different from the US where I live, which is that telcos in Europe, have put money into sustainability through bonds. And so they use the money that they then get from the bonds that they create, to, to supply or to fuel their innovation in sustainability. And so there's a dollar amount on sustainability. There's also an opportunity obviously from a growth perspective. And there's a risk mitigation, right? Especially in Europe, more and more you're going to be evaluated based on how sustainable you are. So there are a lot of companies here, if you're thinking about the Ciscos of the world. Dell, IBM all talking about sustainability and how to help carriers measure, and then obviously be more sustainable with their consumption and, and power. >> Going to be interesting to see where that goes over the years, as we talk to, every company we talk to at whatever show, has an ESG sustainability initiative, and only, well, many of them only want to work with other companies who have the same types of initiative. So a lot of, great that there's focus on sustainability, but hopefully we'll see more action down the road. Wanted to ask you about your book, "Blind," the name is interesting, "Blindsided." >> Well, I just want to tag on to this. >> Sure. >> One of the most exciting things for me is fast charging technology. And Shalmie, cell phone, or a smartphone maker from China, just announced yesterday, a smartphone that charges from 0 to 100% in five minutes. Now this is using GAN FEST technology. And the leader in the market is a company called Navitas. And this has profound implications. You know, it starts with the smartphone, right? But then it moves to the laptops. And then it'll move to EV's. So, as we electrify the $10 trillion a year transportation industry, there's a huge opportunity. People want charging faster. There's also a sustainability story that, to Carolina's point, that it uses less electricity. So, if we electrify the grid in order to support transportation, like the Tesla Semi's coming out, there are huge demands over a period. We need energy efficiency technologies, like this GAN FEST technology. So to me, this is humongous. And it, we only see it here in the show, in Shalmie, saying, "Five minutes." And everybody, the consumers go, "Oh, that's cool." But let's look at the bigger story, which is electrifying transportation globally. And this is going to be big. >> Yeah. And, and to, and to double click on that a little bit, to be clear, when we talk about fast charging today, typically it's taking the battery from a, not a zero state of charge, but a relatively low state of charge to 80%. >> Yep. >> Then it tapers off dramatically. And that translates into less range in an EV, less usable time on any other device, and there's that whole linkage between the power in, and the battery's ability to be charged, and how much is usable. And from a sustainability perspective, we are going to have an avalanche of batteries going into secondary use cases over time. >> They don't get tossed into landfills contrary to what people might think. >> Yep. >> In fact, they are used in a variety of ways after their primary lifespan. But that, that is, that in and of itself is a revolutionary thing. I'm interested in each of your thoughts on the China factor. Glaringly absent here, from my perspective, as sort of an Apple fanboy, where are they? Why aren't they talking about their... They must, they must feel like, "Well we just don't need to." >> We don't need to. We just don't need to. >> Absolutely. >> And then you walk around and you see these, these company names that are often anglicized, and you don't necessarily immediately associate them with China, but it's like, "Wait a minute, "that looks better than what I have, "and I'm not allowed to have access to that thing." What happens in the future there geopolitically? >> It's a pretty big question for- >> Its is. >> For a short little tech show. (Caroline laughs) But what happens as we move forward? When is the entire world going to be able to leverage in a secure way, some of the stuff that's coming out of, if they're not the largest economy in the world yet, they shortly will be. >> What's the story there? >> Well, it's interesting that you mentioned First Apple that has never had a presence at Mobile World Congress. And fun enough, I'm part of the GSMA judges for the GLOMO Awards, and last night I gave out Best Mobile Phone for last year, and it was to the iPhone4 Team Pro. and best disruptive technology, which was for the satellite function feature on, on the new iPhone. So, Apple might not be here, but they are. >> Okay. >> And, and so that's the first thing. And they are as far as being top of mind to every competitor in the smartphone market still. So a lot of the things that, even from a design perspective that you see on some of the Chinese brands, really remind you of, of Apple. What is interesting for me, is how there wouldn't be, with the exception of Samsung and Motorola, there's no one else here that is non-Chinese from a smartphone point of view. So that's in itself, is something that changed dramatically over the years, especially for somebody like me that still remember Nokia being the number one in the market. >> Huh. >> So. >> Guys, we could continue this conversation. We are unfortunately out of time. But thank you so much for joining Dave and me, talking about your perspectives on the event, the industry, the disruptive forces. It's going to be really interesting to see where it goes. 'Cause at the end of the day, it's the consumers that just want to make sure I can connect wherever I am 24 by seven, and it just needs to work. Thank you so much for your insights. >> Thank you. >> Lisa, it's been great. Dave, great. It's a pleasure. >> Our pleasure. For our guests, and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching, "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage coming to you day three of our coverage of MWC 23. Stick around. Our next guest joins us momentarily. (outro music)

(lively music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Supercloud presentation here. I'm theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host. What a great segment here. We're going to unpack the networking aspect of the cloud, how that translates into what Supercloud architecture and platform deployment scenarios look like. And demystify multi-cloud, hybridcloud. We've got two great experts. Amir Khan, the Co-Founder and CEO of Alkira, Atif Khan, Co-Founder and CTO of Alkira. These guys been around since 2018 with the startup, but before that story, history in the tech industry. I mean, routing early days, multiple waves, multiple cycles. >> Welcome three decades. >> Welcome to Supercloud. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> So, let's get your take on Supercloud because it's been one of those conversations that really galvanized the industry because it kind of highlights almost this next wave, this next side of the street that everyone's going to be on that's going to be successful. The laggards on the legacy seem to be stuck on the old model. SaaS is growing up, it's ISVs, it's ecosystems, hyperscale, full hybrid. And then multi-cloud around the corners cause all this confusion, everyone's hand waving. You know, this is a solution, that solution, where are we? What do you guys see as this supercloud dynamic? >> So where we start from is always focusing on the customer problem. And in 2018 when we identified the problem, we saw that there were multiple clouds with many diverse ways of doing things from the network perspective, and customers were struggling with that. So we delved deeper into that and looked at each one of the cloud architectures completely independent. And there was no common solution and customers were struggling with that from the perspective. They wanted to be in multiple clouds, either through mergers and acquisitions or running an application which may be more cost effective to run in something or maybe optimized for certain reasons to run in a different cloud. But from the networking perspective, everything needed to come together. So that's, we are starting to define it as a supercloud now, but basically, it's a common infrastructure across all clouds. And then integration of high lift services like, you know, security or IPAM services or many other types of services like inter-partner routing and stuff like that. So, Amir, you agree then that multi-cloud is simply a default result of having whatever outcomes, either M&A, some productivity software, maybe Azure. >> Yes. >> Amazon has this and then I've got on-premise application, so it's kinds mishmash. >> So, I would qualify it with hybrid multi-cloud because everything is going to be interconnected. >> John: Got it. >> Whether it's on-premise, remote users or clouds. >> But have CTO perspective, obviously, you got developers, multiple stacks, got AWS, Azure and GCP, other. Not everyone wants to kind of like go all in, but yet they don't want to hedge too much because it's a resource issue. And I got to learn this stack, I got to learn that stack. So then now, you have this default multi-cloud, hybrid multi-cloud, then it's like, okay, what do I do? How do you spread that around? Is it dangerous? What's the the approach technically? What's some of the challenges there? >> Yeah, certainly. John, first, thanks for having us here. So, before I get to that, I'll just add a little bit to what Amir was saying, like how we started, what we were seeing and how it, you know, correlates with the supercloud. So, as you know, before this company, Alkira, we were doing, we did the SD-WAN company, which was Viptela. So there, we started seeing when people started deploying SD-WAN at like a larger scale. We started like, you know, customers coming to us and saying they needed connectivity into the cloud from the SD-WAN. They wanted to extend the SD-WAN fabric to the cloud. So we came up with an architecture, which was like later we started calling them Cloud onRamps, where we built, you know, a transit VPC and put like the virtual instances of SD-WAN appliances extended from there to the cloud. But before we knew, like it started becoming very complicated for the customers because it wasn't just connectivity, it also required, you know, other use cases. You had to instantiate or bring in security appliances in there. You had to secure all of that stuff. There were requirements for, you know, different regions. So you had to bring up the same thing in different regions. Then multiple clouds, what did you do? You had to replicate the same thing in multiple clouds. And now if there was was requirement between clouds, how were you going to do it? You had to route traffic from somewhere, and come up with all those routing controls and stuff. So, it was very complicated. >> Like spaghetti code, but on network. >> The games begin, in fact, one of our customers called it spaghetti mess. And so, that's where like we thought about where was the industry going and which direction the industry was going into? And we came up with the Alkira where what we are doing is building a common infrastructure across multiple clouds, across in, you know, on-prem locations, be it data centers or physical sites, branches sites, et cetera, with integrated security and network networking services inside. And, you know, nowadays, networking is not only about connectivity, you have to secure everything. So, security has to be built in. Redundancy, high availability, disaster recovery. So all of that needs to be built in. So that's like, you know, kind of a definition of like what we thought at that time, what is turning into supercloud now. >> Yeah. It's interesting too, you mentioned, you know, VPCs is not, configuration of loans a hassle. Nevermind the manual mistakes could be made, but as you decide to do something you got to, "Oh, we got to get these other things." A lot of the hyper scales and a lot of the alpha cloud players now, and cloud native folks, they're kind of in that mode of, "Wow, look at what we've built." Now, they're got to maintain, how do I refresh it? Like, how do I keep the talent? So they got this similar chaotic environment where it's like, okay, now they're already already through, so I think they're going to be okay. But then some people want to bypass it completely. So there's a lot of customers that we see out there that fit the makeup of, I'm cloud first, I've lifted and shifted, I move some stuff to the cloud. But I want to bypass all that learnings from all the people that are gone through the past three years. Can I just skip that and go to a multi-cloud or coherent infrastructure? What do you think about that? What's your view? >> So yeah, so if you look at these enterprises, you know, many of them just to find like the talent, which for one cloud as far as the IT staff is concerned, it's hard enough. And now, when you have multiple clouds, it's hard to find people the talent which is, you know, which has expertise across different clouds. So that's where we come into the picture. So our vision was always to simplify all of this stuff. And simplification, it cannot be just simplification because you cannot just automate the workflows of the cloud providers underneath. So you have to, you know, provide your full data plane on top of it, fed full control plane, management plane, policy and management on top of it. And coming back to like your question, so these nowadays, those people who are working on networking, you know, before it used to be like CLI. You used to learn about Cisco CLI or Juniper CLI, and you used to work on it. Nowadays, it's very different. So automation, programmability, all of that stuff is the key. So now, you know, Ops guys, the DevOps guys, so these are the people who are in high demand. >> So what do you think about the folks out there that are saying, okay, you got a lot of fragmentation. I got the stacks, I got a lot of stove pipes, if you will, out there on the stack. I got to learn this from Azure. Can you guys have with your product abstract the way that's so developers don't need to know the ins and outs of stack's, almost like a gateway, if you will, the old days. But like I'm a developer or team develop, why should I have to learn the management layer of Azure? >> That's exactly what we started, you know, out with to solve. So it's, what we have built is a platform and the platform sits inside the cloud. And customers are able to build their own network or a virtual network on top using that platform. So the platform has its own data plane, own control plane and management plane with a policy layer on top of it. So now, it's the platform which is sitting in different clouds, but from a customer's point of view, it's one way of doing networking. One way of instantiating or bringing in services or security services in the middle. Whether those are our security services or whether those are like services from our partners, like Palo Alto or Checkpoint or Cisco. >> So you guys brought the SD-WAN mojo and refactored it for the cloud it sounds like. >> No. >> No? (chuckles) >> We cannot said. >> All right, explain. >> It's way more than that. >> I mean, SD-WAN was wan. I mean, you're talking about wide area networks, talking about connected, so explain the difference. >> SD-WAN was primarily done for one major reason. MPLS was expensive, very strong SLAs, but very low speed. Internet, on the other hand, you sat at home and you could access your applications much faster. No SLA, very low cost, right? So we wanted to marry the two together so you could have a purely private infrastructure and a public infrastructure and secure both of them by creating a common secure fabric across all those environments. And then seamlessly tying it into your internal branch and data center and cloud network. So, it merely brought you to the edge of the cloud. It didn't do anything inside the cloud. Now, the major problem resides inside the clouds where you have to optimize the clouds themselves. Take a step back. How were the clouds built? Basically, the cloud providers went to the Ciscos and Junipers and the rest of the world, built the network in the data centers or across wide area infrastructure, and brought it all together and tried to create a virtualized layer on top of that. But there were many limitations of this underlying infrastructure that they had built. So number of routes per region, how inter region connectivity worked, or how many routes you could carry to the VPCs of V nets? That all those were becoming no common policy across, you know, these environments, no segmentation across these environments, right? So the networking constructs that the enterprise customers were used to as enterprise class carry class capabilities, they did not exist in the cloud. So what did the customer do? They ended up stitching it together all manually. And that's why Atif was alluding to earlier that it became a spaghetti mess for the customers. And then what happens is, as a result, day two operations, you know, troubleshooting, everything becomes a nightmare. So what do you do? You have to build an infrastructure inside the cloud. Cloud has enough raw capabilities to build the solutions inside there. Netflix's of the world. And many different companies have been born in the cloud and evolved from there. So why could we not take the raw capabilities of the clouds and build a network cloud or a supercloud on top of these clouds to optimize the whole infrastructure and seamlessly connecting it into the on-premise and remote user locations, right? So that's your, you know, hybrid multi-cloud solution. >> Well, great call out on the SD-WAN in common versus cloud. 'Cause I think this is important because you're building a network layer in the cloud that spans out so the customers don't have to get into the, there's a gap in the system that I'm used to, my operating environment, of having lockdown security and network. >> So yeah. So what you do is you use the raw capabilities like bandwidth or virtual machines, or you know, containers, or, you know, different types of serverless capabilities. And you bring it all together in a way to solve the networking problems, thereby creating a supercloud, which is an abstraction layer which hides all the complexity of the underlying clouds from the customer, right? And it provides a common infrastructure across all environments to that customer, right? That's the beauty of it. And it does it in a way that it looks like, if they have the networking knowledge, they can apply it to this new environment and carry it forward. One way of doing security across all clouds and hybrid environments. One way of doing routing. One way of doing large-scale network address translation. One way of doing IPAM services. So people are tired of doing individual things and individual clouds and on-premise locations, right? So now they're getting something common. >> You guys brought that, you brought all that to bear and flexible for the customer to essentially self-serve their network cloud. >> Yes, yeah. Is that the wave? >> And nowadays, from business perspective, agility is the key, right? You have to move at the pace of the business. If you don't, you are losing. >> So, would it be safe to say that you guys have a network supercloud? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> We, pretty much, yeah. Absolutely. >> What does that mean to our customer? What's in it for them? What's the benefit to the customer? I got a network supercloud, it connects, provides SLA, all the capabilities I need. What do they get? What's the end point for them? What's the end? >> Atif, maybe you can talk some examples. >> The IT infrastructure is all like distributed now, right? So you have applications running in data centers. You have applications running in one cloud. Other cloud, public clouds, enterprises are depending on so many SaaS applications. So now, these are, you can call these endpoints. So a supercloud or a network cloud, from our perspective, it's a cloud in the middle or a network in the middle, which provides connectivity from any endpoint to any endpoint. So, you are able to connect to the supercloud or network cloud in one way no matter where you are. So now, whichever cloud you are in, whichever cloud you need to connect to. And also, it's not just connecting to the cloud. So you need to do a lot of stuff, a lot of networking inside the cloud also. So now, as Amir was saying, every cloud has its own from a networking, you know, the concept perspective or the construct, they are different. There are limitations in there also. So this supercloud, which is sitting on top, basically, your platform is sitting into the cloud, but the supercloud is built on top of using your platform. So that abstracts all those complexities, all those limitations. So now your limitations are whatever the limitations of that platform are. So now your platform, that platform is in our control. So we can keep building it, we can keep scaling it horizontally. Because one of the things is that, you know, in this cloud era, one of the things is autoscaling these services. So why can't the network now autoscale also, just like your other services. >> Network autoscaling is a genius idea, and I think that's a killer. I want to ask the the follow on question because I think, first of all, I love what you guys are doing. So, I think it's a great example of this new innovation. It's not obvious until you see it, right? Geographical is huge. So, you know, single instance, global instances, multiple instances, you're seeing global. How do you guys look at that global equation? Because as companies expand their clouds into geos, and then ultimately, you know, it's obviously continent, region and locales. You're going to have geographic issues. So, this is an extension of your network cloud? >> Amir: It is the extension of the network cloud because if you look at this hyperscalers, they're sitting pretty much everywhere in the globe. So, wherever their regions are, the beauty of building a supercloud is that you can by definition, be available in those regions. It literally takes a day or two of testing for our stack to run in those regions, to make sure there are no nuances that we run into, you know, for that region. The moment we bring it up in that region, all customers can onboard into that solution. So literally, what used to take months or years to build a global infrastructure, now, you can configure it in 10 minutes basically, and bring it up in less than one hour. Since when did we see any solution- >> And by the way, >> that can come up with. >> when the edge comes out too, you're going to start to see more clouds get bolted on. >> Exactly. And you can expand to the edge of the network. That's why we call cloud the new edge, right? >> John: Yeah, it is. Now, I think you guys got a good solutions, network clouds, superclouds, good. So the question on the premise side, so I get the cloud play. It's very cool. You can expand out. It's a nice layer. I'm sure you manage the SLAs between latency and all kinds of things. Knowing when not to do things. Physics or physics. Okay. Now, you've got the on-premise. What's the on-premise equation look like? >> So on-premise, the kind of customers, we are working with large enterprises, mid-size enterprises. So they have on-prem networks, they have deployed, in many cases, they have deployed SD-WAN. In many cases, they have MPLS. They have data centers also. And a lot of these companies are, you know, moving the applications from the data center into the cloud. But we still have large enterprise- >> But for you guys, you can sit there too with non server or is it a box or what is it? >> It's a software stack, right? So, we are a software company. >> Okay, so no box. >> No box. >> Okay, got it. >> No box. >> It's even better. So, we can connect any, as I mentioned, any endpoint, whether it's data centers. So, what happens is usually these enterprises from the data centers- >> John: It's a cloud endpoint for you. >> Cloud endpoint for us. And they need highspeed connectivity into the cloud. And our network cloud is sitting inside the or supercloud is sitting inside the cloud. So we need highspeed connectivity from the data centers. This is like multi-gig type of connectivity. So we enable that connectivity as a service. And as Amir was saying, you are able to bring it up in minutes, pretty much. >> John: Well, you guys have a great handle on supercloud. I really appreciate you guys coming on. I have to ask you guys, since you have so much experience in the industry, multiple inflection points you've guys lived through and we're all old, and we can remember those glory days. What's the big deal going on right now? Because you can connect the dots and you can imagine, okay, like a Lambda function spinning up some connectivity. I need instant access to a new route, throw some, I need to send compute to an edge point for process data. A lot of these kind of ad hoc services are going to start flying around, which used to be manually configured as you guys remember. >> Amir: And that's been the problem, right? The shadow IT, that was the biggest problem in the enterprise environment. So that's what we are trying to get the customers away from. Cloud teams came in, individuals or small groups of people spun up instances in the cloud. It was completely disconnected from the on-premise environment or the existing IT environment that the customer had. So, how do you bring it together? And that's what we are trying to solve for, right? At a large scale, in a carrier cloud center (indistinct). >> What do you call that? Shift right or shift left? Shift left is in the cloud native world security. >> Amir: Yes. >> Networking and security, the two hottest areas. What are you shifting? Up or down? I mean, the network's moving up the stack. I mean, you're seeing the run times at Kubernetes later' >> Amir: Right, right. It's true we're end-to-end virtualization. So you have plumbing, which is the physical infrastructure. Then on top of that, now for the first time, you have true end-to-end virtualization, which the cloud-like constructs are providing to us. We tried to virtualize the routers, we try to virtualize instances at the server level. Now, we are bringing it all together in a truly end-to-end virtualized manner to connect any endpoint anywhere across the globe. Whether it's on-premise, home, multiple clouds, or SaaS type environments. >> Yeah. If you talk about the technical benefits beyond virtualizations, you kind of see in virtualization be abstracted away. So you got end-to-end virtualization, but you don't need to know virtualization to take advantage of it. >> Exactly. Exactly. >> What are some of the tech involved where, what's the trend around on top of virtual? What's the easy button for that? >> So there are many, many use cases from the customers and they're, you know, some of those use cases, they used to deliver out of their data centers before. So now, because you, know, it takes a long time to spend something up in the data center and stuff. So the trend is and what enterprises are looking for is agility. And to achieve that agility, they are moving those services or those use cases into the cloud. So another technical benefit of like something like a supercloud and what we are doing is we allow customers to, you know, move their services from existing data centers into the cloud as well. And I'll give you some examples. You know, these enterprises have, you know, tons of partners. They provide connectivity to their partners, to select resources. It used to happen inside the data center. You would bring in connectivity into the data center and apply like tons of ACLs and whatnot to make sure that you are able to only connect. And now those use cases are, they need to be enabled inside the cloud. And the customer's customers are also, it's not just coming from the on-prem, they're coming from the cloud as well. So, if they're coming from the cloud as well as from on-prem, so you need like an infrastructure like supercloud, which is sitting inside the cloud and is able to handle all these use cases. So all of these use cases have to be, so that requires like moving those services from the data center into the cloud or into the supercloud. So, they're, oh, as we started building this service over the last four years, we have come across so many use cases. And to deliver those use cases, you have to have a platform. So you have to have your own platform because otherwise you are depending on somebody else's, you know, capabilities. And every time their capabilities change, you have to change. >> John: I'm glad you brought up the platform 'cause I want to get your both reaction to this. So Bob Muglia just said on theCUBE here at Supercloud, that supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So the question is, is supercloud a platform or an architecture in your view? >> That's an interesting view on things, you know? I mean, if you think of it, you have to design or architect a solution before we turn it into a platform. >> John: It's a trick question actually. >> So it's a, you know, so we look at it as that you have to have an architectural approach end to end, right? And then you build a solution based on that approach. So, I don't think that they are mutually exclusive. I think they go hand in hand. It's an architecture that you turn into a solution and provide that agility and high availability and disaster recovery capability that it built into that. >> It's interesting that these definitions might be actually redefined with this new configuration. >> Amir: Yes. >> Because architecture and platform used to mean something, like, aight here's a platform, you buy this platform. >> And then you architecture solution. >> Architect it via vendor. >> Right, right, right. >> Okay. And they have to deal with that architecture in the place of multiple superclouds. If you have too many stove pipes, then what's the purpose of supercloud? >> Right, right, right. And because, you know, historically, you built a router and you sold it to the customer. And the poor customer was supposed to install it all, you know, and interconnect all those things. And if you have 40, 50,000 router network, which we saw in our lifetime, 'cause there used to be many more branches when we were growing up in the networking industry, right? You had to create hierarchy and all kinds of things to figure out how to solve that problem. We are no longer living in that world anymore. You cannot deploy individual virtual instances. And that's what approach a lot of people are taking, which is a pure overly network. You cannot take that approach anymore. You have to evolve the architecture and then build the solution based on that architecture so that it becomes a platform which is readily available, highly scalable, and available. And at the same time, it's very, very easy to deploy. It's a SaaS type solution, right? >> So you're saying, do the architecture to get the solution for the platform that the customer has. >> Amir: Yes. >> They're not buying a platform, they end up with a platform- >> With the platform. >> as a result of Supercloud path. All right. So that's what's, so you mentioned, that's a great point. I want to double click on what you just said. 'Cause I like that what you said. What's the deployment strategy in your mind for supercloud? I'm an architect. I'm at an enterprise in the Midwest. I'm an insurance company, got some cloud action going on. I'm mostly on-premise. I've got the mandate to transform the company. We have apps. We'll be fully transformed in five years. What's my strategy? What do I do? >> Amir: The resources. >> What's the deployment strategy? Single global instance, code in every region, on every cloud? >> It needs to be a solution which is available as a SaaS service, right? So from the customer's perspective, they are onboarding into the supercloud. And then the supercloud is allowing them to do whatever they used to do, you know, historically and in the new world, right? That needs to come together. And that's what we have built is that, we have brought everything together in a way that what used to take months or years, and now taking an hour or two hours, and then people test it for a week or so and deploy it in production. >> I want to bring up something we were talking about before we were on camera about the TCP/IP, the OSI model. That was a concept that destroyed the proprietary narcissist. Work operating systems of the mini computers, which brought in an era of tech prosperity for generations. TCP/IP was kind of the magical moment that allowed for that kind of super networking connection. Inter networking is what's called as a category. It feels like something's going on here with supercloud. The way you describe it, it feels like there's this unification idea. Like the reality is we've got multiple stuff sitting around by default, you either clean it up or get rid of it, right? Or it's almost a, it's either a nuance, a new nuisance or chaos. >> Yeah. And we live in the new world now. We don't have the luxury of time. So we need to move as fast as possible to solve the business problems. And that's what we are running into. If we don't have automated solutions which scale, which solve our problems, then it's going to be a problem. And that's why SaaS is so important in today's world. Why should we have to deploy the network piecemeal? Why can't we have a solution? We solve our problem as we move forward and we accomplish what we need to accomplish and move forward. >> And we don't really need standards here, dude. It's not that we need a standards body if you have unification. >> So because things move so fast, there's no time to create a standards body. And that's why you see companies like ours popping up, which are trying to create a common infrastructure across all clouds. Otherwise if we vent the standardization path may take long. Eventually, we should be going in that direction. But we don't have the luxury of time. That's what I was trying to get to. >> Well, what's interesting is, is that to your point about standards and ratification, what ratifies a defacto anything? In the old days there was some technical bodies involved, but here, I think developers drive everything. So if you look at the developers and how they're voting with their code. They're instantly, organically defining everything as a collective intelligence. >> And just like you're putting out the paper and making it available, everybody's contributing to that. That's why you need to have APIs and terra form type constructs, which are available so that the customers can continue to improve upon that. And that's the Net DevOps, right? So that you need to have. >> What was once sacrilege, just sayin', in business school, back in the days when I got my business degree after my CS degree was, you know, no one wants to have a better mousetrap, a bad business model to have a better mouse trap. In this case, the better mouse trap, the better solution actually could be that thing. >> It is that thing. >> I mean, that can trigger, tips over the industry. >> And that that's where we are seeing our customers. You know, I mean, we have some publicly referenceable customers like Coke or Warner Music Group or, you know, multiple others and chart industries. The way we are solving the problem. They have some of the largest environments in the industry from the cloud perspective. And their whole network infrastructure is running on the Alkira infrastructure. And they're able to adopt new clouds within days rather than waiting for months to architect and then deploy and then figure out how to manage it and operate it. It's available as a service. >> John: And we've heard from your customer, Warner, they were just on the program. >> Amir: Yes. Okay, okay. >> So they're building a supercloud. So superclouds aren't just for tech companies. >> Amir: No. >> You guys build a supercloud for networking. >> Amir: It is. >> But people are building their own superclouds on top of all this new stuff. Talk about that dynamic. >> Healthcare providers, financials, high-tech companies, even startups. One of our startup customers, Tekion, right? They have these dealerships that they provide sales and support services to across the globe. And for them to be able to onboard those dealerships, it is 80% less time to production. That is real money, right? So, maybe Atif can give you a lot more examples of customers who are deploying. >> Talk about some of the customer activity. What are they like? Are they laggards, they innovators? Are they trying to hit the easy button? Are they coming in late or are you got some high customers? >> Actually most of our customers, all of our customers or customers in general. I don't think they have a choice but to move in this direction because, you know, the cloud has, like everything is quick now. So the cloud teams are moving faster in these enterprises. So now that they cannot afford the network nor to keep up pace with the cloud teams. So, they don't have a choice but to go with something similar where you can, you know, build your network on demand and bring up your network as quickly as possible to meet all those use cases. So, I'll give you an example. >> John: So the demand's high for what you guys do. >> Demand is very high because the cloud teams have- >> John: Yeah. They're going fast. >> They're going fast and there's no stopping. And then network teams, they have to keep up with them. And you cannot keep deploying, you know, networks the way you used to deploy back in the day. And as far as the use cases are concerned, there are so many use cases which our customers are using our platform for. One of the use cases, I'll give you an example of these financial customers. Some of the financial customers, they have their customers who they provide data, like stock exchanges, that provide like market data information to their customers out of data centers part. But now, their customers are moving into the cloud as well. So they need to come in from the cloud. So when they're coming in from the cloud, you cannot be giving them data from your data center because that takes time, and your hair pinning everything back. >> Moving data is like moving, moving money, someone said. >> Exactly. >> Exactly. And the other thing is like you have to optimize your traffic flows in the cloud as well because every time you leave the cloud, you get charged a lot. So, you don't want to leave the cloud unless you have to leave the cloud, your traffic. So, you have to come up or use a service which allows you to optimize all those traffic flows as well, you know? >> My final question to you guys, first of all, thanks for coming on Supercloud Program. Really appreciate it. Congratulations on your success. And you guys have a great positioning and I'm a big fan. And I have to ask, you guys are agile, nimble startup, smart on the cutting edge. Supercloud concept seems to resonate with people who are kind of on the front range of this major wave. While all the incumbents like Cisco, Microsoft, even AWS, they're like, I think they're looking at it, like what is that? I think it's coming up really fast, this trend. Because I know people talk about multi-cloud, I get that. But like, this whole supercloud is not just SaaS, it's more going on there. What do you think is going on between the folks who get it, supercloud, get the concept, and some are who are scratching their heads, whether it's the Ciscos or someone, like I don't get it. Why is supercloud important for the folks that aren't really seeing it? >> So first of all, I mean, the customers, what we saw about six months, 12 months ago, were a little slower to adopt the supercloud kind of concept. And there were leading edge customers who were coming and adopting it. Now, all of a sudden, over the last six to nine months, we've seen a flurry of customers coming in and they are from all disciplines or all very diverse set of customers. And they're starting to see the value of that because of the practical implications of what they're doing. You know, these shadow IT type environments are no longer working and there's a lot of pressure from the management to move faster. And then that's where they're coming in. And perhaps, Atif, if you can give a few examples of. >> Yeah. And I'll also just add to your point earlier about the network needing to be there 'cause the cloud teams are like, let's go faster. And the network's always been slow because, but now, it's been almost turbocharged. >> Atif: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And as I said, like there was no choice here. You had to move in this industry. And the other thing I would add a little bit is now if you look at all these enterprises, most of their traffic is from, even from which is coming from the on-prem, it's going to the cloud SaaS applications or public clouds. And it's more than 50% of traffic, which is leaving your, you know, what you used to call, your network or the private network. So now it's like, you know, before it used to just connect sites to data centers and sites together. Now, it's a cloud as well as the SaaS application. So it's either internet bound or the public cloud bound. So now you have to build a network quickly, which caters to all these use cases. And that's where like something- >> And you guys, your solution to me is you eliminate all that work for the customer. Now, they can treat the cloud like a bag of Legos. And do their thing. Well, I oversimplify. Well, you know I'm talking about. >> Atif: Right, exactly. >> And to answer your question earlier about what about the big companies coming in and, you know, now they slow to adopt? And, you know, what normally happens is when Cisco came up, right? There used to be 16 different protocols suites. And then we finally settled on TCP/IP and DECnet or AppleTalk or X&S or, you know, you name it, right? Those companies did not adapt to the networking the way it was supposed to be done. And guess what happened, right? So if the companies in the networking space do not adopt this new concept or new way of doing things, I think some of them will become extinct over time. >> Well, I think the force and function too is the cloud teams as well. So you got two evolutions. You got architectural relevance. That's real as impact. >> It's very important. >> Cost, speed. >> And I look at it as a very similar disruption to what Cisco's the world, very early days did to, you know, bring the networking out, right? And it became the internet. But now we are going through the cloud. It's the cloud era, right? How does the cloud evolve over the next 10, 15, 20 years? Everything's is going to be offered as a service, right? So slowly data centers go away, the network becomes a plumbing thing. Very, you know, simple to deploy. And everything on top of that is virtualized in the cloud-like manners. >> And that makes the networks hardened and more secure. >> More secure. >> It's a great way to be secure. You remember the glory days, we'll go back 15 years. The Cisco conversation was, we got to move up to stack. All the manager would fight each other. Now, what does that actually mean? Stay where we are. Stay in your lane. This is kind of like the network's version of moving up the stack because not so much up the stack, but the cloud is everywhere. It's almost horizontally scaled. >> It's extending into the on-premise. It is already moving towards the edge, right? So, you will see a lot- >> So, programmability is a big program. So you guys are hitting programmability, compatibility, getting people into an environment they're comfortable operating. So the Ops people love it. >> Exactly. >> Spans the clouds to a level of SLA management. It might not be perfectly spanning applications, but you can actually know latencies between clouds, measure that. And then so you're basically managing your network now as the overall infrastructure. >> Right. And it needs to be a very intelligent infrastructure going forward, right? Because customers do not want to wait to be able to troubleshoot. They don't want to be able to wait to deploy something, right? So, it needs to be a level of automation. >> Okay. So the question for you guys both on we'll end on is what is the enablement that, because you guys are a disruptive enabler, right? You create this fabric. You're going to enable companies to do stuff. What are some of the things that you see and your customers might be seeing as things that they're going to do as a result of having this enablement? So what are some of those things? >> Amir: Atif, perhaps you can talk through the some of the customer experience on that. >> It's agility. And we are allowing these customers to move very, very quickly and build these networks which meet all these requirements inside the cloud. Because as Amir was saying, in the cloud era, networking is changing. And if you look at, you know, going back to your comment about the existing networking vendors. Some of them still think that, you know, just connecting to the cloud using some concepts like Cloud OnRamp is cloud networking, but it's changing now. >> John: 'Cause there's apps that are depending upon. >> Exactly. And it's all distributed. Like IT infrastructure, as I said earlier, is all distributed. And at the end of the day, you have to make sure that wherever your user is, wherever your app is, you are able to connect them securely. >> Historically, it used to be about building a router bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, you know, and then interconnecting those routers. Now, it's all about horizontal scale. You don't need to build big, you need to scale it, right? And that's what cloud brings to the customer. >> It's a cultural change for Cisco and Juniper because they have to understand that they're still could be in the game and still win. >> Exactly. >> The question I have for you, what are your customers telling you that, what's some of the anecdotal, like, 'cause you guys have a good solution, is it, "Oh my god, you guys saved my butt." Or what are some of the commentary that you hear from the customers in terms of praise and and glory from your solution? >> Oh, some even say, when we do our demo and stuff, they say it's too hard to believe. >> Believe. >> Like, too hard. It's hard, you know, it's >> I dont believe you. They're skeptics. >> I don't believe you that because now you're able to bring up a global network within minutes. With networking services, like let's say you have APAC, you know, on-prem users, cloud also there, cloud here, users here, you can bring up a global network with full routed connectivity between all these endpoints with security services. You can bring up like a firewall from a third party or our services in the middle. This is a matter of minutes now. And this is all high speed connectivity with SLAs. Imagine like before connecting, you know, Singapore to U.S. East or Hong Kong to Frankfurt, you know, if you were putting your infrastructure in columns like E-connects, you would have to go, you know, figure out like, how am I going to- >> Seal line In, connect to it? Yeah. A lot of hassles, >> If you had to put like firewalls in the middle, segmentation, you had to, you know, isolate different entities. >> That's called heavy lifting. >> So what you're seeing is, you know, it's like customer comes in, there's a disbelief, can you really do that? And then they try it out, they go, "Wow, this works." Right? It's deployed in a small environment. And then all of a sudden they start taking off, right? And literally we have seen customers go from few thousand dollars a month or year type deployments to multi-million dollars a year type deployments in very, very short amount of time, in a few months. >> And you guys are pay as you go? >> Pay as you go. >> Pay as go usage cloud-based compatibility. >> Exactly. And it's amazing once they get to deploy the solution. >> What's the variable on the cost? >> On the cost? >> Is it traffic or is it. >> It's multiple different things. It's packaged into the overall solution. And as a matter of fact, we end up saving a lot of money to the customers. And not only in one way, in multiple different ways. And we do a complete TOI analysis for the customers. So it's bandwidth, it's number of connections, it's the amount of compute power that we are using. >> John: Similar things that they're used to. >> Just like the cloud constructs. Yeah. >> All right. Networking supercloud. Great. Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks for coming on Supercloud. >> Atif: Thank you. >> And looking forward to seeing more of the demand. Translate, instant networking. I'm sure it's going to be huge with the edge exploding. >> Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much. >> Okay. So this is Supercloud 2 event here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. The network Supercloud is here. Checkout Alkira. I'm John Furry, the host. Thanks for watching. (lively music)

(bright music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to live coverage day two or day one, day two for theCUBE, day one for the event. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. It's the keynote analysis segment. Adam just finished coming off stage. I'm here with Dave Vellante and Zeus Kerravala, with principal analyst at ZK Research, Zeus, it's great to see you. Dave. Guys, the analysis is clear. AWS is going NextGen. You guys had a multi-day analyst sessions in on the pre-briefs. We heard the keynote, it's out there. Adam's getting his sea legs, so to speak, a lot of metaphors around ocean. >> Yeah. >> Space. He's got these thematic exploration as he chunked his keynote out into sections. Zeus, a lot of networking in there in terms of some of the price performance, specialized instances around compute, this end-to-end data services. Dave, you were all over this data aspect going into the keynote and obviously, we had visibility into this business transformation theme. What's your analysis? Zeus, we'll start with you. What's your take on what Amazon web service is doing this year and the keynote? What's your analysis? >> Well, I think, there was a few key themes here. The first one is I do think we're seeing better integration across the AWS portfolio. Historically, AWS makes a lot of stuff and it's not always been easy to use say, Aurora and Redshift together, although most customers buy them together. So, they announce the integration of that. It's a lot tighter now. It's almost like it could be one product, but I know they like to keep the product development separately. Also, I think, we're seeing a real legitimization of AWS in a bunch of areas where people said it wasn't possible before. Last year, Nasdaq said they're running in the cloud. The Options Exchange today announced that they're going to be moving to the cloud. Contact centers running the cloud for a lot of real time voice. And so, things that we looked at before and said those will never move to the cloud have now moved to the cloud. And I think, my third takeaway is just AWS is changing and they're now getting into areas to allow customers to do things they couldn't do before. So, if you look at what they're doing in the area of AI, a lot of their AI and ML services before were prediction. And I'm not saying you need an AI, ML to do prediction, was certainly a lot more accurate, but now they're getting into generative data. So, being able to create data where data didn't exist before and that's a whole new use case for 'em. So, AWS, I think, is actually for all the might and power they've had, it's actually stepping up and becoming a much different company now. >> Yeah, I had wrote that post. I had a one-on-one day, got used of the transcript with Adam Selipsky. He went down that route of hey, we going to change NextGen. Oh, that's my word. AWS Classic my word. The AWS Classic, the old school cloud, which a bunch of Lego blocks, and you got this new NextGen cloud with the ecosystems emerging. So, clearly, it's Amazon shifting. >> Yeah. >> But Dave, your breaking analysis teed out the keynote. You went into the whole cost recovery. We heard Adam talk about macro at the beginning of his keynote. He talked about economic impact, sustainability, big macro issues. >> Yeah. >> And then, he went into data and spent most of the time on the keynote on data. Tools, integration, governance, insights. You're all over that. You had that, almost your breaking analysis almost matched the keynote, >> Yeah. >> thematically, macro, cost savings right-sizing with the cloud. And last night, I was talking to some of the marketplace people, we think that the marketplace might be the center where people start managing their cost better. This could have an impact on the ecosystem if they're not in in the marketplace. So, again, so much is going on. >> What's your analogy? >> Yeah, there's so much to unpack, a couple things. One is we get so much insight from theCUBE community plus your sit down 101 with Adam Selipsky allowed us to gather some nuggets, and really, I think, predict pretty accurately. But the number one question I get, if I could hit the escape key a bit, is what's going to be different in the Adam Selipsky era that was different from the Jassy era. Jassy was all about the primitives. The best cloud. And Selipsky's got to double down on that. So, he's got to keep that going. Plus, he's got to do that end-to-end integration and he's got to do the deeper business integration, up the stack, if you will. And so, when you're thinking about the keynote and the spirit of keynote analysis, we definitely heard, hey, more primitives, more database features, more Graviton, the network stuff, the HPC, Graviton for HPC. So, okay, check on that. We heard some better end-to-end integration between the elimination of ETL between Aurora and Redshift. Zeus and I were sitting next to each other. Okay, it's about time. >> Yeah. >> Okay, finally we got that. So, that's good. Check. And then, they called it this thing, the Amazon data zones, which was basically extending Redshift data sharing within your organization. So, you can now do that. Now, I don't know if it works across regions. >> Well, they mentioned APIs and they have the data zone. >> Yep. And so, I don't know if it works across regions, but the interesting thing there is he specifically mentioned integration with Snowflake and Tableau. And so, that gets me to your point, at the end of the day, in order for Amazon, and this is why they win, to succeed, they've got to have this ecosystem really cranking. And that's something that is just the secret sauce of the business model. >> Yeah. And it's their integration into that ecosystem. I think, it's an interesting trend that I've seen for customers where everybody wanted best of breed, everybody wanted disaggregated, and their customers are having trouble now putting those building blocks together. And then, nobody created more building blocks than AWS. And so, I think, under Adam, what we're seeing is much more concerted effort to make it easier for customers to consume those building blocks in an easy way. And the AWS execs >> Yeah. >> I talked to yesterday all committed to that. It's easy, easy, easy. And I think that's why. (Dave laughing) Yeah, there's no question they've had a lead in cloud for a long time. But if they're going to keep that, that needs to be upfront. >> Well, you're close to this, how easy is it? >> Yeah. >> But we're going to have Adrian Cockcroft (Dave laughing) on at the end of the day today, go into one analysis. Now, that- >> Well, less difficult. >> How's that? (indistinct) (group laughing) >> There you go. >> Adrian retired from Amazon. He's a CUBE analyst retiree, but he had a good point. You can buy the bag of Lego blocks if you want primitives >> Yeah. >> or you can buy the toy that's glued together. And it works, but it breaks. And you can't really manage it, and you buy a new one. So, his metaphor was, okay, if the primitives allow you to construct a durable solutions, a lot harder relative to rolling your own, not like that, but also the simplest out-of-the box capability is what people want. They want solutions. We call Adam the solutions CEO. So, I think, you're going to start to see this purpose built specialized services allow the ecosystem to build those toys, so that the customers can have an out-of-the box experience while having the option for the AWS Classic, which is if you want durability, you want to tune it, you want to manage it, that's the way to go for the hardcore. Now, can be foundational, but I just see the solutions things being very much like an out-of-the-box. Okay, throw away, >> Yeah. >> buy a new toy. >> More and more, I'm saying less customers want to be that hardcore assembler of building blocks. And obviously, the really big companies do, but that line is moving >> Yeah. >> and more companies, I think, just want to run their business and they want those prebuilt solutions. >> We had to cut out of the keynote early. But I didn't hear a lot about... The example that they often use is Amazon Connect, the call center solution. >> Yeah. >> I didn't hear a lot to that in the keynote. Maybe it's happening right now, but look, at the end of the day, suites always win. The best of breed does well, (John laughing) takes off, generate a couple billion, Snowflake will grow, they'll get to 10 billion. But you look at Oracle, suites work. (laughs) >> Yeah. >> What I found interesting about the keynote is that he had this thematic exploration themes. First one was space that was like connect the dot, the nebula, different (mumbles) lens, >> Ocean. >> ask the right questions. (Dave laughing) >> Ocean was security which bears more, >> Yeah. >> a lot more needed to manage that oxygen going deep. Are you snorkeling? Are you scuba diving? Barely interesting amount of work. >> In Antarctica. >> Antarctica was the performance around how you handle tough conditions and you've got to get that performance. >> Dave: We're laughing, but it was good. >> But the day, the Ocean Day- >> Those are very poetic. >> I tweeted you, Dave, (Dave laughing) because I sit on theCUBE in 2011. I hate hail. (Dave laughing) It's the worst term ever. It's the day the ocean's more dynamic. It's a lot more flowing. Maybe 10 years too soon, Dave. But he announces the ocean theme and then says we have a Security Lake. So, like lake, ocean, little fun on words- >> I actually think the Security Lake is pretty meaningful, because we were listening to talk, coming over here talking about it, where I think, if you look at a lot of the existing solutions, security solutions there, I describe 'em as a collection of data ponds that you can view through one map, but they're not really connected. And the amount of data that AWS holds now, arguably more than any other company, if they're not going to provide the Security Lake, who is? >> Well, but staying >> Yeah. >> on security for a second. To me, the big difference between Azure and Amazon is the ecosystem. So, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler, name it, CyberArk, Rapid7, they're all part of this ecosystem. Whereas Microsoft competes with all of those guys. >> Yes. Yeah. >> So it's a lot more white space than the Amazon ecosystem. >> Well, I want to get you guys to take on, so in your reaction, because I think, my vision of what what's happening here is that I think that whole data portion's going to be data as code. And I think, the ecosystem harvests the data play. If you look at AWS' key announcements here, Security Lake, price performance, they're going to optimize for those kinds of services. Look at security, okay, Security Lake, GuardDuty, EKS, that's a Docker. Docker has security problems. They're going inside the container and looking at threat detection inside containers with Kubernetes as the runtime. That's a little nuance point, but that's pretty significant, Dave. And they're now getting into, we're talking in the weeds on the security piece, adding that to their large scale security footprint. Security is going to be one of those things where if you're not on the inside of their security play, you're probably going to be on the outside. And of course, the price performance is going to be the killer. The networking piece surprise me. Their continuing to innovate on the network. What does that mean for Cisco? So many questions. >> We had Ajay Patel on yesterday for VMware. He's an awesome middleware guy. And I was asking about serverless and architectures. And he said, "Look, basically, serverless' great for stateless, but if you want to run state, you got to have control over the run time." But the point he made was that people used to think of running containers with straight VMs versus Fargate or Knative, if you choose, or serverless. They used to think of those as different architectures. And his point was they're all coming together. And it's now you're architecting and calling, which service you need. And that's how people are thinking about future architectures, which I think, makes a lot of sense. >> If you are running managed Kubernetes, which everyone's doing, 'cause no one's really building it in-house themselves. >> No. >> They're running it as managed service, skills gaps and a variety of other reasons. This EKS protection is very interesting. They're managing inside and outside the container, which means that gives 'em visibility on both sides, under the hood and inside the application layer. So, very nuanced point, Zeus. What's your reaction to this? And obviously, the networking piece, I'd love to get your thought. >> Well, security, obviously, it's becoming a... It's less about signatures and more of an analytics. And so, things happen inside the container and outside the container. And so, their ability to look on both sides of that allows you to happen threats in time, but then also predict threats that could happen when you spin the container up. And the difficulty with the containers is they are ephemeral. It's not like a VM where it's a persistent workload that you can do analysis on. You need to know what's going on with the container almost before it spins up. >> Yeah. >> And that's a much different task. So, I do think the amount of work they're doing with the containers gives them that entry into that and I think, it's a good offering for them. On the network side, they provide a lot of basic connectivity. I do think there's a role still for the Ciscos and the Aristas and companies like that to provide a layer of enhanced network services that connects multicloud. 'Cause AWS is never going to do that. But they've certainly, they're as legitimate network vendor as there is today. >> We had NetApp on yesterday. They were talking about latency in their- >> I'll tell you this, the analyst session, Steven Armstrong said, "You are going to hear us talk about multicloud." Yes. We're not going to necessarily lead with it. >> Without a mention. >> Yeah. >> But you said it before, never say never with Amazon. >> Yeah. >> We talk about supercloud and you're like, Dave, ultimately, the cloud guys are going to get into supercloud. They have to. >> Look, they will do multicloud. I predict that they will do multicloud. I'll tell you why. Just like in networking- >> Well, customers are asking for it. >> Well, one, they have the, not by design, but by defaulter and multiple clouds are in their environment. They got to deal with that. I think, the supercloud and sky cloud visions, there will be common services. Remember networking back in the old days when Cisco broke in as a startup. There was no real shortest path, first thinking. Policy came in after you connected all the routers together. So, right now, it's going to be best of breed, low latency, high performance. But I think, there's going to be a need in the future saying, hey, I want to run my compute on the slower lower cost compute. They already got segmentation by their announcements today. So, I think, you're going to see policy-based AI coming in where developers can look at common services across clouds and saying, I want to lock in an SLA on latency and compute services. It won't be super fast compared to say, on AWS, with the next Graviton 10 or whatever comes out. >> Yeah. >> So, I think, you're going to start to see that come in. >> Actually, I'm glad you brought Graviton up too, because the work they're doing in Silicon, actually I think, is... 'Cause I think, the one thing AWS now understands is some things are best optimized in Silicon, some at software layers, some in cloud. And they're doing work on all those layers. And Graviton to me is- >> John: Is a home run. >> Yeah. >> Well- >> Dave, they've got more instances, it's going to be... They already have Gravitons that's slower than the other versions. So, what they going to do, sunset them? >> They don't deprecate anything ever. So, (John laughing) Amazon paid $350 million. People believe that it's a number for Annapurna, which is like one of the best acquisitions in history. (group laughing) And it's given them, it's put them on an arm curve for Silicon that is blowing away Intel. Intel's finally going to get Sapphire Rapids out in January. Meanwhile, Amazon just keeps spinning out new Gravitons and Trainiums. >> Yeah. >> And so, they are on a price performance curve. And like you say, no developer ever wants to run on slower hardware, ever. >> Today, if there's a common need for multicloud, they might say, hey, I got the trade off latency and performance on common services if that's what gets me there. >> Sure. >> If there's maybe a business case to do that. >> Well, that's what they're- >> Which by the way, I want to.... Selipsky had strong quote I thought was, "If you're looking to tighten your belt, the cloud is the place >> Yeah. >> to do it." I thought >> I tweeted that. >> that was very strong. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And I think, he's right. And then, the other point I want to make on that is, I think, I don't have any data on this, but I believe believe just based on some of the discussions I've had that most of Amazon's revenue is on demand. Paid by the drink. Those on demand customers are at risk, 'cause they can go somewhere else. So, they're trying to get you into optimized pricing, whether it's reserved instances or one year or three-year subscriptions. And so, they're working really hard at doing that. >> My prediction on that is that's a great point you brought up. My prediction is that the cost belt tightening is going to come in the marketplace, is going to be a major factor as companies want to get their belts tighten. How they going to do that, Dave? They're going to go in the marketplace saying, hey, I already overpaid a three-year commitment. Can I get some cohesively in there? Can I get some of this or that and the other thing? >> Yep. >> You're going to start to see the vendors and the ecosystem. If they're not in the marketplace, that's where I think, the customers will go. There are other choices to either cut their supplier base or renegotiate. I think, it's going to happen in the marketplace. Let's watch. I think, we're going to watch that grow. >> I actually think the optimization services that AWS has to help customers lower spend is a secret sauce for them that they... Customers tell me all the time, AWS comes in, they'll bring their costs down and they wind up spending more with them. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And the other cloud providers don't do that. And that has been almost a silver bullet for them to get customers to stay with them. >> Okay. And this is always the way. You drop the price of storage, you drop the price of memory, you drop the price of compute, people buy more. And in the question, long term is okay. And does AWS get commoditized? Is that where they're going? Or do they continue to thrive up the stack? John, you're always asking people about the bumper sticker. >> Hold on. (John drowns out Dave) Before we get the bumper sticker, I want to get into what we missed, what they missed on the keynote. >> Yeah, there are some blind spots. >> I think- >> That's good call. >> Let's go around the horn and think what did they miss? I'll start, I think, they missed the developer productivity angle. Supply chain software was not talked about at all. We see that at all the other conferences. I thought that could have been weaved in. >> Dave: You mean security in the supply chain? >> Just overall developer productivity has been one of the most constant themes I've seen at events. Who are building the apps? Who are the builders? What are they actually doing? Maybe Werner will bring that up on his last day, but I didn't hear Adam talk about it all, developer productivity. What's your take in this? >> Yeah, I think, on the security side, they announced security data lake. I think, the other cloud providers do a better job of providing insights on how they do security. With AWS, it's almost a black hole. And I know there's a careful line they walk between what they do, what their partners do. But I do think they could be a little clearer on how they operate, much like Azure and GCP. They announce a lot of stuff on how their operations works and things like that. >> I think, platform across cloud is definitely a blind spot for these guys. >> Yeah. >> I think, look at- >> But none of the cloud providers have embraced that, right? >> It's true. >> Yeah. >> Maybe Google a little bit >> Yeah. >> and Microsoft a little bit. Certainly, AWS hasn't at this point in time, but I think, they perceive the likes of Mongo and Snowflake and Databricks, and others as ISVs and they're not. They're platform players that are building across clouds. They're leveraging, they're building superclouds. So, I think that's an opportunity for the ecosystem. And very curious to see how Amazon plays there down the stream. So, John, what do you think is the bumper sticker? We're only in day one and a half here. What do you think so far the bumper sticker is for re:Invent 2022? >> Well, to me, the day one is about infrastructure performance with the whole what's in the data center? What's at the chip level? Today was about data, specialized services, and security. I think that was the key theme here. And then, that's going to sequence into how they're going to reorganize their ecosystem. They have a new leader, Ruba Borno, who's going to be leading the charge. They've integrated all their bespoke fragmented partner network pieces into one leadership. That's going to be really important to hear that. And then, finally, Werner for developers and event-based services, micro services. What that world's going on, because that's where the developers are. And ultimately, they build the app. So, you got infrastructure, data, specialized services, and security. Machine learning with Swami is going to be huge. And again, how do developers code it all up is going to be key. And is it the bag of Legos or the glued toy? (Dave chuckles) So, what do you want? Out-of-the-box or you want to build your own? >> And that's the bottom line is connecting those dots. All they got to be is good enough. I think, Zeus, to your point, >> Yep. >> if they're just good enough, less complicated, the will keep people on the base. >> Yeah. I think, the bumper stickers, the more you buy, the more you're saving. (John laughing) Because from an operational perspective, they are trying to bring down the complexity level. And with their optimization services and the way their credit model works, I do think they're trending down that path. >> And my bumper sticker's ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. This company has 100,000 partners and that is a business model secret weapon. >> All right, there it is. The keynote announced. More analysis coming up. We're going to have the leader of (indistinct) coming up next, here on to break down their perspective, you got theCUBE's analyst perspective here. Thanks for watching. Day two, more live coverage for the next two more days, so stay with us. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante and Zeus Kerravala here on theCUBE. Be right back. (bright music)

(intro music) >> Hi everybody. Dave Vellante, back with Day Two coverage, we're live at the ARIA Hotel in Las Vegas for fal.con '22. Several thousand people here today. The keynote was, it was a little light. I think people were out late last night, but the keynote was outstanding and it's still going on. We had to break early because we have to strike early today, but we're really excited to have Stephan Goldberg here, Vice President of Technology Alliances at Claroty. And we're going to talk about an extremely important topic, which is the internet of things, the edge, we talk about it a lot. We haven't covered securing the edge here at theCUBE this week. And so Stephan really excited to have you on. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're very welcome. Tell us more about Claroty, C-L-A-R-O-T-Y, a very interesting spelling, but what's it all about? >> Claroty is cybersecurity company that specializes in cyber physical systems, also known as operational technology systems and the extended internet of things. The difference between the traditional IoT and what what everyone calls an IoT in the cyber physical system is that an IoT device has anything connected on the network that traditionally cannot carry an agent, a security camera, a card reader. A cyber physical system is a system that has influence and operates in the physical world but is controlled from the cyberspace. An example would be a controller, a turbine, a robotic arm, or an MRI machine. >> Yeah, so those are really high-end systems, run, are looked after by engineers, not necessarily consumers. So what's what's happening in that world? I mean, we've talked a lot on theCUBE about the schism between OT and IT, they haven't really talked a lot, but in the last several years, they've started to talk more. You look at the ecosystem of IoT providers. I mean, it's companies like Hitachi and PTC and Siemens. I mean, it's the different names than we're used to in IT. What are the big trends that you're seeing the macro? >> So, first of all, traditionally, most manufacturers and environments that were heavy on operations, operational technology, they had the networks air-gapped, completely separated. You had your IT network for business administration, you had the OT network to actually build stuff. Today with emerging technologies and even modern switching architecture everything is being converged. You have the same physical infrastructure in terms of networking, that carries both networks. Sometimes a human error, sometimes a business logic that needs to interconnect these networks to transmit data from the OT side of the house, to the IT side of the house, exposes the OT environment to cyber threats. >> Was that air-gap by design or was it just that there wasn't connectivity? >> It was air-gap by design, due to security and operational reasons, and also ownership in these organizations. The IT-managed space was completely separate from the OT-managed space. So whoever built a network for the controllers to build a car, for example, was an automation engineer and the vendors, that have built these networks, were automation vendors, unlike the traditional Ciscos of the world, that we're specializing in IT. Today we're seeing the IT vendors on the OT side, and the OT vendors, they're worried about the IT side. >> But I mean, tradition, I mean, engineers are control freaks. No offense, but, I'm glad they are, I'm thankful for that. So there must have been some initial reticence to them connecting up these air-gap systems. They went wanted to make sure that they were secure, that they did it right, and presumably that's where you guys come in. What are the exposures and risks of these, of this critical infrastructure that we should be aware of? >> So you're completely right. And from an operational perspective let let's call it change control is very rigorous. So they did not want to go on the internet and just, we're seeing it with adoption of cloud technologies, for example. Cloud as in industry four ago, five ago, cloud as in cyber security. We all heard Amol's keynote from this morning talking about critical infrastructures and we'll touch upon our partnership in a second, but CrowdStrike, CrowdStrike being considered and deployed within these environments is a new thing. It's a new thing because the OT operation managers and the chief information security officers, they understand that air-gap is no longer a valid strategy. From a business perspective, these networks are already connected. We're seeing the trends of cyber attacks, IT cyber attacks, like not Patreon, I'm not talking about the Stoxnet, the targeted OT. I'm talking about WannaCry, EternalBlue, IT vulnerabilities that did not target OT, but due to the outdated and the specification of OT posture on the networks, they hit healthcare, they hit OT much harder than they did IT. >> Was Log4J, did that sleep into OT, or any IT that. >> So, absolutely. >> So Log4J right, which was so pervasive, like so many of these malwares. >> All these vulnerabilities that, it's a windows vulnerability, it has nothing to do with OT. But then when you stop and you say, hold on, my human machine interface workstation, although it has some proprietary software by Rockwell or Siemens running on it, what is the underlying operating system? Oh, hold on, it's Windows. We haven't updated that for like eight years. We were focused on updating the software but not the underlying operating system. The vulnerabilities exist to a greater extent on the OT side of the house because of the same characteristic of operational technology environments. >> So the brute force air-gap approach was no longer viable because the business imperative came in and said, no, we have to connect these systems to digitally transform, or advance our business, there's opportunities to monetize, whatever it was. The business laid that out as an imperative. So now OT engineers have to rethink how they secure it. So what are the steps that they're taking and how does Claroty help? Is there a sort of a playbook, a sequential playbook? >> Absolutely, so before we discussed the maturity curve of adopting an CPS security, or OT security technology, let's touch upon the characteristic of the space and what it led vendors like Claroty to build. So you have the rigorous chain control. You have the security in mind, operations, lowered the risk state of mind. That led vendors, likes of Claroty, to build a solution. And I'm talking about seven, eight years ago, to be passive, mostly passive or passive only to inspect network and to analyze network and focus on detection rather than taking action like response or preventative maintenance. >> Um-hmm. >> It made vendors to build on-prem solutions because of the cloud-averse state of mind of this industry. And because OT is very specific, it led vendors to focus only on OT devices, overlooking what we discussed as IoT, Unfortunately, besides HMI and PLC, the controller in the plant, you also have the security camera. So when you install an OT security solution I'm talking about the traditional ones, they traditionally overlook the security camera or anything that is not considered traditional OT. These three observations, although they were necessary in the beginning, you understand the shortcomings of it today. >> Um-hmm. >> So cloud-averse led to on-prem which leads to war security. It's like comparing CrowdStrike and one of its traditional competitors in the antivirus space. What CrowdStrike innovated is the SaaS first, cloud-native solution that is continuously being updated and provide the best in cloud security, right? And that is very much like what Claroty's building. We decided to go SaaS first and cloud-native solution. >> So, because of cloud-aversion, the industry shows somewhat outdated deployment models, on-prem, which limited scale and created greater diversity, more stovepipes, all the problems that we always talk about. Okay, and so is the answer to that, just becoming more cloud, having more of an affinity to cloud? That was a starting point, right. >> This is exactly it. Air-gap is perceived as secured, but you don't get updates and you don't really know what's going on in your network. If you have a Claroty or a crosswork installer, you have much higher probability detecting fast and responding fast. If you don't have it, you are just blind. You will be bridged, that's the. >> I was going to say, plus, air-gap, it's true, but people can get through air-gaps, too. I mean, it's harder, but Stoxnet. Yeah, look at Stoxnet right, oh, it's mopping the floor, boom, or however it happened, but so yeah. >> Correct. >> So, but the point being, you know, assume that breach, even though I know CrowdStrike thinks that the unstoppable breach is a myth, but you know, you talk to people like Kevin Mandia, it's like, we assume you're going to get breached, right? Let's make that assumption. Yeah, okay, and so that means you've got to have visibility into the network. So what are those steps that you would, what's that maturity model that you referenced before? >> So on top of these underlying principles, which is cloud-native, comprehensive, not OT only, but XIoT, and then bring that the verticalization and OT specificity. On top of that, you're exactly right. There is a maturity curve. You cannot boil the ocean, deploy protections, and change the environment within one day. It starts with discovering everything that is connected to your network. Everything from the traditional workstations to the cameras, and of course ending up with the cyber physical systems on the network. That discovery cannot be only a high level profile, it needs to be in depth to the level you need to know application versions of these devices. If you cannot tell the application version you cannot correlate it to a vulnerability, right? Just knowing that's an HMI or that's a PLC by Siemens is insufficient. You need to know the app version, then you can correlate to vulnerability, then you can correlate to risk. This is the next step, risk assessment. You need to put up a score basically, on each one of these devices. A vulnerability score, risk score, in order to prioritize action. >> Um-hmm. >> These two steps are discovery and thinking about the environment. The next two steps are taking action. After we have the prioritized devices discovered on your network, our approach is that you need to ladle in and deploy protections from a preventative perspective. Claroty delivers recommended policies in the form of access control lists or rules. >> Right. >> That can leverage existing infrastructure without touching a device without patching it, just to protect it. The next step would be detection and response. Once you have these policies deployed you also can leverage them to spot policy deviations. >> And that's where CrowdStrike comes in. So talk about how you guys partner with CrowdStrike, what that integration looks like and what the differentiation is. >> So actually the integration with CrowdStrike crosses the the entire customer journey. It starts with visibility. CrowdStrike and us exchange data on the asset level. With the announcement during FalCon, with Falcon Discover for IoT, we are really, really proud working on that with CrowdStrike. Traditionally CrowdStrike discovered and provided data about the IT assets. And we did the same thing with CPS and OT. Today with Falcon Discover for IoT, and us expanding to the XIoT space, both of us look at all devices but we can discover different things. When you merge these data sets you have an unparalleled visibility into any environment, and specifically OT. The integrations continue, and maybe the second spotlight I'll put, but without diminishing the other ones, is detection and response. It's the XDR Alliance. Claroty is very proud to be one of the first partners, XDR Alliance partners, for CrowdStrike, fitting in to the XDR, to CrowdStrike's XDR, the data that is needed to mitigate and respond and get more context about breaches in these OT environments, but also take action. Also trigger action, via Claroty and leverage Claroty's network-centric capabilities to respond. >> We hear a lot. We heard a lot in today's keynote note about the data, the importance of data, of the graph database. How unique is this Stephan, in the industry, in your view? >> The uniqueness of what exactly? >> Of this joint solution, if you will, this capability. >> I told my counterparts from CrowdStrike yesterday, the go-to market ones and the product management ones. If we are successful with Falcon Discover for IoT, and that product matures, as we plan for it to mature, it will change the industry, the OT security industry, for all of us. Not only for Claroty, for all players in this space. And this is why it's so important for us to stay coordinated and support this amazing company to enter this space and provide better security to organizations that really support our lives. >> We got to leave it there, but this is such an important topic. We're seeing in the war in Ukraine, there's a cyber component in the future of war. >> Yes. >> Today. And what do they do? They go after critical infrastructure. So protecting that critical infrastructure is so important, especially for a country like the United States, which has so much critical infrastructure and a lot to lose. So Stephan, thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> For the work that you're doing. It was great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll be right back from fal.con '22. We're live from the ARIA in Las Vegas. (techno music)

>>mhm. >>With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for Hyper Flex at Cisco at Flash for all number four. Love that on Twitter And Deron Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco Mister Hyper flex at Mr Hyper Flex on Twitter. Thanks, guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and and hyper flex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks, David. >>Thanks. Hi, >>Daryn. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud you gotta have on Prem Connection. Right? So you've got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, but you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud, you need a strong foundation. I'm conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building with hyper convergence in particular hyper flex no to make all that work. They need a good, strong Cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that. To be able to connect that around a Saas offering that looks around simplified operations, gives them optimisation and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren, let's stay with you for a minute when you talk to your customers. What are they thinking these days, when it comes to implementing hyper converged infrastructure in both the the enterprise and and at the edge? What are they trying to achieve? >>So there's many things they're trying to achieve? Probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at in terms of simplicity. How can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyper conversions and storage networking, and we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that, a collapse into hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure. Also about scalability. They don't know the end game, so they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper conversions. Very easy is one of the major factors and benefits of hyper conversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all the way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around. The simplicity model is the management layer ease of management to make it easier for their operations that we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model, deploying out flex also around the time savings. They make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think that we one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements, and the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper converged, especially with edge edges of major key use case for us and what I want. What our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data centre at the edge without a big investment. They don't compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management employment. And we've seen analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deployed hyper conversions. As I said, the savings elements to keep it and again, not always, but obviously those are his studies around about public Cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. We again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers looking for >>Great. Thank you for that, Darrin minutes. We have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >>Yeah, Thanks. Leave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. the first one is a new offer, um, called hyper Flex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Inter site lead and Cisco and decide managed it Hyper flex configurations that we feel are the fastest part to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AM Iraq, U. C s and Iraq. And the third is a new capability that we're introducing that we're calling local contemporaries witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a very nifty capability to optimise for forage environments. So, you know, this leverages the Ciscos ubiquitous presence. Uh, the networking, um, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest hyper flex configuration that we have is, uh it do not configuration, which is primarily used in edge environment. Think of a, you know, a back home in a department store or a oil rig. Or it might even be a smaller data centre, uh, somewhere, uh, on the globe. For these two not configurations. There is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for hyper flex as well. The problem that customers faces where you host this witness it cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, um, sort of upgrade rates. Which note gets to survive, so it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environment. So what we've done is we've taken that witness. We've converted it into a container reform factor and then qualified a very large a slew of Cisco networking products that we have right from S. R. S R. Texas catalyst, industrial routers, even even a raspberry pi that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure or doing any, um, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we're announcing today. >>So I want to ask you about hyper Flex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's global supply chain issues are in the news. Everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that? A little bit more Can can hyper flex express help customers respond to some of these issues. >>Yeah, indeed. The, uh, you know, the primary motivation for hyper Flex Express was indeed, uh, an idea that, you know, one of the folks around my team had, which was to build a set of hyper flex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for something in it for customers, for sales as well as our partners. So, for example, you know, for customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the instal for hyper flex express. These are still hypertext configurations, and you would, at the end of it, get a hyper flex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much much simplifying. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data centre configurations But you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy it with your existing top of rack. Um, we've also, you know, already attract attractive price point for these. And of course, you know these will have better lead times because we made sure that, you know, we are using components that are that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, Uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a settled, risky, friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the deceased as well. >>It's interesting many. So I'm looking at some fresh survey data. More than 70% of the customers that were surveyed this GTR survey again mentioned at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring, uh, server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So so that's encouraging. What about Manisha AMG that's new for hyper flex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, so you know, in the short time that we've had UCS am direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a it's a It's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it and hyper flex. Uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from Day one is that it is. It has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we're going to get the fastest compute together with the fastest storage and this we are hoping that will basically unlock, you know, a unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyper converged experience. >>Yeah, cool. Uh, so, Darren, can >>you can you give us >>an idea as to how hyper flexes is doing in the field? >>Sure, Absolutely So both me and my initial been involved right from the start and before it was called Hyper Flex, and we've had a great journey, and it's very excited to see where we're taking where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they approved the technology and are comfortable with technology. They repeat by for expanding capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an energy perspective, more numbers of science so really good. Endorsement the technology. We get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical applications as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. Uh, and we are the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers think one example, and I apologise for the worldwide audience. But this resonates with the American audiences the Super Bowl. So the sofa like stadium that housed the Super Bowl actually has Cisco hyper Flex running all the management services through from the entire stadium for digital signage. Four K video distribution, and it's complete completely cashless. So if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few notes across a few racks and have 100 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with High Flex where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases were getting involved in very, very excited. >>Come on, Darren. It's Super Bowl NFL. That's a That's international now. And, you know, the NFL >>NFL. It's >>invading London. Of course I see the picture of the real football over your shoulder, But last question for many is give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for hyper flex? >>Yeah, so you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved the type of flicks since the beginning, Uh, but I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for for hyper Flex. One is in. The site is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass management. But we're going to take this beyond the Lifecycle management, which is for hyper flex, which is integrated in winter side today and element management. We're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of a job. Because Interstate really provides us an ideal platform to gather starts from all the clusters across the globe. Do AML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer valued, um, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is you'll see us expand the hyper flex portfolio. Go beyond you see us to third party server platforms, and newer, you see a server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is a checks on X CDs. Experience is another thing that we're able to, uh you know, uh, announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But a check sonic series. We'll have that by the end of this calendar year, and that should unlock with the flexibility of X series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of hyper flex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, that we're locked out previously. And then the last thing is hyper flex leader platform. This is the heart of the offering today, Uh, and you'll see the hyper flex data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, unique distributed architecture primarily where we get our, you know, record breaking performance from you'll see it get faster, more scalable, more resilient. And we'll optimise it for, you know, containerised workloads, meaning it will get granular containerised container granular management capabilities and optimised for public. So those are some things that were the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum and maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay, guys, we got to leave it there and you know many She was talking about the HX on X Series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that, and it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach and we're gonna dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube, your leader in enterprise tech coverage.

>>it's mhm Okay, we're here in the cube unpacking the HPD Green Lake announcements, Daniel neumann series Principal analyst and founder of your um research Damn. You're good to see you again, >>Dave always going to jump jump on with you. It's good to have a minute sit down. So >>what's your favorite announcement from from Green Lake? What do you, what do you make of what they announced today? >>Well, I love the opportunity for the company to position itself up against a growth monster like snowflake. I mean looking at the ability to handle the breath of the data at scale and offer a data service that can compete in that space. That's exactly the kind of narrative that I think the markets, the outside world is going to want to hear from HP is how you're not just competing with your traditional, the doubles, the Ciscos, the IBM, you're going after the, the mega growth cloud players and data services. And for me that's really attractive because I've been really on top of hb saying, hey, you're doing a lot of the right things, but people have to feel and see the growth. >>To me this is a major move toward the tam expansion strategy. It's kind of the job of every Ceo right, is to expand the tam. And I'm interested to see how HP e plays this and communicates this because, you know, traditionally it's a hardware company, uh moving into data management Data services. That's an enormous market. We'll talk about how important data is but the data management is just huge. And to do it in a cloud like fashion, how do you see that as potentially expanding the total available market for HP? >>Well, first, let's just almost walking back a second, Dave HP is a cloud player. Okay. And that's the story that it is trying to get out there. It is not a hardware player that's tinkering in software. Hp has done software, this isn't its first go. But if you want to be a cloud player, you look at the big hyper scale as you look at the AWS, as you look at the google, you look at as the google built, not just on hardware, it's built that big C and I've had this conversation before, all the things that make up the cloud, it's the hardware, it's the software, it's the services, the platform, you got to put all these things together. And if HP wants to be a public cloud experience, taking advantage of where we're moving with hybrid and offering it private, it has to have that same subset of services. Look at the investment, whether it's been a W S or google or Azure in data services, HP has to be in this space. So, seeing this come to fruition, in my opinion, is directionally the right path, getting it to be well received, winning the right customers and showing the growth from these investments is going to be the next important phase. >>Do you see that as a service model as being more margin friendly for HP and and if so why? Well, I think >>universally we found there's two major improvements that moving to the as a service. One is, it does over time create expanded operational margin. It's just economies of scale. You can utilize every resource more efficiently. Of course there are Capex expenses, You've seen the amount that hyper skeletons have had to spend to expand their their footprints globally. So there is some Capex upfront but that also on the back end creates the depreciation and different bottom line profit creators. At the same time though, as a service is huge for the multiples and evaluation, which by the way is one of the things that has been a real in focus point for H. P. E. Is how does it up that that number, You know, you look at the snowflakes, not even profitable but getting huge. You know, um, you know, huge multiples on revenue. And then you see even the other hyper scale is all getting bigger plays on revenue and on E. P. S. Most of it has to do with the fact that recurring revenue is beloved by investors, but it's also really sticky and creates a ton of stability within the company for the culture of the business to say, hey, we have customers, they're going to stay with us. They're not going anywhere. They're subscribed to our services. They're buying into what we're doing and by the way, net revenue expansion as you get them sticky, you layer in new services. We've seen how this has worked across the board with public cloud, with software with SAS, can HP do it as well? And of course it's been something they're doing, but it's something we need to watch really closely and I think it's an opportunity that the company needs to lean into it. And I think they will, >>you mentioned snowflake a couple times, there's a there's a, there's a discussion in the industry, it was sort of prompted by martin casado and sarah wang about repatriation and particularly as it relates to software, saas companies uh that the the the cloud bill is so high at some point, they're giving away margin, so they're going to have to come back on prem, I'm not sure that to date that has applied to the general audience of customer, although there's a lot of debate as well between the expensive cloud, obviously, you know, egress charges. So it's hard sometimes to squint through that when you think about HP E bringing Green Lake to market at scale bringing repeatable processes, driving automation, etcetera. How do you think that that cloud repatriation argument, which frankly, I haven't seen a huge cloud repatriation in in the macro, but how do you think that will play out over time, Do you feel like the on prem play can be as cost effective or more cost effective or maybe you feel like it is already today? >>Well, I also listen to the injuries and Horowitz uh, repatriation narrative as well. I think there are economies of scale with cloud that companies have to look at closely. But I also think that has a lot to do with why hybrid has been sort of the story of the day. That's why hyper sailors are going on prem or, and that's why I'm primes are moving to the cloud is because it's always going to be some, you know, some group of different placements of workloads to ultimately get to that optimized result. And so, you know, when you look at, you know, sort of what you asked in my opinion, you know, ultimately it's all about the efficiency of your organization trying to accomplish what your business is. And will there be some repatriation of workloads possibly. But there will be a very important hybrid mix. And I think we're gonna continue to see that trend and I think that's exactly where everyone's going in. Hp is going as well. >>All right, then we've got to leave it there. Thanks so much for your insights, appreciate it. We're gonna definitely have you back you and I are going to do some cool stuff together. So we'll talk next time. Thanks all right, and thank you for watching, this is Dave Volonte for the keeps coverage of H P E Green Lakes announcement, keep it right there. Mm

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Mobile World Congress is alive, theCUBE will be there and we'll certainly let you know if it's alive and well when we get on the ground. Now, as we approach a delayed mobile world congress, it's really appropriate to reflect in the state of the telecoms industry. Let's face it. Telcos have done of really good job of keeping us all connected during the pandemic, supporting work from home and that whole pivot, accommodating the rapid shift to landline traffic, securing the network and keeping it up and running but it doesn't change the underlying fundamental dilemma that Telco has faced. Telco is a slow growth, no growth industry, with revenue expectations in the low single digits. And at the same time network traffic continues to grow at 20% annually. And last year it grew at 40% to 50%. Despite these challenges, Telcos are still investing in the future. For example, the Telco industry collectively is selling out more than a trillion dollars in the first half of this decade on 5G and fiber infrastructure. And it's estimated that there are now more than 200 5G networks worldwide. But a lot of questions remain, not the least of which is, can and should Telcos go beyond connectivity and fiber. Can the Telcos actually monetize 5G or whatever's next beyond 5G? Or is that going to be left to the ecosystem? Now what about the ecosystem? How is that evolving? And very importantly, what role will the Cloud Hyperscalers play in Telco? Are they infrastructure on which the Telcos can build or are they going to suck the value out of the market as they have done in the enterprise? Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, it's my pleasure to welcome a long time telecoms industry analyst and colleague, and the founding director of Lewis Insight, Mr. Chris Lewis. Chris, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on >> Dave, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. >> It is really our pleasure. So, we're going to cover a lot of ground today. And first thing, we're going to talk about Mobile World Congress. I've never been, you're an expert at that and what we can expect. And then we're going to review the current state of telecoms infrastructure, where it should go. We're going to dig into transformation. Is it a mandate? Is it aspirational? Can Telcos enter adjacent markets in ways they haven't been able to in the past? And then how about the ecosystem? We're going to talk about that, and then obviously we're going to talk about Cloud as I said, and we'll riff a little bit on the tech landscape. So Chris, let's get into it, Mobile World Congress, it's back on, what's Mobile World Congress typically like? What's your expectation this year for the vibe compared to previous events? >> Well Dave, the issue of Mobile World Congress is always that we go down there for a week into Barcelona. We stress ourselves building a matrix of meetings in 30 minutes slots and we return at the end of it trying to remember what we'd been told all the way through. The great thing is that with the last time we had a live, with around 110,000 people there, you could see anyone and everyone you needed to within the mobile, and increasingly the adjacent industry and ecosystem. So, he gave you that once a year, big download of everything new, obviously because it's the Mobile World Congress, a lot of it around devices, but increasingly over the last few years, we saw many, many stands with cars on them because the connected car became an issue, a lot more software oriented players there, but always the Telcos, always the people providing the network infrastructure. Increasingly in the last few years people provided the software and IT infrastructure, but all of these people contributing to what the network should be in the future, what needs to be connected. But of course the reach of the network has been growing. You mentioned during lockdown about connecting people in their homes, well, of course we've also been extending that connection to connect things whether it's in the home or the different devices, monitoring of doorbells and lights and all that sort of stuff. And in the industry environment, connecting all of the robots and sensors. So, actually the perimeter, the remit of the industry to connect has been expanding, and so is the sort of remit of Mobile World Congress. So, we set an awful lot of different suppliers coming in, trying to attach to this enormous market of roughly $1.5 trillion globally. >> Chris, what's the buzz in the industry in terms of who's going to show up. I know a lot of people have pulled out, I've got the Mobile World Congress app and I can see who's attending. And it looks like quite a few people are going to go but what's your expectation? >> Well, from an analyst point of view, obviously I'm mainly keeping up with my clients and trying to get new clients. I'm looking at it and going most of my clients are not attending in person. Now, of course, we need the DSMA, we need Mobile World Congress for future for the industry interaction. But of course, like many people having adopted and adapted to be online, then they're putting a lot of the keynotes online, a lot of the activities will be online. But of course many of the vendors have also produced their independent content and content to actually deliver to us as analysts. So, I'm not sure who will be there. I like you, but you'll be on the ground. You'll be able to report back and let us know exactly who turned up. But from my point of view, I've had so many pre-briefs already, the difference between this year and previous years, I used to get loads of pre-briefs and then have to go do the briefs as well. So this year I've got the pre-brief so I can sit back, put my feet up and wait for your report to come back as to what's happening on the ground. >> You got it. Okay, let's get into a little bit and talk about Telco infrastructure and the state, where it is today, where it's going, Chris, how would you describe the current state of Telco infrastructure? Where does it need to go? Like, what is the ideal future state look like for Telcos in your view? >> So there's always a bit of an identity crisis when it comes to Telco. I think going forward, the connectivity piece was seen as being table stakes, and then people thought where can we go beyond connectivity? And we'll come back to that later. But actually to the connectivity under the scenario I just described of people, buildings, things, and society, we've got to do a lot more work to make that connectivity extend, to be more reliable, to be more secure. So, the state of the network is that we have been building out infrastructure, which includes fiber to connect households and businesses. It includes that next move to cellular from 4G to 5G. It obviously includes Wi-Fi, wherever we've got that as well. And actually it's been a pretty good state, as you said in your opening comments they've done a pretty good job keeping us all connected during the pandemic, whether we're a fixed centric market like the UK with a lot of mobile on top and like the US, or in many markets in Africa and Asia, where we're very mobile centric. So, the fact is that every country market is different, so we should never make too many assumptions at a very top level, but building out that network, building out the services, focusing on that connectivity and making sure we get that cost of delivery right, because competition is pushing us towards having and not ever increasing prices, because we don't want to pay a lot extra every time. But the big issue for me is how do we bring together the IT and the network parts of this story to make sure that we build that efficiency in, and that brings in many questions that we going to touch upon now around Cloud and Hyperscalers around who plays in the ecosystem. >> Well, as you know, Telco is not my wheelhouse, but hanging around with you, I've learned, you've talked a lot about the infrastructure being fit for purpose. It's easy from an IT perspective. Oh yeah, it's fossilized, it's hardened, and it's not really flexible, but the flip side of that coin is as you're pointing out, it's super reliable. So, the big talk today is, "Okay, we're going to open up the network, open systems, and Open RAN, and open everything and microservices and containers. And so, the question is this, can you mimic that historical reliability in that open platform? >> Well, for me, this is the big trade-off and in my great Telco debate every year, I always try and put people against each other to try and to literally debate the future. And one of the things we looked at was is a more open network against this desire of the Telcos to actually have a smaller supplier roster. And of course, as a major corporation, these are on a national basis, very large companies, not large compared to the Hyperscalers for example, but they're large organizations, and they're trying to slim down their organization, slim down the supplier ecosystem. So actually in some ways, the more open it becomes, the more someone's got to manage and integrate all those pieces together. And that isn't something we want to do necessarily. So, I see a real tension there between giving more and more to the traditional suppliers. The Nokia's, Ericsson's, Huawei's, Amdocs and so on, the Ciscos. And then the people coming in breaking new ground like Mavenir and come in, and the sort of approach that Rakuten and Curve taken in bringing in more open and more malleable pieces of smaller software. So yeah, it's a real challenge. And I think as an industry which is notorious for being slow moving, actually we've begun to move relatively quickly, but not necessarily all the way through the organization. We've got plenty of stuff sitting on major or mainframes still in the back of the organization. But of course, as mobile has come in, we've started to deal much more closely, uninteractively in real time, God forbid, with the customers. So actually, at that front end, we've had to do things a lot more quickly. And that's where we're seeing the quickest adaptation to what you might see in your IT environment as being much more, continuous development, continuous improvement, and that sort of on demand delivery. >> Yeah, and we're going to get to that sort of in the Cloud space, but I want to now touch on Telco transformation which is sort of the main theme of this episode. And there's a lot of discussion on this topic, can Telcos move beyond connectivity and managing fiber? Is this a mandate? Is it a pipe dream that's just aspirational? Can they attack adjacencies to grow beyond the 1% a year? I mean, they haven't been successful historically. What are those adjacencies that might be, an opportunity and how will that ecosystem develop? >> Sure. >> So Chris, can and should Telcos try to move beyond core connectivity? Let's start there. >> I like what you did there by saying pipe dreams. Normally, pipe is a is a negative comment in the telecom world. But pipe dream gives it a real positive feel. So can they move beyond connectivity? Well, first of all, connectivity is growing in terms of the number of things being connected. So, in that sense, the market is growing. What we pay for that connectivity is not necessarily growing. So, therefore the mandate is absolutely to transform the inner workings and reduce the cost of delivery. So, that's the internal perspective. The external perspective is that we've tried in many Telcos around the world to break into those adjacent markets, being around media, being enterprise, being around IOT, and actually for the most part they've failed. And we've seen some very significant recent announcements from AT&T, Verizon, BT, beginning to move away from, owning content and not delivering content, but owning content. And the same as they've struggled often in the enterprise market to really get into that, because it's a well-established channel of delivery bringing all those ecosystem players in. So, actually rather than the old Telco view of we going to move into adjacent markets and control those markets, actually moving into them and enabling fellow ecosystem players to deliver the service is what I think we're beginning to see a lot more of now. And that's the big change, it's actually learning to play with the other people in the ecosystem. I always use a phrase that there's no room for egos in the ecosystem. And I think Telcos went in initially with an ego thinking we're really important, we are on connectivity. But actually now they're beginning to approach the ecosystem things saying, "How can we support partners? How can we support everyone in this ecosystem to deliver the services to consumers, businesses and whomever in this evolving ecosystem?" So, there are opportunities out there, plenty of them, but of course, like any opportunity, you've got to approach it in the right way. You've got to get the right investment in place. You've got to approach it with the right open API so everyone can integrate with your approach, and approach it, do I say with a little bit of humility to say, "Hey, we can bring this to the table, how do we work together? >> Well, it's an enormous market. I think you've shared with me, it's like 1.4 trillion. And I want to stay on these adjacencies for a minute, because one of the obvious things that Telcos will talk about is managed services. And I know we have to be careful of that term in an IT context, that it's different in a, you're talking about managing connectivity, but there's professional services. That's a logical sort of extension of their business and probably a safe adjacency, maybe not even adjacency, but they're not going to get into devices. I mean, they'll resell devices, but they're not going to be, I would presume not go back to trying to make devices, but there's certainly the edge and that's so, it'll define in opaque, but it's huge. If there's 5G, there's the IT component and that's probably a partnership opportunity. And as you pointed out, there's the ecosystem, but I wonder, how do you think about 5G as an adjacency or indoor opportunity? Is it a revenue opportunity for Telcos or is that just something that is really aspirational? >> Oh, absolutely it's a revenue opportunity, but I prefer to think of 5G as being a sort of a metaphor for the whole future of telecom. So, we usually talk, and MWC would normally talk about 5G just as a mobile solution. Of course, what you can get with, you can use this fixed wireless access approach, where the roots that sits in your house or your building. So, it's a potential replacement for some fixed lines. And of course, it's also, gives you the ability to build out, let's say in a manufacturing or a campus environment, a private 5G network. So, many of the early opportunities we're seeing with 5G are actually in that more private network environment addressing those very low latency, and high bandwidth requirements. So yeah, there are plenty of opportunities. Of course, the question here is, is connectivity enough, or especially with your comment around the edge, at the edge we need to manage connectivity, storage, compute, analytics, and of course the applications. So, that's a blend of players. It's not going to be in the hands of one player. So yes, plenty of opportunities but understanding what comes the other way from the customer base, where that's, you and I in our homes or outward as an about, or from a business point of view, an office or a campus environment, that's what should be driving, and not the technology itself. And I think this is the trap that the industry has fallen into many times, is we've got a great new wave of technology coming, how can we possibly deliver it to everybody rather than listening to what the customers really require and delivering it in a way consumable by all those different markets. >> Yeah now, of course all of these topics blend together. We try to keep them separately, but we're going to talk about Cloud, we're going to talk about competition, But one of the areas that we don't have a specific agenda item on is, is data and AI. And of course there's all this data flowing through the network, so presumably it's an opportunity for the Telcos. At the same time, they're not considered AI experts. They do when you talk about Edge, they would appear to have the latency advantage because of the last mile and their proximity, to various end points. But the Cloud is sort of building out as well. How do you think about data and AI as an opportunity for Telco? >> I think the whole data and AI piece for me sits on top of the cake or pie, whatever you want to call it. What we're doing with all this connectivity, what we're doing with all these moving parts and gathering information around it, and building automation into the delivery of the service, and using the analytics, whether you call it ML or AI, it doesn't really matter. But actually using that information to deliver a better service, a better outcome. Now, of course, Telcos have had much of this data for years and years, for decades, but they've never used it. So, I think what's happening is, the Cloud players are beginning to educate many of the Telcos around how valuable this stuff is. And that then brings in that question of how do we partner with people using open APIs to leverage that data. Now, do the Telcos keep hold of all that data? Do they let the Cloud players do all of it? No, it's going to be a combination depending on particular environments, and of course the people owning their devices also have a vested interest in this as well. So, you've always got to look at it end to end and where the data flows are, and where we can analyze it. But I agree that analysis on the device at the Edge, and perhaps less and less going back to the core, which is of course the original sort of mandate of the Cloud. >> Well, we certainly think that most of the Edge is going to be about AI inferencing, and then most of the data is going to stay at the edge. Some will come back for sure. And that is big opportunity for whether you're selling compute or conductivity, or maybe storage as well, but certainly insights at the Edge. >> Everything. >> Yeah. >> Everything, yeah. >> Let's get into the Cloud discussion and talk about the Hyperscalers, the big Hyperscaler elephant in the room. We're going to try to dig into what role the Cloud will play in the transformation of telecoms on Telecom TV at the great Telco debate. You likened the Hyperscalers, Chris, to Dementors from Harry Potter hovering over the industry. So, the question is, are the Cloud players going to suck the value out of the Telcos? Or are they more like Dobby the elf? They're powerful, there's sometimes friendly but they're unpredictable. >> Thank you for extending that analogy. Yes, it got a lot of reaction when I use that, but I think it indicates some of the direction of power shift where, we've got to remember here that Telcos are fundamentally national, and they're restricted by regulation, and the Cloud players are global, perhaps not as global as they'd like be, but some regional restrictions, but the global players, the Hyperscalers, they will use that power and they they will extend their reach, and they are extending their reach. If you think they now command some fantastic global networks, in some ways they've replaced some of the Telco international networks, all the submarine investments that tend to be done primarily for the Hyperscalers. So, they're building that out. So, as soon as you get onto their network, then you suddenly become part of that environment. And that is reducing some of the spend on the longer distances we might have got in the past approaches from the Telcos. Now, does that mean they're going to go all the way down and take over the Telcos? I don't believe so, because it's a fundamentally different business digging fiber in people's streets and delivering to the buildings, and putting antennas up. So, they will be a coexistence. And in fact, what we've already seen with Cloud and the Hyperscalers is that they're working much more close together than people might imagine. Now, you mentioned about data in the previous question, Google probably the best known of the of the AI and ML delivers from the Cloud side, working with many of the Telcos, even in some cases to actually have all the data outsourced into the Google Cloud for analytics purposes. They've got the power, the heavy lifting to do that. And so, we begin to see that, and obviously with shifting of workloads as appropriate within the Telco networking environment, we're seeing that with AWS, and of course with Azure as well. And Azure of course acquired a couple of companies in affirmed and Metro switch, which actually do some of the formal 5G core and the likes there within the connectivity environment. So, it's not clean cuts. And to go back to the analogy, those Dementors are swooping around and looking for opportunities, and we know that they will pick up opportunities, and they will extend their reach as far as they can down to that edge. But of course, the edge is where, as you rightly say, the Telcos have the control, they don't necessarily own the customer. I don't believe anyone owns the customer in this digital environment, because digital allows you to move your allegiance and your custom elsewhere anyway. So, but they do own that access piece, and that's what's important from a national point of view, from an economic point of view. And that's why we've seen some of the geopolitical activity banning Huawei from certain markets, encouraging more innovation through open ecosystem plays. And so, there is a tension there between the local Telco, the local market and the Hyperscaler market, but fundamentally they've got an absolute brilliant way of working together using the best of both worlds to deliver the services that we need as an economy. >> Well, and we've talked about this you and I in the past where the Telcos, portions of the Telco network could move into the Cloud. And there of course the Telcos all run the big data centers, and portions of that IT infrastructure could move into the Cloud. But it's very clear, they're not going to give up the entire family jewels to the Cloud players. Why would they? But there are portions of their IT that they could move into. Particularly, in the front end, they want to build like everybody. They want to build an abstraction layer. They're not going to move their core systems and their backend Oracle databases, they're going to put a brick wall around those, but they wanted abstraction layer, and they want to take advantage of microservices and use that data from those transaction systems. But the web front end stuff makes sense to put into Cloud. So, how do you think about that? >> I think you've hit the nail on the head. So you can't move those big backend systems straight away, gradually over time, you will, but you've got to go for those easy wins. And certainly in the research I've been doing with many of my clients, they're suggested that front end piece, making sure that you can onboard customers more easily, you can get the right mix of services. You can provide the omnichannel interaction from that customer experience that everybody talks about, for which the industry is not very well known at all by the way. So, any improvement on that is going to be good from an MPS point of view. So yeah, leveraging what we might, what we call BSS OSS in the telecom world, and actually putting that into the Cloud, leveraging both the Hyperscalers, but also by the way, many of the traditional players who people think haven't moved Cloud wards, but they are moving Cloud wards and they're embracing microservices and Cloud native. So, what you would have seen if we'd been in person down in Barcelona next week, would be a lot of the vendors who perhaps traditionally seems a bit slow moving, actually have done a lot of work to move their portfolio into the Cloud and into Cloud native environments. And yes, as you say, we can use that front end, we can use the API openness that's developed by people at the TM forum, to actually make sure we don't have to do the backend straight away, do it over time. Because of course the thing that we're not touching upon here, is the revenue stream is a consistent revenue stream. So, just because you don't need to change the backend to keep your revenue stream going, this is on a new, it keeps delivering every month, we keep paying our 50, 40, whatever bucks a month into the Telco pot. That's why it's such a big market, and people aren't going to stop doing that. So, I think the dynamics of the industry, we often spend a lot of time thinking about the inner workings of it and the potential of adjacent markets, whereas actually, we keep paying for this stuff, we keep pushing revenue into the pockets of all the Telcos. So, it's not a bad industry to be in, even if they were just pushed back to be in the access market, it's a great business. We need it more and more. The elasticity of demand is very inelastic, we need it. >> Yeah, it's the mother of old golden geese. We don't have a separate topic on security, and I want to touch on security here, is such an important topic. And it's top of mind obviously for everybody, Telcos, Hyperscalers, the Hyperscalers have this shared responsibility model, you know it well. A lot of times it's really confusing for customers. They don't realize it until there has been a problem. The Telcos are going to be very much tuned into this. How will all this openness, and we're going to talk about technology in a moment, but how will this transformation in your view, in the Cloud, with the shared responsibility model, how will that affect the whole security posture? >> Security is a great subject, and I do not specialize in it. I don't claim to be an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I would say security for me is a bit like AI and analytics. It's everywhere. It's part of everything. And therefore you cannot think of it as a separate add on issue. So, every aspect, every element, every service you build into your micro services environment has to think about how do you secure that connection, that transaction, how do you secure the customer's data? Obviously, sovereignty plays a role in that as well in terms of where it sits, but at every level of every connection, every hop that we look through, every route to jump, we've got to see that security is built in. And in some ways, it's seen as being a separate part of the industry, but actually, as we collapse parts of the network down, we're talking about bringing optical and rooting together in many environments, security should be talked about in the same breath. So when I talked about Edge, when I talked about connectivity, storage, compute, analytics, I should've said security as well, because I absolutely believe that is fundamental to every chain in the link and let's face it, we've got a lot of links in the chain. >> Yeah, 100%. Okay, let's hit on technologies and competition, we kind of blend those together. What technology should we be paying attention to that are going to accelerate this transformation. We hear a lot about 5G, Open RAN. There's a lot of new tech coming in. What are you watching? Who are the players that we maybe should be paying attention to, some that you really like, that are well positioned? >> We've touched upon it in various of the questions that have proceeded this. So, the sort of Cloudification of the networking environment is obviously really important. The automation of the process we've got to move away from bureaucratic manual processes within these large organizations, because we've got to be more efficient, we've got to be more reliable. So, anything which is related to automation. And then the Open RAN question is really interesting. Once again, you raised this topic of when you go down an Open RAN routes or any open route, it ultimately requires more integration. You've got more moving parts from more suppliers. So, therefore there are potential security issues there, depending on how it's defined, but everybody is entering the Open RAN market. There are some names that you will see regularly next week, being pushed, I'm not going to push them anymore, because some of them just attract the oxygen of attention. But there are plenty out there. The good news is, the key vendors who come from the more traditional side are also absolutely embracing that and accept the openness. But I think the piece which probably excites me more, apart from the whole shift towards Cloud and microservices, is the coming together, the openness between the IT environment and the networking environment. And you see it, for example, in the Open RAN, this thing called the RIC, the RAN Interconnection Controller. We're actually, we're beginning to find people come from the IT side able to control elements within the wireless controller piece. Now that that starts to say to me, we're getting a real handle on it, anybody can manage it. So, more specialization is required, but understanding how the end to end flow works. What we will see of course is announcements about new devices, the big guys like Apple and Samsung do their own thing during the year, and don't interrupt their beat with it with MWC, but you'll see a lot of devices being pushed by many other providers, and you'll see many players trying to break into the different elements of the market. But I think mostly, you'll see the people approaching it from more and more Cloudified angle where things are much more leveraging, that Cloud capability and not relying on the sort of rigid and stodgy infrastructure that we've seen in the past >> Which is kind of interesting because Cloud, a lot of the Clouds are Walled Gardens, at the same time they host a lot of open technologies, and I think as these two worlds collide, IT and the Telco industry, it's going to be interesting to see how the Telco developer ecosystem evolves. And so, that's something that we definitely want to watch. You've got a comment there? >> Yeah, I think the Telco developer they've not traditionally been very big in that area at all, have they? They've had their traditional, if you go back to when you and I were kids, the plain old telephone service was a, they were a one trick pony, and they've moved onto that. In some ways, I'd like them to move on and to have the one trick of plain old broadband that we just get broadband delivered everywhere. So, there are some issues about delivering service to all parts of every country, and obviously the globe, whether we do that through satellite, we might see some interesting satellite stuff coming out during NWC. There's an awful lot of birds flying up there trying to deliver signal back to the ground. Traditionally, that's not been very well received, with the change in generation of satellite might help do that. But we've known traditionally that a lot of developer activity in there, what it does bring to the four though, Dave, is this issue of players like the Ciscos and Junipers, and all these guys of the world who bring a developer community to the table as well. This is where the ecosystem play comes in, because that's where you get the innovation in the application world, working with channels, working with individual applications. And so it's opening up, it's basically building a massive fabric that anybody can tap into, and that's what becomes so exciting. So, the barriers to entry come down, but I think it will see us settling down, a stabilization of relationship between the Telcos and the Hyperscalers, because they need each other as we talked about previously, then the major providers, the Ciscos, Nokias, Ericssons, Huawei's, the way they interact with the Telcos. And then allowing that level of innovation coming in from the smaller players, whether it's on a national or a global basis. So, it's actually a really exciting environment. >> So I want to continue that theme and just talk about Telco in the enterprise. And Chris, on this topic, I want to just touch on some things and bring in some survey data from ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, our partner. And of course the Telcos, they've got lots of data centers. And as we talked about, they're going to be moving certain portions into the Cloud, lots of the front end pieces in particular, but let's look at the momentum of some of the IT players within the ETR dataset, and look at how they compare to some of the Telcos that ETR captures specifically within the Telco industry. So, we filtered this data on the Telco industry. So, this is our X, Y graph that we show you oftentimes on the vertical axis, is net score which measures spending momentum, and in the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness in the dataset. Now, this data is for shared accounts just in the Telco sector. So we filtered on certain sectors, like within the technology sectors, Cloud, networking, and so it's narrow, it's a narrow slice of the 1500. It respondents, it represents about 133 shared accounts. And a couple of things to jump right out. Within the Telco industry, it's no surprise, but Azure and AWS have massive presence on the horizontal axis, but what's notable as they score very highly in the vertical axis, with elevated spending velocity on their platforms within Telco. Google Cloud doesn't have as much of a presence, but it's elevated as well. Chris was talking about their data posture before, Arista and Verizon, along with VMware are also elevated, as is Aruba, which is HPEs networking division, but they don't have the presence on the horizontal axis. And you got Red Hat OpenStack is actually quite prominent in Telco as we've reported in previous segments. Is no surprise You see Akamai there. Now remember, this survey is weighted toward enterprise IT, so you have to take that into consideration, but look at Cisco, very strong presence, nicely elevated as is Equinox, both higher than many of the others including Dell, but you could see Dell actually has pretty respectable spending in Telco. It's an area that they're starting to focus on more. And then you got that cluster below, your Juniper, AT&T, Oracle, the rest of HPE TELUM and Lumen which is formerly, century link via IBM. Now again, I'm going to caution you. This is an enterprise IT heavy survey, but the big takeaway is the Cloud players have a major presence inside of firms that say they're in the telecommunications industry. And certain IT players like Cisco, VMware and Red Hat appear to be well positioned inside these accounts. So Chris, I'm not sure if any of this commentary resonates with you, but it seems that the Telcos would love to partner up with traditional IT vendors and Cloud players, and maybe find ways to grow their respective businesses. >> I think some of the data points you brought out there are very important. So yes, we've seen a Microsoft Azure and AWS very strong working with Telcos. We've seen Google Cloud platform actually really aggressively pushed into the market certainly the last 12, 24 months. So yeah, they're well positioned, and they all come from a slightly different background. As I said, the Google with this, perhaps more data centric approach in its analytics, tools very useful, AWS with this outpost reaching out, connecting out, and as you'll, with its knowledge of the the Microsoft business market certainly pushing into private networks as well, by the way. So yeah, and Cisco, of course in there does have, and it's a mass scale division, a lot of activity there, some of the people collapsing, some of that rooting an obstacle together, their big push on Silicon. So, what you've got here is a sort of cross representation of many of the different sorts of suppliers who are active in this market. Now Telcos is a big spenders, the telecom market, as we said, a $1.4 trillion market, they spend a lot, they probably have to double bubble spend at the moment to get over the hump of 5G investment, to build out fiber where they need to build out. So, any anything that relates to that is of course a major spending opportunity, a major market opportunity for players. And we know when you need the infrastructure behind it, whether it's in data centers or in their own data centers or in the Cloud to deliver against it. So, what I do like about this as an analyst, a lot of people would focus on one particular piece of the market. So you specialize on handsets, people specialize on home markets and home gateways. So, I tend to sit back and try and look at the big picture, the whole picture. And I think we're beginning to see some very good momentum where people are, where companies are building upon, of course their core business within the telecom industry, extending it out. But the lines of demarcation are blurring between enterprise, Telco, and indeed moving down into small business. And you think about the SD-WAN Market, which came from nowhere to build a much more flexible solution for connecting people over the wide area network, which has been brilliant during the pandemic, because it's allowed us to extend that to home, but be of course, build a campus ready for the future as well. So there are plenty of opportunities out there. I think the big question in my mind is always about from going into the Telco, as I said, whether they wannna reduce the number of suppliers on the roster. So that puts a question mark against some of the open approaches, and then from the Telco to the end customer, because it goes to the Telcos, 30% of their revenue comes from the enterprise market, 60% from the consumer market. How do they leverage the channel? Which includes all the channels, we talked about security, all of the IT stuff that you've already touched upon and the Cloud. It's going to be a very interesting mix and balancing act between different channels to get the services that the customers want. And I think increasingly, customers are more aware of the opportunities open to them to reach back into this ecosystem and say, "Yeah, I want a piece of humans to Telco, but I want it to come to me through my local integrated channel, because I need a bit of their expertise on security." So, fascinating market, and I think not telecom's no longer considered in isolation, but very much as part of that broader digital ecosystem. >> Chris, it's very hard to compress an analysis of a $1.4 trillion business into 30 or 35 minutes, but you're just the guy to help me do it. So, I got to really thank you for participating today and bringing your knowledge. Awesome. >> Do you know, it's my pleasure. I love looking at this market. Obviously I love analogies like Harry Potter, which makes it bring things to life. But at the end of the day, we as people, we want to be connected, we as business, we want to be connected, in society we want to be connected. So, the fundamental of this industry are unbelievably strong. Let's hope that governments don't mess with it too much. And let's hope that we get the right technology comes through, and help support that world of connectivity going forward. >> All right, Chris, well, I'll be texting you from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and many thanks to my colleague, Chris Lewis, he brought some serious knowledge today and thank you. And remember, I publish each week on wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. And these episodes are all available as podcasts. You just got to search for Breaking Analysis podcasts. You can always connect with me on twitter @dvellante or email me at dave.vellante@siliconangle.com. And you can comment on my LinkedIn post, and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Hey, is Keith Townsend, principal at CTO Adviser, and you're watching the Cube virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm really excited whenever we get toe talk to actual end users. Builders. The conversation is dynamic. This is no exception. Back on the show, Al Vanish despondent head off architectures at logic I've been ish. Welcome back to the show. >>Thanks, Kate. Good to be here >>and on the other side of my screen or how you depend on how you're looking at it is Anthony Brooks Williams C E O off HBR Anthony, Welcome back to the Cube. I know your kind of tired of seeing us, but the conversation is gonna be good, I promise. >>Thanks very much. Look forward to being here and great as you said to talk about a use case for the customer in the real world. >>So I'll be let's start off by talking about lodge attacking. What are you guys doing in a W s in general? I mean, e no. Every company has public cloud, but Logitech and AWS and Public Cloud doesn't naturally come to mind. Help educate the audience. What do you guys doing? >>Sure, so traditionally, audience knows Logitech as the Mice and keyboard company, but we do have a lot of brands which are cool brands off logic tech If you know about gaming, Logitech G is a huge brand for us. We are in video collaboration space. We compete with the likes off Ciscos of the world, where we have hardware that goes on bond works with Zoom Google as well as Microsoft ecosystems. That has been a huge success in a B two b well for us. Beyond music industry gaming as an Astro gaming Jay Bird head phones for athletes. We are also in security system space. On top of that were also in the collaboration space off streaming as in stream labs so a Z can see logic has grown toe where that a lot off use cases, apart from just peripherals, is out there. We connected devices, so we're also looking to move towards a cloud ecosystem where we could be in on on our toes, toe provisioning information on DNA, make sure we are computing to the best of the world. So we are in AWS. We do a lot more in AWS now, compared to what we used to do in the past last five years has seen a change and a shift towards more cloud public cloud usage pure SAS environments in the ws as well And we provisioned data for analysis and essentially a data driven enterprise. Now more so on V as we move towards more future >>and Anthony talked to me about not necessarily just largest heck, but the larger market. How are you seeing companies such as logic? Heck take advantage off A W s and Public cloud. >>Yeah, but I think you mean ultimately we've seen it accelerated the show. Me Castle's just looking for a better way to connect with their prospects, you know, and leverage data in doing so. And we've seen this this driver around digital transformation and that's just being sped up the shirt, given what we've seen around covert and so a lot more companies have really pushed forward and adopting, you know, the infrastructure and the availability off systems and solutions that you find in a platform such as AWS on bets that we've seen grand deduction from our side of customers doing that, we provide the most efficient way of protesters to move data to so platforms such as I don't yes, and that's what we've seen. A big uptick picture. >>So let's focus the conversation around data data, the new oil. We've heard the taglines. Let's put some meat on the bone, so to speak and talk through How are you at logic Tech using real time data in the public cloud? >>Sure, Yeah. I mean, traditionally, if you look at it, uh, logic could selling hardware. Andi hope it >>works for >>the end consumer. Uh, we would not necessarily have an insight into how that product is being used. I think come fast forward. Today's world. It's a connected devices environment. You want to make sure when you sell something, it is working for that consumer. You would want them to be happy about that product, ensuring a seamless experience. Eso customer experience is big. You might want to see a repeat customer come about right. So So the intent is to have a lot off. It is connected experience where you could provisional feedback loop to the engineering team toe to ensure stability off the product, but also enhancements around that product in terms off usage patterns. And and we play a big role with hardware in what you're gaming, for example. And as you can see, that whole industry is growing toe where everything is connected. Probably people do not buy anything, which is a static discussing thing. It's all online gaming. So we want to ensure we don't add Leighton. See in the hardware that we have, ensuring a successful experience and repeat customers right? The essential intent is at the end of the day, to have success with what you sell because there's obviously other options on the market and you want to make sure our customers are happy with the hardware they are investing. Maurin that hardware platform and adding different, very fills along with it so that seamless experiences where we wanna make sure it's connected devices to get that insight. We also look at what people are saying about our products in terms off reviews on APS are on retail portals to ensure we we hear the wise off customer on channel. How's that energy in a positive way to improve the products as well as trying to figure out if there are marketing opportunities were you could go across sailing up cells, so that's essentially driving business towards that success, and at the end of it, that would essentially come up with a revenue generation model >>for us. So Anthony talked to me about how HBR fits into this, because when I look at cloud big, that can be a bit overbearing, like, where's where's the starting point? >>So I mean, for us, you mean the starting point Answer questions around. Acquiring the data data is generated in many places across organizations in many different platforms and many systems. And so we have the ability to have a very efficient technique in the way we go acquire data the way we capture data through this technique called CBC Chinese share the capture where you're feeding incremental updates off off the data across the network. That's the most efficient way to move this data. Firstly, across a wide area network cloud is an endpoint. Uh, you mean off that, And so, firstly, we specializing in supporting many different source systems and so we can acquire that data very efficiently, put it into our into a very scalable, flexible architecture that we have. That's that's a great foot for this modern world of great foot for the cloud. So not only can we capture data from many different source systems, their complexities and a lot of these type of the moments that customers have, we could take the data and move it very efficiently across that network at scale. Because we know, as you've said, data is the new oil that's the lifeblood of organizations today. So we can move that data efficiently at scale across the network and then put it into a system such a snowflake running in AWS like we do for a hobby and a larger taken. So that's really where we fit. I mean, we can, you know, we support data taken from many sources, too many different target systems. We make sure that data is highly accurate. When we move that data across that matches what was in the source of matches, what's in the in the target system. And we do that in this particular use case and what we see predominantly today, the source systems are capturing the data typically today. Still generated on Prem could be data that's sitting in an SFP environment. Unpack that data. Decode that data is to be complex to get out and understand it on moving across and put it in their target system, that predominance sitting in the cloud for all the benefits that we see that the cloud brings around elasticity and efficiency and operational costs the most type of things. And that's probably human in where we fit into this picture. >>You know, I think if I add a little bit there, right, So to Anthony's point for us, we generate a lot of data. You're looking at billions off rolls a day from the edge where people like you and I are using logic devices and we also have a lot off prp transactions That going so the three V s Typically that they call about big data is like the variety off data volume of data at velocity that you want to consume it. So the intent is if you need to be data driven, the data should be available for business consumption as it is being generated very near real time, and that the intent for some of these platforms like H we are, is How efficiently could you move that data, whether it's on Prem or a different cloud into AWS on giving it for business consumption of business analysis in near real time. So you know we strive, Toby Riel time. Whether it's data from China in our factory, on the shop floor, whether it's being generated from people like you and I playing a game for eight hours on generating so many events, we're gonna ensure all that data is being available for business analysis and gone out of those days where we would load that data once a day. And in the hope that we do a weekly analysis right today, we do analysis on make business decisions on that data as the data is being generated. And that's the key to success with such platforms, where we want to make sure we also look at build vs buy rather than us doing all that core and trying toe in just that data we obviously partner with which we are in certain application platforms to ensure stability off it. And they have proven with their experience the I P or the knowledge around how to build those platforms, which even if we go build it, we might need bigger teams to build that. I would rather rely on partners for that capability. And I bring more business value by enabling and implementing such solutions. >>So let's put a little color around that skill whenever I talk to CDOs. Chief data officers, data architects One of the biggest problems that they have in these massive systems you're talking about getting data from E. AARP uh, Internet of things devices, etcetera is simple data transformation. E t l data scientists spend a good droid at a time, maybe sometimes 80% of their time on that data transformation process that slows down the ability to get answers to critical business. Analytic questions. How is HBR assistant you guys and curling down at time for detail? >>Absolutely. So we we do not. We went to cloud about five years back, and the methodology that you talk about e t. L is sort of a point back in the day when you would do, you know, maybe a couple of times a day ingestion. So it's like in the the transition off the pipeline. As you are ingesting data, you would transform and massage the return, enhance the data and provisioned it for business consumption. Today we do lt we extract loaded into target and natively transform it as needed from business consumption. So So we look at each. We are, for example, is, uh, we're replicating all off our e r P data into snowflake in the cloud for real time ingestion and consumption. Uh, if you do all of this analysis on article side to it, typically you would have ah, processing where you would put put in a job toe, get that data out, and analysis comes back to you in a couple of hours out here, you could be slicing and dicing the data as needed on it's all self serve on provisioning. We do not build analysis foreign users. Neither do we do a lot off the data science. But we want to make sure when businesses using that data they can act on that as it's available on the example is we had a processing back in the day with demand forecasting, which we do for every product off logic for 52 weeks, looking ahead for for every week, right, and it will run for a couple of days that processing today with such platforms on in public Lot. We do that in an hour's time. Right now That's critical for business success because you want to know the methodologies you feel need Tofail or have challenges. You probably wanna have them now rather than wait a couple of days for that process in the show up, and then you do not have enough time to, at just the parameters are bringing back some other business process toe augmented. So that's what we look at. The return on investment for such investment are essentially ensuring business continuity and success outfront on faster time to deliver. >>Yeah, >>so, Anthony, this seems like this would really change the conversation within enterprises. The target customer or audience really changes from kind of this IittIe centric movement tome or strategic move. We talked to me about the conversations you've had, what customers and how this has transformed their business. >>Yeah, a few things to unpack there, um, one. You mean, obviously, customs wanna make decisions on the freshest data, so they typically relied on in the past on these batch orientated tough data movement techniques, which which will be touched on there and how we're able to reduce that that time window. Let them make decisions on the freshest data where that takes, you, choose into other parts of organizations. Because, Azzawi said, already, I mean, we know that is the lifeblood of them. There was many, I would say, Typically, I t semi, but let's call it data. Seven people sitting in the both side of organizations, if not Mawr, than used to sit in the legacy I t side. They want access to this data. They want to be able to access their daily easy. And so one of these things cloud based system SAS based systems have made that a lot easier for them. And the conversations. We have a very much driven from not only the chief data officers, but the CEOs. Now they know in order to get the advantage to win. To survive in today's times, they need to be data driven organizations, and it sounds cliche. We hear these digital transformation stories and data driven taglines. They get thrown out there, but what we've seen is where it's really it's been put to toss this year it is happening. Projects that would happen 9 12 months have been given to month Windows to happen because it's a matter of survival and so that's what's really driven. And then you also have the companies that benefit as well. You mean we're fortunate that we are able as a company globally, with composer of all to work from her very efficiently. But then support customers like Obvious who or providing these work from home technology systems that can enable another? The semester It's really moved. That's driven down from being purely I t driven to its CEO, CEO, CEO driven because its's what they've got to do. It z no longer just table stakes. >>I >>think the lines are great, right way we roll up into CEO and like I work for the CEO at at large detect. But we strive to be more service oriented than support. So I t was traditionally looked at as a support our right. But we obviously are enabling the enterprise to be data driven, so we strive to be better at what we do and how we position ourselves. As as more off service are connected to business problem, we understand the business problem and the challenge that they have on and ensuring we could find solutions and solution architectures around that problem to ensure success for that, right? And that's the key to it. Whether we build, vs, buy it. It's all about ensuring business doesn't have toe find stopgap solutions to be successful in finding a solution for their problem. >>Avi Anthony, I really appreciate you guys taking the time to peel back the layers and help the audience understand how to take thes really abstract terms and make them rial for getting answers on real time data and kind of blowing away these concepts of E t l and data transformations and how toe really put data toe work using public cloud resource sources against their real time data assets. Thank you for joining us on this installment of the Cube virtual as we cover A W s re event, make sure to check out the portal and Seymour great coverage off this exciting area off data and data analysis

>> Announcer: From Austin, Texas it's theCube, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Howdy from Austin, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante we are on day one of our coverage of Pure Accelerate 2019. Welcoming a couple of guests to theCube. One is an alumni, Nathan Hall, VP of America's Systems Engineering from Pure, Nathan welcome back to theCube. >> Thanks, thanks very much. >> Lisa: And you brought a buddy from Cisco. We have Tom Sutliff, director of systems engineering and the America's data center, welcome to the Cube Tom. >> Thanks for having me. >> Dave: It's howdy you all. >> Howdy you all, okay. Thank you, it took the wicked smart guy from Boston to figure that out. >> A local. >> All right, so you all, let's talk about Cisco and Pure, you guys have been partners now since, Nathan we were chatting, since about the IPO, about four years ago. Let's start with you Nathan, our Pure guy. The Cisco, Pure partnership evolution, better together? What have you done over those last five years that sets you up for another first that you're going to share with us today? >> Sure, so it's a deep relationship that's only getting deeper and it's really at all levels. It starts with the executive alignment and think about Charlie Giancarlo from Cisco we've got a lot of just common, cross pollination there. But now it extends, certainly the field level, Tom and I are doing a lot of planning together in terms of having our teams go after common use cases. But now it extends to engineering as well, we had a UCS director plugin that we've had for some time now but Pure is now first in terms of having integration into Cisco intersight, so we are first and only to have storage integration of the Cisco intersight so that Cisco and Pure customers can really manage their environment from one console, so a lot of simplicity, just single SaaS interface for managing everything. >> Tom why Pure, why first with them? >> Well you know Nathan he articulated it well, we can look at the executive level, we talked about Charlie, but even, you know all of our Cisco executives but also to the engineering. We started really strong with the field sales teams but even if you look at the little things that our customers notice but a lot of people may not like the internal development of validated design guides, use cases. We churn them out with Pure as our top ecosystem partner, more than anybody and there's a lot of work being done, our customers see that and it's really helped drive our goal to market together it's really a very strong strategy. >> So there's a CVD around this is that right? >> Yeah there's many there's 22 right now and we're churning them out about one or two a quarter. With some vendors we might put out some initially we might do one or two things well, we do a lot of things well I guess you could say we do 22 things well with the CVD's but more than that. >> So this really started in the field if I understand correctly is that right? [Nathan] - Yes. >> So I always look for these deals and say is it a Barney deal, you know Barney deal I love you, you love me. And if there's real engineering going on then you say okay it's beyond a Barney deal. So it starts in the field with what, hey we should you know a customer wants us to work together and then how does the partnership evolve into where you're putting engineering resources and what does that look like? >> I think a lot of it evolves from just showing progress and showing success. If you look at, we just have a lot of common goals and from a portfolio perspective we fill in a lot of each others gaps so that's really where it started was having the success in the field and that drove, we should actually make greater investments in terms of engineering development, those 22 CVD's, the intersight integration, et cetera. >> So we were talking earlier about CI, HCI for audience members who it's kind of nuanced, how do you guys look at the intersection of those two? >> I say it's another better together story, for example we have a recent joint customer win where essentially across their entire SAP landscape we have Cisco hyper flex the HX managing the database portion, we have FlashStack with Pure Storage managing the Hanna portion, and really it all comes down to single console which is intersight. So we're really able to provide the best type of infrastructure for the right workload at the right time but all make it look like one single experience to the customer. >> So from a customer conversation perspective let's go back to you know we've talked about now this exciting new first engineering alignment. Going back to the field where customers have a multitude of workloads, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, FEEdi, and there's FlashStack like 31 flavors of FlashStack right. What's that conversation like in terms of CI versus HCI when you guys come into play? Obviously FlashStack being I mentioned a number of flavors of that have been around for awhile, how do you help the customers determine what infrastructure is optimal for their workloads and their business objectives? >> You know there's a clear delineation between a hyper convergence, our HX platform, a hyper flex platform, and the converged infrastructure that we have with FlashStacks. If you look at a FlashStack it's an all in one solution, compute, fabric, storage. It's more for tier one apps, something that's you know scalable, something that's a highly dense tier one application. Latency obviously plays into this you know, I'd say it's a little less with the hyper flex platform and hyper convergence, much easier to stand up, much quicker to stand up within a half an hour. It's a storage play it does many of the similar same things but you know we're kind of closing the gap on both of them because even what you would call that smaller platform that started off at more tier one, excuse me tier two and tier three is now moving into the tier one space so. But it's really about scalability, ease of use, some of them are stronger in some markets like maybe a higher enterprise. But we can sell them across anywhere whether it be public sector, commercial, mid market, smaller customers. But they each have use cases that they fit in very well. >> This morning in the key notes we heard a lot about API's, I want to get into Multi Cloud in a second but before I do we talk a lot about infrastructures code, DevOps, we heard a lot about Kubernetes, a little bit about Kubernetes this morning. And the Cisco DevNet I've often said on theCUBE that they're the only large established company that's figured out how to do something for developers. Now does your partnership extend into sort of infrastructures code, how does that all sort of go through? Is DevNet a play here or even on the roadmap? >> Nathan: So from DevNet can you take that one? >> Well I can say yes it is a play, if you take a look at all of our solutions, primarily the compute and the fabric solutions, programmability is really a key function that we have and the customers can go in and they can actually working with our API's, API's that we work with separate with other vendors too that are dedicated to other vendors. It is a key thing and DevNet became to the forefront probably about five years ago and it was really built off of that development effort so that's critical for us going forward here there's a lot that we're doing I know we're going to talk about intersight and some other things where that was a key element of it. >> Yeah so this is important. You were at Cisco Live. >> And Cisco DevNet. >> And we were in the DevNet zone and you remember, you had many many booths, very specialized, then you have CCIE's learning python, learning how to program infrastructure for new use cases, edge comes in. Anything you'd add Nathan to sort of programmability? >> So I think just from day one from Pure Storage just having our restful API interface, having code.purestorage.com we've tried to make it as much automatable as possible, as easy for to really create a community of developers that can create these integrations very quickly, and honestly evidence of that is in intersight itself. How quickly we got that integration happening is because of that restful API interface. We were able to take the kind of AI Ops of Pure One and bring it into intersight, be able to get intersight to talk to Pure Storage very easily because of that strength of API first. >> What do we need to know about intersight? Add some color there, what is it, how's it work, what's the kind of history and how do you guys turn what you're doing in integration into customer value? >> So if I look at, going back to your comments around why converge versus hyper converge, it's often really a story of simplicity right? Customers want something simple for the data center, they know they can get it out in the Cloud but they can't always run their workloads out in the external Cloud. So simplicity is for intersight, no matter what it is, if it's converged or hyper converged, if it's Pure Storage, being able to have single interface to monitor your infrastructure, lifecycle it, to get really specific imagine a VMware administrator is able to in that single console, provision storage from Pure to a UCS server, format it for VMware ESX and VMFS, and in that single console so doesn't have to go to a bunch of different consoles, gets that Cloud like experience and that's what intersight delivers. So you get that simplicity whether its converged or hyper converged with intersight. >> Whether it's in the Cloud, it's the Edge, it's the Branch, Hybrid Cloud, instead of having to manage it I think that Nathan just hit on these single clusters of storage, compute, what have you. These can all be managed from one single console world wide no matter where they sit. >> So I want to talk about Multi Cloud if we can. So if I look at the players in Multi Cloud, the big whales, VMware, Red Hat, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco, you partner with all of those pretty much I think. AWS is not on the list but you figure they're kind of the facto part of the Multi Cloud scene but they're not going after Multi Cloud, Cisco was a relatively new entrant there. You got companies that have a Cloud like Microsoft and Google that want to participate, you've got companies that don't have a Cloud like Cisco that want to participate, where does Pure fit in to that Multi Cloud opportunity and how does it relate to the partnership? >> Well I think where we found a solid partnership with Cisco and Multi Cloud is the same approach to Multi Cloud and that is I'd call it open Multi Cloud. As opposed to having, forcing a single type of hyper visor on one side or a single Cloud, external Cloud on the other side, how do we make certain that our customers can run any app, anywhere? How do we appear and provide the data fabric having the most efficient amenity of fabric out there to kind of get around the data gravity problems of moving workloads, and we do that now with Pure Flash right on premises, Cloud block store out in the Cloud, our ability to Cloud snap to Azure, to AWS, and that's part of the story. The other part of the story is the fabric and the compute. So with ACI anywhere really that compeletes the any workload anywhere story, and keeping it open so it's not just one hyper visor or one Cloud provider on the other side. >> So you be the data plane in that equation, with the management of that data plane, and Cisco is the overall management framework the control plane I guess we could call that. Is that the right way to think about it? >> I'd say part of the control plane and the network fabric as well, and we're part of essentially the consistent data services no matter where you go. So really upleveling for example EBS to an enterprise grade of storage that it wasn't before, now we have something that whether you're on hardware on premises or in the cloud, you can run that monolithic application in places you couldn't do it before. >> So let's look at this in the real world in a customer environment, talk to me about whatever kind of whether it's a bank or an airline or what have you, what are the business benefits that, we'll use delta Airlines as an example, what would they get out of this if they think of all of the things that they need to achieve internally and be able to deliver to their customers? What's that you know TCO, ROI, what are all those sexy things that you guys are delivering? >> So I'd say they get essentially a lot of the barriers to getting the TCO you want for a given workload are based on compatibility. Maybe you want to run it out in Amazon but you can't get it there because it's this massive monolithic gap, the sync would take days, the SLA out there isn't quite what you want. Now being able to provide a consistent experience no matter where that data plane is, you get that choice. You can go and evaluate AWS or Azure and say that's ultimately the right TCO for my application and I know it could run out there because I've essentially standardized my data fabric anywhere, and it's the same story essentially now with ACI anywhere as well. So the ability to keep essentially the fundamental elements of the application, the infrastructure around it consistent no matter where it is, freeze that IT decision maker to put it in the right place. You don't have to be constrained by compatibility anymore. >> So internal operations can be dialed way up which means those folks are free to resources to work on other higher value projects, and the customer on the other end who doesn't know any of this stuff is under the hood is getting what they need when they want it. >> Exactly, yeah you can manage if you look at ACI you can manage the automation of the applications across the network fabric again wherever it may be, and there's robustness there, there's telemetry, there's measurements. So instead of just looking at the application you look at the robustness of that on the network and the network here us absolutely critical, none of this is going to run I think as Nathan hit on that it could be in the Cloud, it could be in the Branch, you still want the same level of performance the SLA, the five nines and that's where the network comes in that's what's critical. >> Well and the security piece as well. >> Absolutely. >> You guys are largely coming at the Multi Cloud from of course the network strength that you have but you've also got a security angle there because you can go deep packet inspection and that's a sweet spot for you guys. >> Tom: Absolutely. >> Talk about security and it's importance and so on. >> Well I think the security I mean one of the big plays that we have with ACI and with Tetration is being able to look in literally billions of packets a second and being able to track and make realtime decisions on any type of threat, threat defense that's built right in. So normally obviously you have firewall and you try to keep everything out but a lot of what will happen a lot of the penetration security hack happens inside. So this is able to look at all of the flows, at every single packet the flow of the application and the information to see if there's a threat in real time. It takes a lot of processing power a lot of storage and a lot of capacity but you know that's a Tetration product and it's a huge play, our security team is actually out selling that in addition to the data center teams. >> So is Wallingford Yankee's country or Red Sox country? >> Oh it's right on the border so I've got my in laws Yankee's, my parents Redsox, so it's very difficult at home. >> You're a Pat's fan of course, did you feel dirty watching the game on Sunday or? >> Tom: No not at all. >> Oh you felt good? >> Maybe 19 and O this year we'll see. >> And you're Switzerland in this whole debate? >> I try to be it's hard. >> Well you know this company is Warrior's so we can talk NBA too. >> You bet! >> There's a really interesting NBA season coming up now. Not so much for our team but. (laughter) >> Lisa: You never know! >> You never know. >> I had to try to be Switzerland too cause I was the West Coaster with the East Coaster boss, you know how it goes. So Tom last question for you, whole bunch of announcements that came out of Pure today as we look at all of the partnerships that Pure has we talked about that, that Cisco has as well, what are some of the things that as a partner as a valued strategic partner, that Cisco hears when they hear Pure talking about delivering everything as a service and what they're doing with AI and dialing up things there, what is Ciscos reaction to that news? >> Well the thing with Pure and it preceded this conference but you know I really heard it with the new announcements and Nate and I we have a lot of things we're going to work with our systems engineers on in the Americas, it's just the innovation which is pretty incredible. You know you kind of have the big four products here but primarily with the Flash arrays the CI platforms, the Flash blades, what's going on with Pure one, that's going to be critical going forward and we have very similar messages with Multi Cloud. We talked about the validated designs, this is really going to lead us to almost like it's kind of funny when you have an innovative partner you can do reboots every year and people don't think you're just throwing work at them or what have you. It's like now we really innovated again, 12, 15 months later we're going to hit this again and come at it. And so Pure is probably one of the only partners we have that type of relationship with. >> Alright well guys thank you so much for joining Dave and me on theCUBE today we appreciate it. We look forward to following the evolution of this Cisco Pure partnership, thanks for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE ya'll from Pure Accelerate in Austin, Texas. (upbeat music)

>> From the Silicon Angle Media Office, in Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this breaking analysis where we try to provide you some insights on theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Jim Kobielus who was up today, and Jim we were just off of the VMworld 2019. Big show, lot of energy, lot of announcements. I specifically want to focus on containers and the impact that containers are having on VMware, specifically the broader ecosystem and the industry at large. So, first of all, what was you take on VMworld 2019? >> Well, my take was that VMware is growing fast, and they're investing in the future, which is fairly clearly cloud and native computing on containers with Kubernetes and all that. But really that's the future and so, what VMware is doing is they're making significant bets that containers will rule the roost in cloud computing and application infrastructures going forward. But in fact virtual machines, VMs hypervisors are hotter than ever and that was well established last week by the fact that the core predominate announcement last week was a VMware Tanzu, which is not yet a production solution, but is in a limited preview, which is the new platform for coexistence of containers and vSphere. A container run time embedded in vSphere, so that customers can run containers in a highly-iso workloads, in a highly isolated VM environment. In other words, VMware is saying, we're saying to their customers, "You don't have to migrate away from VMs "until you're good and ready. "You can continue to run whatever containers "you build on vShpere, "but we more than encourage you to continue to run VMs "until you're good and ready "to migrate, if ever." >> All right. So, I want to come back and unpack that a little bit, but does your data, does your analysis, when you're talking to customers and the industry at large, is there any evidence from what you see that containers are hurting VMware's business? >> I don't get any sense that containers are hurting VMware's business. I get the strong sense that containers, they've just of course acquired Pivotal, a very additive to the revenue mix at VMware. And VMware, most of their announcements last week were in fact all around Kubernetes, and containers, and products that are very much for those customers who are going deep down the container road. >> So that was a setup question. >> You've got lots of products for them. >> So that was a setup question. So I have some data on this. >> Go ahead >> Right answer. So, I want to show you this. So, Alex, if you wouldn't mind bringing up that slide. And we shared this with you last week when we were prepping for VMworld. This is data from Enterprise Technology Research ETR, and they have a panel of 4500 end user customers that they go out and do spending surveys with them. So, what this shows is, this is container customers spending on VMware. So, you can see it goes back to early January. Now it's a little deceiving here. You see that big spike, but what it shows it that, A, that big spike is the number of shared customers. So, you really didn't have many customers back then that were doing both containers and VMware that ETR found. But as the N gets bigger, 186, 248, 257, 361, across those 461 customers, those are the shared customers in the green. And you can see that it's kind of a flat line. It's holding very well in the high 30's percent range, which is their sort of proprietary metric. So, there's absolutely no evidence, Jim, that containers, thus far anyway, are hurting VMware's business. Which of course was the narrative, containers are going to kill VMware, no evidence of that. But then why would they acquire Pivotal? Are they concerned about the future, what's your-- >> Well, they're concerned about cross selling their existing customer base who are primarily on V's, fearing the hypervisors, cross selling them on the new world of Kubernetes base products for cloud computing, and so forth and so on. In other words it's all about how do they grow their revenue base? VMware's been around for more than 20 years now. They rule the roost on the hypervisors. Where do they go from here, in terms of their product mix? Well, Kubernetes and beyond that, things like serverless will clearly be in the range of the things that they could add on. Their customers could add on to their existing deploys. I mean, look at Pivotal. Pivotal has a really strong Kubernetes distribution, which of course VMware co-developed with them. Pivotal also has a strong functions as a service backplane, the Pivotal function service for, serverless environments. So, this acquisition of Pivotal very much positions VMware to capitalize on those opportunities to sell those products when that market actually develops. But I see some evidence that virtual machines are going like gang busters in terms of customer deployments. Last week on theCUBE at VMworld, Mark Lohmeyer who's an SVP at a VMware for one of their cloud business unit, said that in the last year, for example, customers who are using a VMware cloud on AWS, VMware grew the customer base by 400% last year, and grew the number of VMs running in VMware, cloud, and AWS by 900%, which would imply that on average each customer more than doubled the number of VMs they're running on that particular cloud service. That means VMs are very much relevant now, and probably will be going forward. And why is that? That's a good question, we can debate that. >> Well, so the naysayers at VMworld in the audience were tweeting that, "Oh, I though we started Pivotal. "We launched Pivotal so that we didn't have to run VMs on, "or run containers on VMs, "so we could run them on bare metal." Are people running containers on virtual machines? >> Well, they are, yes. In fact, there's a broad range of industry initiatives, not just Tanzu at VMware, to do just that. To run containers on VMs. I mean, there is the KubeVirt, open source project over at CNCF, that's been going for a couple years now. But also, Google has Gvisor, Intel has the Kata containers initiative, I believe that there are a few others. Oh yeah, AWS with Firecracker, last year's reinvent. All this would imply, strongly indicate that these large cloud and tech vendors wouldn't be investing heavily into convergence of containers and VMs and hypervisors, if there weren't a strong demand from customers for hybrid environments where they're going to run both stacks as it were in parallel, why? Well, one of the strong advantages of VMs is workload isolation at the hardware level, which is something that typically container run times don't offer. For example, the workload isolation seems to be one of the strong features that VMware's touting for Tanzu going forward. >> So, VMware is--the centerpiece of VMware's strategy is obviously multicloud, Kubernetes as a lynch pin to enable running applications on different platforms. Will, in your opinion, and of course VMware is hard core enterprise, right? Will VMware, two things, will they be able to attract the developers, number one. And number two, will those developers build on top of VMware's platform or are they going to look to their cloud? >> That's a very important question. Last week at VMworld, I didn't get a sense that VMware has a strong developer story. I think that's a really open issue going forward for them. Why would a developer turn to VMware as their core solution provider when they don't offer a strong workbench for building these hybridized VM, /container/serverless applications that seem to be springing up all over? AWS and Microsoft and Google are much stronger in that area with their respective portfolios. >> So, I guess the obvious answer there is Pivotal is their answer to the developer quandary. >> Yes. >> And so, let's talk about that. So, Pivotal was struggling. I talked last week in my analysis, you saw the IPO price and then it dipped down, it never made it back up. Essentially the price that VMware paid the public shareholders for Pivotal was about half of it's initial IPO price, so, okay. So, the stock was struggling, the company didn't have the kind of momentum that, I think, that it wanted, so VMware picks it up. Can VMware fold in Pivotal, and use its go-to-market, and its largess to really prop up Pivotal and make it a leader? >> Well, possibly because Cloud Foundry, Pivotal Cloud Foundry could be the lynch pin of VMware's emerging developer story, if they position in that and really invest in the product in that regard. So yeah, in other words this could very much make VMware a go-to-vendor for the developers who are building the new generation of applications that present serverless functional interfaces, but will have containers under the cover, but also have VMs under the cover providing strong workload isolation in a multi-tenant environment. That would be the promise. >> Now, a couple things. You mentioned Microsoft, of course as you're in the clouding, and Google. The ETR data that I dug into when I wanted to understand, better understand multicloud. Who's got the multicloud momentum? Well, guess who has the most multicloud momentum? It's the cloud guys. Now, AWS doesn't specifically say they participate in multicloud. Certainly their marketing suggest that multicloud is for somebody else, that really they want to have uni-cloud. Whereas Google, and as you're kind of embracing multicloud and Kubernetes specifically, now of course AWS has a Kubernetes offering, but I suspect it's not something that they want to promote hard in the market place because it makes it easier for people to get off of AWS. Your thoughts on multicloud generally, but specifically Kubernetes, and containers as it relates to the big cloud providers. >> Yeah, well my thoughts on multicloud generally is that multicloud is the strategy of the second tier cloud vendors, obviously. If they can't dominate the entire space, at least they can maintain a strong, provide a strong connective tissue for the clouds that actually are deployed in their customer's environments. So, in other words, the Ciscos of the world, the VMwares of the world, IBM. In other words, these are not among the top tier of the public cloud players, hence where do they go to remain relevant? Well, they provide the connective tissue, and they provide the virtualized networking backbones, and they provide the AI ops that enables end-to-end automated monitoring management of the entire mesh. The whole notion of a mesh architecture is something that grew up with IBM and Google for lots of reasons, especially due to the fact that they themselves, as vendors, didn't dominate the public cloud. >> Well, so I agree with you. The only issue I would take is I think Microsoft is a leader in public cloud, but because it has a big On-Prem presence, it's in its best interest to push containers and Kubernetes, and so forth. But you're right about the others. Cisco doesn't have a public cloud, VMware doesn't have a public cloud, IBM has a public cloud but it's really small market share, and so it's in those companies, and Google is behind, but it's in those companies best interest really to promote multicloud, try to use it as a bull work against AWS, who's got an obviously awesome market momentum. The other thing that's interesting in the ETR data when I poke in there, it seems like there are more people looking at Google. Now maybe that's 'cause they have such strong strength in data and analytics, maybe it's 'cause they're looking for a hedge on AWS, but the spending data suggests that more and more people are kicking the tires, and more than kicking the tires on Google. Who of course is obviously behind Kubernetes and that container movement, and open source, your thoughts? >> Yeah, well, many ways, you have to think, that Google has developed the key pieces of the new stack for application development in the multicloud. Clearly they developed Kubernetes, its open source, and also they developed TensorFlow open sources, it's the predominant AI workbench essentially for the new generation of AI driven applications, which is everything. But also, if you look at Google developed Node JS for web applications and so forth. So really, Google now is the go-to-vendor for the new generation of open source application development, and increasingly DevOps in a multicloud environment, running over Istio meshes and so forth. So, I think that's, so, look at one of the announcements last weekend at VMworld. VMware and NVIDIA, their announcement of their collaboration, their joint offering to enable AI workloads, training workloads to run in GPUs in an optimal high performance fashion within a distributive of VMware cloud end-to-end. So really, I think VMware recognizes that the new workloads in the multicloud are predominately, increasingly AI workloads. And in order to, as the market goes towards those kinds of workloads, VMware very much recognizes they need to have a strong developer play, and they do with NVIDIA in a sense. Very much so because NVIDIA with the rapid framework and so forth, and NVIDIA being the predominant GPU vendor, very much is a very strategic partner for VMware as they're going forward, as they hope to line up the AI developers. But Google still is the vendor to beat as regards to AI developers of the world, in that regard, so-- >> So we're entering a world we sometimes call the post-virtual machine world. John Furrier is kind of tongue and cheek on a play on web tudauto. He calls it cloud tudauto, which is a world of multiple clouds. As I've said many times, I'm not sure multicloud is necessarily a coherent strategy yet as opposed to sort of a multi-vendor situation, Shadow IT, >> Yes. >> Lines on business, et cetera. But Jim, thanks very much-- >> Sure. >> For coming on and breaking down the container market, and VMworld 2019. It was great to see you. >> Likewise. >> All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Jim Kobielus. We'll see you next time on theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> live from Mountain View, California It's the queue covering definite create twenty nineteen. Brought to You by Cisco >> Hi, Lisa Martin With the Cube. We're live at the Computer History Museum for Cisco. Definite Create twenty nineteen John for years my co host, and we're pleased to welcome back to the Cube. Mandy Whaley, senior director of developer experience for Definite Mandy. This event is bursting at the seams. This is the third definite create, but you've been involved for the last five years or so from the beginning, when this was really groundswell talk. Before we're going to talk about a history of Devon, tell our audience what definite is. What definite create is as well, >> Absolutely definite is Cisco's developer community so anywhere that Cisco has a P iis rst case anywhere that people can build on top of our platforms. Definite is the community that enables those developers. So we do. You know a lot of connecting of people within the community way also do a lot of developer enablement Sample code Documentation Blog's Learning Resource is in person workshops, online workshops. I lead our developer experienced team, which is our developer advocates who are you know being the voice of developer, helping the developers get inspired in buildings also are definite. Sandbox teams hosted labs. If you want to use some networking FBI's you may not have extra network playing around that you can program against an experiment. So we offer reserved hosted labs that anyone can use free by becoming a definite remember and then the other part is our our developer content and support. So really getting the information out there and supporting the developers so definite is our community that enables everyone to build on top of Cisco. >> And this community is now sorry, John. We're both very excited, Assistant Suzy was announcing this morning over five hundred eighty five thousand members strong and the energy and the excitement in the room this morning with the Kino people are jumping at the bid. When you guys talked about WiFi six, I loved the examples that you gave this community is it is engaged. That is one of >> the things that's really exciting. Teo, about working with the definite community is that I feel like the energy that we put in, we get back multiple fold from the community, right, and it's great to see people who started with us maybe five years ago who have, you know, made their first AP I call started down this path, and now they're building full applications and they're here sharing that information by presenting with the community and giving back and that excitement that engagement is really one of the funnest parts of my job. >> Man, you talk about the evolution of definite create definite, pretty good background on that. Tell the story. I know I've been there with you guys since the beginning of the Cube. I know little about, but I want you to tell the story because it was a genesis that came out of what you guys we're seeing in the definite community where Cloud was really becoming part of it. Tell the where the definite created portion came on. And what it means for the definite community and developers at large. >> Yes, absolutely. So I started working with Emmet before Devon. It had a name so before it was actually definite. That was five years ago and way started building the community. We have a developer event within Sisqo live. So we have the definite zone, and it's we offer a lot of our constant and classes and workshops. Their way started getting requests from that audience, saying WAY would like a smaller events with more ability, tohave, you know, deeper conversations more, one on one and just focused on the developer community. And this was when multi Cloud was really starting to become a big piece of the Cisco strategy. Are developers were trying to figure out howto work in that space. Cloud native was taking King off, and that was the first definite create on, which was three years ago. It was a very small venue in San Francisco, and it was our very closest and, you know, deepest engage set of members that came to that first year and then. But we had such great engagement. Some of that energy that you mentioned and everyone who helped build it towards the second year, which we had last year at the Computer History Museum, says same same than you. And what special, definite create. As we really try to get the two parts of our definite community together, the application developers and our infrastructure automation Dev ops teams right, and we try to bring them together. This one event where they can really exchange ideas, you know, get to be talking the same language. This morning we had conversations around WiFi six from the application Developer side Like what does that enable for the application developers and new things you could build? And then, you know, how is that also interesting? Teo, the networking site >> of any demos, are a big part of it. You got the hack a thon camp. Get the camp experience. You can create great tools, but the the events, not your classic event. It's not like that's Get the numbers up. Let's get tennis. Let's make some money. It's not about that vibe. This is a different vibe. It's more of let's make it intimate, somewhat structured, but disorganized enough to be collaborative. >> Yes, it's definitely collaborative, and it's definitely a community focused event over. I think over seventy five percent of the content this year came from the community, so they're here giving back and presenting their workshops. It's also very hands on. Hands on is actually kind of a core definite value. We, like Teo, always give people the ability Teo code something. Try something, build something So you mentioned can't create that is our it's >> it's We call it a build a thon because it's a little more structure >> than a free form hackathon. We start with some use cases. We make the technology available, and they actually started yesterday before the conference even began. Those teams started building solutions, and they'LL be presenting them on Thursday and then >> in the >> conference. We have hands on workshops in small groups with eight people, so you can really, you know, take the time to actually get in, run the code, do the work, ask questions right to the presenter on. And we really want that collaborative. You know, sharing ideas feels very intentional part of building this conference. >> So I'd love to ask you some probing questions around the future of where you see this going because you have the key ingredients are coming together. You mentioned them, so scaling this up it's going to be a challenge because you have definite. You have Definite Zone and Sisqo live, which is the Cisco proper. Then you kind of have this elite community as my words. I guess it's, you know, the best of the best, but it's really a cross section of unique profile of persona is the intention to have these guys then go back to their communities are within the communities. Is that the scale point? Because how do you run these intimate events right and not lose the spirit of the ethos. >> So that's something we're, you know, putting specific thought into because we do want to keep the spirit. We've actually heard that from some of our, you know, kind of core community members that they really want to keep that aspect. So couple of things that we are planning tto help with that one is you may have seen this morning we gave the definite Creator awards. So those air awards for people who contribute to the community and a lot of those are people who have come and learn skills, taken aback to their organizations and been able to scale that out to their organizations. That's something that we're really actively working with people to do and do that in a very organic and community lead way. Um, the other thing that we have been working with is a program called Definite Express. So this is actually where we take a small part of our definite content. We kind of package it up and make it available for anyone to run in their region. Jin so they can have it. You know, in a different country they can have some of the same feeling that we have here some of these same workshops we've had those in. It was about two hundred fifty of those events in forty nine countries. >> So wait, man kind of thing. Yes, it's a physical events. It's not just sass on site services. >> That's right. >> Portable portal >> event and they do workshops just like they are here way. Inject some of the fun, same fun kind of activities. And then we provide all the infrastructure. There are sandbox, >> you hologram in there. I mean, you're so popular you can't attend all of them. >> No, I cannot. >> But I love >> to see on Twitter you can look up definite express and see one's happening, you know, all over the world at the same time, which is really fun. >> And how did those folks that are doing these definite expressed events How are they able to collaborate with you guys provide feedback from what they're experiencing in the field to help create Maur no pun intended helped create more. Definitely more, exactly more opportunities, you know, and really help you guys with this larger event so that they feel like they were in this community. And five hundred eighty five thousand. There's only about four hundred here that can fit in Russian. What's that somebody else? It's like So one of the things >> we do is while we're here at definite create, we do live stream a lot of the content. So it was really fun today. When we finished the keynote, I heard from some people that told me I was in the keynote. I was watching and I started texting my friends. Hey, you got to get on the live stream And that's a great thing to hear from the community because you're giving away for this people to join in. We also have on definite our community chat room. It's on every page, chat with us definite. It gets you right into a room with the developer advocates on our team and other community members, and we see the community there, you know, answering each other's questions, giving us feedback, letting us know what they need to move ahead in their careers and their projects. So that community chat room is really key. >> Give some highlights on what change since just go live Barcelona. What? Some of the important notable successes and work areas that you guys are doing a definite and definite create. >> Right. So we, as we mentioned in the Kino, our community growth, we've reached five hundred eighty five thousand. So that registered Dove nut members, that is, it's great to see that growing. And then we also see those members you know, growing their engagement with them, not going deeper into the material, building, more content, taking it back to their organizations and things like that. Right now we are building up to Cisco Live Us, which is coming up in San Diego in June, will have our full definite zone there. So a lot of exciting activities that were planning for their We hope everybody can come and see us there, and then another thing is, could exchange. So could exchange. We actually announced it a definite create last year and launched it a little bit after definite create code exchanges the place for the community to share their projects so they can anything that is open source. They can share it by sending us there. Have link way curate that end Tio Francisco relevant sort of catalog. If you're looking for a sample to use DNA center and you want to see it in Python, you Khun, go search for exactly that. Get back some projects that the community have submitted. So we're excited to announce this week that we've reached over four hundred projects in code exchange of those curated, you know, projects that have gone to the process and been posted there. That was a really exciting milestone, looking back to create from LA >> So it's working. Yeah. So what's the vibe in? Certainly Cisco. I know Suzy has and Team have been kind of getting a lot of press and praise press externally, praise internally it Cisco, as the big battleship of Cisco, kind of gets on that cloud wave coming multi cloud hot area. >> It is so one of the things that is really exciting as we are seeing a p, I be available across our whole portfolio. So in every area that Cisco has products and up and down the stack at the device layer at the controller layer at the cloud layer. So that's very exciting from a definite perspective, because it gives us more for our community to work with more opportunity for developers. And that changes Ciscos very palpable. It's very exciting. And we're, you know, bringing the definite community into that as much as >> it's from creativity to we saw the demo for a fish about the virtual realities cable first peek in Barcelona. But here, amplifying that with with five six to you could just with virtual reality look at a devices. They see all the staff see with network coverage. Yeah, WeII to do work. >> Yeah, exactly. And >> me, that demo is a great you know, example of this applications meaning infrastructure message, which is really what definite create is about. We wrote an augmented reality application running on a mobile device, but you can check literally seeing the signal strength from all your access points on. So that's just a great example of those two things coming together. >> Speaking of coming together, one of the things that you touched on this a minute ago. But what in the keynote this morning, when I was looking at in the Mirror Rocky demo of the other things that you guys were doing and the evolution of Cisco. I just thought, What CART horse which ones, which was It has definite been really kind of fueling Cisco's evolution. Looking at all of the available, as you mentioned across the product portfolio has been around a long time. Is it is it fair to say that definite has kind of been a fuel for that? And Cisco's going Wow, we've got this phenomenal community were evolving because our customers are we need Teo. Yeah, I think it is. It is very much >> hand in hand. We worked really closely with our product teams and we worked hard to be that voice of the developer with our product teams and Cisco. And it's been a journey that started, you know, five years ago where we knew that the guys were going to come, we knew that there would be a prize across the portfolio and within definite. We really believed in that and are definite community believed in it. And you know, we've been building it very step wise and very intentionally since then. So it's really been a great partnership and a really exciting time to be it Cisco and being a part of that transition. >> Well, I just signed up to chat with you guys since you brought it up earlier. Developer dot cisco dot com That little chat with us on every page signing I signed with my get hub handles >> you can log in with. You're having >> your chair stealing the code and check it into the >> codex scene. >> We're gonna blow something for one. So many exciting has been great to watch. You guys, you got the Moroccan green jacket off. >> It's very Rocky demo today. >> Meraki has been a big part of definite success, and within the community's been the reaction's been very positive. It's not in the classic portfolio of collaboration. It's really going to a different What is muraki mean for the development? What? What has it done? What has enabled Why is it important? >> Yeah, so, um, a Rocky has been great because it's one. As Todd mentioned today, they really have this mission of simplifying their experience, and they've done that in there. You I and they've brought that to their developer experience as well, which is really exciting for me. Rocky is Cloud Managed Network Club managed WiFi, and then they have a very happy I'd driven approach where you can automate almost everything you could do through the eyes. And then there's additional services that you could get from Iraqi, like indoor location data and things like that. So it really opens up opportunities for both of our parts of our definite audience application developers who might be writing an indoor location based application or doing something with the cameras that we saw today on DH, then the infrastructure automation side who can very, very efficiently, you know, manage and deploy their networks. >> It's nice connective tissue for the developers kind of gives you best table two worlds, wireless on the front end, back and network connections. So it really becomes a big part than seems like >> it is. It is. And that's another reason why we were so excited about the new MURAKI developer hub that Todd adults today on Definite because it really is a place where we can show that connective aspect of it. I have all the code and use cases that really connects this to audience. >> We'LL talk will be very excited to know that some of your community members actually have Iraqi devices at their house. They way, they're running their cameras at their homes and everything's >> that's right. >> So being I think it's on the Web, one of the, if not the on ly conference community that brings together the APP developers, those girls and guys thie infrastructure, folks, What's one of your favorite stories that really shows thes two worlds coming together, understanding each other, communicating anything that really sticks out of the last few years for you? Gosh, there's >> many and a lot of them are just hallway conversations that I might stop by and hear people connecting and kind of learning about. You know what each person works on and learning to kind of speak the same language and get together. One story that I think really stands out as a big success is around a partner that we work with who does indoor location applications. And there's pure software company right. They write mobile applications that do indoor location, and but they they need a network underneath that, and so we have had a great coming together of some of our main Cisco loyal people who go out and stall the network's connecting with partners like that who come from the pier software side. We've written applications on DSO. That's that's a great one. And that is really something that we see replicating in many places. And I feel like some of the hallway conversations here are, you know, starting the next stories that happened like that. >> This is one of some of the best cause they're natural. Organic conversations are not scripted. It's not reading slides. Well, I wish we had more time, but we'll have to see you back at dusk alive. All right? What about six weeks or so? Yes, it's coming out coming, kid. And Oh, Mandy, congratulations on this success bursting at the seams. And we appreciate you taking some time to talk with John and me today. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Our pleasure for John, for your I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Cisco. Definite. Create twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching. >> Yeah,

>> live from Mountain View, California It's the queue covering definite create twenty nineteen Brought to you by Cisco >> Hey, welcome back to the cave, Lisa Martin with John Barrier. We're coming to you Live from the Computer System Museum at the third annual Cisco Definite Create twenty nineteen Excited to be joined by Joycelyn Developer Advocate from Postman Joyce Welcome to the Q Thank you. So you are a developer advocate. But postman is a tool that helps the community learn about Cisco ap eyes Postman is a Cisco was a customer of yours but a little bit about your experience at definite cry Because you have an interesting story from last year, which was your first year of this event >> Exactly last year. We just happen to stop by. And as I was walking through this very room you hear all these workshops going on behind us My ears perked up cause I heard somebody say python in postman or two of most powerful tools And I was like, Hey, I >> work a postman >> So I like, stopped in to see and I slapped my team back immediately at the office there, really using postman to teach Cisco Technology here. >> That was surprising to you. And here you are now here a year later. Tell us some of the things that you're expecting to learn and hear and feel and see from twenty nineteen. Create. >> So this year I hear about all these people learning postman learning about tech through postman. So I'm actually giving to talks this afternoon The first talks talking about building the community because a lot of people use postman in the second talk is about using mock servers. Had a fake an AP I until you actually coded and deploy it. >> Take a minute to explain. Postman. Why is it so popular? Why Francisco jazzed about it? What are they using it for? How they bring that in take a minute to talk about what you guys do >> Well, several years ago, when postman started as a side project was primarily for developers and help developers do their day to day jobs. But we found a lot more People are interacting with technology or working at tech companies where they might not have the setup to initiate a request. AP I request, and so postman allows them tio on their desktop be able. Teo interact with the tech in a way that normally they wouldn't have the whole set up to do it. >> So So in terms of developers, what's is a freemium model? They do have a free hand leads >> premium. And I think within the last year we've scooch almost anything that used to be a paid feature down to free so you can try it out. And in fact, if you have a small business or a side project, it's it's free. >> And what's the talk track? You're gonna have to get to talks. One on community, one on serve servers. Monster. >> Yeah, So Mock service is something that I thought might be interesting to this crowd. But a lot of these people have are in charge of managing the infrastructure or supporting existing AP eyes or services that are out in the cloud. And so mock servers are a way that you can essentially mock an FBI for parallel development or to build a prototype put into >> you. And so this helps develop, get faster app up and running. And then what happens when they have to get rid of mock server and put a real server on there? They had built out the re p I. Is that what happens? >> Typically, they're spinning Oppa marks over first, and then they're building out their own servers. So, yeah, they would swap out the mock with their own. >> And what's the other talk on community? Just how did do a community open sores? What's the aspects of the community talk? >> It's kind of on >> odd topic for this kind of crowd, but a lot of people work for companies that are or work for teams where they're just trying to build, like, a sense of community or foster some sort of mission. And so just telling the Postman story and Postman was free for absolutely free for a super long time in growth has just been astronomical. >> You're six million developers on the planet working on that, but I can't say on the company's one hundred thirty million plus AP eyes. And that's all. Just since the company was established in twenty fourteen after this sort of side project that you talked about so pretty, >> pretty quick >> growth trajectory that you guys are on >> and a lot of it was word of mouth. I mean, until I came here last year and heard all the system people talking about how they're using postman. We did not know that. >> So how have how has Postman actually evolved your technology in the last year? Just since you stumbled upon? Wow, this we're actually really hot here. We are really facilitator of developers. This community that's now what five hundred eighty five thousand members strong Learn about Cisco AP eyes. I'd love to know how that has sort of catalyzed growth for postman. Well, back in the >> day, Postman started as developer first. So here's an individual developer. How can they work more effectively? But teams like Cisco you'll be lucky if you find a team of ten people these air hundreds and thousands of developers coming together to work together. So postman as a tool has shifted from focusing on on ly the developer to how do you support developers working in larger teams? >> So what? The community angle? Because one of the things that Lise and I were just talking about you she does a lot of women in tech interviews with Cube and we're building out these communities ourselves and in Silicon Valley, the old expression fake it till you make it. It's kind of a startup buzzword, but people try to fake community or by community. You really can't get away with that. In communities, communities are very fickle. A successful open source projects you've gotta contribute. You've gotta have presence. You've got to show your work to get you to the bad actors. It's >> pretty >> efficient. But things air new now in communities this modern era coming into slag, you got tools. How is community evolving? That's your perspective on this. >> That's an interesting question. I think the community you never wanted fake community absolutely agree, and something that Postman is kind of lagged on is the community's been huge, but we haven't really been involved. So around the world we have people giving workshops that we don't even know about, like around the world. And how can we support them and allow them to tell, teach things consistently and teach best practices? So I wouldn't say unfortunately, well or fortunately, we're not in the position where we have to encourage the growth, but rather just support the people that are already doing this. This >> is the pure ingredient Teo Community development, because you're enabling other people to be relevant with their communities. So you're not so much like just trying to be a community player. You're just your product enables community growth. >> Absolutely. Yeah. >> You just gotta come feed >> postman as a tool. And then postman, the seeds >> of community. >> Yeah, we're healthy. >> So talk about some of the where you guys locate. How many people in your company? What's this? What numbers >> were headquartered in San Francisco. We have a huge engineering department in Bangalore where our founders air from. And I think just a few months ago, we started having distributed people. So now we're everywhere. I think we're about a hundred head count. Uh, fifty five percent of that is engineering. So where? I don't know where a >> start off. I mean, they were started hunting with number two hundred thousand companies using the technologies. We said over six million developers. How do you get a handle on to your point earlier supporting all of these groups that are out there enabling us Johnson enabling and fueling communities like Deb. Nanny? How do you start that with a one hundred person organization? >> Yeah. I'm so glad you're like, Wow, that doesn't seem like a huge organization because other people are like I thought you are way bigger than that. One thing is that we do listen to our community. And so if they're having a pain point way, try to aggregate all those voices and then come out with a cohesive road map because what might be the loudest voice for even a lot of voices might not be what's right for the tool. The other thing is, we're not open source company, but we have a ton of open source projects. So the community has again developed converters, integrations all these open source tools that for their specific workflow works for them. And actually, they're sharing with the community. >> How did you get into all this? How did you join the company? What attracted you and what's what story? >> Well, I'm in San Francisco, so I work for a tech company. I have a hodgepodge background, but I won't go into because it just sounds confusing. Some people call me the Wolverine at work. >> That's a nickname. >> Um, hopefully it's not because I'm so Harry, but because I've had many lives, so I I kind of bring a little bit of that, too. My developer advocate role, a little bit of product, A little bit of marketing, little bit of the business side. >> It's good versatility, lot of versatility. Yeah, let me ask a question. One of the things we've been covering is actually we love cloud nated. We've been covering cloud in the early days. Oh, wait. Oh, seven All the way through Love Cloud native We get that check enterprises Ha! You see Cisco using your stuff. Enterprise developers are hot right now. People are fast filling applications has got a cloud native flare to a definite create. It's also gotta integrate into the classic enterprise. What's the difference in your view and your experience, your observations between enterprise developers and then your classic You know, hard core cloud native developer >> I would say that's something that postman, as an organization is dealing with right now because we started developer first. Now we're finding Oh, it's a different person making these decisions. What tools should we use? Sometimes it's top down, but at the end of the day, it's always the developer that is going to support a top down decision. A developer that's going to find the utility out of certain tool. So we're shifting our focus. But not necessarily by that much. Because long as you focus developer first, it's still >> so enterprise. Kind of taking more of a classic cloud developer or native cloud native developer. You think that kind of profile you in your mind? >> Well, again, you have an enterprise developer. But what? Where's that enterprise developer going to be in two years? So we're not hanging our hat too much on Enterprise? Only now >> what do you want? The Ciscos measures of programming. The network. I mean, infrastructure is code. That's kind of a nice value proposition. Take the complexity away. What's your take on reaction toe that vision? >> I don't know what you're talking >> about. I don't know what part. >> What part of tell you are. >> Well, they're saying developers shouldn't have to configure hardware. You know, abstract the network capabilities out and make it code. So the developers just it just happens. >> Got it? Yeah, And if you think about how you Khun scale, can you scale linearly or exponentially? Enabling every developer or team to deploy their own code at their own pace with their own tools is something that allows you to scale exponentially. So things like mock servers that were talking about earlier. If I'm relying on somebody, that's my bottleneck. To spin this up with the normal workflow for the organization, that's a bottleneck. Spin up your own mock server. >> Find mock servers were great. Resource because remember the old days and mobile the emulators kind of had to have an emulator to kind of get going. Okay, that was, like five years, but similar model like, Hey, I don't need I can't build that out now. But I need to know what it's gonna look like so I can get this done. >> And that allows you to iterated at the fastest >> level at the local >> developer level. >> We've been covering the old days here in the Cube world. >> Throwback. Joyce, thanks so much for your time joining us on the cue program this morning. It a definite creed. Best of luck in your two sessions later on today. We look forward to seeing you next time. Great. Thank you. Nice to meet you for John Ferrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching to keep live from Cisco Definite create twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching

(music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCube. Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's eco system partners. >> Welcome back everyone. Live here in Barcelona. It's theCubes coverage day two of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier With Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante. Dave in this segment. Our next guest is Gordon Thompson, Vice President, Global Enterprise Network from Cisco Worldwide. Run a lot of countries here in Cisco. Knows the territory. Knows the lay of the land in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia. Now global. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you very much. Glad to be with you. >> You're on stage in the keynote. You say we're here in Barcelona. Lot of action in Europe. Europe's different than North America, but you start to see them leading the trends on how to handle these complex environments like highly regulated compliance. GDPR, we've been hearing about that. Security, cyber security. So a lot of trends in Europe are actually leading in some areas. That's impacting the network. Your thoughts on this show so far. How's it going? >> Yeah. I think, there's a fundamental phenomenal opportunity for our customer base and for Cisco at the moment in terms of where technology is going. It's mostly being driven by software innovation in the business. For many, many years we built world class hardware and a software operating system that did one thing. It provided connectivity. But it did one thing. Reliable, secure, performance based connectivity but it did one thing. The opportunity now, going back to your question is we're developing software that doesn't do one thing. It's software that does multiple different things. On top of that hardware that therefore helps solve some of the challenges around compliance and all of these sorts of things, but at the same time start to provide much deeper insight and analytics into what's going on in your environment and that then starts to let you say, hey, there's information here in the network that I've never been exposed to before, that I'm now exposed to and I can start to do something meaningful with that data. That's the opportunity, I think, for our customers is how they monetize that. How they use that information. Providing that information on a real time basis is going to be the critical thing. We see lots, it's a very competitive environment Amir, we see lots of business in Amir looking to see how they can use technology to drive differentiation for them in the market and they're beginning to realize that data is the key to being able to do that and they're now seeing how much data they've got on their network that if they can get exposure to they can start to use in a meaningful way. Really exciting. It's very innovative here. We're seeing customers starting to realize how important the network is. >> In your keynote, you made a bunch of people uncomfortable saying you have to change. >> Yeah. >> And then admitted I don't like it when people tell me I have to change, but you need to change. What do they have to change? >> They have to think about truly how they're architecting and designing their networks. As I said earlier, on Ciscos an organization's been phenomenally successful but we've really done one thing in 30 years, provide reliable, secure, connectivity. And over the last four years our innovation strategy has changed to say we're not just going to deliver connectivity, we're going to look at how we can deliver automation on top of the network. We're going to look at how we deliver security embedded in the network. We're going to look at how we take real time analytical insights off of the network. When you think differently about how you use a network you'll then start to think differently about the value the network can bring. I was making that comment 'cause I was wanting customers to think about the network no longer just being something that's going to deliver connectivity. It's something that will absolutely drive business transformation for them if they approach it with that thought process in mind. It was really a challenge to get people to think slightly differently. >> Yeah. Wake up a little bit and say, okay, what's going on here? And I want to get your thoughts on the trend because the tail winds, I think that Cisco's feeling right now is, in every major inflection point there's always complexity and abstraction layers of software always take away the complexities. Software check, big time trend. But cloud scale and horizontal scale now with the Enterprise, HyperFlex out to the edge, ACI Anywhere, so you start to see Cisco as one large scalable network with complexities that's being managed by software across domains. This seems to be a beautiful formula for what customers want which is secure networks. Do you see it that way? Is that a major wave you're riding? Is that what customers are saying? Because I think you're getting at something that's important which is I'm moving packets around, moving data around but I got to put my solution out in front of customers. The applications. How they access and engage. These are big picture items, but what's your thoughts on this? >> Okay. It's interesting, right. 'cause what we've created is, so we've created this software overlay network in various different areas. We've created a fabric. In the data center we've created an ACI fabric. In the Branch and the Campus we've created what we call software defined access fabric. And in the ONE we've created this software defined ONE fabric with our WHIPTAIL acquisition. Also with Meraki. The interesting thing is people have created these software fabrics to drive southbound automation onto the network to save money. To move more quickly. What we are saying to our customers is actually the value isn't just about driving southbound automation onto each of these fabrics, it's about how you take information from each of these fabrics, connect that information together holistically and then start to provide more value around behavioral analytics. To secure your environment more. Et cetera, et cetera. You're going to see individual fabrics, but then what Dave Goeckeler was talking about was how he connects these fabrics or domains together. Connecting them together is going to help us secure the environment even more effectively. It's also going to help us analyze what's going on more effectively as well. This is really the sweet spot, I think, for us to work more closely with our customers. >> Talk about security because I think this is a great point. I think if you guys can, well you have the fabrics now, product portfolio has broadened. It's filled in, but security still is hot. It's still number one. You guys are embedding that foundational into the network and lifting the data up to create insight. What are some of the actionable things that you're seeing enabled from, one the fabrics coming together and talk about the dynamic of security specifically because if you don't fix the security paradigm at the network level, it's a house of cards. Everything crashes. That's my opinion. Your thoughts. Do you agree with that? >> I hope that nothing crashes at entity, but the key thing, I think is, we like to say we put security in the network, whereas we looked at all of the other networking vendors applying security on top of the network. >> What's the difference? Explain the difference. >> In our own, one word each with two letters in them but a massive difference in terms of what they do. Ultimately the network can provide us with loads of contextual information around what's happening in the environment. It's about how you use that information in a real time basis to help make better security decisions. It's really taking the value of networking devices and passing that information from a network switch or a wireless controller to a security policy control capability is really where we start to see value come together. And it sees things that are important to us. For example, I met with a sales leader recently in a very large pharmaceutical company in Europe, and their problem was their salespeople were handing in their resignation but they were doing it the day after they'd taken all the intellectual property out of the company. They had gone and taken all of the customer data base. They'd put it on a stick. They put it in their pocket. And they went away. It happens every day. The challenge is the network should be able to see a behavioral change. If that was you or me we normally perform the same activities on the network every day. We don't really change what we do, but the minute we start to go to old servers to download information that we haven't downloaded in years, you know, that's a behavioral change. And the network should be able to identify that, pass that information to the network administrator and deal with it so we can stop that sort of data leakage from our organization. These are the sorts of things that I think are exciting. >> And Cisco's unique because of the scope of your portfolio or the technology? >> Well, a bit of both. Cisco's unique because of the scope of the technology, but it's also about the amount of information we take off the network. You know, people talked about in this software overlay world the network becoming, hardware becoming commoditized. Oh, Cisco, your hardwire is going to be commoditized. We'll move to white box. The reality is it's the power of our hardware, our ASIC Design that allows us to pull all of this information off the network. People are beginning to realize how important data is now. And now they're beginning to see actually hardware's really important. Although it's the software that does all the sexy stuff, hardware's really important. We're beginning to see customers recognize two things, the breadth of the portfolio, as we mentioned earlier on, but also the power of the hardware to allow the software to do everything it does. >> Gordon, I know you got to go. Thanks for coming on. One final question while you're here 'cause I know you have a unique perspective. Want to get it real quick. Quick soundbite here. Global is now a big part of everyone's plan. Global economy. You have good experience globally with Cisco and also here in Amir, how should companies think about global networking? What's your insight into how people should start thinking about global architectures, global clouds, global networks? Your thoughts. >> I think every organization is looking to build out these capabilities. There's absolutely no doubt they are, but I think the way to approach it nowadays with all of the software capabilities we have, is to build bit by bit, right? To build your networks in different islands and then look to how you join those islands together. I think, ultimately, that's how most organizations are looking to move forward. From our point of view, I think, we'll look to connect those islands or fabrics together with the power of data. Ultimately, I think, we've always said data is the new oil, but I think, truly in the networking industry now, data is the new oil and it's truly how organizations will differentiate themselves in the future. >> Gordon, thank you for spending the time on the Cube. I know you got to hard stop. Appreciate it. >> No problem. >> Thank you for your precious time. It's the Cube live coverage from Barcelona. I'm John Furrier with Dave Elante. More live coverage. Stay with us after this short break. (techno music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. (bubbly music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to the live coverage, here with theCUBE, here in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman, for the next three days of wall-to-wall live coverage. We have the co-founders of the Network Collective here Eyvonne Sharp and Jordan Martin, thanks for joining us today, Network Collective. Sounds great, sounds like it's a collection of networks, so what's goin' on, what do you guys do? First let's talk about what you guys do, obviously you guys do a lot of podcasting, a lot of diggin' into the tech, what is Network Collective? >> Network Collective is a video podcast that Jordan and I started. We really felt like there was a need to build community around network engineers, and that really a lot of network engineers are very isolated in their job, there's only a couple people where they work, they know what they know, and they don't have a lot of peers. And so we see Network Collective as a way to bring network engineers together to learn about their craft, and also share with one another in a community that's more than a once-a-year conference like Cisco Live. >> That's awesome, I love the video podcasting, more than ever now the need for kind of peer review, conversations around learning because the world's shifting. In the keynote today the CEO of Cisco talked about the old way, and the new networks that are coming. We've been talking about no perimeters for years, but now security threats are real, gotta keep that strain solid, keep managing that, but also bring in a new kind of a cloud-hybrid, multi-cloud world, requires real skill adoption, new things. What're you guys seeing, what's your thoughts, and what's some of the things that you guys are exploring on your video podcast around these trends? >> You wanna take that Jordan? >> Sure. So, I think the rate of change of networking is faster than it's been in a very long time, so we've, we've had to, we've kinda not had a whole lotta churn in the things we've had to learn, I mean it's been complex and difficult, and there's been challenges in getting up to speed, but, with the transition to more developer-focused, and developer-centric model of deploying equipment, it is--and the integration of cloud into what is essentially our infrastructure. It's changing so much, that it's good to get together and have those conversations because it's very difficult to navigate this by yourself, it's, you know, it's a lot to learn. >> You know, I wanna push back little bit on that 'cause, you know, I've been in networking my whole career. When I used to, I used to speak at Interop, and I'd put down, you know, here's the rate of change, and here are the decades. And it's like, you know, okay 10 gig, here's where the standards are, here's where the first pieces are, it's gonna take years for us to deploy this. I don't disagree that change is happening overall faster, but how are people keeping up with it? Are the enterprises that the networking people work for allowing them to roll out some of these changes a little faster? So, give us a little insight as to what you're hearing from the community? >> I think, I mean technology, I mean, we've got Moore's law, right? I mean technology has always been changing rapidly, I think the thing that is different is the way network engineers need to interact with their environment. Five to 10 years ago, you could still operate in an environment where you still did a lot of static routing, for example. Now, with the cloud, with workloads moving around, there is no way to run a multi-cloud enterprise network without some serious dynamic routing chops, whether that's BGP, or EIGRP, or OSPF, or all of the above, and a lot of network engineers are still catching up with some of those technologies, they're used to being able to do things the way that they've always done them. And I think there needs to be a mind shift where we start thinking about things dynamically, in that, you know, an IP address may not live in the same geography, it may move from on-premises to the cloud to another cloud, and we have to be able to build networks that are resilient enough, and flexible enough, to be able to support that kind of mobility. >> Yeah, I love that Eyvonne. Right, you talked about the multi-cloud world. Jordan, a follow up question I have for you, how does the networking person look at things when there's a lot of the networking that are really outside of their control when you talk about really, the cloud world today. >> Sure, and before we jump there, I wanna say, the change that we're talking about though, is a bit different than what's happened. So, what we've seen traditionally would be speeds and feeds, but what's changing is the way we operate networks, and that hasn't changed a lot. Now, as for, you know, how do you view it when you don't-- well that's a challenge that everyone is facing. We see networking getting further and closer to the host. And, when we see networking inside of VMware, I mean this has been something that's been around for, you know, a while now, but, we're just getting comfortable with the idea of hypervisor, and now we've got, you know, we've got containers, and we've got networking in third party services that we don't necessarily have access to, we don't have full control over, and it's a completely different nomenclature we have to relearn all the terms because of course, no one reused the stuff we were familiar with, because this all started from a developer mindset. It all makes sense where it came from, but now we're catching up. And so it's, the challenge is not only understanding what needs to be done in all these different environments, but also understanding, just the terminology, and what is means. What is a VPC? Well VPC means something completely different to a networker that has never touched Amazon, than it does to somebody who has worked at Amazon completely there's overlapping terms and confusion around that and it's just a matter of, I think you need some broader coordination. There's been discussion about something like a full stack engineer, I think that's a pretty rare thing, I don't know how, how likely it is that you're gonna be expert level in all different disciplines, but you do need, you do need cross-team collaboration more than you have traditionally. We've had these silos, those no longer work in a multi-cloud world, it just doesn't, just doesn't work anymore. >> One of the things that came out with the keynote was, the networks next act was the main theme, as they talked about this new way, I mean, they use secure, intelligent platform, you know, for digital business, you know, level one marketing there, more complex than a few years ago and then the onslaught of new things coming, AI, augmented reality, machine learning, and I'd put blockchain in there, I thought they would put blockchain in the keynote to hype it up a bit, but, then they introduced the multi-cloud concept at that point. So in the keynote, multi-cloud didn't come up until the next act came up, so obviously that is a key part of what we're seeing, we saw Google clouds CEO Diane Greene come on. How are network engineers looking at the multi-cloud? 'Cause, I mean, how are they, toe in the water, are they puttin' the tow in the water? (chuckles) What is multi-cloud to them? Because, I mean, we talk about Kubernetes all the time, from an app standpoint, but, networks have been locked down for many, many years, you talked about some of the chops they need, what are those next chops for a network engineer when it comes to taking the road to multi-cloud? >> Sure, I mean I think if you're going to do any kind of multi-cloud interconnect, you've gotta know VGP. But at the same time, you need to understand some of those fundamental concepts that, the reason developers are pushing to the cloud, is not cost, although I've heard that a lot, that you know this cloud thing can't be cheaper, but it's really about enabling the business to move faster, and so we need to start thinking that way as network engineers more too. We have I think historically, our mentality, we've even trained our network engineers to go slow, to be very deliberate, to plan out your changes, to have these really complex change windows, and we need to start thinking differently, we need to think about how to make modular changes, and to be able to allow our workloads to move and shift in ways that don't provide a lot of risk, and I think that's a new way of thinking for networking engineers. >> Yeah. >> Well, we're sitting here in the DevNet zone, and that was one of the highlights in the keynote, talking that there are over 500 thousand developers now registered on this platform that they've built here. Bring us inside a little bit, you know, is it, what was it, John, DevNet sec? There's all of these acronyms as to, you know, how developers-- >> Yeah, NetApp was their big thing. >> how the network and the operations go together. What are you seeing, what's working, what's some of the challenges? >> I think this is a shift of necessity. As we see more problems solved in the network, we're adding complexity at that layer that hasn't been seen before, before it was routing, we just had to get traffic from one place to another, then we added security, so okay we have security, but we, we create these choke points in security where we can send all the traffic through this place and just like, we can use filtering, or some sort of identification there. Well then we start moving to cloud and we talk about dynamic workloads, and we talk about things that could just shift anywhere in the world, well now our choke point is gone, and so now we have to manage all the pieces, all the solutions, all the things we're putting into the network, but we've gotta manage it in a distributed way. And so that's where I think the automation's, why it's such a big push right now is because, we have to do it that way, there's no way to manually put these features in the network and be able to manage them at any type of scale without automating that process, and that's why, I think, we see the growth of DevNet, I mean, if you've been here the past few years, it's gone from a little thing to a much, much bigger thing, there's a lot of people looking at automation specifically, that 500 thousand number is, rather large. Really impressive that there's that many people looking at networks from a programmatic way. But in the meantime, I think that there's also, a bit of a divide here, 'cause I think that there's, a lot of people are looking this way, but I think there's, we talk about this on the show pretty often, there's really two types of networks. There's the networks at companies where, it really is, they see their network as a competitive advantage, and those places are definitely looking at automation, and they're looking at multi-cloud. But we also see another trend in networking, and that is to, I want some simple, push button, just put it out, get packets A to B, and I don't wanna mess with it, I don't want expensive engineers on staff, I don't want-- So I feel like the industry's almost coming to a divide. That we're gonna have two different types of networks, we're gonna have the network for the place that the just want packets going A to B, and they really don't want much, and the other side of that divide is gonna be very complex networks that have to be managed with automation. >> Talk about that other divide, it's between, I mean, I love that conversation, because, that almost kinda comes into like the notion of networks as a service. Because if you wanna have less expensive people there, but yet have the reliability, how do those companies grow and maintain the robust resiliency of these networks, and have the high performance, take advantage of the goodness, well what does it matter? I mean, how are they, how is the demographic of the network evolving, 'cause, either they're stunted for growth, or they have an enabler. How do you view that, how do you take that apart? >> I think we have to, we have to look at our business needs, and evaluate the technologies that we use appropriate to that. There are times for complexity, I think we've pushed, as Jordan very eloquently described, a lot of complexity down into the network, and we're working, I think, now, as the entire industry to maybe back some of that out. But one of the things that I hear a lot when we talk about automation and things like DevNet and developers is, I believe a lot of network engineers are afraid their jobs are going away, but if you look at what's going on, we have more connected devices than we've ever had before, and that's not gonna stop, and all of those connected devices need networks. And so really what's happened is we've reached a complexity inflection point, which means we have to have better tools, and I think that's really what we're talking about is, is how do we, instead of doing everything manually, how do we look at the network as a system, and manage it as a system, with tools to manage it that way. >> Your point about that jobs going away, I love that comment because, that's a sunk fallacy because, there's so much other stuff happening, talk about security, so the basic question, I mean first of all, guys your job's not goin' away! (laughs) Check! It's only a, well, kind of, you don't stay current, so it's all the learning issues, the progression for learning. But really it's the role of the network engineers and the people running the networks, I mean, I remember back in, the old way, the network guys were the top dogs, they were kickin' butt, takin' names, they ran the show, a lot was riding on the network. But as we go into this new dynamic environment, what are the roles of the network? Is it security? I mean, what are some of the things that people are pivoting to, or laddering up to from a roles standpoint that you see, in terms of a progression of new discovery, new skills. Is there a path, have you seen any patterns, for the growth of the person? >> I really think network engineers need to at least understand what the cloud is and why it exists. And they need to understand more about the applications and what they mean to the business. I think we have created a divide sometimes where, you know, my job is just to get packets from point A to B, and I don't really need to understand what we do as an organization, and I think that those days are going to be behind us, we need to understand, you know, what applications are critical, why do we need to build the systems the way that we need to build them and use that information from the business? So I think for network engineers, I think cloud security, understanding applications, and learning the business and being able to talk that language is what's gonna be most valuable to them in their career in the future. >> Yeah, we've heard the term many times, I'm a plumber! Well, I mean, implying that moving packets from A to B. It gets interesting with containers. Policy-based stuff has been known concept in networking, QOS, these are things that are well known, but when we start lookin' at the trends up the stack, we're seeing that kinda thing goin' on, service meshes for instance, they talk about services from a policy standpoint, up the stack. That's always been the challenge for the Ciscos over the past 20 years is, how to move up the stack, should they move up the stack, but I think now seems to be a good time. Your reaction guys, to that notion of moving up the stack while maintaining the purity and the goodness of good networking. (laughing) >> I think that's the big challenge right now, right? The more we mesh it all together and we don't, we don't really define the layers that we've traditionally used, the more challenging it is to have experts in that domain, because the domain just grows so incredibly large. And so there's gotta be a balance here, and I think we're trying to find that, I don't know that we've hit that yet, you know where, where we understand where networking fits into all these pieces, how far into the host, or how far into the application does networking go, we've seen certain applications not using the host TCP/IP stack, right, just to find some sort of performance benefit and it, to me that seems like we're pushing really far into this idea of, you know, well if we don't have standards and define places where these things exist, it's gonna be very much the wild, wild west for a while, until we figure out where everything's going to be. And so I think it just presents challenges and opportunities I don't know that we have the answer about how far it goes yet. >> Well let me ask you a question, a good point by the way, we agree, it's evolving, it's a moving train as they say. But as, people that might be watching that might be a Cisco customer or someone deploying a lot of Cisco networks and products in his portfolio, what's your advice to them, what're you hearing that's a good first three steps to take today? Obviously the show's goin' on here, multi-cloud is in center of the focus, this new network age is here for the CEO. What are some things that people can do now that are safe and good first steps to continue on the journey to whatever this evolves into. >> Well I think as you're building your network you need to think about modularization, you need to think about how to build it in small, manageable pieces, and, even if you're not ready to take the automation step today, you need to think about what that's gonna look like in the future, so, if you really want to automate your network you have to have consistency, consistent policy, consistent configuration across your environment, and it's never too late to start that, or too early to start that, right? And so you can think about, if I wanted to take these 10 sites and I wanted to manage them as one, how would I build it? And you can use that kind of mental framework to help guide the decisions you make, even if you're not ready to jump into a full scale automation from soup to nuts. And also I think, it's important to start playing around with automation technology, there are all kinds of tools to do that, and you can start in an are that's either dev, or QA, that's not gonna be production impacting, but you really need to get your, wrap your hands around some of the tools that exist to automate, and start playing with those. >> Stay where you're comfortable, get in, learn, get hands on. Jordan, your thoughts? >> Yeah, so, I was just over here like nodding my head furiously, 'cause everything she said, I 100% agree with. >> Ditto. (laughing) >> Yes, ditto, exactly. The only thing I would add is that we think about automation a lot in the method of config push. Right, the idea of configuring a device in an automated way, but that's not the only avenue for automation. Start by pulling information from your devices, it is really, really low risk way to start looking at your network programmatically, is to be able to go out to all of your switches, all of your routers, all of your networking devices and pull the same information and correlate that data and get yourself some information that's with a broader view. Does nothing to effect the change or state of your network, but you are now starting to look at your network that way. And I will reiterate Eyvonne's point, you cannot automate a network if it's not repeatable. If every design, every topology, every location is a special snowflake, you will never be able to automate anything because you're gonna have a hundred unique automation scripts to run a hundred unique sites. >> You'd be chasin' your tail big time. >> You'd be chasin' your tail, and so it is critical, if you're not in that state now, what you need to do is start looking how to modularize, and make repeatable config blocks in your network. >> Well guys, thanks for comin' on, Eyvonne, Jordan, thanks for comin' on, appreciate you taking the time. Final question for ya, I know it's day one, we got two more days of live coverage here, but, if you can kinda project, and in your minds eye see the development of the show, what's bubbling up as the most important story that's gonna come out of Cisco Live if you had to look at some early indications from the keynotes and some of the conversations in the hallway, what do you think is the biggest story this year for Cisco Live? >> I think for me personally, I wanna understand what Cisco's cloud strategy looks like, to know where they're going with the cloud and how they're going to help stitch together all the different services that we have. The clouds are becoming their own monolith, they each do things their own way, and still the network is what is stitching all those services together to provide access. And so I think it's important to understand that strategy, and where Cisco's goin'. >> Jordan, your thoughts? >> My, what I'm really looking for from the show this year is how Cisco is gonna make orchestration approachable. We've seen this process of automation where only the hardcore programmers could do it, then we got some tools. And these tools, as we watch as more of Cisco's product platforms start to integrate with each other I think the key piece for enterprise shops that don't have that type of resource on staff is what tools are they gonna give them to make this orchestration, between the way in and the enterprise campus, and into the cloud and in the data center, how do we tie all that together and make that to like a nice, seamless way to operate your network? >> Hey, what a great opportunity to have another podcast called under the hood, see what's goin' on, lot of chops needed, thanks for comin' on, give a quick plug for the address for your podcast, where do we find it, what's the site, Network Collective, obviously you guys are doing great things. Share the coordinates. >> Sure, you can find us at thenetworkcollective.com we usually use the hashtag: #NetworkCollective I'm on Twitter @SharpNetwork. Jordan, you wanna tell people where to find you? >> Sure, @bcjordo on Twitter, and obviously if you wanna interact with Network Collective, @NetCollectivePC on Twitter as well. >> Alright, thanks so much for the commentary, great to have a little shared, little podcast here, live on theCUBE, here in Orlando, I'm John Furrier, with Stu Miniman for our coverage at Cisco Live 2018, stay with us for more, we've got two more days of this, got day one just gettin' started, be right back after this short break. (bubbly music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE! Covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back in the windy city, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman this is our second day of covering VeeamOn 2018, second year of theCUBE at VeeamOn Danny Allan is here, he's the Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam. Welcome back to theCUBE, it's good to see you again. >> Thank you, very excited to be here! >> Loved the keynote yesterday, gave a lot of detail. The bumper sticker, the summary on your product strategy, how would you summarize your product strategy? >> It is to be the most comprehensive intelligent data management platform that meets the demands of the enterprise. >> So, when you say intelligent data management, people hear that, and they don't--certainly don't go immediately to backup and data protection, so you've expanded that notion of what you guys do, there's a TAM expansion there as well, which is great. What do you guys mean by intelligent data management? >> So, believe it's a journey first of all, right? And it starts with backup in our application, I know that there are vendors that are saying hey this is a new world, completely different. You know what, the cornerstone of this, is still backup in our application so that is the first stage in this journey. We believe that, right now, especially the customers I'm talking to, they're deploying things on the public Cloud, they're deploying things SAS Clouds, it's all over the place, it's growing, it's sprawling, they're trying to get their hands around it. So they have to do that first, is the next step, and then it's an evolution beyond that to okay, now we understand it, now let me do something with it, let me actually drive the business to better outcomes. >> So, some things we know, or we believe anyway, that data protection and orchestration are moving up on the list of priorities for CXOs. That's I think very clear, you would agree. But there's a dichotomy that exists between the perception from the business side, as to, what can be done in terms of data protection, particularly with regard to the degrees of automation and what IT today can deliver. So there's tension there, and there's, frankly lots of opportunity for churn. When you talk to people about, okay, are you going to switch data protection vendors as you go to this digitalization, multi-Cloud? Or you went to them, and they go no we're totally open, we have an open mind. So that's good news for you guys. So thinking about those trends, how do you take advantage, from a product standpoint? >> Well Veeam has been known, I always talk about three words, it just works, people love us because the software works and it's reliable. So that's the starting point in all of this, the opportunity I believe is in that, it just works. And so if we take them through this journey, towards intelligent data management, every step has to be about it just works. In some ways, the step from stage one to stage two, which is aggregating data, is at an infrastructure level, as you get to the later stages of three, four, five, it's it just works at a business level, and so our focus is still going to be on that simplicity, reliability, making sure the platform works. >> So I want to follow up on that, because, it just works obviously is going to resonate with the IT pro, who's got to deal with failed backups, with poor reporting, with lousy recovery, blah, you know, slow, etc, etc, etc, gettin' pounded because they're losing data, we all know that thankless world. But in terms of the business side, there's billions of dollars being left on the table by businesses in the fortune one thousand because they have inadequate data protection, processes, procedures, architectures. Not, I mean there's becoming aware of it, but what's the above-the-line message? So, it just works, how do you crack through that billions of dollars of opportunity and get CFOs to open up the wallet? That is the great opportunity for you guys, I think. >> It is, so they have challenges in a number of areas, right compliance, security, regulatory, we don't talk to executives at the C level and hear them say oh I need backup, I need replication, they're saying reduce my costs. Well if you can leverage it just works, and deploy this in a way that requires less FTEs, that makes it simpler to do it, that can give them attestation, proof, that hey, I can fail over to the public Cloud, I can burst up to the public Cloud or a manage Cloud, if I can give that fluidity, that's an it just works at an ROI perspective. Or, we talked about intelligent data management, sometimes, I'll be honest, I roll my eyes when I hear artificial intelligence. And that's not because it's not real, it's because what we haven't done is taken it just works and applied it to the business. So an example of this, forget artificial intelligence for a moment, one of the examples I give is, if you see malware crossing the network, that is a really good time to do something, let's leverage that intelligence to provide an outcome. And that's an it just works at the business level rather than at the infrastructure level. >> Alright, so Danny, above the message it's, any data, any app, across any Cloud. We have these pesky little things called like, physics, and data gravity, and the like. So protecting, getting access to my data in the public cloud versus the edge with, where we're going to see 90+% of the data in the future versus my traditional data centers where it's providing the stats. It's a complicated world, how do you make it that simple? >> So let me expand our benefits into a third area, so Veeam took off, in that it was easy to use, it was reliable, but the second one is the portability and the agnosticism of the platform, you didn't need media servers, it was all self-describing backup things, VBKs or vibs, without trying to get too technical here, that self-describing capability allows us to move between infrastructures. In some ways what VMware did, at the hardware level, they decouple the workload from a physical server, we're decoupling the workload from the infrastructure on which it sits because it's this self-describing, very portable format, that enables fluidity of movement. >> I haven't heard much about Edge yet, is that a place that you expect to begin to have a play? >> Yes, and I expect we have to do that, and the reason is because a lot of the computing now is happening at the edge and you want to make you actions out of the edge. There's this concept in the US Air Force called the OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, and act, and you would try to act out on the edge, but my belief is that data protection systems will do some of that protection out on the edge, but sometimes they won't know what to do, and so the information will be sent back to the Cloud, or sent back to the core to make a better business decision on what should we do with this data. >> You think about your platform, we were talking to Peter McKay about, you've kind of gone from a product company to a platform company. We talked about that a little bit, but I wonder if we can dig into it more from a standpoint of your role as head of product strategy. What does platform mean, where do you see that platform going, can you share a little roadmap with us? >> Platform to me has kind of three connotations to it, one is that you have the capabilities within the platform that are very broad, and we believe we have that, we can cover physical/virtual Cloud, we have orchestration, we have reporting, we have all of those capabilities. The second, though, is comprehensive APIs, you need to have the extensibility in a platform that you can actually talk to the ecosystem of partners. And that's actually the third area, it's being able to work with your Ciscos and your NetApps, and your HPEs and all of our partners to deliver these better outcomes. >> Yeah, I mean, it's funny, last year, Stu, when you saw Veeam, and you took the introduction of those capabilities. I noted, I remember the ascendancy of EMC back in the day, they did a really good job of connecting to everything that was out there. I mean, it sounds so simple, but it's integration work, they just went in and rolled up their sleeves and did the dirty work. >> A lot of work Dave, I've got the scars, living in interrupt lab, so. (laughing) >> And you guys do that dirty work, and every time you do that it expands your total available market. I don't want to say it's unique in the business, but you seem to have an aptitude to do it without it appearing to be such a heavy lift to the marketplace. Why is that? >> Well it's, frankly it's a scalability thing, we're an almost one billion dollar company, this year we should cross a billion dollars in bookings, and if you want to scale, to add more and more partners, you take our storage integrations for example we were doing maybe one a year for a few years, and we recognized all these vendors knocking on our door saying hey, give us that capability. And so we've added, just in the last six months, IBM, Lenovo, Infinit App, Pure. The only way you can do that, is to have a consistent API framework that people can plug into. It's the way we scale. >> Again, I look at a company like VMware, we saw all the sort of integration challenges that they went through, and the limited resources they had, you remember it, and the Cartel got the SDKs first, and it took forever to get the integrations done a year later you might see some function. It just seems like you guys have some sort of good process internally to actually make this stuff work. >> We're the largest small company you've ever met, we're really agile internally. It helps us to respond to the customer requests, they come to us and say hey I want this, I want this. If we can't respond to that quickly we'll never be successful. >> Danny, I just wonder if you can expand a little bit on the Cloud opportunity. Should we be looking to see more Cloud services out of Veeam kind of layer on what's happening, you have the acquisition a year ago, and-- >> Unquestionably, so I'd say 2017 was the year of agents, we added support for physical and for Cloud, but through agents. I tell everyone that 2018 is really the year of the Cloud for us, we started the year by acquiring N2W software, but last week for example, it's not even making huge PR announcements, we just release version two of backup for Office 365, which adds OneDrive and Sharepoint support. And you'll see in the next release of our product, Anton has a break-in session on this today, another huge capability around, not just integrating with the cloud but actually integrating in a way that provides business value. I'm a big believer in, you don't just put a check-box in, I support Cloud, I can send things to the Cloud, it's how do I actually use the Cloud in a way that delivers business outcome. So this year actually, 2018 is about Cloud for Veeam. >> I want to follow up on that because as an observer of this industry for a long time there seems to be sort of two philosophies, and you just laid out yours, you're not a big believer in check-boxes, and I've seen it, you're an old company. We got every feature, and they would take the salesperson, we have this they don't. Grr, headlock, buy it! (Danny laughing) So you're not trying to do the check-box game, you're trying to map business value, or your features and capabilities to business value for the customer, that's how you sell, and emphasize in your sales motions? >> Yeah, so, this is somewhat of a controversial statement, but we sometimes say we won't be first to market with a feature, we'll be first to market with a solution. So you can come out with, for example, sending things to object storage in the Cloud, and if you're sending up a one gigabyte object, that is a totally--you're not going to leverage that in the real world. But if you deliver that in a way that is actually effective, then you can leverage the Cloud as a tool, because the Cloud is not a destination for most of these enterprises, it's a tool in their toolbox that they use to solve a problem. So we're all about solving those problems. >> Excellent. Alright, Danny, thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE, we'll give you last word on VeeamOn 2018, and maybe give us a little preview of what we can expect? >> Well, we're really excited to be here, the most exciting thing to me is, is the recognition, the conversation with customers about this journey towards intelligent data management, as you said, most customers are in stage one, stage two, but for us this is a partnership, this isn't us just giving software, this is talking to customers, talking to partners, making them successful. >> Alright well hey, congratulations on a great show, and all the success. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, happy to be here! >> Alright keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. From Chicago, theCUBE, VeeamOn 2018. We'll be right back. (light music)