>> Welcome to the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Data Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm pleased to welcome JT Giri, the CEO and founder of nOps, to the program. JT, welcome. It's great to have you. >> Thank you, Lisa. Glad to be here. >> Talk to me about nOps. This was founded in 2017, you're the founder. What do you guys do? >> Yeah. So just a little bit background on myself. You know, I've been migrating companies to AWS ever since EC2 was in beta. And you know, in the beginning I had to convince people like, "Hey, you should move to cloud." And the question people used to ask me, like, "Is cloud secure?" I'm glad no one is asking that question anymore. So, as I was building and migrating customers to the cloud, one of the things I realized very early on, is just cloud, there are so many resources, so many teams provisioning resources, then how do you align with your business goals? So we created nOps so that, for a mission, how do you are you build a platform where you make sure every single change and every single resource in the cloud is aligned with the business needs, right? Like we really helped people to make the right trade-offs. >> So you mentioned you've been doing this since EC2 was in beta, and we just celebrated, with AWS, EC2's 15th birthday. So you've been doing this awhile. You don't look old enough, but you've been doing this for awhile. So one of the things that I read on the website, I always love to understand messaging, that nOps says about itself, "The first cloud ops platform "designed to sync revenue growth across your teams." Talk to me about how you do that. >> Yeah. So one of the problems we see in the market right now, there are a lot of tools, there are a lot of dashboards that shows like, "Hey, you have this many issues, "here's the opportunity to fix issues. "And here are the security issues." We're more focused on how do we take those issues from a backlog and fixing those issues. Right? So our focus is more on operationalizing, so your teams could actually own that, prioritize, and actually remediate those issues. So that's where we focus our energy. >> Got it. Let's talk about cloud ops now, and how it varies or differs from traditional cloud management. >> Yeah, I think, like I mentioned, cloud management seems to be more like visibility. And everyone knows that there are challenges in their cloud environment. But when you focus more on the operation side, what we really try to do, from an issue, how do you actually fix that issue? How do you prioritize? How do you make the right trade-offs. Right? Trade offs is important because we make a lot of decisions in the cloud when you're building your infrastructure. Sometime you might have to prioritize for costs, sometime you might have to prioritize based on the SLA. You might have to add more resources to hit your SLAs. So we really help you to prioritize. And we build sort of accountability. You know, you can create roles. Most of the time, what we noticed, I truly believe that if it's everyone's responsibility, it's no one's responsibility. You know? So what we do is we help, within the tool, to establish clear roles and responsibilities. And we show audit log of people reviewing and fixing security issues. And we show audit log of people fixing and reviewing cost issues. That's one way we're trying to bring accountability. >> I like what you said, if everyone's responsible, then really no one is. And that seems to be a persistent problem that we see in businesses across industries, is just still that challenge with aligning IT and business. And especially with the dynamics of the market, JT, that we've seen in the last 18 months, things are moving so quickly. Talk to me about how you guys have been helping companies, especially in the last 18 months, with such change to get that alignment. So that that visibility and those clear roles are established and functional. >> Yeah. You know, what we really do is obviously listen to the customers. Right? And one of the challenges we hear over and over is like, you know, I know I have issues in the cloud environment that I really need help prioritizing. And they're really looking for a framework where they can come in and say, "Okay these are the people who are responsible for security. "These are the people who are responsible for the cost." So as part of onboarding with nOps, that's one of the things you do, you define your workloads. By the way, we automatically create your workload across all your accounts. And then we allow you to move resources around if you like. But then one of the first thing we do is assign roles and responsibilities for each one of these workloads. Oh, it's been incredible to see, when you have that kind of accountability, people actually do make sure that the resources are aligned with the business needs. >> So are you seeing, I mean, that's kind of a cultural shift. That changed management is a challenging process. How are you seeing that evolve in organizations who've been used to doing things maybe in a little bit of a blinders on kind of mode? >> Yeah. Well, changed management is an area where we spent a lot of time, because in cloud, changed management is almost like a fire hose. Right? There's so many changes and you could have 20 people or 20 different teams making changes. I think what people really want is sort of root cause analysis. Like, "Hey, this is what changed here. "Here's why it changed. "And here's how actions we could take, or you could take." So this is where we focus on this, where nOps focuses on. We really help people to show the root cause analysis, these three, four things, these three, four changes are related to this cost increase or these security issues. And we show like a clear path on taking action on those issues. >> That's critical. The ability to show the paths, to take the action to remediate or make any changes, course corrections. As we've learned in the last 18 months, real time is no longer for so many industries, a nice-to-have. The ability to be able to pivot on the fly is a survival and thriving mechanism. So that is really key. I do want to talk about the relationship with nOps and AWS. Here we are at the AWS startup showcase. Give me a little overview on the partnership. >> It's been an incredible. Like I said, I have a long history of working with AWS, and I started a consulting company, a very, very successful one. And so I have years of working with AWS partner teams. I think it's incredible. We were the first company in this, maybe not first, maybe very early. We were part of this Well-Architected framework. And when I came out of that training, the Well-Architected training, I was so excited. I was like, "Wow, this is amazing." You know? Because, to me, whenever you're building infrastructure, you really are making trade-offs. You know, sometime you optimize for cost, sometime you optimize for reliability. So it has been incredible to work with the Well-Architected team. Or Amazon also has this, another program, called FTR: Foundational Technical Review. We've been working closely with that team. So yeah, it's been amazing to collaborate with AWS. >> It sounds pretty synergistic. Have you had a chance influence infrastructure, and some of the technical direction? >> Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We work very closely. One of the cool thing about AWS is that they do take customers' feedback very, very seriously. And, Lisa, also other way around. Right? If AWS is going to build something, having that insight into the roadmap is very beneficial. Because if they're doing it, there's no point of us trying to reinvent the wheel. So that kind of synergy is very helpful. >> That's excellent. Let's talk about customers, now. I always loved talking about customer use cases and outcomes. You guys have a great story with Uber. Walk us through what the challenges were, how nOps came in, what you deployed, and how the business is being impacted positively. >> Yeah, I think Uber and all the enterprises, they sort of have the same challenge, right? There are many teams provisioning infrastructure. How do you make sure all those resources are aligned with your business needs? And in addition to that, not only you have different teams provisioning resources, there are different workloads. And these workloads have different requirements. Right? Some are production workloads, some are just maybe task workloads. So one of the things Uber did, they really embraced sort of nOps' way of managing infrastructure, building accountability, sharing these dashboards with all the different teams. And it was incredible, because within first 30 days they were able to save up to 15%. This was in their autonomous vehicle unit. And they spent a lot of money. And having to see that kind of cost saving, it was just amazing. And we see this over and over. And so like when customers are using platform, it's just incredible how much cost savings are there. >> So Uber, you said, in their autonomous vehicle department saved 15% in just the first 30 days alone. And you said that's a common positive business outcome that you're seeing from customers across industries, is that immediate cost savings. Tell me a little bit more about that as a differentiator of nOps' business. >> Yeah. Because as I mentioned earlier, one of the things we do, we bring accountability. Right? Most of the time when people, before nOps, maybe there are resources that are not accounted for. There is not clear owners, there's no budgets, there's no chargebacks. So I do think that's a huge differentiator of nOps, because, as part of onboarding, as you establish these roles and these responsibilities, you find so much unaccounted resources. And sometimes you don't even need those resources, and you shut them down. And those are the easiest next steps. Right? Like, you don't need to architect, you just shut it down. Like no one needs these resources. So that, I do believe, that's our strength. And we were able to demonstrate this over and over, this, on average, 15-30% cost saving in the first month or so. >> That's excellent. That's a lot of what customers, especially these days, are looking for, is cost optimization across the organization. What are some of the things that you've seen, that nOps has experienced in the last 18 months, with so much acceleration? Anything that surprised you, any industries that you see as really leading edge here, or prime candidates for your technology? >> Yeah. A couple of things. We see a lot of partners, a lot of other consulting company, leveraging nOps as a part of their offering. That's been amazing, we have a lot of partners who really leverage nOps as a go to market and ongoing management of their customers. And I do see that shift from the customer side as well. I think the complexity of cloud continues to kind of increase, like you just mentioned, it sounds like from last 18 months, it accelerated even more. How do you stay up to date, you know? And how do you always make sure that you're following best practices? So companies bring in partners to help them implement solutions. And then these partners are leveraging tools like nOps. And we've seen a lot of momentum around that. >> Tell me a little bit about how partners are leveraging nOps. What are some of the synergistic benefits on both sides? >> Yeah, so normally partners leverage nOps, you know, they will use it for Well-Architected assessments. And, you know, I've personally done a lot of these Well-Architected assessments. And, you know, early on, I kind of learned that, assessments are only good if you're able to move forward with fixing issues in the customer's environment. So what we really do, we really help customers, or sorry, we really help partners to actually do these Well-Architected assessments automatically. We auto discover issues, and then we help them to create proposals so they can present it to the customers like, "Hey, here are the five things we can help you with, "and here's how much it will cost." And, you know, we really streamline that whole process. And it's amazing that some partners used to take like days to do these assessments. Now they can do it an hour. And we also increase the close rate on SoW's because they are a lot more clear. You know, like here are the issues and here's how we can help you to fix those issues. >> You got some great business metrics there, in terms of speed and reduction in cost, reduction in speed. But it sounds like what you're doing is helping those partners build a business case for their customers far more efficiently and more clearly than they've ever been able to do before. >> Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And... >> Go ahead. >> Yeah, so absolutely. Before nOps, everyone is using spreadsheets most of the time. Right? It's spreadsheets to collect information, and emails back and forth. And after the partner's start using nOps, they use nOps to facilitate these assessments. And once they have these customers as ongoing customers, they use nOps for checks and balances to make sure they're constantly aligned. Right? And we have a lot of success of having real revenue impact on partners' business, by leveraging nOps. >> Excellent. That's true value and true trust there. Last question. Where can you point folks, a CTA or URL that you want people to go to to learn more about nOps? >> Yeah. Basically just go to nops.io and just put on signup. Yeah. I love doing this stuff. I love talking to the customers. Feel free to reach out to me, as well: jt@nops. I would love to have a conversation. But yeah, just nops.io is the best place to get started. >> Awesome, nops.io. And I can hear enthusiasm for this, and your genuineness comes through the zoom screen here, JT. I totally thought that the whole time. Thank you for talking to me about nOps, how you guys are helping organizations really embrace cloud ops and evolve from traditional cloud management tools. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> For JT Giri, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS Startup Showcase.

>> What does it take for an entrepreneur to develop a disruptive idea, prove that it works and bring it to market. I can think of a lot of things, but one of the most important is speed. (jet engine roars) This is Dave Vellante from theCUBE inviting you to join me and John Furrier for a special CUBE on cloud startup showcase made possible by AWS. Joining theCUBE will be Michael Lebow of McKinsey. We'll also be joined by Greylock's Jerry Chen. He's going to bring the VC perspective. CIO Ben Haynes is also going to be there to lay down his practical knowledge. We'll also have Jeff Barr of AWS and together we'll feature 10 innovative companies from the AWS Global Startup Program. So if you're a technology practitioner, you'll see some of the innovations that might help transform your business. If you're an investor, you'll get a glimpse of the future and if you're an entrepreneur, you'll see how 10 companies are rocketing toward escape velocity. So join us March, 24th at 9:00 AM Pacific for theCUBE on cloud startup showcase, Innovations with Cloud Data and Cloud Ops. We'll see you there. (upbeat music)

(music) >> Everyone, welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. We're here in Palo Alto, theCUBE Studios, I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE video, we're here with a very special guest and the new CEO of a hot startup, Christine Heckart, CEO Scalyr. Welcome to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on. So, you're the new CEO of Scalyr, the CEO transitioned. >> Super great founder, great engineering team. >> Yes, yes. >> Hot startup, lot of finance and a lot of customers. Tell us about Scalyr. >> So, Scalyr was founded by a guy named Steve Newman. He is a serial entrepreneur. Scalyr is his 7th company. His 6th company was called Writely and it got bought by Google and is what we all know and love as Google Docs today. So, when he was inside Google, building out Google Docs he had the same problem that a lot of engineers do right now especially if they're on a modern stack. It's really hard to troubleshoot. It's hard to figure out what's running well and if there's a problem where it's at and fix it quickly. And so he left in 2011 and he founded Scalyr. >> And so, the company has how many employees? Just give us the quick numbers of employees, funding, venture involved, customers... Give us the quick numbers. >> The company has a little over 50 employees. It just took a Series A round about a year, a little under a year-and-a-half ago. Led by Shasta Ventures. There are 300 paying customers. We grew the core customer base last year by 170% revenue. So, it's growing very quickly. We more than doubled the employees in the last year. So, like you say, it's on fire and we're trying to scale up ourselves as we help our customers scale. >> So growth is obviously rocket ship growth is an attractive, enticing opportunity for you. You've been there, done that. So, what else attracted you to the opportunity? What made you make the move to take the leadership helm as the chief of Scalyr? >> The thing that attracted me most to Scalyr is that the world runs on code right now. And for companies for whom the code is the company downtime is money, it's critical. But, in these modern stacks, it's really hard to figure out where the problem is. Everything's been so abstracted. And if you're cloud-based, if you're moving to serverless, if you're on Kubernetes or some kind of container platform trying to do orchestration... Any of that makes it faster and easier to build a service but a lot harder to figure out if and where there's a problem within the service. And Scalyr's designed by engineers for engineers on modern stacks to help them figure out where that problem is and get it solved very quickly. >> So obviously the new wave is the cloud. Cloud natives search for big opportunities converging. What's the market opportunity? What are you guys going after in terms of, if you look at the marketplace, what's the segment you're going after? Lay that out, what segment are you in? Is it just cloud, is it a piece of cloud native, what's the market opportunity? >> We serve customers who have applications built on a new stack a cloud-based stack. And typically the people who use us most and who love us most are the site-reliability engineers, responsible for keeping it up and running. Dev Ops, true developers... One of our largest customers is a company called Zalando. They're an older company that did a digital transition, and so they do online e-commerce now, one of the largest in Europe. And for their engineers, 25% of their engineers use the product daily. 50% use it weekly. So, it's part of the workflow. It helps them do their jobs better. So, it's a utility. And the founder, you said, worked at Google, obviously he saw the scale there. They have a site reliability engineer concept that's obviously run a huge infrastructure. Is that kind-of the market you're going after? Dev Ops, SRE types? >> Yep, so we're an observability tool. There's kind-of two camps of observability. We've started in the logging space. So, what we're really known for is the fast logging tool. And the reason why we're known for being fast is unlike all the other architectures that were optimized for the more traditional stack, we've been written and optimized for the new stack and we're the only architecture that doesn't use keyword index in order to do that search. And that's what makes us fast. But it's also what makes us more affordable. And it contributes to, the architecture contributes to the simplicity of how you can use the tool and how the tool is written. >> So, the core tech is, under the hood would be, what, what's the core tech in that. Because speed obviously means you've got some technology there. What's the core technology that makes that speed work? >> So, we're a true multi-tenancy product, we run on Amazon ourself, it's a multi-tenancy system, it uses massive parallel processing. And basically we can ingest any data, in fact we're designed for machine data, for logs, for things that don't, they're not full documents, it's not like a video or something on the World Wide Web. These are little tiny events that come in and there's lots and lots and lots of them. Scalyr is the name of the company, we scale up and we scale out. And what we do is, when you go to run a query we throw every processor in our system at every query that comes in. And the reason why that becomes important in this multi-tenancy architecture is the more customers we have, the more data that we ingest, the more servers we have to throw at every query for every customer. So as we grow, the service gets better, it gets faster, it gets more affordable for all customers. >> That's the best thing about the cloud, you can bring that compute to bear so you have a little flywheel of acceleration. Talk about the role of data, because this is interesting, one of the core problems we hear a lot in the cloud native world is that so many, now, sets of services being deployed Kubernetes is becoming the de-facto sceme for orchestration around micro-services, containers obviously they're our standard as well. Which means there's more instrumentation, right? So, I could almost see how the founder saw this future because he lived it. >> Exactly. >> He lived the future, and now the real world's going "hey, we have that Google-like problem, we have tons of services playing around but it's not just logging and getting a query back in minutes. These services are talking to applications through each other. This is like mission critical. >> Very mission critical. >> Is this what you guys are doing? >> Right, if you are running in a traditional environment and you're running sort-of traditional applications there are really good logging solutions out there for that. That's what Splunk was founded on, they're amazing at doing that. But, nobody had built an optimized logging system and an observability system for the new stack. And that's what we're designed to do. And you use, you said, in minutes. And minutes is what it takes for most log queries in a traditional environment. 96% of all of our queries happen in less than a second. We're fast. >> So, this is really what the Agile teams need, Dev Ops teams need. >> Yes. When code is money, when it's the company, when every second of downtime, or even a service that's impaired, it might not be hard down but it's not running the way that it should, that impacts the customer experience, it impacts how many customers you can get if you're a real-time business, it impacts revenue. It's important to get that service up and running quickly. >> So, you guys are re-imagining logging, which is more mission critical rather than okay, where the breach is, what's going on in the basic logs, like Splunk used to do. So, talk about the product. Who's the target persona, how is it consumed, you mentioned on the cloud, is it SAS? How does someone get involved, do they just download it, do they get a consult, talk about the product and the target audiences. >> So, it is SAS, it's delivered by SAS. We don't have a non-prime service today or an offering. And, typically it's the site-reliability engineer, the architects, the developers themselves, Dev Ops for sure, Cloud Ops, they're the ones that are using the tool day-to-day. And it's a beautiful dashboard, a lot of it is just point and click. You can go in, if you want to add English-language query, you don't have to learn a special query language to use this, that's why people say it's so fast and easy to learn to use and I think that's why we get the kind of daily usage we have. You don't have to be an expert in the tool, it's very intuitive, you get a dashboard, you can just keep clicking down off of a chart and get all the way to the code. In fact, we can link you from where the problem is straight into the code that underlies that so you can then go and solve the problem. >> So, it's really easy to get into. >> Very. >> So I don't need do any kind of elaborate configurations? >> No. You don't need to do elaborate configurations and, as importantly, you don't need to learn a new specialized query language. Which, again, in the more traditional systems you find that there's only a few people that really know how to use the product because you have to learn the query language. It's kind-of like CLI or something in networking. And so there's a few specialists and they're very good, but if you're an engineer and there's a problem and you want to use the tool, you don't have time to become an expert. You've got to just use it. And so, even though it's designed to search machine language, you can use English, it's pretty easy to figure out how to write that query, and it comes back so quickly, if you didn't get it quite right you can just refine and do the search again and narrow down. >> I can see why the V.C.'s like this, the venture capitalists, because it markets good, big wave, cloud native lot of growth there. Certainly hyper-scalers, enterprisers are coming next, so I can imagine that's more head room. Product is consumable, SAS, in the cloud, technology that's fast, compelling, >> You're good, you can be on the pitch team. >> Final check box is customers. >> Yes. >> So, how many customers do you have? >> We have 300 paying customers. That doubled in the last year, and we have some big names and a lot of small companies. So, some of the fun ones are Giphy, my kids love that, my husband, right? Using them every day. NBC Universal, kind-of on the other side of that. Companies for whom the application is the business. And it can be a traditional company that's trying to launch new digital transformation initiatives, or it can be companies that were born in the cloud. >> And that's only going to get better, again, the markup. There's more companies going to the cloud. Talk about multi-cloud, because you know we had conversations in the past before you came on Scalyr around multi-cloud. That's only going to increase the sets of microservices and the role of data. Not just code, because code is data. Data is code. It's going to be a whole data ops movement coming soon, we see that tsunami coming. How does the multi-cloud fit into all of this in your mind? Is it too early, is that coming later? Or, is it available now? Could your customers have the multi-cloud now? >> For our customers, if they are in a multi-cloud environment today, we're an ideal tool for them 'cause we can run on any of their clouds. Most customers are not yet in multi-cloud, but they're trying to get there. Just like most customers are not yet fully containerized, but you want to pick a tool today that will grow with you and get you to tomorrow. And that's where Scalyr comes in, because we are designed and optimized for that environment. And, there's kind-of no scale too big for us. The company was named very deliberately. We can scale up, we can scale out, and we can continue to be simple and fast as your business scales. >> Christine, you've had a track record, you've had a great career, you've seen a lot of waves of innovation. You've been working for big companies, a dozen start-ups, now you're back at a start-up. So, I got to ask you a personal question, how does it feel? What's it like back into the trenches? And, you've got a hot start-up here. One month on the job, what's going on there? >> I love it. I really love it. You know, there's 50 people in the company every one of them is high-energy they're so committed to the cause. You know, when the world runs on code and you help that code run better, you're making an impact on the world every single day. These people know it, they feel it. They're very committed. And, unlike some of the much bigger companies I've been at, you can innovate so quickly. So, I just finished my first 30 days onboarding, I have talked to our big customers, a couple dozen of our really big customers. And, they all say a couple of things over and over again, there's just some consistent themes. Fast always comes up, it's usually the first word. Simple comes up. Affordable, which is nice. People pay a lot of money for these tools and they don't always feel good about all that money. We can come in and be much more affordable and they appreciate that. But, the thing that kept coming up over and over again was the customer service and the customer support. And nobody, I come from worlds where nobody ever raves about customer service and customer support. So, it was odd and I dug a little bit, and there were two pieces to that. One, because we're 50 people, when somebody has a problem, we're all-in. It gets solved quickly. A lot of times we can sort-of flag that problem for the customer because we're keeping track. But the other thing that was brought up is when they need something that maybe we don't deliver today they ask for it. And a lot of times we can give it to them pretty quickly. There's not some big, huge long roadmap process. We're a small company, we can't always do it quickly, but a lot of times we can turn stuff around and it's great. >> Well, you're hitting the ground running, got your running shoes on, sounds like a great opportunity. You've got a lot of work to do! What are some of the priorities? I'm sure hiring is big. Take a minute to give the plug on for any hirings you have. >> So, we're just moving to brand new facilities in downtown San Mateo a couple blocks from Caltrain. And that is because we doubled the company size last year, and we need to double it again this year. So, we are hiring, if you know of any great people, please send them to us. We announced some new things at Amazon Reinvent, late last year, one of which is new distributed tracing. We're on the very leading edge of this trend, and it's an important one. It's probably a conversation maybe with Steve himself. Yeah, he's very knowledgeable, and it's a fascinating area because the APM systems, again, kind-of the traditional if you can say that for APM, have all been built for the front-end, for the websites. But, once you move into these container environments you need that same kind of capability for the back end. And so you need something called distributed tracing. It turns out that if you're born in the logs like we are doing that distributed tracing which links them together and gives you a picture systemically of what's happening and how you link the events for a fuller picture. We're kind-of uniquely good at that. So, we've got that coming out later this quarter. >> That'll attract some engineers 'cause that's a hard problem. >> It's a hard, a lot of the problems we solve are hard, interesting problems, and they're problems for the new stack, and they're problems at scale. And smart engineers like to work on that. >> You know, state's a big one, stateless applications, state is a huge problem I'm sure you guys are on, this is where the tracing plays in. >> Yes, exactly. >> Final question for you before we end is competition. Certainly people who are in the new world, going cloud native, they get it, they get the complexity, they get the opportunity as well. So, there's a lot of investment there. But, the folks that are looking at Scalyr like "ooh, what's the competitive lens"? How do you answer that? What's your response to differentiate, being different from the competition? So, there's lots and lots of observability tools, and even logging tools in the market. And from that standpoint you could say there's tons of competition. They're all built on keyword indexing, so they're all optimized for looking back, for yesterday's world. We're the only ones that are built on this very new architecture, designed for the future stack, designed for the new stack. And, we're the only ones that don't use keyword indexing. And, what we have is this amazing, multi-tenancy, columnar-based approach that gives you these advantages of fast, simple, and affordable. >> So you're staking the ground in the marketplace of speed, sub-second response, 2 queries, 4 runtime applications that are mission critical to businesses. Is that right? >> Said very well, thank you. >> Well, that's what we do here at theCUBE, we figure it out, we get the data. >> Christine, thanks for coming out. Congratulations on the new role. We'll be following you guys. Love the name, Scalyr. Scaling is table stakes now in the cloud. If you don't compete at scale, or operate at scale, or develop at scale, you're probably going to be in trouble. So, theCUBE's covering it as always. Thanks for watching, I'm John Furrier.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to the special CUBE conversation on secondary storage and data protection, which is one of the hottest topics in the business right now. Cloud, multi-cloud, bringing the Cloud experience to wherever your data lives and protecting that data driven by digital transformation. We're gonna talk about that with Patrick Osborne, the Vice President and General Manager for big data and secondary storage at HPE, good friend and CUBE alum. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great, thanks for having us. >> So let's start with some of those trends that I mentioned. I think, let's start with digital transformation. It's a big buzzword in the industry but it's real. I travel around, I talk to customers all the time, everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. And digital means data, data needs to be protected in new ways now, and so when we trickle down into your world, data protection, what are you seeing in terms of the impact of digital and digital transformation on data protection? >> Absolutely, great question. So the winds of change in secondary storage are blowing pretty hard right now. I think there's a couple different things that are driving that conversation. A, the specialization of people with specific backup teams, right, that's moving away, right. You're moving away from general storage administration and specialized teams to people focusing a lot of those resources now on Cloud Ops team, DevOps team, application development. So they want that activity of data protection to be automated and invisible. Like you said before, in terms of being able to re-use that data, the old days of essentially having a primary dataset and then pushing it off to some type of secondary storage which just sits there over time, is not something that customers want anymore. >> Right. >> They wanna be able to use that data, they wanna be able to generate copies of that, do test and dev, gain insight from that, being able to move that to the Cloud, for example, to be able to burst out there or do it for DR activities. So I think there's a lot of things that are happening when it comes to data that are certainly changing the requirements and expectations around secondary storage. >> So the piece I want to bring to the conversation is Cloud and I saw a stat recently that the average company, the average enterprise has, like, eight clouds, and I was thinking, sheesh, small company like ours has eight clouds, so I mean, the average enterprise must have 80 clouds when you start throwing in all the saas. >> Yeah. >> So Cloud and specifically, multi-cloud, you guys, HPEs, always been known for open platform, whatever the customer wants to do, we'll do it. So multi-cloud becomes really important. And let's expand the definition of Cloud to include private cloud on PRM, what we call True Private Cloud in the Wikibon world, but whether it's Azure, AWS, Google, dot, dot, dot, what are you guys seeing in terms of the pressure from customers to support multi... They don't want a silo, a data protection silo for each cloud, right? >> Absolutely. So they don't want silos in general, right? So I think a couple of key things that you brought up, private cloud is very interesting for customers. Whether they're gonna go on PRM or off PRM, they absolutely want to have the experience on PRM. So what we're providing customers is the ability, through APIs and seamless integration into their existing application frameworks, the ability to move data from point A to point B to point C, which could be primary all-flash, secondary systems, cloud targets, but have that be able to be automated full API set and provide a lot of those capabilities, those user stories around data protection and re-use, directly to the developers, right, and the database admins and whoever's doing this news or DevOps area. The second piece is that, like you said, everyone's gonna have multiple clouds, and what we want to do is we want to be able to give customers an intelligent experience around that. We don't necessarily need to own all the infrastructure, right, but we need to be able to facilitate and provide the visibility of where that data's gonna land, and over time, with our capabilities that we have around InfoSight, we wanna be able to do that predictably, make recommendations, have that whole population of customers learn from each other and provide some expert analysis for our customers as to where to place workloads. >> These trends, Patrick, they're all interrelated, so they're not distinct and before we get into the hard news, I wanna kinda double down on another piece of this. So you got data, you got digital, which is data, you've got new pressures on data protection, you've got the cloud-scale, a lot of diversity. We haven't even talked about the edge. That's another, sort of, piece of it. But people wanna get more out of their data protection investment. They're kinda sick of just spending on insurance. They'd like to get more value out of it. You've mentioned DevOps before. >> Yep. >> Better access to that data, certainly compliance. Things like GDPR have heightened awareness of things that you can do with the data, not just for backup, and not even just for compliance, but actually getting value out of the data. Your thoughts on that trend? >> Yeah, so from what we see for our customers, they absolutely wanna reuse data, right? So we have a ton of solutions for our customers around very low latency, high performance optimized flash storage in 3PAR and Nimble, different capabilities there, and then being able to take that data and move it off to a hybrid flash array, for example, and then do workloads on that, is something that we're doing today with our customers, natively as well as partnering with some of our ISV ecosystem. And then sort of a couple new use cases that are coming is that I want to be able to have data providence. So I wanna share some of my data, keep that in a colo but be able to apply compute resources, whether those are VMs, whether they are functions, lambda functions, on that data. So we wanna bring the compute to the data, and that's another use case that we're enabling for our customers, and then ultimately using the Cloud as a very, very low-cost, scalable and elastic tier storage for archive and retention. >> One of the things we've been talking about in theCUBE community is you hear that Bromite data is the new oil, and somebody in the community was saying, you know what? It's actually more valuable than oil. When I have oil, I can put it in my house or I can put it my car. But data, the unique attribute of data is I can use it over and over and over again. And again, that puts more pressure on data protection. All right, let's get into some of the hard news here. You've got kind of a four-pack of news that we wanna talk about. Let's start with StoreOnce. It's a platform that you guys announced several years ago. You've been evolving it regularly. What's the StoreOnce news? >> Yes, so in the secondary storage world, we've seen the movement from PBBA, so Purpose-Built Backup Appliances, either morphing into very intelligent software that runs on commodity hardware, or an integrated appliance approach, right? So you've got a integrated DR appliance that seamlessly integrates into your environment. So what we've been doing with StoreOnce, this is our 4th generation system and it's got a lot of great attributes. It has a system, right. It's available in a rote form factor at different capacities. It's also available as a software-defined version so you can run that on PRM, you can run it off PRM. It scales up to multiple petabytes in a software-only version. So we've got a couple different use cases for it, but what I think is one of the key things is that we're providing a very integrated experience for customers who are 3PAR Nimble customers. So it allows you to essentially federate your primary all-flash storage with secondary. And then we actually provide a number of use cases to go out to the Cloud as well. Very easy to use, geared towards the application admin, very integrative. >> So it's bigger, better, faster, and you've got this integration, a confederation as you called it, across different platforms. What's the key technical enabler there? >> Yeah, so we have a really extensible platform for software that we call Recovery Manager Central. Essentially, it provides a number of different use cases and user stories around copy data management. So it's gonna allow you to take application integrated snapshots. It's gonna allow you to do that either in the application framework, so if you're a DVA and you do Arman, you could do it in there, or if you have your own custom applications, you can write to the API. So it allows you to do snapshots, full clones, it'll allow you to do DR, so one box to another similar system, it'll allow you to go from primary to secondary, it'll allow you to archive out to the Cloud, and then all of that in reverse, right? So you can pull all of that data back and it'll give you visibility across all those assets. So, the past where you, as a customer, did all this on your own, right, bought on horizontal lines? We're giving a customer, based on a set of outcomes and applications, a complete vertically-oriented solution. >> Okay, so that's the, really, second piece of hard news. >> Yeah. >> Recovery Manager Central, RMC, 6.0, right-- >> Yeah. >> Is the release that we're on? And that's copy data management essentially-- >> Absolutely. >> Is what you're talking about. It's your catalog, right, so your tech underneath that, and you're applying that now across the portfolio, right? >> Absolutely. So, we're extending that from... We've had, for the past year, that ability to do the copy data management directly from 3PAR. We're extending that to provide that for Nimble. Right, so for Nimble customers that want to use all-flash, they want to use hybrid flash arrays from Nimble, you can go to secondary storage in StoreOnce and then out to the Cloud. >> Okay, and that's what 6.0 enables-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> That Nimble piece and then out to the Cloud. Okay, third piece of news is an ecosystem announcement with Commvault. Take us through that. >> Yeah, so we understand at HPE, given the fact that we're very, very focused on hybrid Cloud and we have a lot of customers that have been our customers for a long time, none of these opportunities are greenfield, right, at the end of the day. So your customers are, they have to integrate with existing solutions, and in a lot of cases, they have some partners for data protection. So one of the things that we've done with this ecosystem is made very public our APIs and how to integrate our systems. So we're storage people, we are data management folks, we do big data, we also do infrastructure. So we know how to manage the infrastructure, move data very seamlessly between primary, secondary, and the Cloud. And what we do is, we open up those APIs in those use cases to all of our partners and our customers. So, in that, we're announcing a number of integrations with Commvault, so they're gonna be integrating with our de-duplication and compression framework, as well as being able to program to what we call Cloud Bank, right? So, we'll be able to, in effect, integrate with Commvault with our primary storage, be able to do rapid recovery from StoreOnce in a number of backup use cases, and then being able to go out to the cloud, all managed through customers' Commvault interface. >> All right, so if I hear you correctly, you've just gotta double click on the Commvault integration. It's not just a go-to-market setup. It's deeper engineering and integration that you guys are doing. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, great. And then, of course the fourth piece is around, so your bases are loaded here, the fourth piece is around the Cloud economics, Cloud pricing model. Your GreenLake model, the utility pricing has gotten a lot of traction. When we're at HPE Discover, customers talking about it, you guys have been leaders there. Talk about GreenLake and how that model fits into this. >> Yeah, so, in the technology talk track we talk about, essentially, how to make this simple and how to make it scalable. At the end of the day, on the buying pattern side, customers expect elasticity, right? So, what we're providing for our customers is when they want to do either a specific integration or implementation of one of those components from a technology perspective, we can provide that. If they're doing a complete re-architecture and want to understand how I can essentially use secondary storage better and I wanna take advantage of all that data that I have sitting in there, I can provide that whole experience to customers as a service, right? So, the primary storage, your secondary storage, the Cloud capacity, even some of the ISV partner software that we provide, I can take that as an entire, vetted solution, with reference architectures and the expertise to implement, and I can give that to a customer in an OpEx as a service elastic purchasing model. And that is very unique for HPE and that's what we've gone to market with GreenLake, and we're gonna be providing more solutions like that, but in this case, we're announcing the fact that you can buy that whole experience, backup as a service, data protection as a service, through GreenLake from HPE. >> So how does that work, Patrick, practically speaking? A customer will, what, commit to some level of capacity, let's say, as an example, and then HPE will put in some extra headroom if, in fact, that's needed, you maybe sit down with the customer and do some kind of capacity planning, or how does that actually work, practically speaking? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we work with customers on the architecture, right, up front. So we have a set of vetted architectures. We try to avoid snowflakes, right, at the end of the day. We want to talk to customers around outcomes. So if a customer is trying to reach outcome XYZ, we come with a recommendation on how to do that. And what we can do is, we don't have very high up-front commitments and it's very elastic in the way that we approach the purchasing experience. So we're able to fit those modules in. And then we've made some number of acquisitions over the last couple years, right? So, on the advisory side, we have Cloud Technology Partners. We come in and talk about how do you do a hybrid cloud backup as a service, right? So we can advise customers on how to do that and build that into the experience. We acquired CloudCruiser, right? So we have the billing and the monitoring and everything that gets very, very granular on how you use that service, and that goes into how we bill customers on a per-metric usage format. And so we're able to package all of that up and we have, this is a kind of a little-known fact, very, very high NPS score for HPE financial services. Right, so the combination of our point next services, advisory, financial services, really puts a lot of meat behind GreenLake as a really good customer experience around elasticity. >> Okay, now all this stuff is gonna be available calendar Q4 of 2018, correct? >> Correct. >> Okay, so if you've seen videos like this before, we like to talk about what it is, how it works, and then we like to bring it home with the business impact. So thinking about these four announcements, and you can drill deeper on any one that you like, but I'd like to start, at least, holistically, what's the business impact of all of this? Obviously, you've got Cloud, we talked about some of the trends up front, but what are you guys telling customers is the real ROI? >> So, I think the big ROI is it moves secondary storage from a TCO conversation to an ROI conversation. Right, so instead of selling customers a solution where you're gonna have data that sits there waiting for something to happen, I'm giving customers a solution that's consumed as a service to be able to mine and utilize that secondary data, right? Whether it's for simple tasks like patch verification, application rollouts, things like that, and actually lowering the cost of your primary storage in doing that, which is usually pretty expensive from a storage perspective. I'm also helping customers save time, right? By providing these integrated experiences from primary to secondary to Cloud and making that automatic, I do help customers save quite a bit in OpEx from an operator perspective. And they can take those resources and move them on to higher impact projects like DevOps, CloudOps, things of that nature. That's a big impact from a customer perspective. >> So there's a CapEx to OpEx move for those customers that want to take advantage of GreenLake. [Patrick] Yep. >> So certain CFOs will like that story. But I think the other piece that, to me anyway, is most important is, especially in this world of digital transformation, I know it's a buzzword, but it's real. When you go to talk to people, they don't wanna do the heavy lifting of infrastructure management, the day-to-day infrastructure management. A lot of mid-size customers, they just don't have the resources to do it anymore. >> Correct. >> And they're under such pressure to digitize, every company wants to become a software company. Benioff talks about that, Satya Nadella talks about that, Antonio talks about digital transformation. And so it's on CEOs' minds. They don't want to be paying people for these mundane tasks. They really wannna shift them to these digital transformation initiatives and drive more business value. >> Absolutely. So you said it best, right, we wanna drive the customer experience to focusing on high-value things that'll enable their digital transformation. So, as a vision, what we're gonna keep on providing, and you've seen that with InfoSight on Nimble, InfoSight for 3PAR, and our vision around AI for the data center, these tasks around data protection, they're repeatable tasks, how to protect data, how to move data, how to mine that data. So if we can provide recommendations and some predictive analytics and experiences to the customers around this, and essentially abstract that and just have the customers focus on defining their SLA, and we're worried about delivering that SLA, then that's a huge win for us and our customers. And that's our vision, that's what we're gonna be providing them. >> Yeah, automation is the key. You've got some tools in the toolkit to help do that and it's just gonna escalate from here. It feels like we're on the early part of the S-curve and it's just gonna really spike. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Patrick. Hey, thanks for coming in and taking us through this news, and congratulations on getting this stuff done and we'll be watching the marketplace. Thank you. >> Great. Kudos to the team, great announcement, and we look forward to working with you guys again. >> All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante on theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to the special CUBE conversation on secondary storage and data protection, which is one of the hottest topics in the business right now. Cloud, multi-cloud, bringing the Cloud experience to wherever your data lives and protecting that data driven by digital transformation. We're gonna talk about that with Patrick Osborne, the Vice President and General Manager for big data and secondary storage at HPE, good friend and CUBE alum. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great, thanks for having us. >> So let's start with some of those trends that I mentioned. I think, let's start with digital transformation. It's a big buzzword in the industry but it's real. I travel around, I talk to customers all the time, everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. And digital means data, data needs to be protected in new ways now, and so when we trickle down into your world, data protection, what are you seeing in terms of the impact of digital and digital transformation on data protection? >> Absolutely, great question. So the winds of change in secondary storage are blowing pretty hard right now. I think there's a couple different things that are driving that conversation. A, the specialization of people with specific backup teams, right, that's moving away, right. You're moving away from general storage administration and specialized teams to people focusing a lot of those resources now on Cloud Ops team, DevOps team, application development. So they want that activity of data protection to be automated and invisible. Like you said before, in terms of being able to re-use that data, the old days of essentially having a primary dataset and then pushing it off to some type of secondary storage which just sits there over time, is not something that customers want anymore. >> Right. >> They wanna be able to use that data, they wanna be able to generate copies of that, do test and dev, gain insight from that, being able to move that to the Cloud, for example, to be able to burst out there or do it for DR activities. So I think there's a lot of things that are happening when it comes to data that are certainly changing the requirements and expectations around secondary storage. >> So the piece I want to bring to the conversation is Cloud and I saw a stat recently that the average company, the average enterprise has, like, eight clouds, and I was thinking, sheesh, small company like ours has eight clouds, so I mean, the average enterprise must have 80 clouds when you start throwing in all the sass. >> Yeah. >> So Cloud and specifically, multi-cloud, you guys, HPEs, always been known for open platform, whatever the customer wants to do, we'll do it. So multi-cloud becomes really important. And let's expand the definition of Cloud to include private cloud on PRM, what we call True Private Cloud in the Wikibon world, but whether it's Azure, AWS, Google, dot, dot, dot, what are you guys seeing in terms of the pressure from customers to support multi... They don't want a silo, a data protection silo for each cloud, right? >> Absolutely. So they don't want silos in general, right? So I think a couple of key things that you brought up, private cloud is very interesting for customers. Whether they're gonna go on PRM or off PRM, they absolutely want to have the experience on PRM. So what we're providing customers is the ability, through APIs and seamless integration into their existing application frameworks, the ability to move data from point A to point B to point C, which could be primary all-flash, secondary systems, cloud targets, but have that be able to be automated full API set and provide a lot of those capabilities, those user stories around data protection and re-use, directly to the developers, right, and the database admins and whoever's doing this news or DevOps area. The second piece is that, like you said, everyone's gonna have multiple clouds, and what we want to do is we want to be able to give customers an intelligent experience around that. We don't necessarily need to own all the infrastructure, right, but we need to be able to facilitate and provide the visibility of where that data's gonna land, and over time, with our capabilities that we have around InfoSight, we wanna be able to do that predictably, make recommendations, have that whole population of customers learn from each other and provide some expert analysis for our customers as to where to place workloads. >> These trends, Patrick, they're all interrelated, so they're not distinct and before we get into the hard news, I wanna kinda double down on another piece of this. So you got data, you got digital, which is data, you've got new pressures on data protection, you've got the cloud-scale, a lot of diversity. We haven't even talked about the edge. That's another, sort of, piece of it. But people wanna get more out of their data protection investment. They're kinda sick of just spending on insurance. They'd like to get more value out of it. You've mentioned DevOps before. >> Yep. >> Better access to that data, certainly compliance. Things like GDPR have heightened awareness of things that you can do with the data, not just for backup, and not even just for compliance, but actually getting value out of the data. Your thoughts on that trend? >> Yeah, so from what we see for our customers, they absolutely wanna reuse data, right? So we have a ton of solutions for our customers around very low latency, high performance optimized flash storage in 3PAR and Nimble, different capabilities there, and then being able to take that data and move it off to a hybrid flash array, for example, and then do workloads on that, is something that we're doing today with our customers, natively as well as partnering with some of our ISV ecosystem. And then sort of a couple new use cases that are coming is that I want to be able to have data providence. So I wanna share some of my data, keep that in a colo but be able to apply compute resources, whether those are VMs, whether they are functions, lambda functions, on that data. So we wanna bring the compute to the data, and that's another use case that we're enabling for our customers, and then ultimately using the Cloud as a very, very low-cost, scalable and elastic tier storage for archive and retention. >> One of the things we've been talking about in theCUBE community is you hear that Bromite data is the new oil, and somebody in the community was saying, you know what? It's actually more valuable than oil. When I have oil, I can put it in my house or I can put it my car. But data, the unique attribute of data is I can use it over and over and over again. And again, that puts more pressure on data protection. All right, let's get into some of the hard news here. You've got kind of a four-pack of news that we wanna talk about. Let's start with StoreOnce. It's a platform that you guys announced several years ago. You've been evolving it regularly. What's the StoreOnce news? >> Yes, so in the secondary storage world, we've seen the movement from PBBA, so Purpose-Built Backup Appliances, either morphing into very intelligent software that runs on commodity hardware, or an integrated appliance approach, right? So you've got a integrated DR appliance that seamlessly integrates into your environment. So what we've been doing with StoreOnce, this is our 4th generation system and it's got a lot of great attributes. It has a system, right. It's available in a rote form factor at different capacities. It's also available as a software-defined version so you can run that on PRM, you can run it off PRM. It scales up to multiple petabytes in a software-only version. So we've got a couple different use cases for it, but what I think is one of the key things is that we're providing a very integrated experience for customers who are 3PAR Nimble customers. So it allows you to essentially federate your primary all-flash storage with secondary. And then we actually provide a number of use cases to go out to the Cloud as well. Very easy to use, geared towards the application admin, very integrative. >> So it's bigger, better, faster, and you've got this integration, a confederation as you called it, across different platforms. What's the key technical enabler there? >> Yeah, so we have a really extensible platform for software that we call Recovery Manager Central. Essentially, it provides a number of different use cases and user stories around copy data management. So it's gonna allow you to take application integrated snapshots. It's gonna allow you to do that either in the application framework, so if you're a DVA and you do Arman, you could do it in there, or if you have your own custom applications, you can write to the API. So it allows you to do snapshots, full clones, it'll allow you to do DR, so one box to another similar system, it'll allow you to go from primary to secondary, it'll allow you to archive out to the Cloud, and then all of that in reverse, right? So you can pull all of that data back and it'll give you visibility across all those assets. So, the past where you, as a customer, did all this on your own, right, bought on horizontal lines? We're giving a customer, based on a set of outcomes and applications, a complete vertically-oriented solution. >> Okay, so that's the, really, second piece of hard news. >> Yeah. >> Recovery Manager Central, RMC, 6.0, right-- >> Yeah. >> Is the release that we're on? And that's copy data management essentially-- >> Absolutely. >> Is what you're talking about. It's your catalog, right, so your tech underneath that, and you're applying that now across the portfolio, right? >> Absolutely. So, we're extending that from... We've had, for the past year, that ability to do the copy data management directly from 3PAR. We're extending that to provide that for Nimble. Right, so for Nimble customers that want to use all-flash, they want to use hybrid flash arrays from Nimble, you can go to secondary storage in StoreOnce and then out to the Cloud. >> Okay, and that's what 6.0 enables-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> That Nimble piece and then out to the Cloud. Okay, third piece of news is an ecosystem announcement with Commvault. Take us through that. >> Yeah, so we understand at HPE, given the fact that we're very, very focused on hybrid Cloud and we have a lot of customers that have been our customers for a long time, none of these opportunities are greenfield, right, at the end of the day. So your customers are, they have to integrate with existing solutions, and in a lot of cases, they have some partners for data protection. So one of the things that we've done with this ecosystem is made very public our APIs and how to integrate our systems. So we're storage people, we are data management folks, we do big data, we also do infrastructure. So we know how to manage the infrastructure, move data very seamlessly between primary, secondary, and the Cloud. And what we do is, we open up those APIs in those use cases to all of our partners and our customers. So, in that, we're announcing a number of integrations with Commvault, so they're gonna be integrating with our de-duplication and compression framework, as well as being able to program to what we call Cloud Bank, right? So, we'll be able to, in effect, integrate with Commvault with our primary storage, be able to do rapid recovery from StoreOnce in a number of backup use cases, and then being able to go out to the cloud, all managed through customers' Commvault interface. >> All right, so if I hear you correctly, you've just gotta double click on the Commvault integration. It's not just a go-to-market setup. It's deeper engineering and integration that you guys are doing. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, great. And then, of course the fourth piece is around, so your bases are loaded here, the fourth piece is around the Cloud economics, Cloud pricing model. Your GreenLake model, the utility pricing has gotten a lot of traction. When we're at HPE Discover, customers talking about it, you guys have been leaders there. Talk about GreenLake and how that model fits into this. >> Yeah, so, in the technology talk track we talk about, essentially, how to make this simple and how to make it scalable. At the end of the day, on the buying pattern side, customers expect elasticity, right? So, what we're providing for our customers is when they want to do either a specific integration or implementation of one of those components from a technology perspective, we can provide that. If they're doing a complete re-architecture and want to understand how I can essentially use secondary storage better and I wanna take advantage of all that data that I have sitting in there, I can provide that whole experience to customers as a service, right? So, the primary storage, your secondary storage, the Cloud capacity, even some of the ISV partner software that we provide, I can take that as an entire, vetted solution, with reference architectures and the expertise to implement, and I can give that to a customer in an OpEx as a service elastic purchasing model. And that is very unique for HPE and that's what we've gone to market with GreenLake, and we're gonna be providing more solutions like that, but in this case, we're announcing the fact that you can buy that whole experience, backup as a service, data protection as a service, through GreenLake from HPE. >> So how does that work, Patrick, practically speaking? A customer will, what, commit to some level of capacity, let's say, as an example, and then HPE will put in some extra headroom if, in fact, that's needed, you maybe sit down with the customer and do some kind of capacity planning, or how does that actually work, practically speaking? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we work with customers on the architecture, right, up front. So we have a set of vetted architectures. We try to avoid snowflakes, right, at the end of the day. We want to talk to customers around outcomes. So if a customer is trying to reach outcome XYZ, we come with a recommendation on how to do that. And what we can do is, we don't have very high up-front commitments and it's very elastic in the way that we approach the purchasing experience. So we're able to fit those modules in. And then we've made some number of acquisitions over the last couple years, right? So, on the advisory side, we have Cloud Technology Partners. We come in and talk about how do you do a hybrid cloud backup as a service, right? So we can advise customers on how to do that and build that into the experience. We acquired CloudCruiser, right? So we have the billing and the monitoring and everything that gets very, very granular on how you use that service, and that goes into how we bill customers on a per-metric usage format. And so we're able to package all of that up and we have, this is a kind of a little-known fact, very, very high NPS score for HPE financial services. Right, so the combination of our point next services, advisory, financial services, really puts a lot of meat behind GreenLake as a really good customer experience around elasticity. >> Okay, now all this stuff is gonna be available calendar Q4 of 2018, correct? >> Correct. >> Okay, so if you've seen videos like this before, we like to talk about what it is, how it works, and then we like to bring it home with the business impact. So thinking about these four announcements, and you can drill deeper on any one that you like, but I'd like to start, at least, holistically, what's the business impact of all of this? Obviously, you've got Cloud, we talked about some of the trends up front, but what are you guys telling customers is the real ROI? >> So, I think the big ROI is it moves secondary storage from a TCO conversation to an ROI conversation. Right, so instead of selling customers a solution where you're gonna have data that sits there waiting for something to happen, I'm giving customers a solution that's consumed as a service to be able to mine and utilize that secondary data, right? Whether it's for simple tasks like patch verification, application rollouts, things like that, and actually lowering the cost of your primary storage in doing that, which is usually pretty expensive from a storage perspective. I'm also helping customers save time, right? By providing these integrated experiences from primary to secondary to Cloud and making that automatic, I do help customers save quite a bit in OpEx from an operator perspective. And they can take those resources and move them on to higher impact projects like DevOps, CloudOps, things of that nature. That's a big impact from a customer perspective. >> So there's a CapEx to OpEx move for those customers that want to take advantage of GreenLake. [Patrick] Yep. >> So certain CFOs will like that story. But I think the other piece that, to me anyway, is most important is, especially in this world of digital transformation, I know it's a buzzword, but it's real. When you go to talk to people, they don't wanna do the heavy lifting of infrastructure management, the day-to-day infrastructure management. A lot of mid-size customers, they just don't have the resources to do it anymore. >> Correct. >> And they're under such pressure to digitize, every company wants to become a software company. Benioff talks about that, Satya Nadella talks about that, Antonio talks about digital transformation. And so it's on CEOs' minds. They don't want to be paying people for these mundane tasks. They really wannna shift them to these digital transformation initiatives and drive more business value. >> Absolutely. So you said it best, right, we wanna drive the customer experience to focusing on high-value things that'll enable their digital transformation. So, as a vision, what we're gonna keep on providing, and you've seen that with InfoSight on Nimble, InfoSight for 3PAR, and our vision around AI for the data center, these tasks around data protection, they're repeatable tasks, how to protect data, how to move data, how to mine that data. So if we can provide recommendations and some predictive analytics and experiences to the customers around this, and essentially abstract that and just have the customers focus on defining their SLA, and we're worried about delivering that SLA, then that's a huge win for us and our customers. And that's our vision, that's what we're gonna be providing them. >> Yeah, automation is the key. You've got some tools in the toolkit to help do that and it's just gonna escalate from here. It feels like we're on the early part of the S-curve and it's just gonna really spike. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Patrick. Hey, thanks for coming in and taking us through this news, and congratulations on getting this stuff done and we'll be watching the marketplace. Thank you. >> Great. Kudos to the team, great announcement, and we look forward to working with you guys again. >> All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante on theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. Brought to you by Girls in Tech. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Girls in Tech Catalyst event. About 700 people listening to two days of short presentations by senior leaders, mainly women senior leaders, and it's a really good event. We were here a couple years ago. Girls in Tech's a great organization, and so we're excited to have a board member with us right now. She's Mayumi Hiramatsu. She's a senior vice president, Cloud Ops, Engineering and Security for Infor. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, too. Thanks for inviting me. >> Absolutely. So let's just jump in. So you've spoken in prior years, you're not speaking this year, but from a corporate perspective as well as a personal perspective, what does this event mean to you? >> From a corporate perspective, from Girls in Tech's perspective, it's just amazing. Every year year it gets better. I did speak the last two years, and I'm humbled by the speakers this year. So I'm actually really enjoying it. (laughing) It's quite a caliber of-- It's kind of fun when you can just sit and relax and watch everybody else speak, right? >> Exactly. And quite a caliber the team's put together. So as a board member, I can't be prouder than what the team's pulled together. And it's so much buzz. Everybody's inspired, I see people taking notes. Folks are really taking this to heart in terms of takeaways, practical tips, and getting energized. So I think it's great. From a personal perspective, a little bit about myself: So I'm from originally Japan, I came here at 17. I didn't speak any English. I wasn't planning on getting in engineering, I have an economics degree. So you can imagine, I got into engineering and built my career here. It was not easy. For a foreigner, a female, Asian, a non-speaking English person. >> You checked all the wrong boxes, right? >> Yeah. I don't know why I choose to do something harder than it needs to be, and I don't even have an engineering degree. I have an economics degree. But I love technology. I've been doing this for 20 plus years, and I think it's a wonderful place for any woman like me to be able to give it a chance and actually have a wonderful career. I also love the fact that it sort of gives, it evens out everybody's potential. So with an economics degree, or from another country, I've been at Silicon Valley and have done great. So if I can do it, I know anybody else can do it. So for me, giving back to the community and making sure the next generation can successfully come through the technology ranks, or have their own company, is really exciting. So it's great to be on the board of Girls in Tech, and I can channel my energy through that way, and I think Girls in Tech is one of the largest, if not the largest world non-profit organization to help women with very practical, and great tips, as well as, not only these Catalyst conferences, but, my goodness, we do hackathons, we do pitch nights and give entrepreneurs a chance to actually shine, global classrooms where we can actually give a lot of teaching opportunities, and learning opportunities. So, super excited to be here. >> Then what about from the Infor perspective? Did you spearhead the Infor participation? Did Girls in Tech, Adriana come seek you out? How did you get directly involved, how did you sell it, and why does it matter to Infor? >> Yeah, so I've been a board member for year and a half, and not so coincidentally you can see Cisco's also there. I used to be a Cisco. Once I introduced Cisco and Infor to Girls in Tech, everybody was really excited. There's just so much win-win. So for Infor, it's great on a couple of things. You may know that Infor is a pretty large company. We're the third or fourth largest ERP. And we have really important business solutions software. For example, focus on verticals; for example, health care, manufacturing, retail, and as a company we're doing really well, but the other thing that really attracted me to Infor is our diversity programs. So we have two of them. One is WIN, Women Infor Network, and it's about essentially women network to help each other out and continue to grow our career, which is important. But the other program is EAP, which is Education Alliance Program. And I love the fact that we actually have a program, we have 80 plus universities that we tie in with, to bring in a diverse workforce, and teach them in the universities and bring them into the workforce, whether it's Infor or not, candidly. So it's STEM programs that gives diversity, whether it's gender, or background, or international location, or even age, right? Because we're bringing in college grads. I just love the programs that Infor has. >> So what is that? How does the relationship go between Infor and the universities? What's kind of the formal structure? >> Yeah, so there's a program called Education Alliance Program, EAP, very, very successful as I mentioned. 80+ universities that we work with already. And what we do is we essentially give these students in the university training program that teaches our software, and there are actually a couple of great things that come out of it. Of course, it's promoting STEM, and making sure that these kids have, young adults, have great technology STEM education coming out of college. It's also great for Infor because we also have people graduating with our technology skillset. So not only directly impacts us as they join our company, but also even if they don't join our company, we've given them a chance to get into technology and it's very, very successful. I'm very proud of it. So Infor is big on diversity in technology as you can see. And, of course, we're proud to be here this year as one of the sponsors. >> So I'll give you the last word as a board member to the audience. How can they get involved with Girls in Tech? How should they get involved? What are some of the ways that you would suggest for them to get their toe in the water if they're not familiar with the organization? >> Yeah, girlsintech.org is a great place to start. We have a wonderful website, of course, and we have various types of programs involved so depending on what it is. If you want to learn you can actually join some of the hackathons or global classrooms to get some practical skills. If you're a founder and you actually want to pitch your idea and get some funding, you can actually go to Pitch Night. There are different programs that we can leverage and I highly encourage everybody to join. >> Alright, well Mayumi thanks for taking a few minutes. Congrats on the sponsorship and all your good work on the board. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome. She's Mayumi, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Girls in Tech Catalyst 2018 in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching.

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. Brought to you by Girls in Tech. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Girls in Tech Catalyst event. About 700 people listening to two days of short presentations by senior leaders, mainly women senior leaders, and it's a really good event. We were here a couple years ago. Girls in Tech's a great organization, and so we're excited to have a board member with us right now. She's Mayumi Hiramatsu. She's a senior vice president, Cloud Ops, Engineering and Security for Infor. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, too. Thanks for inviting me. >> Absolutely. So let's just jump in. So you've spoken in prior years, you're not speaking this year, but from a corporate perspective as well as a personal perspective, what does this event mean to you? >> From a corporate perspective, from Girls in Tech's perspective, it's just amazing. Every year year it gets better. I did speak the last two years, and I'm humbled by the speakers this year. So I'm actually really enjoying it. (laughing) It's quite a caliber of-- It's kind of fun when you can just sit and relax and watch everybody else speak, right? >> Exactly. And quite a caliber the team's put together. So as a board member, I can't be prouder than what the team's pulled together. And it's so much buzz. Everybody's inspired, I see people taking notes. Folks are really taking this to heart in terms of takeaways, practical tips, and getting energized. So I think it's great. From a personal perspective, a little bit about myself: So I'm from originally Japan, I came here at 17. I didn't speak any English. I wasn't planning on getting in engineering, I have an economics degree. So you can imagine, I got into engineering and built my career here. It was not easy. For a foreigner, a female, Asian, a non-speaking English person. >> You checked all the wrong boxes, right? >> Yeah. I don't know why I choose to do something harder than it needs to be, and I don't even have an engineering degree. I have an economics degree. But I love technology. I've been doing this for 20 plus years, and I think it's a wonderful place for any woman like me to be able to give it a chance and actually have a wonderful career. I also love the fact that it sort of gives, it evens out everybody's potential. So with an economics degree, or from another country, I've been at Silicon Valley and have done great. So if I can do it, I know anybody else can do it. So for me, giving back to the community and making sure the next generation can successfully come through the technology ranks, or have their own company, is really exciting. So it's great to be on the board of Girls in Tech, and I can channel my energy through that way, and I think Girls in Tech is one of the largest, if not the largest world non-profit organization to help women with very practical, and great tips, as well as, not only these Catalyst conferences, but, my goodness, we do hackathons, we do pitch nights and give entrepreneurs a chance to actually shine, global classrooms where we can actually give a lot of teaching opportunities, and learning opportunities. So, super excited to be here. >> Then what about from the Infor perspective? Did you spearhead the Infor participation? Did Girls in Tech, Adriana come seek you out? How did you get directly involved, how did you sell it, and why does it matter to Infor? >> Yeah, so I've been a board member for year and a half, and not so coincidentally you can see Cisco's also there. I used to be a Cisco. Once I introduced Cisco and Infor to Girls in Tech, everybody was really excited. There's just so much win-win. So for Infor, it's great on a couple of things. You may know that Infor is a pretty large company. We're the third or fourth largest ERP. And we have really important business solutions software. For example, focus on verticals; for example, health care, manufacturing, retail, and as a company we're doing really well, but the other thing that really attracted me to Infor is our diversity programs. So we have two of them. One is WIN, Women Infor Network, and it's about essentially women network to help each other out and continue to grow our career, which is important. But the other program is EAP, which is Education Alliance Program. And I love the fact that we actually have a program, we have 80 plus universities that we tie in with, to bring in a diverse workforce, and teach them in the universities and bring them into the workforce, whether it's Infor or not, candidly. So it's STEM programs that gives diversity, whether it's gender, or background, or international location, or even age, right? Because we're bringing in college grads. I just love the programs that Infor has. >> So what is that? How does the relationship go between Infor and the universities? What's kind of the formal structure? >> Yeah, so there's a program called Education Alliance Program, EAP, very, very successful as I mentioned. 80+ universities that we work with already. And what we do is we essentially give these students in the university training program that teaches our software, and there are actually a couple of great things that come out of it. Of course, it's promoting STEM, and making sure that these kids have, young adults, have great technology STEM education coming out of college. It's also great for Infor because we also have people graduating with our technology skillset. So not only directly impacts us as they join our company, but also even if they don't join our company, we've given them a chance to get into technology and it's very, very successful. I'm very proud of it. So Infor is big on diversity in technology as you can see. And, of course, we're proud to be here this year as one of the sponsors. >> So I'll give you the last word as a board member to the audience. How can they get involved with Girls in Tech? How should they get involved? What are some of the ways that you would suggest for them to get their toe in the water if they're not familiar with the organization? >> Yeah, girlsintech.org is a great place to start. We have a wonderful website, of course, and we have various types of programs involved so depending on what it is. If you want to learn you can actually join some of the hackathons or global classrooms to get some practical skills. If you're a founder and you actually want to pitch your idea and get some funding, you can actually go to Pitch Night. There are different programs that we can leverage and I highly encourage everybody to join. >> Alright, well Mayumi thanks for taking a few minutes. Congrats on the sponsorship and all your good work on the board. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome. She's Mayumi, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Girls in Tech Catalyst 2018 in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching.