>>Good morning, welcome to the cubes coverage of Qube con and cloud native con 21 live from Los Angeles. Lisa Martin, here with Dave Nicholson. David's great to be in person with other humans at this conference. Finally, I can't believe >>You're arms length away. It's unreal. >>I know, and they checked backs cards. So everybody's here is nice and safe. We're excited to welcome kingdom Barrett to the program, flux, maintainer and open source support engineer at we works. He came to him. Welcome to the program. >>Oh, thank you for having me on today. >>So let's talk about flux. This is a CNCF incubating project. I saw catalyze as adopt talk to us about flux and its evolution. >>Uh, so flex is, uh, uh, just got into its second version a while ago. We've been, uh, working on, um, uh, we're an incubating project and we're going towards graduation at this point. Um, flex has seen a great deal of adoption from, uh, infant cloud infrastructure vendors in particular, uh, like Microsoft and Amazon and VMware, all building products on, um, flux, uh, the latest version of flux. And, uh, we've heard, uh, from companies like Alibaba and state farm. We had a, uh, uh, conference, uh, at a co-hosted event earlier on Tuesday called get-ups con, uh, where we presented all about get ops, which is the technology, uh, guiding, uh, set of principles that underlies flux. And, uh, there are new adopters, um, all, all every day, including, uh, the department of defense, uh, who has a hundred thousand developers. Um, it's, it's, it's very successful project at this point, who are the >>Key users of flux flux? >>Excuse me. The key users of flux are, uh, probably, uh, application developers and infrastructure engineers, and platform support folks. So a pretty broad spectrum of people. >>And you've got some news at the event. >>Yeah, we actually, uh, we have a, uh, ecosystem event that's coming up, um, on October 20th, uh, it's free virtual event. Uh, folks can join us to hear from these companies. We have people from high level, uh, CTOs and GMs, uh, from companies like Microsoft, Amazon VMware, uh, we've worked D two IQ, um, that are, uh, going to be speaking, uh, about their, uh, products that you can buy from their cloud vendor, uh, that, uh, are based on flux. Uh, so, so that's a milestone for us. That's a major milestone. These are large vendors, um, major cloud vendors that have decided that they trust, uh, flux with their customers workloads. And it's, it's the way that they want to push get ups. Great >>Validation. Yeah. >>So give us an example, just digging in a little bit on flux and get ops. What are some of the things that flux either enforces or enables or validates? What, how would you describe the flux get ops relationship? >>So the first to get ops principles is declarative infrastructure and that's, uh, that's something that people who are using Kubernetes are already very familiar with. Um, flux has a basic itself, or, or I guess spawned, uh, maybe is a better way to say it. Uh, this, um, uh, whole get ops working group, that's just defined the principles. There's four of them in the formal definition. That's just been promoted to a 1.0 and, uh, the get ups working group, publish, publish this at, uh, open get-ups dot dev where you can read all four. And, um, it's great copy site. If you're not really familiar with get ops, you can, you can read all four, but, uh, the other, uh, the second one I would have mentioned is, uh, version storage is, is, uh, it's called get ups and get as a version store. So it's a good for, um, disaster recovery. >>Uh, and, uh, if you have an issue with a new release, if you're, uh, pushing changes frequently, that's, you know, more than likely you will have issues from time to time. Uh, you can roll back with, get ups because everything is version. Um, and, uh, you can do those releases rapidly because the deployment is automatic, um, and it's continuously reconciling. So those are the four principles of get ups. Uh, and they're, they're not exactly prescriptive. You don't have to adopt them all at once. You can pick and choose where you want to get started. Um, but that's what, uh, is underneath flux. >>How do you help customers pick and choose based on what are some of the key criteria that you would advise them on? >>We would advise them to try to follow all of those principles, because that's what you get out of the box with fluxes is a solution that does those things. But if there is one of those things that gets in a way, um, there's also the concept of a closed loop that is, um, sometimes debated as whether it should be part of the get ops principles or not. Um, that just means that, uh, when you use get-ups the only changes that go to your infrastructure are coming through get-ups. Uh, so you don't have someone coming in and using the back door. Um, it all goes through get, uh, w when you want to make a change to your cluster or your application, you push it to get the automation takes over from there and, um, and makes, uh, developers and platform engineers jobs a lot easier. And it makes it easier for them to collaborate with each other, >>Of course, productivity. You mentioned AWS, Microsoft, VMware, uh, all working with you to deliver, get ups to enterprise customers. Talk to me about some of the benefits in it for these big guys. I mean, that's great validation, but what's in it for AWS and VMware and Microsoft, for example, business outcome wise. >>Well, uh, one of the things that we've been promoting and since June is a flex has been, uh, uh, there's an API underneath, that's called the get ops toolkit. This is, uh, if you're building a platform for platforms like these cloud vendors are, um, we announced that fluxes APRs are officially stable. So that means that it's safe for them to build on top of, and they can, uh, go ahead and build things and not worry that we're going to pull the rug out from under them. So that's one of the major vendors, uh, one of the major, uh, uh, vendor benefits and, um, uh, we've, we've also added a recent improvement, uh, uh, called service side apply that, uh, will improve performance. Uh, we reduced the number of, um, API calls, but also for, for, uh, users, it makes things a lot easier because they don't have to write explicitly health checks on everything. Uh, it's possible for them to say, we'd like to see everything is healthy, and it's a one-line addition, that's it? >>So, you know, there's been a lot of discussion from a lot of different angles of the subject of security, uh, in this space. Um, how does this, how does this dovetail with that? A lot of discussion specifically about software supply chain security. Now this is more in the operations space. How do, how do those come together? Do you have any thoughts on security? >>Well, flux is built for security first. Um, there are a lot of products out there that, uh, will shell out to other tools and, and that's a potential vulnerability and flux does not do that. Uh, we've recently undergone a security audit, which we're waiting for the results and the report over, but this is part of our progress towards the CNCF graduated status. Um, and, uh, we've, we've liked what we've seen and preliminary results. Uh, we've, we've prepared for the security audit on knowing that it was coming and, uh, uh, flexes, uh, uh, designed for security first. Uh, you're able to verify that the commits that you're applying to your cluster are signed and actually come from a valid author who is, uh, permitted to make changes to the cluster and, uh, get ops itself is, is this, uh, model of operations by poll requests. So, um, you, you have an opportunity to make sure that your changes are, uh, appropriately reviewed before they get applied. >>Got it. So you had a session at coupon this week. Talk to me a little bit about that. What were like the top three takeaways, and maybe even share with us some of the feedback that you got from the audience? >>Um, so, uh, the session was about Jenkins and get ups or Jenkins and flux. And the, um, the main idea is that when you use flux, flux is a tool for delivery. So you've heard maybe of CIC, D C I N C D are separate influx. We consider these as two separate jobs that should not cross over. And, uh, when, when, uh, you do that. So the talk is about Jenkins and flux. Jenkins is a very popular CII solution and the messages, uh, you don't have to abandon, if you've made a large infrastructure investment in a CII solution, you don't have to abandon your Jenkins or your GitHub actions or, or whatever other CII solution you're using to build and test images. Uh, you can take it with you and adopt get ups. >>Um, so there's compatibility there and, and usability familiarity for the audience, the users. Yeah. What was some of the feedback that they provided to you? Um, were they surprised by that? Happy about that? >>Well, and talk to us a little bit fast paced. Uh, we'll put it in the advanced CIC D track. I covered a lot of ground in that talk, and I hope to go back and cover things in a little bit smaller steps. Um, I tried to show as many of the features of Fluxus as I could. Uh, and, and so one of the feedback that I got was actually, it was a little bit difficult to follow up as, so I'm a new presenter. Um, this is my first year we've worked. I've never presented at CubeCon before. Um, I'm really glad I got the opportunity to be here. This is a great, uh, opportunity to collaborate with other open source teams. And, um, that's, that's, uh, that's the takeaway from me? No. >>So you've got to give a shout out to, uh, to weave works. Absolutely. You know, any, any organization that realizes the benefit of having its folks participating in the community, realizing that it, it helps the community, it helps you, it helps them, you know, that's, that's what we love about, about all of this. >>Yeah. We're, uh, we're really excited to grow adoption for, um, Kubernetes and get ops together. So, >>So I've asked a few people this over the last couple of days, where do you think we are in the peak Kubernetes curve? Are we still just at the very beginning stages of this, of this as a, as a movement? >>Um, certainly we're, um, it's, it's, uh, for, for people who are here at CubeCon, I think we see that, you know, uh, a lot of companies are very successful with Kubernetes, but, um, I come from a university, it, uh, background and I haven't seen a lot of adoption, uh, in, in large enterprise, um, more conservative enterprises, at least in, in my personal experience. And I think that, uh, there is a lot for those places to gain, um, through, through, uh, adopting Kubernetes and get ups together. I think get ops is, uh, we'll provide them with the opportunity to, uh, experience Kubernetes in the best way possible. >>We've seen such acceleration in the last 18, 19 months of digital transformation for companies to survive, to pivot during COVID to survive, doubt to thrive. Do you see that influencing the adoption of Kubernetes and maybe different industries getting more comfortable with leveraging it as a platform? >>Sure. Um, a lot of companies see it as a cost center. And so if you can make it easier or possible to do, uh, operations with fewer people in the loop, um, that, that makes it a cost benefit for a lot of people, but also you need to keep people in the loop. You need to keep the people that you have included and, and be transparent about what infrastructure choices and changes you're making. So, uh, that's one of the things that get ups really helps with >>At transparency is key. One more question for you. Can you share a little bit before we wrap here about the project roadmap and some of the things that are coming down the pike? Yeah. >>So I mentioned a graduation. That's the immediate goal that we're working towards? Uh, most directly, uh, we have, um, grown our, uh, number of integrations pretty significantly. We have an operator how entry in red hat, open shift there's operator hub, where you can go and click to install flux. And that's great. Um, and, uh, we looked forward to, uh, making flux more compatible with more of the tools that you find in the CNCF umbrella. Um, that's, that's what our roadmap is for >>Increasing that compatibility. And one more time mentioned the event, October 20th, I believe he said, let folks know where they can go and find it on the web. Yeah. >>If you're interested in the get ups days.com, it's the get-ups one-stop shop and it's, uh, vendors like AWS and Microsoft and VMware detour IQ. And we've worked, we've all built a flux based solutions, um, for, uh, that are available for sale right now. So if you're, uh, trying to use get-ups and you have one of these vendors as your cloud vendor, um, it seems like a natural fit to try the solution that's out of the box. Uh, but if you need convincing, you get Upstate's dot com, you can go find out more about the event and, uh, we'll hope to see you there. >>I get upstairs.com kingdom. Thank you. You're joining Dave and me on the program, talking to us about flux. Congratulations on its evolution. We look forward to hearing more great things as the years unfold. >>Thank you so much for having me on our pleasure >>For Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the kid live from Los Angeles at CubeCon cloud native con 21 stick around Dave and I, and we'll be right back with our next guest.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston connecting with alt leaders all around the world, This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this Breaking Analysis. I'm here with Erik Bradley, who's the managing director of ETR and runs their VEN program. Erik good to see you. >> Very nice to see you too Dave. Hope you're doing well. >> Yeah, I'm doing okay hanging in there. You know, you guys in New York are fighting the battle. Looks like we're making some progress here so, you know, all the best, you and your family and the wider community. I'm really excited to have you on today because I had the pleasure of sitting in on a CIO/ CISO panel last week. And we're going to explain sort of what that's all about, but one of the things ETR does that I really like is they go deeper with anecdotal information and it's almost like in-depth interviews in these round tables. So they compliment their quarterly surveys, and their other drill down surveys, with other anecdotal information for people in their community. So it's a tried and true survey practice that adds some color to the dataset. So guys if you bring up the agenda, I want to share with the audience what we're going to talk about today. So, we'll talk a little bit about, you know we just did intros, I want to ask Erik, what ETR VENN is and then we'll go through some of the guests, but if we go back to Erik, explain a little bit about VENN and the whole process and how you guys do that. >> Yeah sure, we should hire you for marketing. You just did a great job, actually, describing that, but about three years ago what we decided was, ETR does an amazing job collecting the data. It can tell you what's happening, who it's happening to and when it's happening. But it can't always tell you why it's happened. So leveraging a lot of my background in twenty-plus years in journalism and institutional Wall Street research, we decided to take the ETR community, the people that actually take the surveys, and start doing interviews with them and start doing events with them. And enable to doing that, we're basically just trying to compliment the survey findings and the data. So what we always say is that ETR will always give you the quantitative answer and VENN will give you the qualitative answer. >> Now guys, let's bring up the agenda slide again, let's take a look at the folks that participated in the round table. Now, for ETR's clients, they actually know the names and the titles and well the company that these guys work for. We've anonymized it for the public. But you had a CIO of a Global Auto Supplier, a CISO of a Diversified Holdings Firm, who actually had some hospitality exposure but also some government contract manufacturing exposure. Chief Architect of a Software ISV and a VP and CISO of a Global Hospitality Resort Chain. So you had three out of the for, Erik, were really in industries that are getting hit hard. Obviously the software company maybe a little bit better. But maybe you can add some color to that. >> Well actually the software company, unfortunately, was getting hit hard as well because they're a software ISV that actually plays into the manufacturing space as well. So, this particular panel of CIOs and CISOs were actually in a very hard hit industries. And are going to make sure we do two more follow-ups with different industry verticals to make sure we're getting a little bit of a wider berth and collect all of that information in a better way. But coming back to this particular call, the whole reason we did this, and as you know, you spoke to my colleague and friend, Sagar Kadakia, who is the Director of Research for ETR, and we were nimble enough to actually change our survey while it was in the field, to start collecting data on what the real-time impact was on the COVID-19 pandemic. We were able to take that information, extrapolate it, and then say okay let's start reading out to these people and dig deeper. Find out why it's happening and even more so, is it permanent? And which vendors are going to win and which vendors might lose from it. So that was the whole reason we set up the series of calls. We've only conducted on so far. We have another one this coming Tuesday as well with four entirely new panelists that are going to be from different industry verticals because, as you astutely pointed out, these verticals were very hard hit and not all of them are as hard as others. So it's important to get a wider cross-section. >> So, guys let's take a look at some of the budget impacts the anecdotal evidence that we gathered here. So let me just scan through it and then Erik, I'll ask you to comment. So, you know, like Erik said, some hard hit industries. All major projects, anything sort of next-generation, have been essentially shelved. That was the ISV. And then another one, we cut at least 70% of the big projects moving forward. He mentioned ServiceNow actually calls them out, but the ServiceNow is a SaaS company they'll probably, you know, weather the storm here. But he did say we've put that on hold. The best comment, you know, "As-a-service has Saved our SaaS." (Erik laughs) That one's great. And then we're going to get into some of the networking commentary. Some really interesting things about how to support the work from home. You know, kind of shifting from a hardened top into remote workers. And then a lot of commentary on security. So, you know, that's sort of a high level scan and there's just so much information here Erik, but maybe you could sort of summarize on some of that commentary. >> Yeah, we should definitely dig into each of those sectors a little more, but to summarize what we're seeing here was the real winners and losers are clear. Not everyone was prepared to have a work from home strategy. Not everyone was prepared to send their workers out. Their VPN wasn't, they didn't have enough bandwidth. So there was a real quick uptick in spending, but longer term we're starting to see that these changes will become more permanent. So the real winners and losers right now, we're going to see on the loser's side traditional networking. The MPLS networking is in a lot of trouble according to all the data and the commentary that we're seeing. It's expensive, it's difficult to ramp to up bandwidth as quickly as you need and it doesn't support remote. So we're seeing that lose out and the winners there are in the SD-WAN space. It's going to be impossible to ignore that going forward and some of our CIO and CISO panelists said that change will be permanent. Also, we're seeing, at the same time, what they were calling a "SaaS and Cloud". Now, we know these trends obviously were already happening but they're being exacerbated. They're happening even more quickly and more strong. And I don't see that changing any time soon. That, of course, is at the expense of network, I'm sorry, data centers. Whether it be your own or hosted. Which has huge ramifications on on-prem hardware. Even the firewall providers. So what we're seeing here is obviously we know things are going to be impacted by this situation. We didn't necessarily expect all of our community members and IT decision-makers to talk about them being possibly permanent. So that on a high level was something that was extremely interesting. And the last one that I would bring up is that as we make this shift towards working from home, towards remote access, you also have to align yourself with the security that can support that. And one of the things that we're seeing in our data side on ETR, is a widening bifurcation between the next-generation security vendors and the more traditional security or the legacy security players. That bifurcation just keeps getting wider and wider and this situation could be the last straw. >> So I want to follow up on a couple of those things. You're talking about sort of the network shift you know, towards the SD-WAN. What people have described to me is that they got a, you know, a hardened top. It's a hierarchical network. It's very well understood and it's safe, right? And now all of a sudden you got all those remote workers and so you've got to completely soft of rethink your whole network architecture. The other thing I want to drill into is your Cloud commentary. There's a comment that I saw, Erik, that really stood out. One of the folks said, "I would like to see the data centers "be completely deleted, if you will, or closed down." I think we're going to see, you know, a lot more of this obviously. Not only from the standpoint of, and you heard this a lot, the kind of paid by the drink. But just generally getting rid of all that sort of so-called non-differentiated heavy-lifting as we often hear about. >> That is a extreme comment. I don't think everyone feels that way. But, yes, the comment was made and we've heard the comment from other people. As you and I both know, the larger the enterprise the harder that is to go completely SaaS. But yeah, when a situation like this has and see the inflexibility of their on-prem infrastructure, yes it becomes something that really has to be addressed and it can become a permanent change. I was also shocked about that comment. That gentleman also stated that his executives outside of the ITs area, the CEO, the CFO, had never ever, ever wanted to discuss Cloud. They did not want to discuss work from home. They did not want to discuss remote access. He said that conversation has changed immediately and to the credit of the actual IT companies out there, the technology companies, they're doing everything they can with this opportunity to make that happen. >> Yeah, and so you're right the whole work from home conversation. To your point earlier, Erik, big chunks of COVID, the post-COVID world are going to remain permanent. Guys bring up the SaaS slide if you will. The SaaS commentary, "As-a-Service Saved our SaaS." "The wittiest quip award" going to the ETR. You know, but you had, what's very interesting to hear folks, in fact I think somebody even called out, "Hey," you know, "we expected Oracle to," you know, "be auditing us but they're actually being supportive "as is IBM." Salesforce was an interesting common, Erik. One of the folks said they would share accounts on-prem, but when they all do the work from home they had to actually buy some more. You also got Cisco with big props. Microsoft was called out. A lot of organizations actually allowing them to defer payments. So the SaaS vendors actually got very high marks didn't they? >> They really did and even I wrote that summary and it was difficult to write that about Oracle because we all know that they're infamous for auditing their own customers in 2009 right after we came out of financial crisis. They have notoriously been a-- I don't know if they found religion and they decided to be nice to their customers, but every-single person mentioned them as one of the vendors that was actually helping. That was very shocking. And we all know that when bad situations happen people become opportunistic. And right now it's really seeming that the SaaS vendors understand that they need a longterm relationship with these customers and they're being altruistic instead. Which is really nice. >> Yeah I think that anybody with a Cloud realizes that hey, we have an opportunity here that the lifetime value of that customer, whereas maybe in 2009 when Oracle didn't have a Cloud, they had to get people in a headlock to try to persevere their, you know, income statement. Let's go to the networking drill down guys, that next slide because Fortinet, some of the things we've been reporting on is the sort of divergence in evaluations between Fortinet and Palo Alto before this whole thing hit, Fortinet has done a really good job with its Cloud offerings. Palo Alto struggles a little bit with trying to figure out the sales compensation, is maybe a little bit behind. Although both companies got strong props and I've talked to a number of customers, Palo Alto is going to be in the mix. Fortinet, from a Cloud standpoint, seems to be doing quite well? Obviously networking, Cisco is the big gorilla there. But we also got call outs from guys like Trend Micro which was interesting, from some of the folks. So, your thoughts on this Erik. >> Yeah, I'll start on the networking side because this is something that I've really, I've dug into quite amount, in not only this panel, but a lot of interviews and it really seems as if as networking refresh starts to come up, and it's coming up with a lot of large enterprises, when your network refresh comes up people are going to do an RFP for SD-WAN. They are sick and tired of paying MPLS network vendors and they really want to look at something else. That was even prior to this situation. Now what we're hearing is this is a permanent change. I particularly had one person say, I wanted to find this quote real quickly if I can, but basically they basically saying that, "From a permanency perspective, the freedom from MTLS "will reduce our networks spend by over half "while more than doubling or tripling our bandwidth." You can't ignore that. You're going to save me money and triple my bandwidth, and hey by the way, my refresh is due. It's something that's coming and it's going to happen. And yes, you mentioned the few right? There's Viptela, there's Velocloud, there's some big players like Cisco. The Palo Alto just acquired CloudGenix in the midst of all of this. They just went and got an SD-WAN player themselves. And they just keep acquiring a portfolio to shift from their on-prem to next-generation. It's going to take some time, because 70% plus of their revenues is still on-prem hardware, but I do believe that their portfolio that they're creating is the way the world is moving. And that's just one comment on the traditional networking versus the next-generation SD-WAN. >> And the customers have indicated, you know it's not easy just to get off of their MPLS network. I mean it takes time, it's like slowly pulling of the bandaid. But, like many things, COVID-19 is sort of accelerating that. We haven't talked about digital transformation. That came up as a maybe more strategic initiative. But one that very clearly has legs. >> You know, David, it's very simple. You just said it. People, when things are going well and they're comfortable, they don't change. And that's the same for an enterpriser company. Hey, everything's great, our revenue's fine. Why would we do this? We'll worry about that next year. Then something like this happens and you realize wow, we've been dragging our feet. That digital transformation that we've been talking about, and we've been a little bit slow to accept, we need to accept it, we need to move now. And yes, it was another one of the major themes and it sounds silly for researchers like you and I because we know this is a theme. We know Clouded option is there, we know digital transformation is there. But, there are still a lot of people that haven't moved as quickly as they should and this is going to be that final catalyst to get them there, without a doubt. Quickly on your point of Fortinet, I was actually very impressed with the commentary that came from that because Fortinet is sometimes one of those names that you think of that maybe plays in a smaller pool or isn't as big as some of the 800 pound gorillas out there. But in other other interviews besides this I've heard the phrase coined of "Forti-everything". So through RND and through acquisition, Fortinet has really expanded the portfolio and right now is their time to shine because when you have smaller satellite, you know, offices and branches that you need to connect, they're really, really good at it. And you don't always want to call a Palo Alto and pay that price when you have smaller branch offices. And I actually, I was glad you brought up Fortinet because it's not a name that we get to herald that often and it was deserving from this panel. >> Yeah and, you know, companies that can secure gateways, secure endpoints, obviously going to have momentum. Zscaler came up, you know I think that, and I'll tell ya, looking at, I've done a couple of breaking analysis on security and Fortinet has been strong in two dimensions. You know ETR is, as our audience is I think getting to know. We really look at two key metrics. One is net score, which is a measure of spending momentum, and the other is market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness. And companies like Fortinet, in security, show up on both of those dimensions so it's notable. >> Yes, it certainly is, it is. And I'm glad you brought up Zscaler too. Very recently by client request, we did a very in-depth research on Zscaler versus Palo Alto Prisma Access and they were very interested. This was before all this happened, you know. Does Palo Alto have a chance of catching up, taking share from Zscaler. And I've had the pleasure, myself, personally hosting Jay the CEO of Zscaler at an event in New York City. And I have nothing but incredible respect for the company. But what we found out through this research is Zscaler, at the moment, their technology is still ahead, according to their answers. There's no doubt. However, there doesn't seem to be any real secret sauce that will stop Palo Alto from catching up. So we do believe the parody of feature set will shrink over time. And then it will come down to Palo Alto obviously has a wider and user base. Now, what's happening today might change that. Because if I had to make a decision right now, for my company on secure web gateway, I'm still probably going to go to Zscaler. It's the name. If I had to choose that in a year from now, Palo Alto might have had a better chance. So in this panel, as you brought up, Zscaler was mentioned numerous times as just the wave of the future. Along with CASB brokers right? Whether you're talking about a Netskoper or Forcepointer. All those people that also play in CASB space to secure your access. Zero trust is no longer a marketing-hype term. It is real and it is becoming more real by the week. >> And so, I want to kind of end on one of the other comments that really struck me because we're constantly talking about okay, do you go with a portfolio of a suite of services or do you go with best of breed? What about startups? Are startups more risky in a crisis like this? And one of your panelists, I just love this comment, he said, "One of things that I've always done," he said, "You always hear about the guy, "oh we're going to go to the gardener, we're going to "check out the magic water, we'll pick out three guys "in the upper right hand corner and test them out." He says, "One of the things I always like to do, "I'll pick two from the upper right "and I'll take one from the lower left." One of the emerging, text, "And I'll give em a shot." It won't win every time, but then he called out FireEye as one of the organizations that he found early that gave them competitive advantage. >> Right. >> Love that comment. >> It's a great comment. And honestly if you're in charge of procurement you'd be stupid not to do that. Not only just to see what the technology is, but now I can play you off the big guys because I have negotiating leverage and I can say oh, well I could always just take their contract. So it's silly not to do it from a business perspective. But from technology perspective, what we kept hearing from these people with the smaller vendors. My partner Peter Steube, my colleague and I, we did the host together, we asked this question really believing that the financial insecurity of the moment and the times would make smaller vendors not viable. We heard the exact opposite. What our panelists said was, "No, I'd be happy "to work with a smaller vendor right now "because they're going to give me pricing flexibility, "they're going to work with me right now. "I don't need to pay them upfront "because we're seeing a permanent shift from CapEx to OpEX, "and the smaller vendors are willing to work with me and I can pay them later." So we were actually surprised to hear that and glad to hear it because, to connect to your other point, the other person who was talking about security and the platform approach versus best of breed, he said "Listen, platform approaches you're already "with the vendor, you can bundle a little bit. "But the problem is, if you're just going to acquire "a new technology every time there's a new threat, "the bad guys are just going to switch the threat. "And you can't acquire indefinitely. "So therefore, best of breed with security "will always beat platform." And that's kind of a message to Palo Alto and Cisco, in my opinion, because they seem to be the ones fighting that out. Even Microsoft now, trying to say they're a platform approach in security. >> Well and this says to me the security business, as we predicted, is going to stay fragmented because you're still going to get that best of breed. You know, just like Cloud is going to be fragmented and it's, you know, multiple vendors. Ever since I've been in this business people are trying to consolidate the number of vendors, but technology moves so quickly, it gives competitive advantage. Erik, awesome! Thank you so much for joining us. I'm looking forward to next Tuesday with the next vendor and love to have you back and talk about it anytime. You're a great guest, thanks so much. >> Certainly, I'll do my best to get a better AV connection the next time guys, I apologize for that. But it was great talking to you tonight. >> Hey we're all learning, you know so, thank you everybody for watching, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen, brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of Del Technologies World here at the Venetian fifteen thousand attendees. One of the biggest, most important tech conferences all year long. I'm Rebecca, not your host. Along with my co host, stew Minutemen. We're joined by Caitlin Gordon. She is the VP product marketing at Delhi Emcee. Thanks so much for coming back on the cute Kate. I >> know This is so nice. Maybe we'LL have to make it three days in a row. >> I would we would love that. All right, so the last year at this very comforted you lunch power, Max, what's Tet Walker viewers through Sort of. The new capability is the latest and greatest. What's going on with power Max this year? >> Yeah, My favorite thing to talk about his power, Max. So we couldn't miss that today. Yeah, So a couple of updates in the Power Mac's front couple on the software side and then on more on the hardware side as well. S o from ah software side. We've got a couple pieces, which is a lot of our customers, really starting with the largest of our customers, are looking to add more automation into their data centers, and storage is no exception. And how do I automate some of those storage work clothes? Teo, make things run more seamlessly, get into more of a cloud operating model. So we had a couple of announcements on that front. We have a new V R. Oh, plug in, um, to automate work clothes through the r o A. CZ. Well, as ants will play books coming this summer, a couple important automation hand spins and obviously a lot more to come there in the future. The other one in a similar vein, is that containers, right. We've seen the increase adoption of container. So, um, and that the container is being used in production applications means that external storage is actually become a reality in that world, and the support for a C. S. I plug in on power Max, is something that we're seeing more interest from. So we have announced that's coming this summer as well. >> So, Caitlyn, I remember a year ago when Power Mask got announced. I heard things like intelligence and automation. And I went to add non, you know who's been working on this kind of technology for decades? Is that non how we've been talking about this for decades? Tell me why it's different and he lit up like I hadn't seen him in awhile, told me, What's going on for I want you to connect now a year later is what's this mean for customers? What does that automation? You know, an intelligence mean, is there a certain KP eyes or hero metrics who have is two customers using this today that they couldn't have done? And with you, no last generation intelligence storage? >> Yeah. Hey, think about it. It's really about moving to this concept of the Autonomous Data center. And how does this become an autonomous storage system? So both the intelligence within the system that we talked about last year and the decisions that the system is making itself every single day all by itself, that's that has really changed. And it's a completely new evolution of its making billions of decisions a day for customers so they don't have to do that means you're gonna have fewer people managing storage and they can invest in other things. Then when you move that up the stack, some of that the bureau, the answer will play books really enables you to then automate more of the work flows within that so again gets you more into that operating model, and you can automate not just the storage infrastructure, but then get to this autonomous data center >> So way talk to Travis briefly about Dev ops and you're mentioning answerable playbooks. You know, for years we've been talking to customers and saying, Okay, we we need to get two more agile environments, you know, Dev ops there, but enterprise storage specifically, there's a little bit slowed up, so it sounds like we're starting to get to greater adoption. What? What, what what got us over that you know, Hurdle, and where our customers with it today? >> Yeah, and I think it's really the maturity of our largest global customers that have gotten to a place where, for the workloads that will continue to remain on these thes on from infrastructure on our purpose built storage on our high end arrays, they need to run that as efficiently as possible. Um, and a lot of the work we've done to build in a. I does part of that, but really, ultimately they're looking at in there. Three. Terek protector. How do they run things more smoothly? Um, and it's really our customers that have brought that us is a requirement, and we've been able to to support that. >> So how do you work with customers? Mean innovation is, of course, an underlying theme of this of this conference. Talk about how you collaborate with customers to to solve their problems and how you help them. Think ahead what their future needs are. >> Yeah, and certainly Travis, I myself, might our teams, as well as the engineering team, spend a lot of time with our customers in the briefing centre. A lot of in the field, um, really talking about their challenges and the privilege that we have, especially with something like a Power Max platform, is the customers we have. There are the ones that are constantly pushing the boundaries of what we can do for them today, so they always need the best performance. The best efficiency and what has changed is they also now we need that simplicity. They need that operational simplicity, even on their high resiliency. High performance systems. Um, and we spend a lot of time understanding those requirements on DH, the problems that they're trying to solve and how we can help them get there and that that could be automation that could be containers. But it could also be cloud right, And that's the other piece that we've we made a lot of investments across our portfolio is how do we support that cloud consumption cloud operating model, leveraging public cloud? Um, and and a lot of it really just comes from how do we help our oppressors continue to solve their problems? >> It's a competitive marketplace, and, as you said, customers, they want everything. They want efficiency. They want simplicity. They wanted to not cost them too much money. What what's your unique selling point? How do you message this is This is why our solution is >> that I mean, our overall strategy delancy from a storage perspective is that we're way. We'LL have a single product in each segment with which we've compete and each one will be architected for very specific requirements so that we can meet the combination of a price points and it features and capabilities across all these different perspectives and that each one of our platforms is designed to be industry leading in that category. Which is why we have power Max on the high end, the resiliency, that performance, the availability that you know, banks, hospitals, governments around the world expect. But the same time we have mid range pot for us. We have an entry platform that could be sold for under twenty five thousand dollars, right and has a different set of requirements. We have the unstructured business, which is supporting the data. Aaron. That data explosion in a file data, Um, so the The fact is the matter is this. That is all about having the right actor architecture's so customers can have the data in the right place at the right time with the right service level. Um, and that's why we have this portfolio and within each portfolio that were leading in each one of those categories, That's kind of the bigger perspective we have on it. We do not just have a hammer. Not everything is a nail for us. Um, and that's an important part of how we can partner with with our customers to help themselves. Not one challenge, but all the challenges they have >> killing one of the interesting shifts we saw the show is clouds being talked at more than ever at this show. One of the earlier segments we had on we talked about the cloud enabled infrastructure. So things like power, Max, you know, I asked J. Crone, you know, tell me why this is cloud watching, and he gave me a good answer. What I want to ask you your angle on is when you talk to customers, you know how to storage fit into the overall discussion of their cloud strategy. You know what, some of the key business drivers and you know how how's Del technology? >> And I'm glad you said that because Jay and I have had this cloud washing conversation as well as I think that's the unfortunate thing in the reality in the market in the past, probably ten years is a lot of cloud washing, and where we're really focused today is, and we talked a little about this yesterday as well as they say. There's one piece of the how do we fit into overall Del technologies cloud strategy with the Del Tech Cloud. I'm in the VCF integration. We kind of covered that the other pieces that when we look at cloud enabled infrastructure, we're focused on solving really specific use cases that we hear our customers trying to solve today of connecting that data center into a public cloud. So that could be what we call cloud connected systems. The tearing of data from your own promises, infrastructure into the public cloud. Really, that's more of an archiving. This case, a kind of a tape replacement use case that could be dead, remain cloud tear, cloud tearing cloud pools. All the different pieces we have there could be CLO Data Services, right. Offering storage Data services is in a public cloud. Unity Cloud Edition will be one or the New Delhi emcee. Cloud storage services could be another one or even that cloud data insights piece of it. So it's really about solving that solving real challenges about disaster recovery Analytics in the cloud. How do you do that? In a really impactful way? That's simple and easy for customers. >> Yeah, the other Claude related thing wanted to get your take on is many of solutions. I heard on there is, you know, it's VX rail underneath. It's VX rail underneath. It's VX rail under >> you. Notice that >> I did, and you know a way. We had a number of people. V X ray. Lt's doing great, but, you know, if you talk about cloud and the infrastructure that I have in my data center, you know, we've talked Teo, talk to Dell for years. You know, the new power Max last year is underneath some of those admire. Where does that fit in? Kind of CIA and cloud, you know, infrastructure piece. >> Yeah, in a lot of different places. And for Roddy, for reasons, right? Some of us just the high value workloads you need. The scalability, the resiliency, the performance you need the ability to scale your computing your capacity separately. You want to be able to consolidate not just your applications, but actually all your file and sew something like unity or even power. Max, you can have your block workloads and your file workloads there. So we have a lot of customers looking to use traditional three tier architecture, but leverage that in a true cloud operating model from an automation standpoint, cloud consumption model, but also leveraging public cloud computing, right, leveraging the public cloud and really impactful ways, for example, for disaster recovery, eh? So it's really that combining what people love about our industry leading best of reed storage. Um, with that agility of the public cloud is a combination that we certainly hear a lot from our customers of How can I make the best use of clouds? Everyone walks in and say that club first strategy, but it's really about well, how do you actually think about data first and then how do you have a cloud strategy that supports that? >> So So let's talk about the future. I mean, ahs, You said This is what the customer is thinking about right now, but it's your job to think ahead and make sure that you are giving them solutions that fit their future need. So what are you thinking about the solutions that are available today that were really unimaginable five years ago. I think about ahead to twenty twenty five when there is enough data to fill the Empire State Building thirteen times over. How are you helping companies manage the tsunami of data? >> Yeah, and I think part of that is really about again the operations we talked about. Part of that really just comes back to having the right architecture for that type of workload. So this is where I salon actually well before the data era actually was designed for this specifically. So Iceland, created in the early two thousand's, was designed of one file system from terabytes and two petabytes. A single administrator can manage now up to fifty eight petabytes in a single file system. That's game changing when you think about the scale that we're seeing today. So the reason we went to that capacity isn't certainly just cause we thought we could. It was cause our customers were asking for it. Is these workloads in that data that we're talking about autonomous driving center that are just driving the scale? Ability limits, And they're asking for more and more in the most efficient floor print possible. And if you think about that, especially even in the cloud context, there's a There's a combination of How do you leverage that in the in the data center right? And physics means you can't get it up into the cloud necessarily. Um, but then also, there are use cases. They're like analytics of How do you leverage public cloud computing? But then you have that industry leading scale out now, as on the from the storage side so you can combine that. So you talk about something that we talked about here last year, and now we're talking about it a little bit more as well as our integration with Google Cloud platforms. So a lot of our customers are looking to use G. C p for compute for analytics workloads on DH. It's really almost rent your compute for analytics, but you have to have the right storage platform with the right architecture on the back end of that. So what we've done is fully integrated. Iceland, uh, platform and file system through G C P portal. So you could actually combine that public hug, compute and that file system that can support that type of scale. So it's a really unique combination that can help support not only the scale of that data, but also that some of the unique use cases and work loads that are coming out of that >> So Caitlin lot of products here that that would be talking about. Last thing I want to ask is customer customer conversation you have, you know, is data the center of the challenge and opportunity. They have something else that kind of bubbling up. As you look across the conversations you're having that you could have your audience. >> I think at the center of what I hear from customers, Data's in there, but they don't come in saying its data, right? They'll come in thinking about, you know, just trying to figure out how to use cloud properly there. Think about how Doe I simplify things. How do I, um, operate in a way to meet the service levels with a budget that's definitely not getting bigger? Um, and really be as efficient as possible. And it's not, um, some people are looking to go public. Cloud thinking. It's an easy button are there, but it's it's really about How do we change things? Teo run more efficiently and customers inherently to understand, right that the data is at the center of it, and that's increasingly the most valuable asset in the organization. And then they need to optimize their infrastructure to support that, so it really does come down to what? What can we help them to simplify? Optimize. Secure that so that they can truly unlock that. David Capital. >> Well, thank you so much, Caitlin, for coming back on the Cube. That's thanks for having me. Rebecca Knight for stew Minutemen. There is so much more coming up of the cubes. Live coverage of Del Technologies World in just a little bit.

>> Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to the live Cube coverage here, three days at Seattle's KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. It's a conference put on by the Linux Foundation. Cube's been there from the beginning, breaking down all the action. 8,000 people, doubling attendance from the last one, now global, on a global scale, seen great traction in China and other areas around the world. It's about the cloud global. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, our next guest, Kelsey Hightower with Google. Former code program share, now out in the wild on his own, super dope, playing with all kinds of new technology, it's great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Proper you said the word dope, by the way, so congratulations there. I'm an attendee, I still have a keynote on Thursday but I do get to enjoy the floor like everyone else. >> So what's new, so you're now, again, there's a lot of pressure now every year. It's more and more people here, so it's a lot of pressure to kind of get all the action packed, but the growth has been pretty phenomenal. You've been looking at serverless, we saw some tweets, again you mention it's super dope, serverless is. You've got serverless, you've got a lot of stuff going on within the CNC app, you've got Kubernetes at the core. A lot of people like calling it the Kubernetes stack or the CNCF stack. Is it really a stack, is it really more of an operating model because there's stacks involved but how do you describe it, because this is a point of clarification. I mean, Kubernetes isn't necessarily a stack. Is it, how do people use it, what's the current state? >> I think when people say stack, you think about the LAMP stack, right? Linux, Apache, MySQL, it's a way of pre-packaging these ideas. This is something that worked for me, it may work for you, you say that enough times and then you say things like the Kubernetes stack. It's a quick, shorthand for Kubernetes and building on top of it. I think from the engineering perspective, when you look at Kubernetes and all the gaps that the CNC app is trying to fill these days, it's all this stuff you're probably building yourself, someone else is building it, and now we kind of have an outlet now. If you're working on a service mesh like list was, you have an outlet to give it to the rest of the world, open governance, and get some contributors. I think what we're seeing now is that hey, CNCF is kind of the place people go to figure out is someone building the thing that I've already started building and can I stop and just download that and go off? >> It's been very successful open source community, obviously, it's been end user leverage, it's been great and it's been open source, community led. Not so much vendor led, but vendors have been participating, so it's been great, but now as Kubernetes is going mainstream, the rise of Kubernetes is undeniable. No one can really deny that. Other end users are now coming in either to participate or to consume Kubernetes. How is that going in your mind? What's going on in the landscape, because people want multicloud, they want hybrid, they want choice. How are end users coming into the ecosystem to consume Kubernetes and the variety of goodness around it and what's going on there? Can you give some color around that option? >> I think regardless of the industry buzzwords like multicloud and hybrid and all that, Kubernetes is good on its own. It solves a lot of problems that your previous tools didn't solve, so people are gravitating towards it regardless in that direction. When you start to talk about portability, yes, it's nice to have two different environments and have the same tools work in a similar way between those environments, that's working well. The people that started three years ago that were doing it themselves, they're finding value and treating that as a service. We saw this happen to DNS, e-mail, so people are saying maybe the value isn't running it myself, so now you kind of see the vendor ecosystem understand what the value is. For a lot of the cloud providers, it's running Kubernetes, patching it, updating it, upgrading it, so that you can go focus on the other parts on top. That's where I think we are as an industry, and then there's gaps to fill, so that's where you see things like native, people building CI-CD tools on top, that's just where the new opportunities are so I think we've kind of matured. People kind of know what Kubernetes is, they know where their value line is for Kubernetes, now they're looking for their partners or vendors or community to just layer the new stuff on top. >> Kelsey, you bring up a great point there because understanding that line of what I should do myself and what I have to do versus what I can buy, consume as a service, is really tough for people, you know. I always say, ask IT departments, what do you really suck at? Because there's somebody else that probably does it better. A year ago, when I talked to users at this show, they were really downloading stuff, putting their things together, and when you asked them why, it was well, the Azure stuff hasn't matured. It just released, Amazon, I'm not sure where they're going with it. It feels like a lot has changed in the last year. You did Amazon the hard way a little over a year ago. What has changed over the last year, you know. >> We saw this with Linux, right? >> Are we ready for that, yeah. >> In Linux everyone use to build their own Linux distro, you took pride in it, using Gentoo and Slackware, and then you're like, I'm tired of that so you go get Red Hat or Ubuntu and call it good, and then you go focus on the other things. Naturally, Kubernetes is early project, has lots of gaps, you can fill those gaps by gluing together open source yourself, but now most of the managed services fill in the gaps by default. You click a button in GKE and a thing comes up, it's secure, has most of the pieces you need, it's integrated, you're like alright, I'm done with that part. >> The other thing, we talked a year ago. There's lots of companies here that are involved in Kubernetes. We've got over 70 that are compliant, and then you've got the service providers. From what I hear, it's people aren't trying to differentiate with Kubernetes and that's probably a good thing. It's something that's going to be baked into the platform, it's something you're going to consume with the other services that I offer, what do you say? >> If you make it different, then it won't work. >> Right. >> It'll be a different thing, so if you make it too different then you lose most of the benefits that we're all talking about here. The ability to learn a set of abstractions once, kind of like we did on Linux, if you start changing the system calls on Linux, then it's not Linux anymore, it's a different thing. >> Just to clarify though, if I'm running in one cloud that has their Kubernetes and I want to go to another, is it similar enough? Can I make that move? Do I need a vendor-independent version? >> So I think up to this value line I've run this container, ship the log somewhere, give me a way to secure access, that's pretty standard. Give me a load balancer. What isn't standard is how do I do CI-DC on top of that, that's not standard. There's different opinions on how to do that. If I'm in Google Cloud, we have IEM one way, Azure has IEM a different way, and same thing for Amazon. There's things around networking, security, that are going to be different based on the environment you're in. Same for on-prem, and that's where you start to look for help. If I go to Google, I'm going to use GKE maybe instead of running it myself on just a bunch of VMs, so that's where you kind of see that little divide. >> Is that going to be custom work, that's a great point, security for instance, we'll just pull that out there. Is that going to automate and be seamless or is that going to be a work area that's always going to have to be differentiated or coded or? >> So for example, we have the big vulnerability recently in Kubernetes world, right? >> It's a big CVE, it affected everyone running Kubernetes. That's a thing, as a vendor, for us GKE people, we upgraded automatically for them and said hey, there's a CVE, it's going to be really scary when you read about it but hey, you're patched. We've taken care of you, so I think people will still look for that relationship. Will it always be custom? At the app level, that is a different story. When you run your container and you want to access the things in your environment, so if you're in Google Cloud you may want to talk to Spanner, you're going to need an IEM set of credentials. That's a little out of scope of Kubernetes, so that's going to be integration work that the provider will do. >> So the holy trinity of computing industry has always been storage, network, and compute, and it changes certainly with cloud and all the goodness that comes out from serverless and whatnot, so containers is interesting. We always love containers but I've heard conversations recently where it's like hey, I want to treat containers not as a first class citizen because it doesn't meet my security boundary. I'm going to put a VM around that and run that under the covers with say, Lambda. Is that feasible, is than an option? I've heard talk about it, is anyone doing that? Is that an alternative, is this going to introduce new elements? >> Let's put it right, in Kubernetes by defaults we chose to build on top of Docker. Industry momentum, great developer workflow, but you're right, it made a security trade off. We know VMs are a much tighter security boundary that people are comfortable with. In that world, at that time, they were too slow for what we needed to happen. Thanks to Intel and others who pulled the thread of let's make VMs faster. Recently you heard the announcement of Firecracker, right, it's part of a derivative from the Chrome VM and that thing is optimized for these kinds of workloads, containers and serverless workloads. Now we go from 10, 20 seconds to hundred milliseconds. Now it makes sense to probably have this become an underlying thing. Now that we have the speed, maybe people say hey, we can maybe take the security without sacrificing the performance. >> That's the trade off. >> Pulled on the thread, you mentioned Firecracker. There's still this tension between what's happening in Kubernetes and serverless. We saw Knative is a hot topic point. It's probably natural that there's some tension there because it's like oh wait, why do you need to learn any of this stuff because if serverless will just make it as a service and make it easy and you don't need to learn all that container stuff and everything, what do you say? >> If you're a Kubernetes user, if you really think about the very broad definition of serverless, meaning I'm not managing the database, I'm using a managed database, serverless database. Storage, I'm using S3 or Google Cloud storage, serverless. Your load balancer, also serverless. So most people in the Kubernetes ecosystem, networking, serverless, storage, serverless, their database, serverless. The only thing that you can say isn't serverless is this compute component, everything else is. Now people are looking at serverless as this spectrum. How serverless are you? If you're on-prem and you buy a server and you rack it and install Kubernetes, you're less serverless, you're probably not serverless at all, no matter what you do. Now, if you put a lot of work in, you can probably put a serverless interface on top. This is what native is designed to do for people. Maybe you have an organization that supports multiple businesses inside of your org. They may not know anything about Kubernetes. You just tell them hey, put your code here, it will run, oh, that feels serverless. You can provide a serverless experience. The delta then becomes what can we do between a container and a function, so the foundation of my keynote is exactly that. What does it mean to take a container and put it into Lambda? What do you have to change? In my presentation, I don't even read write the code. There's a small shim between the two worlds because you're already using managed services around it. We're not talking about throwing away Kubernetes and then starting over our entire architecture. We're swapping out the compute layer. One is a subset of the other. Lambda is about events and functions, Kubernetes is about container and run it however you want. You want to run it when an event comes in, that's native. You want to run it as a batch job, run it as a job. You want to run it as a long running service, run it as a deployment, so that's all we're really talking about here. When we break it down, you're just talking about compute. >> You talk a lot about automation in the CI-CD areas, that differentiation where the value is. In a world as automation goes faster, what does Kubernetes look like when it becomes automated away? Because I don't want to manage anything, why even have managed Kubernetes? It should just automatically, you mentioned the patching. In an automated world, is Kubernetes just running under the covers, how does Kubernetes look down the road in your mind, in terms of when automation comes in? >> I've been in this game maybe over 15 years and one thing holds true: most developers want to focus on the business logic. We hire them because that's their skillset. When they check in code, it would be really nice if you can take it from there and get it where it needs to be. That's been the holy grail. We see it in mobile, you build an app, you put it on the App Store, Apple gets it to every device on the planet, done. Now it's the server side turn to do this. Whether you're doing serverless functions, Kubernetes, VMWare, or Linux, if you have CI-CD in front of any of that, the developer can still have the same experience. I check in code and you're picking a different deploy target. If you did that five years ago, and you understood it, and you were using, let's say maybe Mesos or just VMs, you bring in Kubernetes, you don't even have to change this part of the equation. This is why I tell most people, just focus on this endgame. My keynote last year was about this is the endgame because this is your coacher, this is your change management process, this is your discipline, and this is just a target where that compute goes. >> Alright, we've got two minutes left. I want to get your thoughts and share with the audience who's not here, a big waiting list, I know there's some lobby con going on all around Seattle, people flew in. Great place too to actually have some good lobby con meetings around the lobby area. So what's happening here, in your mind's eye, now you're not in the throes of all the events, you're kind of in the wild here with us, everyone else. What's the top story, what's going on, what's the vibe, what are you extracting out of all this activity as a top story, top level stories here? >> I think everyone's finding their place. If you're a security vendor, you kind of know where your line is, right? I've got this Twistlock shirt on. They want to plan a world where they need to integrate closer to the developer workflow, not just on the infrastructure side. If you're selling load balancers, service mesh is a thing, where do you fit in? The lines are getting a lot clearer. Kubernetes is starting to say maybe we should stop here. Maybe service measures should take it from here and that's where Istio comes in. Traditional vendors can now play in this well-defined space. On the storage side, what are you integrating? Now we have the storage interface, like the container storage interface. Now, if you're a net app, you know where you fit into the puzzle. You don't need to have your own Kubernetes distro. Two years ago, everyone was trying to come out with their own Kubernetes distro so they can actually have an anchor. Now you're like, ah, now I know where to play and now we also know what's missing. After years of doing this, people look back and say there's a lot of stuff missing. It's OK now to go create something new. >> It's a clear visibility into the landscape. What about the impact to end users? What is notable in your mind in terms of highlights, impact to end user organizations really going through this quote digital transformation, which is very cloud-based of course, but they're certainly changing and impacting, what's your thoughts on the end user? >> We're using some of the same words now. Forget the technology piece, now we can all start to talk about the same things, so when we say container, we kind of now are talking about the same thing. When we start to talk about sidecars, whether that's a service mesh, Envoy sidecar, or something that adapts your existing code to the new world, now that we're using the same language, we can actually talk. Traditional enterprise can talk to the startups and have a meaningful conversation. >> That's awesome, any other observations here in terms of the size of the show? Got a lot more activity, feels a little bit like re:Invent, I'm bumping into people, swimming through the crowds, the swag's hot. >> It's 8,000 people here and it feels like there's more users that know nothing about Kubernetes so even though we're about five years in, it reminds me of when we were just getting started. >> Lot more work to do but great, congratulations on all the work you've done Kelsey. Really appreciate you taking the time every year to come on theCUBE. We love having you on, great commentary, great keynotes, very entertaining. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Awesome, thank you. >> I'm John Furrier, Cube here with Kelsey Hightower telling us about all the breakdown of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, the beginning of the cloud tsunami is happening, certainly changing businesses, changing open source, it's changing, it's on a global scale. We're here with coverage for three days. We'll be right back with more after this short break.

>> From Orlando, Florida It's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I am Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. And we are in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. We're at the NetApp booth and we are now talking with Gerald Pfeiffer V SUSE, VP of Products and Technology Programs. Gerald, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So thank you for bringing the SUSE Chameleon here So let's talk about open-source. What is an open-source company? What are the key hallmarks that define an open-source company? >> So when you think of open-source technically it's about the license. It's about the open-source license that the software is under. But if you want to be a real open source company there is actually, it goes beyond that. And that's where many we see many of the classic companies fail as in you take a piece of software that you've written in house you open-source it which means you put an open-source license on it. And then you throw it over the fence. You put it on an FTP server or a NetApp Server or github or somewhere and say this is an open-source project. Technically true but what open-source really is about also is how you develop the software. It's a development model. It's about the community or communities you have. And so as an open-opensource company or a true open-source company what that means is you need to change how you develop the software. And how you go about it and it involves, you need to, You need to, let go. You need to, you need to lose. Lose in a way you lose control and you need to help, if it's something that you initiated you need to make this attractive for others and easy to contribute. And so the development model the transparency collaboration, communications all that is really important for a successful open-source project. But I would argue also for a successful open-source company. >> So let's talk about the community for a little bit when it comes to open-source and especially with SUSE. SUSE's one the most successful open source companies in the world. However, your key product, SUSE Enterprise Linux you guys don't control the kernel you have to work with a community of organizations and personalities and conflicting agendas. How does SUSE organize their self that over a 25 year period you guys have consistently grown become more prominent in the industry. How have you had that when you don't even own you don't, rather, control the key technology, the kernel to your product. >> Ya, so, there is actually a trick behind it and the short answer is you cannot control but you can influence. And so how do you influence? And it's really about becoming part of the community or I usually actually when we get new employees that come from a proprietary background one of the first things I teach them is there is no such thing as the open-source community. It's actually open-source communities. There is actually many of them and even your example, the kernel there is the Linux kernel community, but inside, everyone, the group of everyone who contributes there're actually subgroups. People focusing on different aspects. And so if you want to influence that the easiest way and the hard way is you start contributing. And so you start building up rapport, you start building up credibility and that's usually not something you do overnight It's not like you can come and say Oh, I've been doing operating systems for 30 years. I'm a distinguished engineer and now I'm telling you this is how you need to do it. You start by contributing code. You start by being part of the conversations. By critiquing, constructively hopefully, other people's contributions. usually in a certain area. And then people start getting to know your name. And they start trusting you. And I've, I'm not a kernel engineer but there're a couple of open-source projects I've contributed since writing my PHD thesis And I'm still doing that usually on my weekends or evenings when I have a little time. And so there're people I've been working together for 15 years or more, who I've never met in person. And some I've met and then I realized Wait a minute, I know he's going to be at the conference and I don't know how old he is. He wrote about his children so that gives a certain or his young baby children so that may give an, an idea. But I don't know how old he is. I don't know what color of hair. What color of skin. But then you meet and because you have this relationship you actually, you know, you get together. And there is trust and once you have this trust on a personal level but also, at least as importantly or I would break both the same on a technical side. I trust your, your judgment. Then you start influencing. >> Is that what makes SUSE an open open-source company? >> Ya that's definitely one of the aspects where, when we want to we want to drive something. And I'll give you an example that's actually especially in SAP context this is really relevant is something we call live kernel patching. So you know you have this HANA system so it's lots of memories and you have all those security issues that keep popping up, now and then. And so one of the challenges is you want to apply the security update if you're an IT person but, when you do so, you need to, and it's a kernel thing, then you need to restart the server. Because other sub-systems like a web server you just restart the web server and you're down for one millisecond and nobody really notices unless you're CNN.com or whatever. But if you restart the kernel the whole machine reboots. And then you know you scan the memory and you have a HANA machine with 12 terabyte of memory or 16. So the start up takes and then why is HANA so fast? Because all it did is in memory. Now, doing that isn't, isn't fast. >> So that's really interesting as you look through, I love the integration between SAP and SUSE the in-memory, the continuous kernel, patching, the ability to integrate the two solutions. It's interesting, you guys have a partnership you have outside of SAP with these companies that not necessarily, from a licensing perspective the application is close-sourced. So there is a myth I think, in the industry that close-sourced software versus open-sourced software one is more secure, the other one's more stable Random religious arguments. What are we seeing in the... Wow, what are... How are customers embracing the SUSE relationship along with the SAP relationship. >> You know in a way (laughs) and that's a, nhat's a tricky statement to make but in a way at first approximations customers don't care whether it's open-sourced or proprietary? As a customer, I care that it works. And if I'm a SAP customer my (mumbles) workload needs to stay up. And so what I'm looking for is performance is security, is scalability, is availability, high availability. And so whatever platform gives that to me is the platform that I choose or in the case of HANA for, actually, SAP choose. So if you look at HANA, it's an interesting sample the only operating system it's available on the only platform it's available on is Linux. So SAP actually has done their research and they looked into it and said okay, we need certain characteristics what's... Where do we get the best solution? And it turns out Linux offered that. And so I don't see, when it comes to applications in particular our workloads I don't see it as much as being open-sourced or proprietary It's really what's the best technical solution and then there obviously is the question behind the question is how do you actually get to the best solution? And that's where the open-source model where it's not just one company doing that we have lots of engineers contributing to the kernel and other parts. But it's only one part. Many of our partners contribute Our competitors contribute And so in this open-source arena Things move. Just to improve, for example, the linux kernel and you get a better outcome than any proprietary vendor would actually be been able to deliver with a classic Unix system for example. >> You talked about, you know, customers not caring about the technology. It just needs to work. And it's kinda the same thing I think of when you look at a technology like ERP software that's largely invisible. Right? So is SUSE. And SAP wants to be one of the top ten most valuable global brands. And this morning during the keynote Bill McDermott said that they're now number 17. So they're getting up there to the big brands Like Apple, Coca Cola, Google who all have products that we can kinda see and touch. So when you're in a partnership with SAP how do you articulate the value of what you guys can deliver to help the customer not care about what's under the hood here but also ensure that they're actually able to deliver what they need to to their customers. What are some of those unique maybe customer examples that you have where customers with SAP on SUSE are transforming their businesses or their industries. >> Yeah so, much... Much of this transformation really comes from the SAP stack. What we contribute is really the stability of the platform. And so, Obviously, obviously at the technical level people do care do care actually about open-source because the one thing open-source provides you is the transparency. You can see an SAP engineer actually developing HANA for example. But also other things we do together They have been looking at the source code trying to understand what's going on and then optimize HANA. So when I said customers don't care that's in a first approximation because it needs to work. If it doesn't work, everything else doesn't matter. But if, so there are people who care about the technical more details. Often these days or usually when When it's like at the CLO level or an IT director level what they care more about is things like high-availability scenarios or blueprints. So it's not just one bit of technology or even how HANA runs on SUSE but they know a server is going to fail at one point. How do you-- >> When I ran a SAP environment one of the things that we did, we did a bake-off of Linux distributions for our appliances and these are appliances! In theory you get an appliance you turn it on and you install your SAP app and life goes on, no one should care about the underlying appliance but for us it was about the OS and the availability. You know, we were coming from a non-stop XP, HP, titanium shop and we were very happy with the non-stop capability but going to X86 there's a lot of thought that goes into making that non-stop Can you talk to the relationship between NetApp, SAP and, and SUSE from a community perspective because this is related to the conversation around open-source and making that happen and to your point, how do you care why would an IT director care about SUSE verses some other distribution. >> So, you know, if you look at the conversations I'm having often it's then looking at it at the solutions level So if you can point out that you have the blueprints or reference architectures or whatever you want to call it. You have customer success stories etc. Where you can say, look this is, in a scenario like this in your, in your market or in your in your vertical this is what you can do and this is how it'll be supported. So that your guys don't have to start from zero but it's actually really easy to go high availability or in fact we have a dedicated team that sits in the... That sits in the Linux lab with all the other partners you named and many more where SAP, and that's actually a really clever thing they did, creating this Linux lab and they also have a partner board where talking about communities, they have created this level of community where different vendors come together you know and you have hallway conversations and you want to do something say okay, how do you do this with the SUSE side how do you do this on the NetApp side and then at an engineering level and at a solution level you build something that actually works technically and then obviously the support relationship is really important. So that's, that's one of the challenges open-source had in the beginning compared to proprietary because if you look at some of the old full stack companies or established ones. They used to deliver hardware and then the operating system and then middleware or database and application top. So you had one phone number to call when there's a problem. And originally with open-source you know, you got this piece here and then you got the storage from from NetApp say and .. And who do you call? And then the finger pointing starts. So what's made open-source also successful is the establishment of, of really, processes, agreements and just practical workflows so that our companies work together and the customer, they can pick up the phone in fact, if you look at, let's say SAP applications what we have set up in this SAP environment is you can call SAP and that's the only phone number you ever need to call. And everything behind that happens fully transparently. So all the vendors get together. >> So, to sum up it sounds like what you're talking about that's really key for SUSE is openness, transparency, trust, collaboration. >> Yes, and at the open-source level at Linux kernel, compiler and the individual pro checks but essentially the same. Exactly what you explained. Also at the business level, what we do with partners and what we do with customers. >> And we hear that in the keynote this morning Bill McDermott really kinda was talking about trust as the new currency. So Gerald you're right in line with that. Thank you so much for joining Keith and me today. >> Thank you for having me. >> We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .Next Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, we're here at the Nutanix .Next Conference in Nice, France. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests, but a partnership we've been talking about since the early days of Nutanix. Bernie Hannon, Strategic Alliance Director with Citrix, and Raghu Nandan, Senior Director of Product Management, Nutanix. Thanks so much for joining me. Happy to be here. Great to be here. AlL right, so Bernie, let's start with you, how long have you been with Citrix, a little bit of background and when will you start working for Nutanix? (Bernie laughs) Ten years at Citrix, and we'll see about Nutanix. But no, I'm Strategic Alliances Director. I manage our alliance partnership with Nutanix, and I've been doing that now for about two-and-a-half years. AlL right, Raghu, little bit about your background, and you must have worked for Citrix before, right? I did, coincidentally, work at Citrix for a while, pretty close to ten years, actually, and I've been at Nutanix for almost three years now. I'm part of the product team, managing the full-stack journey that we've been on, building beyond software-defined storage with the Ember virtualization with AHB, the ops, artistration layers on top, and coincidentally, given the background with Citrix it was the first logical place for us to start to make Citrix a tailored-fit for the particular full stack offering,. That's what we've been working on too. Yeah, and let's talk about that Bernie. 'Cause most people for a couple of years, it was like oh, well Nutanix, they're that little VDI company, and do that, and that of course was a strong partnership between Citrix and Nutanix, but, it's much more that. So maybe, give us a little bit, kind of, the breath and depth of the partnership. Well, yeah, so, Nutanix was not shy about letting us know that they shared a common vision about what HCI could do, and what a partnership together could do to be able to strengthen or to further each others' strategies. And it was really all about trying to simplify the customer experience with EDI. And that's always been a challenge for our customers. And Nutanix, very quickly, was able to demonstrate that they could make deploying Citrix on the infrastructure so much easier for customers. And that's really what we've been about working on since we started this partnership. Yeah, and it's been the perfect-tailored workload like I said before, right. So we're on this journey of re-platforming the data center and collapsing as many silos as possible while bringing that public cloud-like consumption margin where people in the IT departments can go focus on applications and services and more business-oriented functions and kind of let IT be a functional thing without spending inordinate amounts of time. While we started our journey as a company with EDI, we've expanded certainly to a bunch of other workloads. But, when we brought this next new concept to the marketplace in September of 2015 by embrating the scavian derived HyperWiser as a built in part of the overall solution, Citrix was a natural place for us to start and that's kind of what we've been working on in that dimension. Yeah, Cloud has been a strategy, it's gone through a lot of changes in the industry but last year I talked to Christian Riley little bit about Citrix Cloud. Nutanix has had the Enterprise Cloud rolling out various pieces. Maybe you could both speak a little bit to kind of, those Cloud strategies. Sure, from a Citrix standpoint, we've been busy migrating our customers from the perpetual license model to a subscription model. And to leverage that through our Citrix Cloud, where we've moved the Citrix control plane up into the Cloud as a service. So, again, another step in making the whole process of deploying Citrix even easier. So, that's really been our strategy. And working with Nutanix we've made that process even easier through the automation tools that they've developed and now, shortly with the next release, Nutanix solutions are going to come Citrix Cloud ready. And that essentially means that customers can not only have the benefits of that subscription model, but they'll also be able to have the benefits of being able to manage Citrix as a service in Citrix Cloud and get the best of both worlds. And that for our customers is really a true hybrid cloud experience. And the Enterprise Cloud for us as Nutanix is really a fabric that kind of envelops the public, the private infrastructure and even stretches out into the edge, right in pleasing to use the disperse Cloud. And in the context of Citrix like Bernie said while Citrix Cloud makes the deployment of the entire Citrix software start, a non-hassle experience for customers, there is still something to be said for the actual infrastructure where the user re-amps a provision. This is the classic use case for hybrid in a sense because it all comes all the desktops and service bottlenecks where you have users on campus logging onto desktops in the public Cloud, yet the applications they need to access are having to help them back into the Enterprise Data Center and this combination of the Citrix Cloud and on tram Nutanix infrastructure, that just in one click plugs to the Citrix Cloud, lets people experience the best of both worlds. This zero, kind of like a one minute deployment of Citrix software stock and a one click experience from Prism to connect the infrastructure to start provisioning the stops and you can be from nothing to a production environment in literally minutes. Yeah. How does management play between the two of your companies, the management layer? The management layer from a Citrix Cloud standpoint, or? So talked a little bit about Prism there, to talking about how Comm fits in. Citrix has a number of software pieces. Just trynna understand, kind of, the boundaries overlaps integrations. That's really where Comm has done an excellent job of making a lot of that transparent, right. So the whole idea is that from the start, with just a couple of clicks, you're able to make the connection to Citrix Cloud, register and then drop the Citrix Cloud connector onto a Nutanix infrastructure and from there Prism is really managing that management experience. It's really two dimensions right. So think of the Citrix management layer as everything that encapsulates the policies, the governance models, everything around the performance expectations of VDI. Who gets what kind of a desktop, what kind of a profile, persistent, non persistent, all those kinds of things. Seamlessly plugs into Prism, which manages the rest of the infrastructure, physical, virtual, with ops and orchestration. So, I don't have to worry about this user needs a graphics enabled desktop, where would I go provision this? The system just automatically detects that. Or I have this thousand user environment and I don't quite know whether I've provisioned the right amount of compute and memory to the right kinds of users. Prism just tells you through behavioral learning, these users VM seem under provision, these users VM seem over provision. So you're getting the best ROI, in terms of your infrastructure span. So think of Prism as everything that manages the physical data central infrastructure including virtualizing and ops. And the Citrix management stack just plugs into that to layer on the governance policies on top. And then things that Citrix does in the background, in terms of managing the scale out. And making sure that everything is kept evergreen. And that the tools are always being refreshed. That happens automatically and seamlessly in the background. Great, Nutanix has been announced at their last show the Google Cloud partnership. My understanding, there's potential intersections between GCP, Citrix and Nutanix, talk to us a little bit about what we would see going forward, how those potentially play together. So Citrix has a new partnership with Google, Google Cloud platform, and our Citrix workspace and environment, the entire digital desktop now is available to deploy onto Citrix. I'm sorry, onto Google Cloud platform. And we believe that with a vergening partnership that's taking place with Nutanix and Google Cloud platform that there's an opportunity in the future to develop some new stories, better together, so it's something that we're just beginning to explore now, but we think there's a lot of possibilities there. I mean, I'll give you a classic example, right, last week I was speaking with a customer that's running Citrix on Nutanix and they're running it for a certain number of users, let's say a few thousand users, and every year at holiday season, they have these three or 400 contracting employees that come online, that they need extra capacity for these temporary desktops. And this combination of Citrix with Google Cloud platform and the Jorte Cloud services provides the perfect solution in which you could create on demand capacity for kind of, burst expectation of resources and once the contract was (mumbles), the environment shrinks back. So this is a start of a journey and we'll figure some things out, but there are some pretty strong synergies for the three to come together to solve for those kinds of interesting use cases. Great example and we think there's a lot more like those to come. Okay, want to give you both the last word. Either customers, any customer story you can tell, or anything else we should be looking at down the road from the partnership. Well, from a Citrix standpoint, I have to say that they are really appreciative of the partnership that we have with Nutanix. I think they feel good knowing that it's an alliance partnership that we have with Nutanix. So that they can make their investments with confidence. They've had a relationship with Citrix for a long time. And there's trust that goes with that. And in the Citrix name. And the fact that we have a strong alliance partnership, makes them feel good investing in Nutanix and then seeing how that better together story is really unfolding for them. And it's a great partnership for several reasons, but I think the single most important reason is the amount of customer delight it offers. When people bring Citrix and Nutanix together. And I've lost count of the number of customers that are appreciative of how much better their environments are. And we are super excited about how much further we can take that journey with this combination of Citrix Cloud with this one take experience within Prism. Yeah it's not just a promise if it's actually being delivered in this thing, it's actually happening. Bernie and Raghu, thank you so much for giving us the update on the partnership there. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City It's theCube covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Inforum. >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of Inforum 2017 here in New York City. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Dave Ballante. We're joined by Mike Rodgers. He is the CSIO of Pilot Flying J. Thanks so much for coming on theCube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So tell our viewers a little bit about Pilot Flying J and your relationship with Inforum. >> So Pilot Flying J is a travel center. We cater to basically over the road truckers and we do have a big gas business too. We operate about 700 locations. Most of them are owned fully by Pilot Flying J. Some of them are dealers where they have a relationship with us. They're in our network but we don't know them. So we run the majority of the locations and we own about 40% of the overall road diesel market. >> Rebecca: In the US and Canada? >> In the US and Canada. >> Okay and talk about your relationship with Inforum. >> So our relationship with Inforum really goes back to Lawson. I've been with the company for about two years. We run Lawson. David Clo-thy will tell you probably 25 years. The company has very rapidly. Started off as a small little Tennessee company. Well now it's a rather large company and we felt we knew we had to make a change relative to our human capital management and our financial systems is because we basically outgrew it. And we like to write a lot of things so we wrote a lot of applications out of our desperate sylo. And of course it's a lot of technical debt that goes along with them. So when I start with the company. We started on valuation process and picked for as the partner to replace all of our financial systems, and all of our human capital management systems. >> And so you migrating from traditional legacy lawson to the cloud suite. >> Pretty much, I would characterize it as a migration but we had very little in the vein of human capital management. And what we did have, we wrote ourselves. For example, we wrote our own applicant tracking system, which we'll of course have to integrate into lawson. So we have an integration layer that we have to support there and that's just one. There was a slide put up this morning that showed that we're going to eliminate 26 systems that we either bought as the best of breed type of application or we wrote ourselves. >> So how painful is that? Is that why you-- >> It's extremely painful. >> They brought you in for this task and you obviously knew this coming in or just-- >> Oh I knew this coming in. >> Dave: No surprise. >> No surprise and by the way, pilot is no different than a lot of other retailers in other companies out there. We've got a lot of technical there and I will tell you the more I see about Inforum. The more I think we made the right decision. I really like the cloud strategy. I'd like the integration associated with all the different functions specifically within the HCM suite. It's not a roll up like some of the other guys have rolled up. They bought but whether it's PeopleSoft or whatever and they many talk about it being integrated, bit it's not as integrated as the Inforum suite. >> So if I may, sorry. We want to stay on the migrations for a second because it's non-trivial and people. The conundrum of migrations is nobody wants to do them because it's just such a heavy lift. But the longer you wait, the more technical debt you accrue. >> I use to say you have to get off the treadmill. You have to stop and say we're not going to keep digging ourself in this ditch and it's going to be painful. It's going to be expensive. It's going to be disruptive and I use to say the (indistinct speaking) usually get fired. That really is, I might say that laughingly but-- >> Dave: You got a got attitude about-- >> It's hard, okay. It's a hard thing not just for the IT guys. It's a hard thing for the organization with respect to change management. >> So incredible amount of planning obviously. You knew your freezing code. >> Pretty much because why would we continue to develop something. I wouldn't say we were 100% frozen. Things come out especially in HR where there's a regulation thing. >> Dave: Compliance, right. >> Right compliance and you got to do it so we got pretty good at saying we're not going to, we're going to wait for Inforum. And we've got a lot of it implemented. We're continuing. We got a nice plan. An iterative plan, we're not trying to blow the ocean and convert everything all at once. Very good engagement from the business. We have a lot of business partners here with us. Like the IT representation at this conference. It's the smallest compared to the business. >> So I would think a key there though is because when you freeze code. It slows your business down, but then when you actually go to the new platform. You want to be able to move faster and leap frog your competition. >> I would argue that really, because we really didn't have much. It really hasn't slow much down. Where we had to do something from a compliance perspective, we've done it. But it hasn't really slowed us down. The leap frog that we're going to do when we implement the whole cloud suite is going to be enormous. >> Sorry about. >> I wanted you to step back a little bit and tell our viewers about some of the specific HCM challenges you have and what you, talk about the pain, I guess is what I want you to describe. >> We run travel service. We're open 365 days a year, 24/7. They never close. They're all on food operations. >> Rebecca: Of the three quick services food operations. >> It could be up to three. If we don't have three in every stores someone said that. We may have one in every store plus a deli operation that we run ourselves and we actually create the food. Whether it's pizza, meatloaf whatever the truck drivers really want with respect to our food offering. They want something different, more variety. So yeah, it's a very complex business. It's hard and we're very spread out throughout the country. We're not necessarily in a big cities like New York. you're not going to see a pilot in New York City. You're going to see a pilot or a flying J on major interstates throughout the country. So there were spread out. So connecting with our team members has been a challenge for us. And our owner Jimmy Haslam will tell you that we probably have not any give himself a vibe. And we are connecting with the team member so we're doing a lot to facilitate that connection. We'd actually partner with the Disney Institute to help us with that. And we've actually called Inforum for project connect. So it's going to provide that connection platform to those team members that are spread throughout the country and Canada for that matter. That we don't get to see that very often, if ever. >> We're hearing a lot at the keynote retail has been highlighted a lot and Pilot J is a form of retail in that sense. And talking about how important it is for the customer experience. The trucker themselves who come in to apply at Pilot Flying J. >> Our strategy is focused on making it a great place to work. In other words, doing the right things for our team member and the investment at Inforum is really going to provide that platform. The other part is making it a great place to shop, and we want our customer to come back. Okay we sell a commodity, let's face it. We sell diesel. You can buy it down the road. We want the experience when they come into our store. We want to take care of our guest like nobody else takes care of them. We got a truck driver. There was an article written in New York Times but you don't throw away people. These guys, you got it, you're wearing it. Your tie, your shirt, whatever came on a truck, and these guys, they're great people. I've talked to a million of them. We want to be the place where they come that feels like home and we want to make a better day for the truck or the driver. It's a tough job. They work hard. They're waking their families. When they come into a pilot. It should feel like somewhat of an oasis. >> Right so, it's super clean I understand. >> Yeah, we try to make them clean. Remember If you're a truck driver and you're away for week's on end. You're going to shower at our locations and so the showers are cleaned and maintained after every shower. Nobody gets in a dirty shower. The rest it's challenging. We have 3000 people come through our doors every day at every location so it's challenging to keep the rest rooms in particular clean. But the showers are cleaned before anybody gets in them. >> And you own the real estate or you lease it? >> We own. >> Dave: Really. >> I'm sure we lease some of this. I've got a question for Dave. We own most of our-- >> But your in the real estate business too. >> Oh yeah. We're definitely in the real estate business. >> What about the data? How is the way in which you use data evolving? >> It's evolving very rapidly and we are a data rich company especially with respect to the professional driver which is the majority of our profitable business. They scan their loyalty card whenever they come. We have a 92% swipe rate and that's because they use those points to buy food, buy showers. >> Rebecca: They're rewarded. >> They're rewarded and it's lucrative to them. They're managing a business so they use that as currency. So that data provides us with the ability to solve. We needed utility along the customer journey. For example, we may know when a guy needs a shower and we may have a fuel buying advantage at a certain location. Offer them a free shower if he fuels at location X because it's beneficial for him and us. Okay we're going to give him a free shower or a free slice of pizza if we feel we have an advantage with respect to purchasing petroleum. >> You're building loyalty. >> Right and builds loyalty so that's on the customer side. >> Rebecca: That's the nudge they need to walk in-- >> To be able to use our digital platforms, our digital properties to take the data and drive behavior, and loyalty. It's really about loyalty. We want to give good things to our loyal customers, take good care of them and solve the problems they have. 'Cause they'll come back. And Jimmy says we want them to come back. He says it and we do things that are going to solve the problem they have. They're going to come back because it's the least friction. >> Are you using data for the logistics in any way, for these truckers in other ways? >> Yeah, that's not Inforum, however well for the truckers. We're using logistics with respect to how we procure petroleum. And I'm probably not going to get into a lot of that because we feel it's a competitive thing there with respect to how we do it. And we are investing a good bit of money into how we procure and manage how we distribute petroleum to our various locations. >> That's a data lever. You got advantage better than-- >> That's where a lot of data reach and we can use data very effectively. >> So data literally is oil. We had a guest on. >> Well data is abundant insights aren't necessarily so that's where you're making money. You've mentioned before Mike that you said you are more confident after you go through this migration, but Inforum was the right decision. What gives you that confidence? Can you double click on that? >> Yeah, it's a couple of things. Number one, and we talked about the technical debt right. So lifting everything to the cloud give me a unique opportunity to eliminate the technical debt 'cause we're not going to write it. We're going to stay current on the latest release of the software. Whereas if you looked around here, everybody will tell you they're behind releases, releases, releases on enterprise software that they've purchased from somebody else that's not in the cloud. So number one elimination of technical debt and staying current on the existing platforms. You really can't customize it. You can customize it within the tool so with the customization or configuration or extensibility carries along as they operate the software. That's the biggest events and I think being in the cloud. I was showing some data to my boss the other day regarding how our infrastructure investment has gone up. Really been able to manage the actual investment with the number of servers, VMware and all that we're running has grown exponentially. That's 'cause we hadn't retire anything. We're going to, with Inforum we're retire 26 platforms. They're going away. They'll be out of the infrastructure and it will be in the cloud. I don't have to manage anymore. >> You're getting rid of stuff, wow. >> Mike: Getting rid of it. >> GRS recall, that never happens in IT. >> I took personal responsibility for the decommissioning aspect of the project. >> I'm going to ask you another IT question is that latest release because you're in the cloud and you're multi-tenet, you have to go essentially into the next release. Does that create down stream problems for you. How do you plan for that? >> Well we're new into it, okay. We're working with Inforum on that and it's perfect now but they get it. We got to be careful when we make the release so we can be prepared for it. So far there have been upgrades and it's been nerve racking. A new release of code that we hadn't really tested or whatever but I think we'll get that route resolved. I said it's new, we got to become efficient in how that happens. We need a little bit of prior notice. >> Dave: Forced agile. >> Yeah, forced agile. Here it comes. (laughing) >> There's a lot of buzz about artificial intelligence here at Inforum. Where would you say Pilot Flying J is with regard to using artificial intelligence as part of your workforce. Giving your workers access to it and also more tools to make the right decision at the right time. >> I think it's at the stage now where it's really cool and it's somewhat of a buzz thing. AI when machine learning. I think it's going to be very relevant and probably not the too distant future. It's not on my immediate road map to worry about artificial intelligence. We thought about doing a project with IBM on fuel procurement and pricing with Lawson. It's just really not quite ready yet. What we can develop is deep insights with the data we have to make better decisions, and put power in the hands of our pricing team or our logistics team to make really good decisions. I think that's for us. Let's get that perfected and then we talked about the voice recognition that we heard yesterday. That I think is imminent and I think it's important for us and it's going to be on our road map because as a truck driver. I'm driving and if I can have the ability to ask questions of our app and purvey information back to that driver, without him having to touch his phone. There's a value of that. Most that has to be architected through the right type of data. How we structure our data to be able to access via natural speech but it is something that is on our road map. >> How large is your IT organization? Roughly. >> In number of people? >> Dave: Yeah. We have about 250 people in our IT organization but we do have a significant use of partners. >> And they're distributed or? >> No, they're in Tennessee. And for the notes popping now we use offshore resources with certain integration partners. We have a couple primary integration partners that we're using. >> So reason I'm asking so as you move to this cloud sass platform. How are you thinking about protecting your data and is it changing. >> It's a good question. And all of a sudden, for awhile there I think we do a great as securing it. We invested a significant amount of money protecting our data. I think I'd be naive to say that we could do a better job than Amazon web services. >> Dave: I would agree, no offense. >> And I think one of the gentleman was speaking yesterday said the same thing. And one of my guys looked at me says that's what we've been saying. I think there's always a risk. Security is a big deal especially with what's happened with one-acry and the subsequent problem. There's going to be more. I think that Amazon could be on top of it. I think together we can do a good job on security. It doesn't worry me anymore than it worries me everyday with respect to my own infrastructure. And it does worry me just not anymore. >> Great, well Mike, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a really enlightening conversation. >> Okay, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Ballante. We'll have more from Inforum in a little bit. (uptempo piano music)

>> Voiceover: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SapphireNow. Headlines sponsored by SAP Hana Cloud, the leader in platform as a service, with support from Console, Inc., the Cloud internet company. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier, and Peter Burris. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Orlando, Florida, for SAP Sapphire coverage from SiliconANGLE Media, theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, and extract the signal for the noise. Want to give a shout out to our sponsors, who allow us to get here, SAP Hana Cloud platform, Console, Inc., EMC, Cap Gemini, thanks for supporting us. We appreciate it. Our next guest is Mitch Kick, Global Vice President, Head of Strategy and Programs for SAP Global Ecosystem. We love strategy guys because, they get the chess board. And they look like they're always playing chess, 3-D chess. Been looking at the landscape, looking at the horse on the track. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you very much. Good to be here. >> It's an evolving ecosystem. It's fluid, but yet, active. The Apple announcement, certainly notable news for SAP. Certainly, the Cloud, mobile, social data trend, the confluence of those things, causing massive innovation surge. So you, got a lot going on. >> Absolutely. >> What is the current ecosystem? >> Well, you know, when you think about the way SAP looks at it's ecosystem, I mean certainly we have those traditional types of partners, who resell our product. But, when we talk about our global ecosystem, we're really talking about those partners who are either strategic service partners, technology partners, some emerging partners and names that you mentioned, like Apple, Uber, Facebook, some of these, they're not your grandfathers, SAP partners. And so, we're really moving to partner in new ways. To co-innovate new types of solutions, that take advantage of the trends in the digital landscape. >> John: Like what are you doing with Facebook? >> Well, Facebook is an example, it's something where we said, "Look, there's all this social data," "that's out there. How do we put that together with" "our Hybris, CEC, types of solutions," "our commerce solutions?". To basically allow marketers to do one-to-one marketing, that leverages the power of Facebook data, and your enterprise data, brings it together in a very manageable tool. >> That must've been a very hard deal, because they're very controlled about their data. And also, each person has their profile settings. So, that's awesome. >> Yeah, and it's something that allows for marketers to just do much more targeting, much more insightful targeting. You know, we announced that last year and over the course of the last year had a number of really interesting pilot examples. >> Can developers get involved in that Or is this more of SAP directly, kind of thing? >> Well that, is an example of where we are creating a solution that sort of packages it turnkey. But, you know when you think something like in Apple, the beauty of that one is, not only are we developing these beautiful industry applications, that are going to be in targeted industries, and I don't know if you saw them, they were out on the floor here. >> Yeah, impressive. >> With regard to retail, or with regard to.. >> Well start-ups will come out of the woodwork just in a short time, have hundreds of employees, with this ecosystem. >> Well, exactly. I guess the point I was making with the Apple deal, is not only are we working with to design some really incredible industry apps, but then we're also creating the software developer kit, making that into the Hana Cloud platform, so that if you're developing on Hana Cloud platform, it now becomes another compelling reason you can leverage these beautiful interfaces, and these beautiful tools, that take full advantage of native capabilities on the Apple devices. And so it's a way that our partnership not only delivers, kind of near-term solutions that matter for us, but enables our broader ecosystem of solution partners to capitalize. >> It's fastest to innovation. I mean, you're going to get more R and D, and then real production apps faster that way. >> Absolutely. >> From the developer. So that's Core. David Valente and I always talk about courses for horses, which is, you know, certain things fit certain ways. There seems to be now, with the Cloud platform, an opportunity for developers to come in. So I want you to explain how Hana fits in. 'Cause this, Hana Cloud and then this Hana Cloud platform. What's the difference between the two? Can you just quickly share what that means to the ecosystem? >> Well, Hana as a database, I mean, the thing about the Hana Cloud Platform is that, that creates platform for our solution partners to extend, and integrate, as well as build and develop on it. And you'd say, "Well, as a platform as a service," "are you guys using HCP, to go out there and win" "the past wars?" In the generic sense of the past, that's really not the intention. The intention is, we've got this huge installed base. We've got these service partners, who are working very closely with their customers to innovate on top of, so that once our customers move to that digital core of S4 Hana, they can use HCP as that extension and integration platform, to tie together a number of different things. And a lot of the things that are, you know, when you think about digital transformation, there is so much activity, and discussion around the customer experience, and architecting a beautiful customer experience, with mobile devices, with you know, targeted types of commerce on the front end. But, what people are coming to realize, I think, is the importance of having that end-to-end. Because, you aren't going to be able to deliver the beautiful experience. And so, the example with, you know I was on a panel yesterday with Uber and Tumi. As an example, Tumi, luxury retailer that wants to create, not only a compelling customer experience that embodies the best of its luxury brand, but also is facing the threat of Amazon Prime Same-Day delivery, in metropolitan areas. And the beauty is, by partnering with Uber, and SAP, we are able to incorporate that seamlessly, as an option for Same-Day delivery. They can deliver in 30 minutes, for seven dollars, it's game-changing. That's an example of where we provide, here at this event, an early window into the type of co-innovation that we are doing. It's sort of like, in the past where you'd think, "Well, SAP has a certain solution footprint," "and we're going to partner with other software companies," "who can plug-in to that footprint.". Now you have, in the new world, where there are industry ecosystems like Uber, platforms that you can capitalize on, it's the business network. You can plug-in business networks to, an overall solution to customers, that's really compelling and that delivers opportunities in ways that we couldn't have imagined a few years ago. >> I want to build on that. So, historically, strategy has been three to five years, tied to asset values, mainly fixed asset values, and how are we going to generate a return in those fixed asset, over an extended period of time. You're describing a world where, whereas especially as those assets become more programmable, they can be applied to a broader array of activities, and opportunities, where the horizon starts to shrink pretty dramatically, the strategic horizon. And it becomes more, "What capabilities do we have?", and "How do we improve those capabilities," "and drive them forward?". And that's a crucial way of thinking about partnerships, is partnerships, as capabilities. I think that's where you were going. >> Absolutely. >> Are you thinking now about partnerships in the ecosystem as crucial capabilities, not only for SAP, but for SAP customers? >> They've always been, in many ways, when you think about, customers need a whole solution. In the past, even when the on-prem software world, you didn't get the whole solution by just buying the software package, it required a lot of additional service. With the Cloud model's that are emerging, it's much more easy to consume the software functionality, but there still is a tremendous amount of on-going innovation, differentiation, customization. And that's why when you look at, a lot of where we're going with our solution, you can hear Mike Getlin talking about our success factors product, and the fact that, "Well, how do partners help us?", "Do our service partners help us in the same way" "of just implementing software?". No. There role is really in integrating and extending it, and creating micro-services on top of it, that then say, "This is a really unique capability" "that's essential for delivering value" "to this particular customer or client.". So, you're now finding that because of our ecosystem, that is getting plugged into these new ways of contributing, we can now have a broad array of contribution. People understand how they can plug-in and capitalize on that, and deliver real innovation and benefit to the end customer. >> So you look a lot at industry trends. As you walk the floor here, what trends are starting to emerge, for you, and what is getting you excited, as a strategist? >> From my standpoint, when you think about digital transformation, and honestly, we were joking a lot about this whole term, because when it first game out, it was sort of like, "I'm not familiar with anyone who's actually" "doing analogue transformation.". All IT is digital. We've been doing digital things for years. And transformation, I mean, I was involved in the early '90s and the big re-engineering wave. Right? Where you're re-engineering, using technology and what not, so what is really different here? And I think what we see, is that, through all these trends, there's sort of confluence of them, and people map out a dozen, two dozen different trends that are going to change the world, they speak breathlessly about all these things. But in the end, what difference does it really make? From my standpoint, it's really three. One is you're starting to see all these things change the customer experience, fundamentally. Right? To the real-time, mobile devices, one-to-one. That's being enabled now. You're also seeing the difference in how value is delivered, in terms of IOT, instrumenting the broader landscape, etc. And you're seeing a difference in business models, in terms of how value is captured. You can think about it as, "Well, how is value consumed?", "How is value being delivered?", "How is value being captured?". The real, so what, is that all these different individual technology trends are combining to make those differences happen, that enable completely different ways of making money, of growing of opportunity. >> It changes the analogue, where, the analogue piece used to be the transactional, digital then hands off to analogue, or vice versa. That whole thing, end-to-end you just talked about, is an end-to-end digital. But the analogue role of the person, is augmented differently. So what you said is interesting because, I think people look at it differently and say, "Hey, if it's digital end-to-end," "where does analogue fit in?". Well still, people walking around here at the show, we're face-to-face, so I think it's interesting when you look at the optimization of digital. I'll take sales leads, for instance or marketing automation. You know, get the form, pass the leads to the sales people, they go knock on the door, call, email, that's analogue transaction. That's now digital. >> Mitch: Right. >> But the still, analogue components. What's your thoughts on that? How do you look at it? 'Cause you still got to do business, the people still are going to be involved. >> That really hit home when we were talking about this Uber example, because everybody talks about Tumi, they were talking about, "Well, its a beautiful experience." for somebody to be able to then say, "I got a one-hour delivery.". We can all identify with going to a retail outlet and they say, "Oh, I'm sorry, we don't have any more" "of those in the store, but we've got one" "that's 40 minutes away, if you want to go drive there.". Well, what if now all of the sudden you can get the product in to this store, in the next 30 minutes? Or, deliver it to wherever you happen to be, in 30 minutes? That changes the game. >> John: And that's user experience. >> Yeah. But, the thing is, so that's nifty, that's great, it's really compelling. But, when you start thinking about what it would take to work this, okay? Well now, you're going to have to have an implication for those retail store people. And so, this notion of, "How are we making this" "a beautiful experience for the retail clerk?", who now, instead of just serving the store, is going to get pinged because, "Hey, wait a minute," "we've got some deliveries that you're going to have to" "pick and pack, to get ready for some Uber driver" "to come in." That's a change to them. So, when you talk about implication, that highlights all of the, "change management", all of the, "how does it make a difference" "in individuals work?", and there's always going to be that last mile engagement that is needed. And that's really when you start talking about trends, how do we see things changing, I think about our service partners, I see their role changing to enable the real business change. >> Well that's it, that's it. The impact is clear. Totally agree, 100%. It's the confluence that magnifies that change, and its massive. It's frickin' awesome. Everyone can look at it and say, "Damn, its going to be big!". My final question to you is, given that impact, what advice are you sharing with your ecosystem, in terms of how to prepare for it? How to be ready not to go out of business, or help your customers not go out of business? And enable them to actually compete, digitally, in the transformation. >> Well, when we look at it, part of the challenge is that the ecosystem is so diverse, that you know, often your guidelines are speaking to specific people. The one thing I would say is, everybody is going out and talking a digital message, we need to be on the same song sheet. So when your solution partner, or service partner, and you've got your own offerings, your own reference architecture's, et cetera, let's work together to make sure that we are all singing from the same sheet. Second thing is, it's really imperative that we, basically migrate our installed base, to the digital core. So, S4 Hana, getting enabled around that, making that change happen, that enables all sorts of other benefits. And the third thing would be, the importance of then leveraging Hana Cloud platform. Because, the integrations that were hard coded, from yesterday, are no longer valid. So, if you leverage Hana Cloud platform from integration standpoint, you're really allowing for this much more agile, and fluid, innovation cycle to happen, in a much faster clip. And that's really what our customers are going to need, and it's going to take all of us working together to deliver that promise, of digital transformation. >> Well the Apple deal puts you guys front and center, on the user experience side, consumerization of IT. The chess board, multiple dimensions of chess, going on at the SAP ecosystem. Mitch, thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely. >> Welcome to The Cube Alumni Club. This is The Cube here live at Sapphire, we'll be right back. You're watching, The Cube.