>> (Narrator) From around the globe. It's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> Welcome to theCUBEs coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, the digital version, I'm Lisa Martin. I've got a CUBE alumni with me here, now Ronen Schwartz joins me from NetApp, the SVP and GM of Cloud Volumes. Ronen it's nice to see that you're doing well and healthy. >> Thank you, I'm glad to join you, even though it's virtually, I hope it will be fun as well. >> Oh yes it will, and that's one of the nice things with this time that we're all trying to figure out if we have technologies like this to be able to still engage with partners with customers, and there's been so much innovation that's gone. So I'd love to get your perspective on what's going on with them. I know you guys had NetApp Insight just a few weeks or a month or so ago, but talk to me about kind of some of the things that you're seeing in the market from a cloud adoption perspective. >> So cloud adoption is actually not new. What we're saying is a continuous acceleration of the cloud adoption, you know, we kind of started by the fact that we are remote and they think definitely, the pandemic, the need to work, remote engage remotely and so on, and actually even accelerated the adoption of cloud, that's something like that could, even exist, I think what we are saying the NetApp in the market in general is very fast adoption of cloud, the movement of the core services, core workloads into the cloud and organization that are not just adopting cloud, but actually innovating in the cloud faster than ever. >> What's been some of the conversations like with customers, cause I know, you know, we've talked a lot about this in the last nine months, this acceleration of digital transformation and customers needing to pivot multiple times, not just survive during this time period or keep the lights on, but really be able to thrive, and push their business forward. Talk to me about some of the customer conversations you're having, is this more of a business level conversation, right now with respect to moving to cloud from a strategic standpoint, because as every business suddenly had to, everyone got to work from home, that was a big shift. >> It is a major shift and it's also for some organization it's a very un-trivial change that needs to happen to the cadence of doing a business to them, to the specific setting, and then, I think we all as individual kind of feel the change, right, I sometimes have like this huge urge to sit with my team and kind of whiteboard, what needs to happen next. And then it will be different to do it, when it is a virtual whiteboard, but if I take it into the conversation that we're having with customers, I think customers have moved from the first few months when it was really about survival, and how do I make the basic things work and ensure continuity, into the place that organization are looking to leverage the change and increase the increasing innovation, increase the transformation they've already been going through, when it comes to these things I really want, there's a really good article from AWS that I want to share, that is really talking about, the six r's of cloud adoption. And, I really like that as an analogy because it talks about the fact that when you have cloud applications, you have the opportunity to rehost, when you lift and shift, then, you have the opportunity to replatform really designed them from the cloud, from scratch, you have the ability to refactor the applications, meaning that you're actually adopting certain cloud component. And in some cases you are actually repurchasing or retiring applications. And in some places, you just retain them on-premise. So I think organizations are looking into their current situation and they're basically choosing their strategy, not their strategy of adopting the cloud, but their strategy of how to move specific workloads into the cloud. >> Right to be, to take advantage of many things, including cost optimization. So talk to me about the NetApp partnership, you guys have been partners with AWS for seven plus years now, NetApp Cloud Volume Platform for AWS, talk to me about that. >> So, none of it's been a long-term partner of AWS and that data is in the core of the cloud business and basically moving data to the cloud, is also a super important, and NetApp is a company that has been a leader in cloud and data services, in general has been there from almost day one. We have been billing, did the capabilities from the cloud volumes NetApp to the cloud volume service, which is a native service in AWS in the last few years. Basically our latest announcement that we made in, in our Insight event is putting all of that in a single platform, the clouds volume and the cloud volumes platform, and that basically optimizing it for the AWS users, meaning that the user with no additional effort can store data, receives it, access to the data and the performance needed for the right application, but also enjoy out of the box data services, like backup, like disaster recovery, like compliance, and like caching and so on, really giving the different use cases, the full support needed. >> What are some of the changes in use cases that you've seen? Now, we talk about compliance. We just had another expansion of the California consumer privacy act on our ballot, during the last general election. We've seen ransomware on the rise. So talking about backup has been a big topic. Talk to me about some of those use cases that are shifting that you see that NetApp is helping customers address. >> This is an excellent question and they know sometimes people treat storage as infrastructure, but the truth is that the data on that storage is actually one of the most important assets that has moved into the cloud and really building your data fabric with the right level of governance and insurance, where everybody is a really important thing. We just talked about like all of this acceleration of moving into the cloud. What that means is that the core data services are no longer optional. They could not be left to a specific implementation desire or no desire, they have to be built into the platform and kind of be insured in a continuous way. >> Absolutely that data is gold or the new oil, if companies can protect it, secure access it and make sure that they can actually extract insights. So, and as we talk about and Gartner and analysts like show the projections of the volumes of data, just growing and growing and growing. And now we've got companies that have gone from maybe 100% on-site operations to maybe a hundred percent remote. We've got the expansion of cloud and the edge. There's a lot of changes going on there. And one of the things that we do know that's happening from an IT perspective, is it's getting more complex. So, talk to me about now, how you're working with customers to make things simpler as data volumes grow and as they're adjusting to a New World. >> So, sometimes maybe this is my opportunity to definitely correct one of the thinkings that some of the AWS customers might have NetApp, which is, it's focused about storage only, the truth is that, there is a variety of services around the infrastructure that we'll go way beyond storage. I kind of mentioned in my last answer, a few of them like disaster recovery, like backup and we just started to touch upon compliance the ability to understand the data that is moving into the cloud, the exposure to PII, PCI, and how does it fit the different regulations. But NetApp is also offering optimized computing, with our spot, with basically our spot acquisitions, but by NetApp technology, we're also offering the full virtual desktop service. And at least the last one is kind of the perfect example. If you would like to empower a thousand people to get their virtual desktops available, it has become a matter of a single click and full automation is giving you, not only the virtual desktop, but also a dedicated storage that is optimized for that. So we're looking into a variety of services, all of them optimize to work on the AWS cloud, all of that with, out of the box, very easy configuration that empower everybody to basically do the right thing in the clouds. >> So when you're in customer situations and conversations, which I know you still are obviously virtually, and you're saying that, you know, we want to make sure that we really clarify, the NetApp has evolved dramatically since 1992, we've been talking about that for a long time. I used to work at NetApp and marketing back in the day, but when you're having this customer conversations, I actually know let's give me a customer, an example of some successful customers who really understand, the value of the full breadth of value that NetApp delivers, especially in AWS environments. >> I would divide the customers buy in a high-level into three categories. You're seeing the basically application developers with a goal to deliver their application, as fast as possible. And then, they're not only, their need is not just to do it as fast as possible, but they're trying to do it in the most efficient cost effective way possible. So, the NetApp conversation with them is how can infrastructure empower them to do things better, faster, and cheaper, and then, there is actually a list of these capabilities that are supporting them very, very well. An example would be that today, a lot of the new developments are done, especially by the cloud native, are done leveraging Kubernetes. So NetApp is giving you Kubernetes optimized storage, Kubernetes say monitoring and resource optimization, and also of the ocean capabilities, the scalability to manage and optimize your containers. So this is kind of one group that developers group, and there is actually thousands of these customers, that are leveraging NetApp on AWS to deliver that. I think the second group is central IT and central IT has a really tough job these days. They need at the same time to support the innovation as we discussed on the first use case, but also the lift and shift and move of that critical applications. When we're looking at, when we're talking to central IT, we're guaranteeing to them the same latency or close as possible latency, the same performance, the same scale that they had on premise and even more in the cloud. So this is what allows, the largest customers in the world to move their SAP from on-premise to the cloud. Really them, I think that the top five and then, at least five of the top 10 SAP applications are leveraging the NetApp as part of their cloud journey. Another example, and maybe the third example, is that it's basically organization where they are putting an innovation in the cloud in parallel to their existing with their on-premise example, there I think one of our reference customers is Blackboard the vendor that is offering something very relevant these days, which is remote learning and capabilities like that. Well they've actually built a very extensive on-premise environment. A lot of their new capabilities, a lot of the innovation is delivered in the cloud where scale is faster, the resources are available, are much easier, but they still need the power of the best of breed and storage technology. They still are looking for cost effective optimization. And this is where NetApp is helping them. >> How do you kind of bridge their different groups you talked about, the developer groups and what they need and what they expect, and a regular world versus central IT, whose job as you said, is now more challenging with this spread. How does the NetApp help those two groups come together and really evaluate the opportunities that this new situation provides and how NetApp can help them accelerate that? So this is basically where the platform capabilities are playing their role, the developer and also the DevOps organization are able to consume the right capabilities that they need in order to get their job faster, both central IT can go into the same platform and basically manage it from security, from backup, from disaster recovery and from performance general performance perspective, including very easy that built-in automation to move, and the entire application from the 2QIA and into production. So the ability of basically the different users to have an optimized experience, when the developers are looking for productivity, time to market, maybe even the cost effectiveness DevOps is looking for the automation, the agility and basically the life cycle and then central IT is looking to optimize costs into the overall resourcing and really delivering it to multiple groups. Single platform gives you everything in one place, >> Make it sound so easy. So last question is, as we go into the year 2021, remember that joke last year, everyone said 2020 it's hindsight, we going to know everything, I think care to forget a whole bunch of things, but as we move forward, and I think we're all counting on the clock changing and bringing in good things, we've seen a lot of change, we've also seen a lot of opportunities uncovered, and you've talked about some of those. Talk to me about some of the things that NetApp and AWS customers can expect next year. >> So we've been innovating together very, very fast. If I just look into the last few months then, you've seen AWS pushing and outposting to the market as kind of the edge of the cloud. NetApp has been an early partner of that kind of coming together and saying that and really offering the best storage as part of outpost. I think what you'll is the, as we go into 2021 is, the foster innovation and the expansion of the offering is going to continue into 2021. The things that both AWS and NetApp already have in progress are kind of ensuring that, so that wouldn't be a big risk for me to share that I can already see the pipeline as it comes to, as it is going into the customer. I think the second thing that you would see is a lot of focus on optimization and a lot of that optimization done automatically for the customer without the customer needs, without the customer need to proactively define and set things, I think it is a very, very strong trend. We're both set optimization for scale, optimization for performance, optimization for costs are kind of built into the offering. I think as we're scaling into the cloud, you'll see significant growth in the amount of offerings coming from vendors, including NetApp and AWS, but also increased consumption of the customers that are, we'll expect more and more of it to be automatic. I think the last thing that I think we are going to see accelerating in 2021 is system of record moving into the cloud. Innovation has already done in a cloud first approach in almost all cases. That's what we're going to see is significant acceleration in the amount of system of records, moving and moving into the cloud analytics, moving into the cloud, and we're going to see it done by mainstream companies in a very, very large scale. >> Lots of things to look forward to. Ronen, thank you for joining me on theCUBE today and sharing what's the latest updates with NetApp and AWS, any opportunities for your customers. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa, it was a pleasure to meet you virtually. >> Likewise, maybe sometime at some event we'll come back and we'll get to meet in person, I hope so. For Ronen Schwartz, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE! Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's fourth year of coverage at KubeCon CloudNativeCon, we're here in San Diego, it's 2019, I'm Stu Miniman, my host for this afternoon is Justin Warren, and happy to welcome two guests from the newly minted platinum member of the CNCF, NetApp, sitting to my right is Matt Baldwin, who is the director of cloud native and Kubernetes engineering, and sitting to his right is Rob Esker, who does product and strategy for Kubernetes, and is also a forward member on the CNCF, thank you both for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, so Matt, maybe start with you, NetApp, companies that know, I've got plenty of history with NetApp there, what I've been hearing from NetApp for the last few years is, the core of NetApp has always been software, and it is a multicloud world. I've been hearing this message since before the cloud native and Kubernetes piece was going. Of course there's been some acquisitions, and NetApp continuing to go through its transformations, if you will. So help us understand NetApp's positioning in this ecosystem. >> In Kubernetes? >> Yes. >> Okay, so, what we're doing is, we're building a product that allows you to manage cloud-native workloads on top of Kubernetes, so we've solved the infrastructure problem, and that's kind of the old problem we're bored to death talking about that problem, but what we try to do is try to provide a single pane of glass to manage on-premise workloads and off-premise workloads, and so that's what we're trying to do, we're trying to say, it's now more about the app taxonomy in Kubernetes, and then what type of tooling do you build to manage that application in Kubernetes, and so that's what we're building right now, that's where we're headed with the hybrid multicloud. >> There's a piece of it, though, that does draw from the historical strengths of NetApp, of course. So we're building, we are essentially already in market a capability that allows you to deploy Kubernetes, in an agnostic way, using pure open unmodified Kubernetes, on all of the major public clouds, but also on-prem. But over time, and some of this is already evident, you'll see it married to the storage and data management capabilities that we draw from the historical NetApp, and that we're starting to deploy into those public clouds. >> With the idea that you should be able to take a project, so a project being in a namespace, namespace having an application in it, so you have multiple deployments, I should be able to protect that namespace, or that project, I should be able to move that, and that data goes with it, so that we're very data-aware, that's what we're trying to do with our software is, make it very data-aware and have that align with apps inside of Kubernetes. >> Yeah, so Rob, maybe step back for a second, one of the things we've heard a few times at this show before, and it was talked about in the keynote this morning, is that it is project over company when it comes to the CNCF. Project over company, so it's about the ecosystem, the CNCF tries not to be opinionated, so it's okay for multiple projects to fit in a space. NetApp moving up to a platinum sponsor level, participated here, NetApp's got lots of histories in participating and driving standards, helping move where the industry's going, where does NetApp see its position in participating in the foundation and participating in this ecosystem? >> Yeah, so great question, and actually, I love it, it's one of my favorite topics, so, I think the way we look at it is, oftentimes projects, to the extent they become ubiquitous, define a standard, a defacto standard, so not necessarily ratified by some standards body, and so we're very interested in making sure that in the scenario where you want to employ this standard, from a technology integration perspective, our capabilities can operate as an implementation behind the standard. So you get the distinguishing qualities of our capabilities, our products and our services, vis-a-vis, or in the context of the standard, but we're not trying to take you down a walled garden path in a proprietary journey, if you will. We would rather compel you to work with us on the basis of the value, not necessarily operating off a proprietary set of interfaces. So Kubernetes, broadly perceive it as a defacto standard at this point, there's still some work to be done on rounding out the edges, a lot of it underway this week, it's definitely the case that there's an appeal to making this more offerable by, pardon the expression, mere mortals, and we think we can offer some help in that respect as well. >> Yeah, where is its usability? I mean, that's the reason I started stacked on cloud, was that there was a usability problem with Kubernetes. I had a usability problem with Kubernetes. That's what we're trying, that's how I'm looking at the landscape, and I look at all the projects inside of the CNCF, and I look at my role is, our role is to, how do we tie these together, how do we make these so they're very very usable to the users, and how we're engaging with the community is to try to align this, basically pure upstream projects, and create a usability layer on top of that. But we're not going to, we don't want to ever say we're going to fork any of these projects, but we're going to contribute back into these projects. >> So that's one concern that I have heard from some customers, which speaking of which, some of them yesterday, one of the concerns they had was that, when you add that manageability onto the base Kubernetes layer, that often, various vendors become rather opinionated about which way we think this is a good way to do that, and when you're trying to maintain that compatibility across the ecosystem, so some customers say, "Well I actually don't want to have to be too closely welded "to any one vendor, 'cause part of the benefit "of Kubernetes is I can move my workloads around." So how do you navigate what is the right level of opinion to have, and which part should actually just be part of a common standard? >> Think it needs to be along the lines of best practices, is how we do it. So, let's take network policy, for example, applying a sane, default network policy to every namespace. Defining a sane, default pod security policy, building a cluster in a best practices fashion, with security turned on, hardening done, where you would've done this already as a user, so we're not locking you in in any way there. So that's, we're not trying, I'm not trying to curate any type of opinion of the product, what we're trying to do is harmonize your experience across all this ecosystem, so that you don't ever have to think about, "I'm building a cluster on top of Amazon, "so I got to worry about how do I manage this on Amazon." I don't want you to have to think about those providers anymore. And then on top of those, on top of that infrastructure, I want to have a way that you're thinking about managing the applications on those environments in the exact same way, so I'm scaling, or I'm protecting an application on-premise, in the identical way I'm doing it in the cloud. >> So if it's the same everywhere, what's the value that you're providing that means that I should choose your option than something else? >> So, we do have, this is where we have controllers that live inside of the clusters, that manage this stuff for the users. So, you could rebuild what we're doing, but you would have to roll it all by hand. But you could, we don't stand in the way of your operations either, so if we go down, you don't go down, type of idea. But we do have controllers, we're using CRDs, and so our app management technology, our controllers are just watching for a workload to come into the environment, and then we show that in the interface, but you can just walk away as well, if you wanted to. >> There's also a constellation of other services that we're building around, this experience, that do draw, again, from some of the storage and data management capabilities, so staple sets, your traditional workloads that want to interact with or transact data against a block or a shared file system. We're providing capabilities for sophisticated qualities of persistence that can exist in all of those same public clouds, but moreover, over time, we're going to be, and on-premise as well, we're going to be able to actually move, migrate, place, cache, per policy, your persistent data, with your workloads, as you move, migrate, scale, burst, whatever the model is, as you move across and between clouds. >> How far down that pathway do you think we are, 'cause one criticism of Kubernetes is that a lot of the tooling that we're used to from more traditional ways of operating this kind of infrastructure, isn't really there yet, hence the question about, we actually need to make this easier to use. How far down that pathway are we? >> I'd argue that the tooling that I've built has already solved some of those problems. So I think we're pretty far down the path. Now, what we haven't done is open sourced all of my tooling, right, to make it easier on everybody else. >> Rob, NetApp's got strong partnerships across the cloud platforms, I had a chance to interview George at the Google Cloud event, I know you partner of the year, I believe, on some of these stuff, help us understand how some of the things Matt and the team are building interact with the public clouds, you look at Anthos, and Azure Arc, and of course Amazon has many different ways you can do your container and management piece there. Talk a little bit about that relationship and how, both with those partners and then across those partners, work. >> Yeah, it's, how much time do we have, so there's certainly a lot of facets to that, but drawing from the Google experience, we just announced the general availability of Cloud Volumes ONTAP, so the ability to stand up and manage your own ONTAP instance in Google's cloud. Likewise, we announced the general availability of the Cloud Volume service, which gives you the managed push button as a service experience of shared file system on demand, at Google, I believe it was either today or yesterday, in London, I guess maybe I'll blame that on the time zone conversion, not knowing what day it was, but the point is, that's now generally available. Some of those capabilities are going to be able to be connected to our ability from MKS, to deploy a on-demand Kubernetes cluster, and deploy applications from a marketplace experience, in a common way, not just with Google but Azure, with Amazon, and so frankly the story does differ a little bit from one cloud to the next, but the endeavor is to provide common capabilities across all of them. It's also the case that we do have people that are very opinionated about, I want to live only in the Google or the Microsoft or the Amazon ecosystem, we're trying to deliver a rich experience for those folks as well, even if you don't value the agnostic multicloud experience. >> Yeah, and Matt, I'm sure you have a viewpoint on this, but it's that skillset that's really challenging. I was at the Microsoft show, and you've got people, it's not just about .NET, they're embracing and open to all of these environments, but people tend to have the environments that they're used to, and for multicloud to be a reality, it needs to be a little bit easier for me to go between them, but it's still, we're making progress but there's work to do. >> Matt: Yeah, what's the question? >> Yeah, so, I know you're building tools and everything, but what more do we need to do, where are some of the areas that you're hopeful for, but where are the areas that we need to go further? >> So for me it's coming down to the data side. I need to be able to say that, when I turn on data services, inside of Kubernetes, I need to be able to have that workload go anywhere, because as a developer, I'm running a production, I'm running an Amazon, but maybe I'm doing tests locally on my bare metal environments, right, I want to be able to maybe sink down some of my data that I'm working with in production down to my test environment. That stuff's missing, there's no one doing that right now, and that's where we're headed, that's the path, that's where we're headed. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, actually, 'cause one of the things that I feel like I heard a little bit last year but it is highlighted more this year, is we're talking a little bit more to the application developers because, Kubernetes is a piece of the infrastructure, but it's about-- >> It's the kernel. >> Yeah, it's the kernel there, so, how do we make sure we're spanning between what the app developer needs and still making sure that infrastructure is taken care of, because storage and networking are still hard. >> It is, yeah, I mean I'm approaching, I'm thinking more along the lines of, I'm trying to think more about app developers, personally, than infrastructure at this point. For me, so I can give you a cluster in three minutes, right, so I don't really have to worry about that problem. We also put Istio on top of the clusters, so it's like we're trying to create this whole narrative that you can manage that environment on day one, day two type operations. But, and that's for an IT manager, right, so inside of our product, how I'm addressing this is you have personas, and so you have this concept, you have an IT manager, they can do these things, they can set limits, but for the developer, who's building the applications or the services and pushing those up into the environment, they need to have a sense of freedom, and so on that side of the house, I'm trying not to break them out of their tooling, so part of our product ties into Git, so we have cd, so you just do a git push, git commit to a branch, and we can target multiple clusters. But at no point did the developer actually draft DAML, or anything, we basically create the container for you, create the deployment, bring it online, and I feel like there's these lines, and the IT guys need to be able to say, "I need to create the guardrails for the devs, "but I don't want to make it seem like "I'm creating guardrails for the devs, "'cause the devs don't like that." So that's how I'm balancing it. >> Okay, 'cause that has always been the tension, in that there's a lot of talk about DevOps, but you go and talk to application developers, and they don't want to have anything to do with infrastructure, they just want to program to an API and get things done, they would like this infrastructure to be seamless. >> Yeah, and what we do, also what I'm giving them is service dashboards, because as a developer, you know, because now you're in charge of your QA, you're writing your tests, you're pushing it through CI, it's going to CD. You own your service and production, right? And so we're delivering dashboards as well for services that the developers are running, so they can dig in and say, "Oh, here's an issue," or "Here's where the issue's probably going to be at, "I'm going to go fix this." And we're trying to create that type of scenario for a developer, and for an IT manager. >> Slightly different angle on it, if I'm understanding the question correctly, part of the complexity of infrastructure is something we're also trying to provide a deterministic sort of easy button capability for, perhaps you're familiar with NetApp's Nason ATI product, which we kind of expand that as hybrid cloud infrastructure. If the intention is to make it a simple, private cloud capability, and indeed, our NetApp Kubernetes service operates directly off of it, it's a big part of actually how we deliver cloud services from it. So the point is that, if you're that application developer, if you want the effective NKS on-prem, the endeavor with our NetApp ATI product is to give you that sort of easy button experience, because you didn't really want to be a storage admin or a network admin, you didn't want to get into the, be mired in the details of infra, so that's obviously work in progress, but we think we're definitely headed down the right direction. >> It does seem that a lot of enterprises want to have the cloudlike experience, but they want to be able to bring it home, we're seeing that a lot more. >> Yeah, so this turnkey on-premise, turnkey cloud on-premise, and, with NKS we can, the same auto-scaling, so take the dynamic nature of Kubernetes, so I have a base cluster size of say four worker nodes, right, but my workload's going to maybe need to have more nodes, so my auto-scaler's going to increase the size of my cluster and decrease the size, right? Pretty much everybody only can do that in the public cloud. I can do that in public cloud and on-premise, now. And so that's what we're trying to deliver, and that's pretty cool stuff, I think. >> Well there's a lot of advantages to enterprises operating in that way, because people out here, I can go and buy them or hire them, and say "Hey, we need you to operate this gear," and you've already done it elsewhere, you can do it in cloud, you can do it on-site, I can now run my operations the same across, no matter where my applications live, which saves me a lot of money on training costs, on development costs, and generally it makes for a much more smooth and seamless experience. >> So Rob, if you could, just love your takeaway on NetApp's participation here at the event, and what you want people to take away from the show this year. >> So it's certainly the case that we're doing a lot of great work, we like people to become aware of it. NetApp of course is not, I think we talked about this in perhaps other contexts, not strictly a storage and data management company only. We do draw from the strengths of that as we're providing full stack capabilities, in a way that are interconnected with public cloud, things like our NetApp Kubernetes service as really the foundational glue in many ways, to how we deliver the application runtime, but over time we'll build a constellation of data-centric capabilities around that as well. >> Matt, I would just love to get your viewpoint as someone that built a company in this ecosystem, there's so many startups here, give us kind of that founder viewpoint of being in this sort of ecosystem. >> Of the ecosystem... So this is, I came into the ecosystem at the beginning. I would have to say that it does feel different at this point, I'm going to speak as Matt, not as NetApp. And so my thinking has always been it feels a lot like, you're a big fan of that rock band, right, and you go to a local club, and we all get to know each other at that local club, and there's maybe 500 of us or 1000 of us, and then that band gets signed to Warner Brothers, and goes to the top, and now there's 20,000 people or 12,000 people. That's how it feels to me right now. I think, but what I like about it is that, it just shows the power of the community is now at a point where it's drawing in cities now, not just a small collection of a tribe of people. And I think that's a very powerful thing with this community, and like all the, what are they called, the Kubernetes Summits that they're doing, we didn't have any of those back when we first got going, I mean it was tough to fill the room, and now we can fill the room, and it's amazing, and what I like seeing is people moving past the problem of Kubernetes itself, and moving into what other problems can I solve on top of Kubernetes, so you're starting to see all these really exciting startups doing really neat things, and I really like, like this vendor hall I really like, 'cause you get to see all the new guys, but there's a lot of neat stuff going on, and I'm excited to see where the community goes in the next five years, but it's, we've gone from zero to 60 insanely fast, 'cause you guys were at the original KubeCon, I think, as well. >> It's our fourth year doing theCUBE at this show, but absolutely, we've watched it since the early days. I'm not supposed to mention OpenStack at this show, but we remember talking to JJ and some of the early people there, and we interviewed Craig McLuckie back in his Google days, and the like, so we've been fortunate to be on here since really day zero here, and definitely great energy, congrats so much on the progress, I really appreciate the updates on everything going, as you said, we've reached a certain state, and adding more value on top of this whole environment. >> Yeah, we're in junior high now, right, and we were in grade school for a few years. >> All right, well Matt and Rob, thank you so much for the update, hopefully not an awkward dance tonight for the junior people. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more coverage here from KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 in San Diego. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. And welcome to Las Vegas! We're at AWS re:Invent, day one of three days of coverage here on the Cube. Along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls. Glad to have you with us here for our live coverage. We're joined now by Jonsi Stefansson, who's the vice-president of Cloud Services at NetApp and Hákon Guöbjartsson, who's the CIO of WuxiNextcode. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us, good to have you here. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, thank you for having, >> Having us. >> And I think, not only your first time on the Cube, but I believe the first time we have had natives of Iceland, I believe. (laughs) >> So, a first for us as well. But glad to have you. First off, Háken if you will, tell us a little bit about WuxiNextcode, what you do and why you're here. >> Yeah, so we are a company that specializes in analysis of genomic data, all the way from gathering cohorts for our pharma customers into providing sequencing services, data analytics, and AI. So we basically cover the full end to end solution space for genomic analysis. >> Okay, and now let's talk about the partnership, or at least the work that's going on between you, if you would, Jonsi, a little bit about when you have a client like this, genomics, what exactly are you trying to peel back for them? What's the challenge that you're trying to address for them? >> So we started Cloud Volumes Services on AWS roughly eight, uh, six months ago. And we've been running it with very selected customer base that is focusing on very specific workloads, like genome sequencing, rendering, database workloads, like workloads that have traditionally have had a hard time finding themselves into the cloud. So we've had a very deep partnership with WuxiNextcode in sort of customizing our offering that fits their needs. So we've been working very closely with them for the past I would say four to five months, and now we've moved their entire production sets into AWS. So that's been something that these research companies have been struggling with. And the Cloud Volumes addresses that, with the data management capabilities and the performance tiers that we offer. >> Could you give us a bit more detail on what it is about Cloud Volumes that's special and different compared to what you would generically get from AWS. Because people have been able to put storage into the cloud >> for some time, >> Of course. >> so what is it about Cloud Volumes that's unique? >> So I think we're very complementary to the storage offerings that AWS has currently. Like WuxiNextcode is running for traditional database, they are using 53 instances, EC2 instances, that all have EPS volumes. But for the analytic data, it actually gets pushed to NFS. So we are basically just have a more performance solution for shared everything solution. If you compare that to EFS for example, EFS is a great offering that AWS already has, but it doesn't reach into that scale, for example, when it comes to the performance tiers that we are offering. We also offer a differentiator for the customers to be able to clone and snapshot data, and only the tester, not to a full copy. So for example, it's really important for data scientists like WuxiNextcode to always be working on production datasets, for like data scientists. So for them to be able to replicate the data across all different environments, testing, staging, development, and production, they basically only have a small tester difference in all those volumes. Which is really important, instead of always having to copy 40 terabyte chunks, they're basically just taking the different between all of them and using the on tap cloning technology. So that's a very unique value proposition. Another unique value proposition of Cloud Volumes is you can automatically or dynamically change the performance tiers of the volume. So you can go from standard, premium, to extreme dynamically, based on when you actually need that extra level of performance. So you don't need to be continuously running at extreme, but only when you actually need to. >> So Háken, what was it about the Cloud Volumes that got your attention initially, that said "actually, this is something "that we should probably look at." >> I mean, so a little bit of a background, we kind of grew out of an environment where we were sort of evolving our architecture around an HPC cluster architecture with highly scalable storage, and actually we were using NextApp storage in our early days when we were developing. Then as we moved into the clouds, we were somewhat struggling with the NFS scalabilities that were available in the cloud. So I sort of like to say that we are kind of reborn now in the clouds, because we have lots of interactive analytics that are user-driven, so high-speed IO is fundamental in our analysis. And we were in a way struggling to self-manage NFS storage in the clouds. And now, Cloud Volumes was in a way, sort of like a dream come true. It's a lot of simplification for us in terms of deployment and management, to have a scalable service providing the NFS sort of service to our applications. So it was a perfect marriage in that regard. It fitted very well with our architecture, even though we use some of our storage relies on optive storage, but all the interactive analytics are performing way better using NFS storage. >> Yeah, Hákon, were there reservation making this move? I mean when, or capabilities that you thought maybe it sounds good, but I don't know if you can deliver on that and things on which you've been pleasently surprised? >> To a certain extent, because we had actually tried several experiments with other solutions, trying to solve sort of the NFS bottleneck for us, and so when we tried this it actually went extremely smoothly. We onboarded 50 terabytes of data over less than a weekend. And when we ran our first sort of test cases to see whether this was working as expected, we actually found it worked over three times better than with our conventional storage. And not only that, there were certain use cases that we had never completed really to the full end, and we were finishing them in times that we were very pleased with, so. >> I mean they were actually running, I mean our goal for the workshop that we did, and we've been doing this with a lot of customers, one of the sort of challenges Hákon came up with was query, a genome query that he created that he was never able to complete. And he wanted to see if by switching this out, he could actually complete that query. And it used to time out in like three or four hours in his time down. >> It was essentially a query that was touching on something on the the order of 20 trillion data points, so we were using lots of quartz. We have a database solution that we have developed which is sort of a proprietary database for genomic analytics, and it was spending up over 500 quartz essentially. And so it was a very kind of a IO intensive query. But as I said, we were able to run that to completion actually in a time that we were very satisfied with, so. >> That's pretty amazing. >> Yeah. >> Absolutely. >> So Hákon, what's your impression of NetApp's data fabric vision? They've been talking about that for a little while, and I'm just curious to hear what your take on it is. >> Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense. I mean, we work with many pharma customers that have lots of data locally, but are also looking at the cloud as a solution for growth and for new endeavors. And having a data fabric infrastructure that allows you to bridge the two I think is something makes a lot of sense with where people want to go in the future. >> Yeah, what are you hoping to hear from Amazon and the show around that idea of being able to live outside of the cloud? Traditionally, Amazon's been very keen on saying, "no, no, everything must be here and in the cloud." They're not so keen on this idea of a data fabric that could move things around in different locations. What are you expecting to hear from them this week? >> I mean, I wouldn't say so much that I'm expecting to hear something, but it's clear for me that customers are more willing now to go into the cloud, but regardless of that, there's still certain reasons to keep certain infrastructures still where it is, moving legacy infrastructure into the cloud may not be necessarily the best way forward, rather to be able to integrate it more seamlessly with the cloud and evolve the new functionality, new features in the cloud. And also there are some, I wouldn't call it privacy, but there are lots of data sets that people are reluctant to move into the cloud still because of the way they are managed, et cetera. And being able to bridge those two things is something that I think is valuable for our customers. >> I actually don't think that the decision to move into the cloud, it's never been a cost decision, in my opinion. It is for companies to actually be able to compete with other companies within their sector and to take advantage of the rapid innovation that is happening in the cloud. I mean, if you take autonomous vehicles for example, the companies that are actually in the cloud and taking advantage of like Changemaker and like this deep learning and machine learning algorithms, it's really hard to compete with AWS, it's really hard to compete with Google or Azure. These are really big companies that are pouring a lot of money into innovation. So I think it's always, it's driven by necessity to stay competitive, to go into the cloud, and being able to tap into that innovation. This actually brings into the sort of, what does it mean to be cloud native? If you're cloud native, it means that your solution, even though it's being serviced through a marketplace, it needs to be able to tap into that innovation. You need to connect to that ecosystem that AWS has. To me, that's a much stronger driving force to drive those legacy applications into the cloud. But with the data fabric, we want to really bridge the gap. So it should be relatively easy for your application or your workload to find the best hope at any given time. Whether that's on premise of in the public cloud, you should have like a, an intelligent way of deciding where each one of your workloads should go. And that's the whole point of the data fabric. Make that really, really easy. >> Well you said the partnership's been about four months, so you're still in the honeymoon, but here's to continued success and thanks for being with us here on the Cube. We appreciate it. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> We are happy to be here. >> Have a great show. Back with more, we are live here on the Cube at AWS re:Invent and we'll be back with more in just a moment. (energetic music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusets, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this preview of HPE's, Discover Madrid storage news. We're gonna unpack that. My name is Dave Vellante and Hewlett Packard Enterprise has a six-month cadence of shows. They have one in the June timeframe in Las Vegas, and then one in Europe. This year, again, it's in Madrid and you always see them announce products and innovations coinciding with those big user shows. With me here is Patrick Osborne who's the Vice President and General Manager of Big Data and Secondary Storage at HPE. Patrick, great to see you again. >> Great to be here, love theCUBE, thanks for having us. >> Oh, you're very welcome. So let's, let's unpack some of these announcements. You guys, as I said, you're on this six-month cadence. You've got sort of three big themes that you're vectoring into, maybe you could start there. >> Yeah, so within HP Storage and Big Data where, you know, where our point of view is around intelligent storage and intelligent data management and underneath that we've kind of vectored in on three pillars that you talked about. AI driven, so essentially bringing the intelligence, self-managing, self-healing, to all of our storage platforms, and big-data platforms, built for the Cloud, right? We've got a lot of use cases, and user stories, and you've seen from an HPE perspective, Hybrid Cloud, you know, is a big investment we're making in addition to the edge. And the last is delivering all of our capabilities, from product perspective, solutions and services as a service, right? So GreenLake is something that we started a few years ago and being able to provide that type of elastic, you know, purchasing experience for our customers is gonna weave itself in further products and solutions that we announce. >> So I like your strategy around AI. AI of course gets a lot of buzz these days. You guy are taking a practical approach. The Nimble acquisition gave you some capabilities there in predictive maintenance. You've pushed it into your automation capabilities. So let's talk about the hard news specifically around InfoSight. >> Yeah, so InfoSight is an incredible platform and what you see is that we've been not only giving customers richer experiences on top of InfoSight that go further up into the stack so we're providing recommendation engines so we've got this whole concept of Cross-stack Analytics that go from, you know, your app and your virtualization layer through the physical infrastructure. So we've had a number of pieces of that, that we're announcing to give very rich, AI-driven guidance, to customers, you know, to fix specific problems. We're also extending it to more platforms. Right, we just announced last week the ability to run InfoSight on our server platforms, right? So we're starting off on a journey of providing that which we're doing at the storage and networking layer weaving in our server platform. So essentially platforms like ProLiant, Synergy, Apollo, all of our value compute platforms. So we are, we're doing some really cool stuff not only providing the experience on new platforms, but richer experiences certainly around performance bottlenecks on 3PAR so we're getting deeper AI-driven recommendation engines as well as what we call an AI-driven resource planner for Nimble. So if you take a look at it from a tops-down view this isn't AI marketing. We're actually applying these techniques and machine learning within our install base in our fleet which is growing larger as we extend support from our platforms that actually make people's lives easier from a storage administration perspective. >> And that was a big part of the acquisition that IP, that machine intelligence IP. Obviously you had to evaluate that and the complexity of bringing it across the portfolio. You know we live in this API-driven world, Nimble was a very modern platform so that facilitated that injection of that intelligence across the platform and that's what we're seeing now isn't it. >> Yeah, absolutely. You go from essentially tooling up these platforms for this very rich telemetry really delivering a differentiated support experience that takes a lot of the manual interactions and interventions from a human perspective out of it and now we're moving in with these three announcements that we've made into things that are doing predictive analytics, recommendations and automation at the end of the day. So we're really making, trying to make people's lives easier from an admin perspective and giving them time back to work on higher value activities. >> Well let's talk about Cloud. HP doesn't have a public Cloud like an Amazon or an Azure, you partner with those guys, but you have Cloud Volumes, which is Cloud-like, it's actually Cloud from a business model perspective. Explain what Cloud Volumes is and what's the news here? >> Yeah, so, we've got a great service, it's called HPE Cloud Volumes and you'll see throughout the year us extending more user stories and experiences for Hybrid Cloud, right. So we have CloudBank, which focuses on secondary storage, Cloud Volumes is for primary storage users, so it is a Cloud, public Cloud adjacent storage as a service and it allows you to go into the portal, into your credentials. You can enter in your credit card number and essentially get storage as a service as an adjacent, or replacement data service for, for example, EBS from Amazon. So you're able to stand up storage as a service within a co-location facility that we manage and it's completely delivered as a service and then our announcement for that is that, so what we've done in the Americas is you can essentially apply compute instances from the public Cloud to that storage, so it's in a co-location facility it's very close from a latency standpoint to the public Cloud. Now we're gonna be extending that service into Europe, so UK, Ireland, and for the EMEA users as well as now we can also support persistent storage work loads for Docker and Kubernetes and this is a big win for a lot of customers that wanna do continuous improvement, continuous development, and use those containerized frameworks and then you can essentially, you know, integrate with your on-prem storage to your off-prem and then pull in the compute from the Cloud. >> Okay so you got that, write once, run anywhere sort of model. I was gonna ask you well why would I do this instead of EBS, I think you just answered that question. It's because you now can do that anywhere, hybrid is a key theme here, right? >> Yeah, also too from a resiliency perspective, performance, and durability perspective, the service that we provide is, you know, certainly six-nines, very high performant, from a latency perspective. We've been in the enterprise-storage game for quite some time so we feel we've got a really good service just from the technology perspective as well. >> And the European piece, I presume a lot of that is, well of course, GDPR, the fines went into effect in May of 2018. There's a lot of discussion about okay, data can't leave a particular locality, it's especially onerous in Europe, but probably other places as well. So there's a, there's a data locality governance compliance angle here too, is there not? >> Yeah, absolutely, and for us if you take a specific industry like healthcare, you know, for example, so you have to have pretty clear line of sight for your data provenance so it allows us to provide the service in these locations for a healthcare customer, or a healthcare ISV, you know, SAS provider to be able to essentially point to where that data is, you know, and so for us it's gonna be an entrance into that vertical for hybrid Cloud use cases. >> Alright so, so again, we've got the AI-driven piece, the Cloud piece, I see as a service, which is the third piece, I see Cloud as one, and as a service is one-A, it's almost like a feature of Cloud. So let's unpack that a little bit. What are you announcing in as a service and what's your position there? >> Yeah, so our vision is to be able to provide, and as a service experience, for almost everything we have that we provide our customers. Whether it's an individual product, whether it's a solution, or actually like a segment, right? So in the space that I work in, in Big Data and secondary service, secondary storage, backup is a service, for example, right, it's something that customers want, right? They don't want to be able to manage that on their own by piece parts, architect the whole thing, so what we're able to do is provide your primary storage, your secondary storage, your backup ISV, so in this case we're gonna be providing backup as a service through GreenLake with Vim. And then we even can bring in your Cloud capacity, so for example, Azure Blob Storage which will be your tertiary storage, you know, from an archive perspective. So for us it really allows us to provide customers an experience that, you know, is more of an, it's an experienced, Cloud is a destination, we're providing a multi-Cloud, a Hybrid-Cloud experience not only from a technology perspective, but also from a purchasing flex up, flex down, flex out experience and we're gonna keep on doing that over and over for the next, you know, foreseeable future. >> So you've been doing GreenLake for awhile here-- >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So how's that going and what's new here? >> Yeah, so that's been going great. We have well over, I think at this point, 500 petabytes on our management under GreenLake and so the service is, it's interesting when you think about it, when we were designing this we thought, just like the public Cloud, the compute as a service would take off, but from our perspective I think one of the biggest pain points for customers is managing data, you know, storage and Big Data, so storage as a service has grown very rapidly. So these services are very popular and we'll keep on iterating on them to create maximum velocity. One of the other things that's interesting about some of these accounting rules that have taken place, is that customers seed to us the, the ability to do architecture, right, so we're essentially creating no Snowflakes for our customers and they get better outcomes from a business perspective so we help them with the architecture, we help them with planning an architecture of the actual equipment and then they get a very defined business outcome in SLA that they pay for as a service, right? So it's a win-win across the board, is really good. >> Okay, so no Snowflakes as in, not everything's custom-- >> Absolutely. >> And then that, so that lowers not only your cost, it lowers the customer's cost. So let's take an example like that, let's take backup as a service which is part of GreenLake. How does that work if I wanna engage with you on backup as a service? >> Yeah, so we have a team of folks in Pointnext that can engage like very far up in the front end, right, so they say, hey, listen, I know that I need to do a major re-architecture for my secondary storage, HPE, can you help me out? So we provide advisory services, we have well-known architectures that fit a set of well-known mission critical, business critical applications at a typical customer site so we can drive that all the way from the inception of that project to implementation. We can take more customized view, or a road-mapped approach to customers where they want to bite off a little bit at a time and use things like Flex Capacity, and then weave in a full GreenLake implementation so it's very flexible in terms of the way we can implement it. So we can go soup to nuts, or we can get down to a very small granular pieces of infrastructure. >> Just sticking on data protection for a second, I saw a stat the other day, it's a fairly well, you know, popular, often quoted stat, it was Gartner I think, is 50% of customers are gonna change their backup platform by like 2023 or something. And you think about, and by the way, I think that's a legitimate stat and when you talk to customers about why, well things are changing, the Cloud, Multicloud, things like GDPR, Ransomware, digital transformation, I wanna get more out of my data then just insurance, my backup then just insurance, I wanna do analytics. So there's all these other sort of evolving things. I presume your backup as a service is evolving with that? >> Absolutely. >> What are you seeing there? >> Yeah, we're definitely seeing that the secondary storage market is very dynamic in terms of the expectations from customers, are, you know, they're changing, and changing very rapidly. And so not only are providing things like GreenLake and backup as a service we're also seeking new partners in this space so one of the big announcements that we'll make at Discover is we are doing a pretty big amplification of our partnership in an OEM relationship with Cohesity, right, so a lot of customers are looking for a secondary platform from a consolidation standpoint, so being able to run a number of very different disparate workloads from a secondary storage perspective and make them, you know, work. So it's a great platform scale-out. It's gonna run on a number of our HPE platforms, right, so we're gonna be able to provide customers that whole solution from HPE partnering with Cohesity. So, you know, in general this secondary storage market's hot and we're making some bets in our ecosystem right now. >> You also have Big Data in your title so you're responsible for that portfolio. I know Apollo in the HPC world has been at a foothold there. There's a lot of synergies between high-performance computing and Big Data-- >> Absolutely. >> What's going on in the Big Data world? >> Yeah, so Big Data is one of our fastest growing segments within HPE. I'd say Big Data and Analytics and some of the things that are going on with AI, and commercial high-performance applications. So for us we're, we have a new platform that we're announcing, our Gen10 version of Apollo 4200, it's definitely the workhorse of our Apollo server line for applications like, Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, we see Apache Spark, Kafka, a number of these as well as some of these newer workloads around HPC, so TensorFlow, Caffe, H2O, and so that platform allows us with a really good compute memory and storage mix, from a footprint perspective, and it certainly scales into rack-level infrastructure. That part of the business for us is growing very quickly. I think a lot of customers are using these Big Data Analytics techniques to transform their business and, you know, as we go along and help them it certainly, it's been a really cool ride to see all this implemented at customer sites. >> You know with all this talk about sort of Big Data and Analytics, and Cloud, and AI, you sort of, you know, get lost, the infrastructure kinda gets lost, but you know, the plumbing still matters, right, and so underneath this. So we saw the flash trend, and that really had a major impact on certainly the storage business specifically, but generally, the overall marketplace, I mean, you really, it'd be hard to support a lot of these emerging workloads without flash and that stack continues to evolve, the pyramid if you will. So you've got flash memory now replacing much of the spinning disk space, you've got DRAM which obviously is the most expensive, highest performance, and there seems to be this layer emerging in the middle, this storage-class memory layer. What are you guys doing there? Is there anything new there? >> Yeah, so we've got a couple things cooking in that space. In general, like when you talk about the infrastructure it is important, right, and we're trying to help customers not only by providing really good product in scalable infrastructure, things like Apollo, you know our system's Nimble 3PAR. We're also trying to provide experience around that too. So, you know, combining things like InfoSight, InfoSight on storage, InfoSight on servers and Apollo for Big Data workloads is something that we're gonna be delivering in the future. The platforms really matter. So we're gonna be introducing NVME and storage class memory into our, what we feel is the industry-leading portfolio for our, for flash storage. So between Nimble and 3PAR we'll have, those platforms will be, and they're NVME ready and we'll be making some product announcements on the availability of that type of medium. So if you think about using it in a platform like 3PAR, right, industry leading from a performance perspective allows to get sub 200 millisecond performance for very mission-critical latency intolerant applications and it's a great architecture. It scales in parallel, active, active, active, right, so you can get quite a bit of performance from a very, a large 3PAR system and we're gonna be introducing NVME into that equation as a part of this announcement. >> So, we see this as critical, for years, in the storage business, you talk about how storage is growing, storage is growing, storage is growing, and we'd show the charts upper to the right, and, but it always like yeah, and somehow you gotta store it, you gotta manage it, you might have to move it, it's a real pain. The whole equation is changing now because of things like flash, things like GPU, storage class memory, NVME, now you're seeing, and of course all this ML and deep learning tech, and now you're seeing things that you're able to do with the data that you've never been able to do before-- >> Absolutely. >> And emerging use cases and so it's not just lots of data, it's completely new use cases and it's driving new demands for infrastructure isn't it? >> Absolutely, I mean, there's some macro economic tailwinds that we had this year, but HP had a phenomenal year this year and we're looking at some pretty good outlooks into next year as well. So, yeah, from our perspective the requirement for customers, for latency improvements, bandwidth improvements, and total addressable capacity improvements is, never stops, right? So it's always going on and it's the data pipeline is getting longer. The amount of services and experiences that you're tying on to, existing applications, keeps on augmenting, right? So for us there's always new capabilities, always new ways that we can improve our products. We use for things like InfoSight, and a lot of the predictive Analytics, we're using those techniques for ourselves to improve our customers experience with our products. So it's been, it's a very, you know, virtual cycle in the industry right now. >> Well Patrick, thanks for coming in to theCube and unpacking these announcements at Discover Madrid. You're doing a great job sort of executing on the storage plan. Every time I see you there's new announcements, new innovations, you guys are hittin' all your marks, so congratulations on that. >> HPE, intelligent storage, intelligent data management, so if you guys have data needs you know where to come to. >> Alright, thanks again Patrick. >> Great, thank you so much. >> Talk to you soon. Alright, thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante from theCUBE. We'll see ya next time. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE! Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of NetApp Insight 2018, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and guess who's here now, Dave Hitz, EVP and founder of NetApp, Dave, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you and glad to be here. >> This is a big event, we were in the keynote this morning when we were walking out, standing room only really strong messages delivered by George Kurian, who stopped by for the first time couple hours ago. Great customer story, the futurist was very interesting perspective, 26 years ago, can you envision? >> You know the futurist? >> Where you are? >> Never mind that, I have a very different perspective than him, I think we are entering the golden decade of artificial intelligence. It's smart enough to be super, super cool and it hasn't figured out how to kill us yet, decade. (laughing) >> Lisa: That's good. >> Enjoy your last 10 years. >> Oh no, that's it? >> I, no, no, you asked, you asked that I envision this 26 years ago, oh my god, no, I mean, you know, we were a little start-up and we had these spread sheets that said we would grow to, you know it basically that, what the VC's told us if we could get to 100 million in revenue we can go public, so, naturally our spread sheets showed 200 million (laughs) in revenue, you know or five, six, some where in there and is like, we're so far beyond anything I imagined when we started, and we were doing technical nerdy products for little engineers and little work groups, you know and the idea that that part of the storage market would merge against the heavy duty, high-end enterprise storage market doing databases, and then that would end up colliding with the cloud market and helping, like no we didn't even imagine this stuff that's happening now, I mean it's so far beyond. >> Enabling DreamWorks to make movies, I mean-- >> I love that, you know they do showings, they do previews for their vendors and so I've gotten to take my 11-year-old daughter, she's 11 now, but to see, you know early viewing of some of these movies it's, it's just fun. >> So, Dave, it's always interesting in the industry a lot of time you say like, okay, this architecture is long in the tooth, there's a new generation do things better and everything like that. ONTAP, been around for a long time now.. >> You know, so let me-- >> Seems like it's been reinvigorated with the cloud and everything like that, you know. >> Let me make a comment about that. >> Yeah. >> Cause people do this, oh, ONTAP is so old, isn't that the old generation? So lets talk about old. Mainframes are old, and AS400s are old, and Unix is old, and then there's Windows which is kind of younger, and ONTAP's younger than that, and then there's Windows NT, which was a rewrite of Windows and Clustered ONTAP is younger than that, so like stop with the old, you know I mean iOS is after that, so okay fine we're older than iOS, but it's not an ancient, and then we've revamped it again to go run in the cloud, I mean we first started doing ONTAP running in Azure, sorry I mean Amazon initially, we started that work in 2013 and shipped it in 2014, so like that was yet another refresh so. >> Well, but you bring a point, you've, it is adjusted and moved, it wasn't something that's static. Can you speak a little bit, that cloud, the you know, the rewrite and focus around the cloud and what, that mean internally, I know you've been reinvigorated. >> Ha! >> With everything that's happened for the last few years. >> You know, the cloud everybody's doing it now and everybody's trying to be cloud relevant, we were really struggling early on I will say you know 2013, 2014 we were really trying to get our heads around what to do and a lot of people were stepping back like, no, no, no, let's see if we can slow it down, and, I mean not just outside of NetApp but NetApp as well, and the guy that was the CEO of the time Tom Georgens, and George Kurian was part of the staff then. We, I'm proud of what we did was we said, you know let's really lean in, its either going to happen or it's not going to happen, probably not, based on what we do, and if it does happen we'll be way better off leaning into it early, learning how to make this stuff work, and that's, you know we shipped ONTAP in the cloud in 2014, and it sucked, I mean, and no one body else had anything like it, it was awesome, right, whenever you look at old tech die, the first iPhone sucked too, but it was both great, but it needed so much more work, like the very first rev I remember a story, Joe CaraDonna as a programmer he's like, we tried to get our own IT organization to use it and they told us the security wasn't good enough, so we had to fix the security, like, I mean we've been through so much stuff that's almost five years ago. We've been working on it, and so you do all of this work and then Cloud Volumes is a complete, have you guys had Anthony on? >> Both: Yes. >> Couple hours ago. >> I love how Anthony thinks, so, he's a cloudy guy right from the foundation, he joins the executive staff, whole new perspective on stuff, so Cloud ONTAP, like ONTAP's my baby and we put it in the cloud. I'm proud of that, like you have our forward leaning cloud and Anthony's like, you know, just so you know, that's not nearly good enough, like, that is a very old school infrastructural thing, probably storage infrastructural people will like that they can have their same old OS running in the cloud, but it's not what cloudy people want, cloudy people don't want to run a storage OS in the cloud, cloudy people just want to say, I'd like a volume, please. Here's your volume, Thank you, and by the way, it should be a RESTful API, like God, ONTAP was none of those things and so if you look at the work we're doing now is like, okay, here's a RESTful API, here's the JSON schema, send it to the Azure Resource Manager Like that's cloudy and so, it was because, you know we did a good job engineering getting it in but we didn't, we didn't have that like the, what does cloud smell like? If you know what I mean, like, the right whiff of cloud. Anyway, so Anthony really brought that and I, and I just feel really good about where we are at now, because, it's like cloud developers, develop this stuff for other cloud developers, it feels like that. >> Well in the last five years it sounds like tremendous amounts of transformation, reinvigoration, NetApp has some bold marketing messaging. We are the data authority, we help customers become data driven, you talk about these three business imperatives, customers have lots of choices that, you know public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, George talked about this morning in his keynote that hybrid and multi-cloud is now de facto. >> You know, someone asked me, I was giving a talk and they asked me, okay so much cloud, how long do you think till NetApp's not shipping hardware? And I was like, no, no, like we don't see that going away anytime soon, if anything we think our success in the cloud, 'cause customers want to do that, will help us gain share on-prem because customers also want to do that, right? George's picture shows, yes there is traditional on-prem IT, enterprise IT, there's private clouds people, HCI, convergence CI, and then there's public cloud. To me the interesting question, is why do people do those different things, the number one driver for public cloud is innovation, like, if you just, like all the catchwords you can think of, if you want to start up a DevOps team to-go program, I would like a new mobile phone app and I want it to take a picture of the person's face, oh look it's a woman, she looks happy, and then you want it to listen to her, to the voice, and like transcribe the voice and then do a sentiment analysis on the words, oh, she looked happy but it's snarky, and then you want to feed that into neural net deep learning engine, and say, what should we try to sell her, like, I guaranteed you, the team working on the public cloud will beat the on-prem team hands down every time. Right, I mean that's, so when you look at people and they go, we want all in on the cloud, or there's got to be 100% cloud. My question is what, what's your, like, don't start with that, what's your problem? If it's derive innovation, for the private cloud, typically that's just all about speed. They're so uniform regular, they're all the same you have extra capacity, you know you got empty rack space, for where the next one goes, someone says, I need some storage, and you say, hey, it's got a self service offer defined API, like, just do it yourself, and then in the enterprise space, the enterprise IT, Unix, Windows, clients, server, like that zone, probably the bulk of your investment, right? That's where you been spending the money historically. Probably still the bulk of most people's investment, but they want to modernize it, they don't want to get rid of it, they don't want to turn it off, it's working, but they'd like it to work better, so flash enable it, just get the performance issues out of the way. By the way, shrinks your footprint in the data center, frees up space, and connected to the cloud. Like not moving it, but just back it up or do DR, or like something cloudy and so to me I look at those three goals are tightly linked to the three styles of infrastructure. Notice, I haven't talked about products yet? The conversations I like to have with customers these days, help me understand what your business challenges are, your trying to move faster, be more innovative, modernize the stuff you have. Okay, like what ratio, now lets talk about how we could do those things together with the Data Fabric and let you build the Data Fabric you need, I mean, our Data Fabric strategy is not to tell customers what to do, it's to help them build the Data Fabric they need for their needs based on, oh, we're all about innovation, all on the cloud, like okay fine. We can do that like, but let's talk about that or is it. Now I'm stuttering. >> You bring up a great point there, Dave. >> I'm excited about this stuff. >> It's really exciting 'cause you know I think back, you know, just a couple of years ago, if you go to the enterprise, oftentimes storage was the boat anchor to prevent me from moving forward. Now we know that data, is absolutely going to be one of the drivers going forward, how do we help those people make that transition? How do you see NetApp driving that transition? So boating, that's an interesting word because I think if you look at cloud compute, it's very easy to move compute into the cloud, right. >> Stu: Yes. >> The thing about compute is it just happens and then its done, like you turn it on, you turn if off. You spin up the VM, you spin down the VM, it's easy. The reason data is a boat anchor is not because its a boat anchor, because data is the hard part, like you fired up the compute to the cloud but usually you're computing some data, well, how did you get the data to the place where the compute is? And then when you're finished a lot of times you created some data, well, how do you keep track of the data you created in the cloud, and is it legal for it to stay in the cloud, and now you want to put the data in a different cloud or put the data in your own data center and like, who's watching all that data? It's not a boat anchor because data sucks, it's a boat anchor actually because its the important thing you want to keep forever, right? I mean, maybe you do or maybe you want to delete it and know for sure it's gone. Like, those, compute doesn't have any of those issues. So, what's my point, whatever is hard, like if this was easy anybody can do it, right? Whatever is hard, you go hire lots and lots of smart people to work on hard problems and then customers are like, whoa, you're solving hard problems, I guess I will pay you after all. Isn't that what business is? >> So the majority of your conversations start with helping customers identify what they've got, where best to spread out their investments, it's not product based its about business outcomes. I'd love to get kind of in the last few minutes here, your perspective on NetApp's own IT and digital, and cultural transformation, how does that help your legacy long time enterprise customers feel an even stronger trust with NetApp? >> I think prior to our cloud work customers for the most part, customers and potential customers, they knew us, you know, it was interesting even as we thought about marketing the new work that we are doing, one of the questions was like, how much should be about the cloud, how much should be about the old stuff, and we've really leaned in almost 100% on telling people our new cloud stories, they're both public and private. And our VP of marketing I think she had a really, Jean English, she had a really good perspective. She basically said look, we've been telling the on-prem storage iron story for 26 years and if there's a customer who's out there waiting to decide who to use I don't think telling them that story again and year 27, is going to be the thing that makes the difference, like, they've decided they're happy with their Hitatchi or they're EM's, whatever it is, but, but they don't know that NetApp can help them in this brave new world. Right, they have no clue that ONTAP is also running on Amazon, I mean, It's like, seriously, I can run ONTAP on Amazon? Yeah like fire it up, it's five bucks an hour, or whatever the number is, it's like that's crazy, you know and so, so and then people go, well, we've had so many conversations where they're trying to get a cloud strategy together, and we talk about all these things and data movement and data management and cloud, and like just all of these tools and they're very excited about where they're trying to go and they said, you know, by the way, I do also have a on-prem storage need. Could you do me a quote for like what I need this week and meanwhile let's do some planning about what I need next year, right, you've got both of them working together, and I think it's that combo that's important. >> Last question, how do you, if only you had more energy and excitement like legitimately about this, but how do you keep some of the NetApp folks that have been here for a long time? How have you helped reinvigorate them to, to really be able to digest the massive impact that you guys are being able to make across industries? >> One of the things I think helps, 'cause there is a... Let me back up a step, you know, Steve Jobs, is such an awesome guy and also in his life he made so many mistakes, and one of the things he did when, when Apple was almost entirely floated on their Apple III business and, was that Apple III, Apple II? And he was doing the Mac, and basically his message to everybody else was, if you're not working on the Mac, you suck, except, by the way, that's the product that's floating the entire business and generating all the products, and I really was conscious of, like that's the wrong way to do it. And when I look in particular of what we're doing we've got new operating systems like E-Series and like SolidFire, the HCI is a whole new thing, and yet ONTAP is still shot through our entire product line. I mean, the Cloud Volumes' the cool, hottest new thing. It's ONTAP under the covers, right, and you look at the HCI it's got the SolidFire block storage built in there as a very scalable model, oh but if you'd like files guess what? We run ONTAP in a VM, it's HCI it runs VM, and so actually if you look at what's going on in there the work that we've done going way back, and yes it's evolved, it's changed, but that same work is actually shot through as technology, no longer the front piece but it's shot through all of it as technology, so it is kind of a unifying characteristic. If you talk about that, I think it helps people get more comfortable both internally but, we have the same, you know, you asked how do you get employees comfortable, a lot of customers have the same problem, you know-- >> Lisa: Right. >> They've spent a lot of investment and learning ONTAP's foibles over the year and Cloud Volume's hides all of that. So, gee, maybe I don't like this, you know what if you need all those features Cloud ONTAP, you can run ONTAP, like some people do want to do that, so, I just feel like the fact that the pieces all fit together, work together, actually gets people comfortable with it. >> Excellent, well Dave thanks so much for stopping by. >> Thank you for having me. >> Thank you for sharing your energy, and your excitement, your passion and all this wisdom and looking at where you guys are 26 years later, we look forward to year 27. >> Great, thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, we're at NetApp Insight 2018 in Vegas. Stick around Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee, the home this week of Commvault GO with Keith Townsend. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE. Happy to welcome to the program a regular on our program, Patrick Osborne, who's the vice president and general manager of Big Data and secondary storage at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Patrick, great to you see. >> Great, thanks for having me. Love to be on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, so we've had you on theCUBE in lots of places, but a first in Nashville 'cause it's the first time we've been here. Keith's second time at the show, my first. What's your impression so far? >> Yeah, so this is our first major presence here at Commvault GO. I think it's going pretty well so far, certainly a great venue. We actually, we do a couple things here for our own presales folks. So first impressions, love the fact that we have a whole conference dedicated to secondary storage, certainly getting a lot of importance lately within customer conversations as well overall investment in the industry, so I'm pretty impressed, pretty lively crowd here. >> Yeah, I really liked, we started off the morning talking to Chris Powell, the CMO of Commvault, talking about how Commvault is a 20-year-old company, and therefore there were certain things that a 20-year-old company has. If you think about their pricing, you think about how people's perception of them are, you work at a company with plenty of history. HPE can partner with whomever they'd like to. >> Yep. >> Stu: Why's it important for HPE to partner with Commvault? >> Yeah, 20 years for Commvault, 78 for HPE, right, so we got a lot of chops there. For us, secondary storage is certainly becoming very important for customers, and it's being driven by new user stories, new capabilities centered around data. So what we look for is, as a technology company, we want to provide an entire solution, vertically oriented, that not only includes our compute networking, storage, secondary storage, cloud, but as well as a very vibrant ecosystem. So we've been working, certainly, with our customers and in the partner ecosystem with Commvault for a number of years, and now we've formalized that and codified it with a couple technology announcements, certainly on the go-to market side, and then some offerings we've done as a service, so backup as a service. >> So let's talk about some of these technology announcements. Talk to us about the significance of the store wants, Commvault integration. Got a great deduplication appliance the store wants, now you're bringing Commvault to the scene, to the solution. What advantage does that bring the customer, first off? >> Yeah, so we have a couple specific integrations we've done. We have our primary all-flash arrays, Nimble and 3PAR, certainly within the Intellus Map umbrella. We've worked with them in the past. We've worked with Commvault recently to deliver some support for our deduplication algorithms. We have our, what we call catalysts. It's the ability to dedupe anywhere, right, within the data center and even outside the data center. So they support that. It really helps out with, certainly, high-speed performance for backup so you can meet those aggressive SLAs. We feel like we've got pretty differentiated technology on the dedupe side, so it helps our customers save in terms of the storage that they have on disk. And then the other big thing is that they've also integrated with Cloudbank, right, so it's our ability to store archived backup data for very, very long periods of time in either Azure or out in Amazon, and essentially using Commvault as the workflow and the catalog, and being able to plug into the ability for us to federate primary, secondary in the cloud is a pretty powerful integration for customers who might already have HPE, might already have Commvault, so it definitely brings a lot of value into that. >> Yeah, Patrick, we've seen a real maturation of that, really, the multi-cloud model in the last couple of years. It seems like that's a foundational piece of the partnership between Commvault and HP. What are you hearing from customers, and what differentiates this solution from others in the market? >> Yeah, so I mean, I think that secondary storage is one that's always rife for having a multi-cloud storage, whether it's people just wanting to do something like I don't want a secondary data center, I want to use the cloud. I want to replace tape. There's a number of different reasons why. I think the differentiation part comes in the technology that I talked about before and making that very seamless for customers and being able to move workloads out to the public cloud for the purposes of long-term data retention. The other key thing is that we're providing this to customers in completely as a service style. So not only from a technology perspective, but the way you consume it now. So we're able to provide primary, secondary, your Commvault solution, the Azure capacity, for example, advisory services, and we're all able to package that up on a per-terabyte or a per-metric basis that customers consume in an elastic manner, like you would the cloud. >> Yeah, HP was one of the first, forgive me if I say legacy, 78-year-old company, people automatically assume companies like AWS and even Azure move that way, but where have you seen customers and their readiness, both from a people standpoint as well as a procurement model for that model, and as I've said, HPE's one of the first ones, the big traditional players, that helped push that model. >> Yeah, so the desire's there. We pitched this every day, ever week, and it's got a lot of legs from a customer interest perspective. We are transacting, and we'll start to build our business and it helps us financially as well, too, right? 'Cause for us to offer those as a service, that's a reoccurring revenue, it's bookings, it's not just your traditional CAPEX hardware acquisition. So it helps us. And a little known fact is that HPE Financial Services, when you talk about an established company, we have a very, very high Net Promoter Score for HPEFS, and that's one of the capabilities that allows us to provide these really, really granular, flexible services for our customers. We've got a lot of things going at HPE. Being a more established, mature company with a very large install base. Not only technology piece, but the financial aspects of it is something we can offer as well. >> Patrick, talk to me about some of the advantages as a service, from an agility perspective. When I think of consuming HPE physical hardware on-prem through HP Financial Services, and I'm consuming this as a service, how does that enable agility for your customers? >> Well, it enables agility in the financial model, number one, so a lot of customers are asking us for as a service, subscription models, moving from CAPEX to OPEX. And not just an OPEX lease, right, 'cause that doesn't count anymore. The rules are changing. So what we're able to do is we provide an actual service. The customer hands over the architecture reins to us, so we have an established methodology of how we implement this, so no snowflakes. We can build on a wealth of experience we have with a number of other customers to be able to essentially deliver a number of outcomes. So it comes very agile in the fact that at the end of the day, secondary storage, some of the user stories are pretty mundane. They're very repeatable, right? And so if you hand that over to us, we're able to help you with that, not only financially but architecturally, and from our operations perspective, and you can focus your talent that you have in your organization on differentiation for your business, right? 'Cause backups, maybe at the end of the day that's not where you're going to hang your hat on your digital transformation as a customer, but it's certainly something you need. So we could both partner together on making that a better experience. >> Stu: All right, go ahead. >> What I was going to ask, what's the interface? How do customers consume these as a service solutions, whether it's the secondary storage or if it's a service living in the cloud? >> Mm, so we have a number of examples of these. So you take a look at a service that we have, for example HPE Cloud Volumes, right? It has a portal, you log in, you can put your credit card in, you can add, let's say, your cloud credentials into that as well, and then you are essentially off and running on dollars per terabyte, and you can scale that up, you can scale that down. So at the end of the day, we're really trying to provide an experience for customers that's very similar to the public cloud. And I think the other area that we've done, we've made some acquisitions in the space, Cloud Technology Partners, RedPixie, Cloud Cruiser, so not only on the being able to use the consumption methodology and the metering that we provide, but also the advisory services, is something that you get from HPE. You actually get to talk to people that know how to do this and have done it before and can help you arbitrate and make you very successful. >> All right, so Patrick, the last 18 to 24 months, the secondary storage space has just been buzzing, almost frothy if you will. >> Yes. >> Commvault's been around for 20 years. Five years ago, there wasn't the excitement in the space. There's the startups, there's companies like Commvault and Veritas and Veen who have established a customer base in there. Why do you see so much excitement there? Is it the new AI of availability? I've got plenty of background in the storage industry, where just data is so critically important that it's right there. What do you see? >> I see it as a massive shift in thinking from TCO to ROI, right? Five years ago, you were having conversation as how can I do this as cheaply as possible, right? It's a non-differentiation life insurance policy at the end of the day. Now it's all about what can I do to maximize the return on that data? And it could be things that are not super sexy, but test verification, sandbox labs, being able to provide copies of data for your developers to get a better experience and a better quality experience for their customers at the end of the day. There's a number of things that we've been able to unlock in the secondary storage area, and some people call it copy data management, hyperconverged for secondary storage, I mean, there's lots of different names and nomenclatures applied to it. But it's essentially, from what I see, people unlocking the value of that data where it used to be captured, siloed, untouchable, but now you've unlocked a number of possibilities for this data, and it's multi-use, right? It's the new currency. >> Yeah, we always argue, at the show, Commvault's saying that data is the new water, but Dave Alante, well water often is a scarce resource and something we all have to fight for. Data, the ability to unlock the data, is we can use it multiple times in lots of different ways, and the more I use the data, the more valuable it is, not like traditional resources. >> Yeah, and also, too, some of the big bats you've seen from HPE, certainly big investment on edge-centric computing as well, too. So our Edgeline, the build out of 5G, certainly the ubiquitous wireless networks that we provide with Aruba. So there's a huge amount of capability of either moving the process outside the data center, but that data's still data. It needs to be protected, you need to be able to use it, so I think we're just getting started in some of these areas, certainly around secondary storage. >> So, let's talk about value that DotNext brings to the mix. We're talking about some pretty advanced use cases, the edge, the data center, the cloud. Stitching this together isn't quite simple. Tell us about the DotNext story and how they helped extend the capability beyond just throwing zeros and ones. >> I think there's a lot of our folks that cover customers, account teams, sales folks that really ensure our customer success, they view this area as very rife for certainly advisory services. I think one of the things is that having the capability of doing this, you guys have seen in the past couple years, people have scaled back dedicated storage admins, right? Dedicated backup admins, unless you're in a very large shop, really don't exist. You've moved towards essentially hypervisor admins, generalist, right? So I think that our capability is we have those services, we have that expertise in-house, and for us to be able to provide very good reference architectures that touch all parts of the stack, because secondary storage is, it's not just selling an all-flash array, or some capacity-optimized disk. It touches everything. It's questions around what's your SLA, what are the apps, what are you trying to do? So for us, we have a wealth of resources and knowledge in this space, and bringing in companies like Cloud Technology Partners and RedPixie into our services organization, that gives us the ability to help customers make that move to hybrid cloud as well, too, which is very important. >> Yeah, Patrick, the other message we're hearing loud and clear from Commvault is the roadmap. There's a lot of automation. There's the intelligence. You talk about all those admins. It was funny, they put up all these roles up on the board in the keynote this morning, and all of them, really, were bots (laughs) underneath. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Automation can do that. Have us look forward. How does the HPE roadmap and the Commvault roadmap, how much synergy with those visions? >> Yeah, so right now we're definitely running along some parallel lines. They'd probably fire me if I didn't get off-stage here without talking about InfoSight, because it's a huge investment for us. We think it's a huge opportunity. You guys have seen the proof in the pudding from that in terms of automated support, we've got predictive analytics now. So for us, the more that you can build in from an AI and ML perspective, we think the value is in a couple area. Certainly cross stack, so going all the way from the app down through the infrastructure, and we're providing that through InfoSight. And then we're also expanding some of the use cases to include things like secondary storage, right? So if you see, let's say we have a signature that we can see, right? A certain IO pattern, right? We'll make some predictive calls to the infrastructure to say hm, that looks like Ransomware. Maybe you should take a full clone of that and then encrypt it and shove it up in the cloud. Or the change rate on your database just elevated two orders of magnitude. Maybe I should think about moving some workloads that are adjacent to that off that system. So as we expand those and then allow that type of workflow to enable our partners as well, too, you can see where that value would head as well, too, where you start to integrate some of the telemetry from HPE, telemetry from a vendor and ISV partner like Commvault. You could do some really powerful things across the stack. >> All right, last thing for you, Patrick. You're going to be on the keynote tomorrow. Show us a little bit for our audience here what to expect from HPE. >> We talked a little bit about today, we're going to focus our talk tomorrow on some of the new consumption models, as as a service, and we're certainly going to highlight some of the things that we've done so far in AI and ML, certainly making the lives of our storage and data customers a lot easier, and a little bit of a vision as to where we're going with both of those two. >> All right, well Patrick, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks for joining us, and look forward to catching up at the next event. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more coverage here from Commvault GO here in Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music)

>> (narrator) Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMWorld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live-tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host, David Floyer. Good to see you again David. VMWorld day three, wall to wall coverage. We got sets going on. 94 guests. Patrick Osborne is here, he's the Vice President of Big Data and Secondary Storage at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Patrick, it's great to see you again. >> Always a pleasure to be on the Cube. >> Big quarter, Antonio Neri early into his tenure. >> Yes. The earnings, raise guidance, great to see that. Got to feel good. Give us the update, VMworld 2018, what's happening with you guys? >> So Q3 was bang up quarter, for all segments of the business. It was great, you know. Obviously it's the kind of earnings you want to have from a CEO in a second quarter. Steering the ship here. I think everyone's jazzed up. He's brought a lot of new life to the company, in terms of technology leadership. He's someone who's certainly grown up, from the grounds up, starting off his career at HPE. So for us who have started off as a Product Manager, an individual contributor, making your way up to CEO is definitely possible. So that's been great and I think it's favorable micro economics and we're taking advantage of that. VMworld's been awesome. I think this whole story around Multicloud and obviously we talk about hybrid IT at HPE, so it fits very well. VMware Technology, partner of the year, again. Four years running, so it's been a really good show for us. >> As last year, data protection is the single, hottest topic. Data protection, obviously Cloud, The Edge, but The Edge is kind of new and it's hot, it's sexy. But in terms of actual business that's getting done, companies that are getting funded, companies getting huge raises, throwing big parties. We saw you back to back nights at Omnia, it's a lot happening in data protection. HPE has got a whole new strategy around data protection. Maybe talk about that a little bit and how it's going. >> So it's going really well, like you said, that part of the market, it's pretty hot right now. I think there's a couple of things playing into that, certainly this new style of IT, like applied to secondary storage. We saw that with primary storage the last few years. Multicloud, the move to all flash, low-latency workloads. And then, certainly a lot of the things, in that area, are disrupting secondary storage. People want to do it different ways, they want to be able to simplify this area. It's a growing area for data, in general. They want to make that data work for them. Test, Dev, workload placement, intelligent placement of data, for secondary and even tertiary storage in the cloud. So a lot of good things happening, from an HPE perspective. >> So not just back up? >> No, not just back up. >> I want more out of my insurance policy. >> Exactly. Something in the past that was moving from purely a TCO type of conversation. My examples are always like, who likes to pay their life insurance premium, right? Because at the end of the day, I'm not going to derive any utility from that payment. So now, it's moving into more ROI. So we have things like, the Hybrid Flash Array, from Nimble, for example. It allows you to put your workloads to work. We have a great cloud service, called HPE Cloud Volumes, that we use for our customers to be able to do intelligent DR, as a service, and be able to apply Cloud compute to your data. So there's a lot of things going on, in the space, that's just outside of your traditional move data from point A to point B. Now you want to make it work for you. >> And what about the big data portfolio? You hear a lot about data. You don't hear a ton about the Big Data, Hadoop piece of the world. I know Hadoop, nobody seems to be talking about that anymore. But everybody's talking about AI, Machine-Learning, Deep-Learning. Certainly The Edge is all about data. What's the Big Data story? >> So at HPE, we're definitely focused on the whole Edge to Core analytic story. So we have a great story and you can see in the numbers from Q3, The Edge business, The Edge line servers, Aruba, driving a lot of growth in the company, where a lot of that data is being created. And then back into the Core, so for Big Data, we see a number of customers, who are using these tools to affect digital transformation. They're doing it, we're doing it to ourselves. So they're moving from batch oriented, to now fast data, so streaming analytics. And then, incorporating concepts of AI and ML to provide better service or better experience for their customers. And we're doing that with, for example, InfoSight. So we have a great product, Nimble, 3PAR. And then we provide a service, on top of that, which is a SAS based service. It has predictive analytics and Machine Learning. And we're able to do that, by using Big Data analytics. >> You're offering that as a service, as a SAS service to your customers? >> Absolutely. And the way we're able to provide those predictive analytics and be able to provide those recommendations and that Machine-Learning across a entire portfolio and be able to scale that service, because it's a service, we got tens of thousands of users using the service on a daily basis, is moving from an ERP system, data warehouse, to batch analytics, to now we're doing Elasticsearch and Kafka and all these really cool techniques, so it's really helped us unlock a lot of value for our customers. >> So, the Nimble acquisision is interesting, it's bringing that sort of Machine-Learning and AI to infrastructure. You got a lot of automation in the portfolio and you can't really talk about Cloud without talking about automations. So talk a little about automation. >> In particular, even at the show here this week, we are a premier technology partner with VMware and I think more that you see in the VMware Ecosystem is all around Cloud and automation. That's really where they're going. And we've been day-zero partners on a lot of different fronts. So VMware Cloud Foundation integration, we do things on the storage level with Vvols and SRM and all these things that allow customers to essentially program that infrastucture and get out of the mundane tasks of having to do this manually. So for us, automation is key part of our story here. Especially with VMware. >> So going a little bit further with that, what sort of examples, what benefit is this to your customers? How are they justifying putting all this in? >> It's a hybrid world, so our customers are going to expect, from us, as a portfolio vendor, the ability to provide an automated solution, on premises, as automated as what you'd get in the cloud. So for us, the ability to have a sourcing experience, that we call GreenLake, so you can buy everything from us, from a solution perspective, in a pay-as-you-go elastic model where you can flex-up, flex-down. And then being able to, essentially provide a different view, depending on what persona you're coming from. Obviously we've been focused on the infrastructure persona, more often, we're getting into the DevOps persona, the Cloud engineer persona, providing all of our infrastructure, whether it's computer networking or storage, that plugs into all these frameworks. Whether it's Ansible, Chef and all these things that we do around our automation ecosystem, it's pretty ubiquitous. >> You're touching on all the Cloud basis and you're seeing a lot of discussion around that. What are you hearing from customers? Sometimes we have to squint through this, a lot of the guys here, we always like to say, move at the speed of the CIO, which sometimes is slow. At the same time, they're all afraid they're going to get disrupted. HPE, over the last two or three years, has really brought in and partnered with some of the guys your talking about. Whether it's containers and companies that do those types of offerings. How fast do the customers actually adopting, where they adopting them, how are they handling, you talked about a hybrid world; How are they bridging the old and the new? >> That's a great question. For a lot of our customers, it's always a brown field conversation. You do have these mission critical workloads that have to run, so there's no Edge to Core without your core ERP system, right? Your Core Oracle System or for smaller customers that are running their businesses on SQL and other things. But what we're seeing is that, by shoring up that Core and we provide a set of services and products that we feel are the best in the industry for that. And then allow them to provide adjacent services on top of that, it's exactly like the same example we had with InfoSight, where those systems use to call home, right now we're taking that data, we're providing a whole ancillary set of services and functions around it and our customers are doing that. Enormous customers, like British Telecom, folks like Wayfair, for example, they're doing this on premises and their disrupting their competitors, in the mean time. >> What do you make of some of the announcements we've heard this week? Obviously VMware making a big deal with what's going on with AWS. We're seeing AWS capitulate, David Floyer you made the call. Got to have an on-prem strategy. Many said no, that'll never happen. They just want to sweep the floor. So that's a tip to the hybrid cap. What are your thoughts on what's going on there? How does HPE sort of participate in those trends? >> I'd say it's, instead of battle and capitulate, we've been very laser-focused on the customers and helping them, along their way, on the journey. So you see a lot of acquisitions we've done around services, advisory service. CTP is a perfect example. So CTP has a whole cadre of experts who understand AGER, who understand ECS and all the services and functions that go along with them And we're able to help people, right size, right place, whatever you want to call it, within their infrastructure. Because we know, we've been in business for 75+ years and have a very loyal customer base, and we're going to help them along their maturity curve and certainly everyone's not on the same path, in the same race. It's been pretty successful so far. >> You guys tend to connect the dots between your HPE Discover in U.S., in Las Vegas and HPE Discover in December. So June to December, you're on these six month cycles, U.S. focus and Europe focus, Decembers in Madrid, again. Second year of Madrid. U.S. is always Vegas, like most of these conferences, what's the cadence that your on? What was the vibe like at Discover? What should we expect leading up to Q4, calendar Q4 in Madrid? >> I'd say that Discover was a big success in Vegas, always fun to spend time here. In Madrid, you'll see a focus around the value part of our business. So we've been growing in automation, we talked about hybrid IT, certainly the Core around storage. We're really focusing and very heavily invested in, not just storage, but intelligent data management. So we really feel that our offerings, especially doubling down and offering more services around InfoSight and some of those predictive and Cloud-ready user stories for our customers is something that definitely differentiates ourselves in the market. So we'll be very focused on the data plan, the data layer and helping customers transform in that area. >> So let's talk some tenor sax. >> (David laughs) >> This is not New Orleans. When we were down in New Orleans, we were at VeeamON, I think you had your sax with you, you jumped in. >> That's right, I played with the Soul Rebels. >> Playing with the Soul Rebels, you were awesome. Leonard, a big jazz man. Love it. I'm a huge TOP fan. What's new in that world? Are you still active? Are you still playing? >> Yeah, the band's still playing. Shout out to my buddies in Jolpe, sitting in with some friends at a Dead cover band coming up, in a couple weeks. So, should be fun. We're going to reenact The Grateful Dead and Branford Marsalis. >> That's wonderful. >> It should be fun. >> We've been getting a big dose of hip-hop this week. >> Yeah. But the new thing is that, in hip-hop, it's getting back to it's original roots, so a lot of folks in the jazz world, collaborating with the folks in the hip-hop world, so not very commercial, definitely underground, but pretty cool. >> I love it. That's right Leonard, you pointing out Miles Davis was one of the first to make that transformation. >> Yeah >> Good call. >> I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but it's about five percent technique and 95 percent attitude. (multiple laughs) >> Jazz, like hip-hop, there's a lot guys just doing their own thing. And somehow it all comes together. >> Absolutely. >> Okay Patrick, great to see you. >> Great to see you guys. Thank you Dave. Yeah, good to see you guys. >> Always a pleasure, go Sox. >> We got some time for talk stocks? >> Alright. >> What do you think? It's getting a little nerve wrecking. >> #Bucky Dent is trending in my Twitter. That's my problem, so hopefully we can..., I definitely don't want to be limping into the playoffs, and still not a fan of this one team wild card playoff, but I think we'll be alright. >> If we go deep... It's a great time to be a Boston fan. >> Celtics. >> Football starting, Celtics are coming in November, so awesome. Great to see you man. >> Thanks for having me. >> Keep it right there everybody, we'll be right back with our next guest. You're watching the Cube, live. Day three at VMWorld 2018, we'll be right back. (techno music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE. I am Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, and we are live in the NetApp booth at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. We are joined by Robert Stumpf, Senior Director of IT, Enterprise Solutions Delivery. Welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you, thank you. >> So we're here in the NetApp booth at SAPPHIRE NOW. As they said in the keynote this morning, they're expecting a million people to engage with SAP SAPPHIRE this week. >> Yes. >> Think, I've heard rumblings there's about 20+ thousand people here in attendance. >> Yeah. >> Huge event, huge show, lots of announcements. Let's talk about NetApp and SAP as partners. Specifically in the context of the Next-Gen Data Center, bringing cloud-ready solutions to business application. What are you guys doing there with SAP? >> Sure, I can talk a little bit about that. The NetApp solutions fit into the Next-Generation Data Center in a variety of different ways. We have the All FAS Flash that really is the core of our product base and is really the workhorse of all the hardcore applications, gives you really a strong performance in the storage area. Then we have the Cloud Volumes with when you want to scale out to hyper scaler, and you can use the Cloud Volumes abilities there. And then when you look at our HCI components, it is capable of giving you a lot more of the container-based compute power, so we fit into a variety of different components there. >> So, Robert, we're at SAP. And SAP hasn't been traditionally known as a cloud-aware application. Tell us, from the NetApp perspective, what's changed with SAP over the years that now, you can comfortably talk about SAP as a cloud-aware application? >> So SAP's moving a long way in that direction. You saw it this morning in the keynote that they were talking about the C4, their customer-focused applications. That's really kind of putting a framework on top of all of the customer engagements, and making the customer the center of everything. So they're moving a lot in that direction. We at NetApp have implemented their Hybris platform, their cloud for customer application. We just went live with that last year, so we're on that journey with SAP as well. >> So, as we talk about that, what makes the application, or what make applications in general cloud-aware? >> Okay, when you look at making something cloud-aware, you want to really look at the architecture that you have underneath it. So you'll build something that has a lot more automation in it, a lot more scalable, where you don't have to, the scalability's built into the framework, like you're leveraging. In the case of our NetApp support site, which we just completely re-architected and went live last month, we have built that on what's called a MEAN stack, so that's where the Mongo database and the back-end that's a NoSQL database, and then on top of an Angular node.js, which gives you much more robust framework for you to be able to scale-out your application. So with it being a website, and your volume can go up and down, so you want to be able to scale the application without needing people to get involved in that scaling, so they will just fire up new containers as needed as the volume increases, and it's a lot more robust in architecture. >> So if we look at Hybris and we look at NetApp products and solutions, that framework and architecture. Can you paint a picture for us what NetApp solutions and products are cloud-aware? >> Sure, the cloud-aware applications, really you need to look at the complete stack of the Next-Generation Data Center, which is really embodying the on-prem data center, your hyperscaler cloud data centers, and then a private cloud if you so wish to build one. So the Next-Generation Data Center takes advantage of the All FAS Flash on your on-prem solution, so you've got your performance, high-performance scalability. Then your Cloud Volumes allows you to move your data between your on-prem out to the hyperscaler as you need to, and the HCI component gives you that container-based compute array that allows the applications to scale. Also, you can leverage StorageGRID, which is much more of an object-based data base, which is something that you'll use extensively on cloud-aware applications. >> So, thanks Keith. So one of the things that was announced this morning, you mentioned C/4HANA where Bill McDermott was sort-of expected to announce what SAP was going to be doing that's gonna help differentiate them. They want more share from Salesforce and Oracle. He made kind of some aloof references to that, but one of the things that he talked about was: companies need, in this day and age, speed obviously, but to move away from a 360-degree view of sales automation to an actual 360-degree view of the customer. I'd love to get your insight on NetApp and SAP as partners together. Are you seeing any particular industries leading here? We think of manufacturing, maybe automotive oil and gas, but I'm just wondering from NetApp's perspective, are you seeing any industries that are really leading-edge here in evolving to a Next-Gen Data Center that enables this 360-degree view? >> There's a variety of different industries that are doing that. If you take a look at applications like Netflix and Amazon Prime, those applications are architectured to be scalable and to be much more robust, and they are much more focused on the customer. And because you don't have outages, right? They don't take the system offline when they're doing an upgrade to their capabilities. When was the last time you heard of Netflix going offline for twelve hours to do an upgrade? So, these applications are built much more robustly around that, and that's what one thing that we are looking to do at NetApp with the Hybris implementation that we did with SAP, and we're also upgrading our back office CRM system to their CRM on HANA on-prem, and we're gonna be taking advantage of the Hybris capabilities there to give that full picture of the customer. We'll be heavily engaged with SAP on their C4 journey and making sure that we are a part of that as well. >> So it's great that you brought up Netflix as an example that continues to be operating an environment that has this huge back-end automated with technology. SAP traditionally hasn't been considered a technology that you could upgrade on the fly. I've managed an SAP environment where we can only take twelve hours of downtime a year because mission critical, it's very difficult to get that time. >> Yes. >> How has the NetApp data fabric story played into making that a possibility in your own environment and customers' environments? >> Okay, we leverage a lot of the NetApp storage on our on-prem system. I'm in the exact place, same situation as you were talking about. We have a lot of mission critical customers that are on our support application. I have to give 90-days notice to take the system down for any longer than four hours at a time, so I'm in that very similar situation. So we leverage a lot of the NetApp technologies to make sure that the applications are available when I'm doing the upgrades, and we can do rapid copies of the data that's in there, make sure it's all robust. Our data, failover database, failover systems, are set up that way so that they take advantage of the snapshots that we got from the application, and we're working with SAP. The SAP Hybris application is actually built on top of NetApp storage, and we're working very closely with SAP to re-architect our applications, to take advantage of the capabilities that NetApp storage brings to the equation. >> So none of this coming into its own in this hybrid cloud model that's been around 26 years, right, long time. But now, it's everything you see. You mentioned Netflix, and I don't know anybody on the planet that would survive if Netflix went down for an hour, let alone twelve. So speed, access to data, but this evolution of NetApp, I'm interested, and you know now again in this hybrid cloud model, you guys made your name from building network attached to storage on-prem data centers, the announcement with Google Platform just last week. Talk to us about some of the evolution from NetApp, from your perspective, from the storage perspective, into really facilitating this hybrid cloud model. >> Sure, we are really at the forefront of that because at the end of the day, it's all about the data. Right, your application can run wherever you want, but wherever your data is is really the key. And that's the framework that we're putting in place is to make your data a lot more mobile. So if you want to keep the data on-premise, then you can keep it on-premise. If you want to move it out next to the hyperscaler, you can burst it out, you can use the Cloud Volumes and migrate the data. So the NetApp picture, the story is really in making your data much more mobile and moving it to the location of choice for any particular workload that you're looking for. >> So, we can't have a discussion in 2018 about data without talking about privacy and security. What's the relationship in ensuring that NetApp and SAP is one, media requirements in GDPR, we have to talk about GDPR, we have to talk about security. How is NetApp securing data and ensuring that in-users' and organizations' data stay private? >> That's a very good question, right? It's definitely a challenge that a lot of companies are struggling with, and the tools that NetApp provides with our storage systems are paramount, security is paramount, and that's something that we're very much focused on in making sure that your data is your data, and the specific components of the data that you want to keep on-premise, which you want to keep as much more secure, then you can keep that on the NetApp All FAS Flash storage systems, and then you protect it as if it's in your own kingdom. But then the data that's a little bit more lax on the security sites, then you can push that out onto the hyperscalers and use the NetApp Cloud Volumes to have it outside of your on-premise. You know, it's like your own firewall. >> So one of the basic things as a ONTAP customer that ONTAP customers depend on and the private data centers, this ability to encrypt data on the fly. Now that we look at, you know we see ONTAP in the cloud, do we get that same basic capability to encrypt data on the fly or encrypt data while it's in transit? How do I know my data is protected from an encryption perspective? >> You get the same capabilities when you're using the on-cloud tools that we provide, so there's no real difference in that, and that's the beauty behind that. You're using the same storage management tools for your Cloud Volumes as you would be for your on-premise systems. >> I want to ask a question on competition. There's a lot of co-opetition that's going on just at SAPPHIRE alone. With what you talked about about how NetApp is leveraging Hybris, you mentioned, to really kind of get towards that model of connecting supply chain with demand, getting that full view of customers, SAP partners with probably all of your competitors. So how is what NetApp is doing internally to digitally transform, how do you see it as giving NetApp that competitive edge against the other guys? >> Okay, the way that we look at our competitive edge at NetApp from an application standpoint is really focusing on keeping our core capabilities very, very vanilla. So in the implementation with Hybris, we were very much focused on not customizing the application. But because at the end of the day, you sell stuff, you build stuff, you manufacture it, and you support it. So those are the core capabilities, and we've kept that very vanilla as much as possible within the implementation. Where we differentiate, that's where we customize. So our application landscape is much more focused on customizing for the differentiating capabilities, and that's the component that's specific to NetApp and how we do business. And that's the way that we go about differentiating ourselves from our competitors. So we use the core capabilities of all the enterprise applications that we have, that we purchase such as Hybris, and then we go build our custom solutions that are differentiated, that really searches our ASUP, AutoSupport system, that gets what's embedded right from day one, that's a custom-built application, it's very proprietary, it's really the keys to the kingdom for our organization. And that's something that's very, very integral as part of the NetApp culture. >> So, let's talk about some lessons learned from that. One of the pain points for many SAP customers is they look at capability like ECC on HANA, really want it, but they've customized their environment too much, so making that switch is extremely difficult for them. What have you learned as a team that says, you know what, the best way to stay in line with SAP and follow that roadmap for mission critical applications that are both stable and differentiating, you should follow these basic policies from a hygiene perspective. >> Sure, we actually went through that last year with our project where we replaced our Sales Force Automation system, and we implemented C4, C4C Hybris. So the key to that is really getting the executive sponsorship bought-in to making sure that you're adhering to the vanilla applications and not customizing it. So we were very fortunate where we had Henri Richard and Bill Miller, our CIO. They were the executive sponsors of the project, and they were adamant that we would not customize the application, and we went through, it took us six months to replace our CRM system for an office CRM system. Very proud of that project. It was an incredible painful journey to go through, but the benefits that we got out of the end of it are phenomenal because we were in that situation where we had an overly-custom SAS application that was running our sales organization that really wasn't meeting the needs of the business. Now we have a much more agile implementation that's on top of SAP's Hybris platform, and we're taking advantage of the new capabilities they introduce, rather than focusing on our own customizations. >> That's a great summary. I think you articulated very well what, one of the themes was from Bill McDermott's keynote this morning, is making things simple, is not an easy thing to do, but it's critical. There are so many-- >> It's totally critical. >> business outcomes that come out of that, not just stream-learning processes, improving sales and marketing and connecting them together, but really affecting revenue, profit, share, et cetera. So Robert, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting with Keith and me today about what you guys are doing with SAP. >> Great, thank you, thank you for your time. >> We want to thank you. You're watching theCUBE: Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP SAPPHIRE 2018, thanks for watching! (light percussive music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering VMWorld 2017, brought to you by VMWare and it's ecosystem partners. >> Okay welcome back everyone live here at VMWorld 2017 behind us we got the stage here set on the VMVillage, a lot of people hanging out, I'm John Furrier with Dave Alante our next guest is Vish Muichand who's the Senior Director of Product Manager HPE, Cube alumni Eric Burgener, Research Director at IDC. Guys welcome to the Cube. >> Thanks very much John. >> Vish, lot of storage action going on VMWare, you see Vsan, the cloud's here, true private cloud report from Wikibonds off the charts, showing a huge growth on prem, cloud operations, storage is impacted. What's the dots that we're connecting here this week? What's the storage story this week? >> So clearly there's a lot of different things happening in the marketplace right, different modes of operation and that in itself is demanding different approaches to infrastructure. So I think what you are seeing in the industry a variety of different approaches in storage, right? Whether it's external storage, whether it's software-defined storage, whether it's hyperconversions, or that's all flash storage. All of these things are coming together and trying to respond to the needs of data and how you want to process that data. >> We've been talking with, we talk to you guys a lot on the Cube, HP Discover, and we always say software's eating the world, we just heard Sanjay Punin from VMWare talking about it, he likes to drop that soundbyte. We take it one step further. He's a Harvard MBA, we got the bapsen mojo here. We say if software's eating the world, then data's eating software. So you guys have had a software core competence and you mentioned data. What is the impact and compromise, more and more data comes in from the edge, this primary, this secondary storage, this backup this data protection, it seems to be like this melting pot of changing architectures. How are you guys handling that at HP? >> Filling software is a very key element because it provides you with those capabilities, right? To really deal with the logical instantiation of assets and in this very virtualized world, this very dynamic world right now, gone are the days where you can do hardware type desegregation. Software gives you that speed, that agility, it gives you that flexibility. Gives you the changeability to move quickly. >> Eric you're at IDC you guys, this is your job. You guys track the market share, you guys have the pulse it's like keeping track of the baseball game. What inning, how are the Red Sox doing? Are they in first place are the Yankees catching up? What is the current state of the server virtualization because you know certainly the game's changing a little bit the world's going to cloud. What are you guys seeing in your research? >> Well so obviously most mainstream computing is running on virtualization, whether that's in the cloud or that's on prem. There's very little physical infrastructure left. There is still some of that but clearly that is not the future, virtualization is the future. >> So I wonder if I may, so you're saying virtualization is the future, so I wonder if we can unpack that a little bit because the theme here is cloud and everything is cloud related. Is your feeling, Eric, that that's sort of over your skis marketing, getting ahead of where the customer really is, I wonder if you could sort of elaborate. >> I think what the customers are really looking for is an easier way to do their jobs for less cost. And cloud provides that flexibility that you don't necessarily get if you're managing your own on-premise infrastructure, that's not 100% true based on some scale issues, but by and large, I think that's really what cloud brings to the table is a different payment model, and a flexibility that you wouldn't necessarily have with on prem infrastructure. >> So what are you guys seeing, do you feel as though the on-prem infrastructure leaders like HP, there are others obviously, are going to be able to bring that cloud-like simplicity to what do you call private cloud or whatever on-prem, is that happening, how fast is it happening, is it viable? >> Yeah so I absolutely think that's happening, in fact that's one of the reasons why software-defined storage is growing so fast is those type of products give you the kind of agility that you would normally get from a cloud environment and if you're running that on prem and you've implemented the right infrastructure around it then you're getting many of those same kind of benefits. Now you're paying for that hardware and software in a different manner than you do for the cloud, but you're getting many of those IT agility benefits that you might otherwise get from the cloud. >> And Dave, you know HP's tagline is Making Hybrid IT Simple right and so our point of view is that there is both on premise and off premise, just depending on what the usage models are and what the problems you're trying to solve, right. And bringing that simplicity where you may be going from a 100% on premise to maybe 20% off, but we've also seen some people at 50% off premise trying to come back a little bit on premise, right? So both directions I think are very very key. >> Is your point of view and I want Eric if you could chime in as well, from HPE's perspective, is hybrid IT sort of horses for courses in other words, workloads on prem versus workloads off prem, or is it beyond that some kind of federation model? >> So we see three key use cases. The first is of course wholesale, applications running on the cloud. Office 365, the perfect example of that, Sharepoint, Dropbox right, that's one. Then there is what I would call disaster recovery as a service, where you may want to have your third site in the cloud even though you got two sites on premise. Then there's also the third use case or in archiving that says how do I archive a portion of my data maybe into the cloud so it is online, but I don't have to manage it and I don't have to maybe deal with some of the associated costs around it. So these are the three sort of cases I see. >> Dave: Okay, what are you seeing in the customer base, Eric? >> Well so I completely agree that hybrid cloud is the way data centers are going to be built going forward. There are reasons to keep certain workloads on prem, generally there's performance, security or some kind of regulatory requirements that might make you put workloads on prem versus putting them in the cloud. It also depends on how often you're using the data. So Vish mentioned archive use cases. So that's a case where you need a lot of storage capacity that you keep for a long time but you may not necessarily be accessing it that much. If you're going to be accessing data a lot, that's another reason why you might consider bringing it on prem, as opposed to leaving it off prem. And of course the access, the costing access models that you get from people like Amazon and Azure are going to impact where you draw the line on that. >> So is there a difference between multi-cloud, I got a bunch of different clouds in my organization, I'm going to choose where to put stuff and cross-cloud sometimes you call it inter-clouding was, I like that term. >> Vish: You could dual source your cloud. >> And either dual source or federate or actually split application work. >> So I have seen several different aspects of that. So a customer has said to me that they need to move 20% of their data off premise, to do that they need two cloud vendors, and to get to two cloud vendors they need to see four or five of them so they can narrow it down and they they says okay, HPE all of the data that I have today is in your premise or with your equipment, how are you helping us broker that kind of arrangement. What are you doing to help federate some of that data? And work with some of these cloud vendors. So I think that's an interesting customer ask. >> Okay, well there's also cost consideration because if you multi-source or you have the opportunity to multi-source, you've got a competitive environment that's going to drive lower costs for you. As opposed to if you just got one choice. The other issue there is data mobility. If I'm locked into cloud vendor one, and it's very difficult, there's major switching costs to move, then that's another reason that might offset the potential price advantage I get from being able to go to any vendor. So there's a lot of vendors out there now, infrastructure vendors that are talking about making it easier to move data on prem to off prem, into different clouds from cloud to cloud and I think that's something that creates a more level playing field that really is going to ultimately result in lower costs. >> That's a great point about the costs, we'll just double down a quick question on that. Where are customers tripping over themselves in terms of total cost of ownership because what you're getting at here is hidden costs, right in plain sight. What are those trip fault wires if you will? What's the pitfalls what should they be looking for? >> Well, so I'll give you a general answer to that, but I think that it's very specific to workload type and the regulatory requirements that you're in but I'll tell ya one of the cases where we see repatriation, workloads moving from the cloud back into on prem is when you get to a certain level of scale. And the largest enterprises. >> John: Scale in terms of when to bring it back? >> Well just in terms of how >> or when to leave >> So how much data do I need to basically maintain in this environment and use on a regular basis. And the larger scale environments are the one where larger enterprises are able to actually bring back, create their own cloud infrastructure on prem, with their own environments and actually manage that for less cost than what they could otherwise pay a public cloud provider. >> So just to take it one step further, connect the next dot, the CXO, the CIO has to try to get some stability and there's some uncontrollable things certainly in retail it's predictable that the holiday season needs bursting or whatever so you do some things in the cloud but that's a known pattern, so you're saying that they're starting to recognize some of these scale issues for predictability they bring them on prem. Is that kind of what I'm getting? >> Well so the scale from a cost point of view, so if you're creating your own private cloud infrastructure and you're using the same kind of highly agile software to find storage designs to build that environment, you somewhat have the same ability to burst. Now yeah, you have to buy the hardware and there's redeployment issues and hopefully when we move forward towards much more composable infrastructure that becomes a lot easier problem to solve but that's you know some years in the future. But what I'm really talking about it's the cost. If I'm going to be maintaining a five petabyte data set over a ten year period, and I know what my access patterns are, is it cheaper to put that in Amazon or is it cheaper for me to build an infrastructure in house and maintain that myself. >> That's a great point. That's huge and Vish what's your reaction, is this basically validates all the action going on on the private cloud right now, on prem activity is setting up the cloud models. They can't do that unless you have the operating model. >> I'll talk about two things right, one called Cloud Bank and another one called Nimble Cloud Volumes and soon to be called HPE Cloud Volumes. So Cloud Bank allows you to take on premise data running on a three part array, and actually take a portion of that data onto either an on premise object store or an off premise object store. And we call that Cloud Bank working together with something called Recovery Managed Central and store once bringing that cloud picture together. Now the HPE cloud volumes on Nimble Cloud Volumes, it's another interesting concept where you have a cloud service that's block storage service, but it gives you the six nines SLA, it gives you the ability to do snapshots and transform data without a lot of charges that Eric talked about. It gives you the ability to move the data to different clouds because it's disagregated from the major cloud providers, it's connected via a close proximity connection so these are just two examples I think that show you how putting these used cases into action. >> Hey can we geek out a little bit here? (laughter) >> Aren't we geeking out now? You want to go deeper? >> So people want simplicity, we know that, we're talking about bringing cloud on prem. How do they get there? Well one of the ways is VVOLs, we sort of been talking about this, they haven't really taken off. Eric you've written some content around this. Like you said off camera, customers don't wake up in the morning and say I got to get me some VVOLs. But they do want simplicity. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> What are VVOLs, why do they matter, and how does it relate to simplicity. >> So yeah, let's talk a little bit about that. So what everybody no matter whether they're putting storage in the cloud, they're building on prem, they're building a private cloud, everybody wants to be able to manage their environments more easily, more intuitively, and one of the things that we've seen as a trend over the last five years is in general across the industry, storage mangement tasks are migrating away from dedicated storage admin teams, more towards IT generalists. In many cases, those are the virtual administrators. To enable that kind of a move, you need to make storage much easier to manage. So the whole idea behind VVOLs is to basically allow a non-storage person who maybe thinks about things in terms of I'd like to do this operation to an application for example, I've got Oracle running or I've got this file system here and I want to create a snapshot of it or I want to do some other task on it. To be able to just select it at the application level and perform that operation, that's very intuitive, it's easy for a non-storage person to understand and VVOLs effectively enables that kind of an ease of use management in block based environments. >> An application view of the storage? >> That's right, and I mean it's effectively it ties storage operations to a single virtual machine, and basically you're running an app on a virtual machine and so that's how you get that tie in in that way. But one other thing I'll say about VVOLs is that so it's not just what VMWare provides, there's some work that needs to be done on the storage array side to integrate with that management framework. And then how that vendor has chosen to integrate with that framework is going to determine the functionality that you have access to when you're using that VVOLs API. >> And how have you chosen to integrate with that framework? >> Yeah so Dave if you look at VVOLs, both HPE and HPE 3Par nimble have bene very very strongly focused on VVOLs in fact we've been working with VMWare gosh over the last five years now, on the reference architecture for VVOLs. Most recently we've now introduced replication support for both 3Parand nimble platforms with VVOLs and I think that capability now within VVOLs is a very important watershed capability because everybody needs resilience, disaster recovery. >> Automation's right around the corner, orchestration all big topics here at VMWorld. >> Correct and so that's a very key piece. And I think if you look at to Eric's point around simplicity, VVOLs is one key area. Two layers maybe I'd like to highlight as well. Number one is the visibility to what the application sees and within the Nimble community, they've talked about this app data gap, which is the applications not knowing why they can't get access to data and so this notion of bringing that level of understanding visibility to that gap saying is it in your computer infrastructure, is it in storage, is it in the network? So this notion of VMVision, Infosight, the Nimble (inaudible) because you're going to bring out the rest of the HPE portfolio I think is very key around simplicity. The third thing let's not forget, VMWare's built a whole ecosystem of management platforms around V-Center, V-Realize operations, all the orchestration and operation pieces and so continuing to integrate and offer customers that view is very key, right, so three prong vector I would say on making things simple. >> Also it gives HPE discovers coming up in Madrid shortly. Congratulations good to see you, Eric thanks so much for stopping by and sharing the IDC perspective. Great job, live coverage here at VMWorld 2017, I'm John Furrier, Dave Alante we'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break. >> Thank you.

(upbeat music) >> Live from San Francisco, California, it's theCUBE at VMWorld 2014. Brought to you by VMware, Cisco, EMC, HP, and Nutanix. (upbeat music) Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back, we're here live in San Francisco for VMWorld 2014, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE. We expect to sue for the noise, get the tech athletes in from CEOs, entrepreneurs, startups, whoever we can get that has that signa. We have Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware here in the house. Pat, great to see you again, great keynote. >> Hey, thank you. >> You've been a great friend of theCUBE, five years now running, just want to put a plug in. >> Five years? Wow. >> I want to thank you for this amazing gift of pens we got from the VMware Opening Campus Day. Great pens, celebrating you guys opening up, officially, the Palo Alto campus, how's that going? What's happening with the campus? >> Well first, the campus opening was great, thank you for joining us there for it. It really is just a fabulous place. I mean, a beautiful campus, and we have the greatest employees, so we wanted to give them the greatest place to work. The campus has gone fabulous, we've opened up almost all the buildings now on campus. Just two more to build out, and we're hosting all sorts of wonderful people who want to come in and see the coolest place in Silicon Valley now. >> It's like China over there. New cranes going up, and putting new buildings up there. Are you guys done with construction there? What's happening? You guys are expanding like crazy. >> Two more buildings to go. >> (laughs) Two more buildings to go. >> Then we're done for a while, so (laughs) almost there, almost there. I got worried when there's so many cranes going around. Do I need all my employees to wear hardhats or something? It's like, no, we're soon done with that, and we can get everybody to work. >> Robin kicked off the keynote before you came on, she talked about staying the course, and use a computing hybrid cloud server to find data, so then you came out and laid out, essentially, the vision of this transformation that's happening. What's the state of your vision there? Expand on that keynote, and share with the folks who might not have caught it live. What was the crux of the presentation? 'Cause it had a lot of Pat Gelsinger vision, it felt like it's transformative. We've even had some guests on talking about commentary, the announcements. Are they playing defense, offense? You're not a defensive player. You're an offensive player. So talk about the offensive moves for VMware, and how that keynote struck a chord there. >> The first one really started with this phrase, "brave, new IT," and the nexus of that was all of our VMware faithful. The V admins, the people who've been using this. They are becoming critically important to the businesses that they serve going forward because not only is it about them doing their job, but with SDDC, Hybrid Cloud, end-user computing, it's them redefining the entire infrastructure for the business. And when the CEO looks down, across his leadership team, who's the most competent person there to navigate through all of these IT trends that are merging to, necessarily, redefine their businesses? And we call this liquid business that's changing. So very quickly, we're seeing that businesses redefine themselves from education, to government, to transportation. Uber, today, not owning any assets, has a market cap equal to that of Hertz and Avis combined. We're just seeing these things emerge so quickly. And who's the smartest guy in technology in the room? The IT guy. Out of that, we laid out, obviously, our continuing progression with the Software-Defined Data Center, updates on major projects, bringing those components together in a big way. One of our first, and I think, most significant announcements today, was a lot of the choice announcements. We are adding an OpenStack distribution, so if you're a vCloud user, I'm going to have the programmatic ability of infrastructure through the OpenStack API's, you now get it with VMware. We also announced an embrace of containers. Containers, this 20-year overnight success where all of a sudden, lots of discussions around containers, and how can I use containers as a new app delivery model? Well, the best way to deliver apps for an enterprise, on top of the VMware infrastructure. So we announced a relationship with Google and Kubernetes, with Docker, one of the leaders in that space early, and how we're going to make them containers without compromise in the data center for enterprise customers. >> On the container piece, last year, we asked you, here, on theCUBE, about Docker and containers. You were like, oh, containers have been around for a while. What made you go, hey, this Docker thing's got legs? Was it the community thing? Part of the Open Source tie-in? Was it the interoperability? Containers is not a new concept, as you had pointed out, but what's changed for you and VMware over the past year to make that happen? >> And it still is very early. Let's be clear, John, that we're very much in this early, nascent phase, right in the hype cycle curve, you know. We're way up, we're probably going to go through the valley of despair in this technology, but very quickly, there's a broad set of these third gen developers that are saying containers is a cool way for me to package, deliver, and manage app deployment over time. We're saying if that is how people want to be able to deliver apps, then we, the preferred infrastructure for delivering apps, we're going to embrace and enable that, as well. So very quickly, it came together, and we engaged with Docker and Google as partners, and they said absolutely, we want to partner with you in this space, so all of the pieces just snapped together overnight. We've been working with them, making meaningful contributions in the space. >> That's a DevOps ethos, right? That's basically a cloud, right? >> DevOps is a funny term. It's funny, I had a bunch of my guys at the DevOps conference here, you know who was there? It was all IT guys, not developers. It's really a progression of developers to DevOps into IT, and we really say that DevOps is where developers and IT come together. We really are trying to enable DevOps to satisfy the business guys. In fact, go back to my brave theme. You're seeing Shadow IT, and developer, and line-of-business go around IT, and IT is now being through announcements, like today, armed with the tools to go to developers and say, oh no, I'm your friend. >> Step out of the shadows. >> I'm going to enable you with the coolest, most efficient infrastructure, and I'm still going to have it secure and managed, as well. You don't need to be running in these environments that we can't scale, manage, and secure. Your apps, now, can operate in an enterprise-worthy way. >> That right once run anywhere concept is very powerful, is the premise, if I understand it correctly, that you'll bring that enterprise capability, the security, and other management capabilities to that concept? >> Yeah, the VM doesn't change. We're adding Docker on top of the VM, and enabling it with some cool, new technologies, like I mentioned, Project Fargo, that actually make that delivery of the container on the VM more efficient and lighter-weight, than a bare, metal, Linux implementation of Docker. That's really powerful, it's really cool that we can do that, and we have some cool technologies that we're showing off that enable that, and will be part of our next major vSphere release. >> So you touched that base, you touched the OpenStack, you got some action going on there, and sort of, embracing, OpenStack. More developers in OpenStack. VMware has a touch act to follow when you think about the whole where we've come from. It seems so simple now. Servers underutilized, you had a 10x disruptive factor. Now, you've got to do it again. I remember Moretz used to talk about this deeper business integration. He'd talk about it like this was grand vision, but you actually, now, have been executing on that. Is that where the next wave comes from? That deeper business integration? You talked about transforming infrastructure, so how do you do it again? Is it a cost reduction, is it a business integration, is it, as you say, transforming that infrastructure? What does that mean to the customer from an operational standpoint? >> If you're the IT guy, do you want to spend a lot of your time worrying about the infrastructure? Actually, what you want to do, is have this programmable, scalable, flexible infrastructure that enables you to go worry about the business problems, which are in the apps. Because you want the IT guy spending all of his time, and most people say, how can I do new application services? How can I enable new business models, et cetera. So he wants this flexible, programmable, secure, managed infrastructure, and he wants to worry less and less about it. E.g., it needs to become more automated, more efficient, more scalable. And we walk into that discussion, say, you know, we've earned the right, CIO, because we've demonstrated more value, more efficiency, more quality of software, and we now have 80 percent of the world's applications running on top of the software that we do enlist for you. We've earned the right to show that we can do that for the full data center. To be able to do that both on and off premise, in a reliable, scalable, managed, and secure fashion, so that we enable you, Mr. IT, to go deliver the environment for the developer. To deliver the environment on or off premise, to secure all those next generation devices and applications, as well. And that's what we're off to do for you, and we deserve a seat at your table to help you do that. >> The Federation helps you with that seat, although, you guys got a pretty big role in the Federation. >> Yeah, yeah, we do. >> I wanted to ask you about the financial analyst meeting, did you get a lot of questions about that? About the whole spin-out thing, and how was that addressed? >> Actually, surprisingly-- >> Didn't come up? >> Not a question. >> 'Cause it's already come up. >> We've talked about it before. Largely, EMC is addressing those things. We've been very proactive in our position. We think the Federation is the right model. It's working, it's delivering value, we're quite committed to it, and we're showing quite a number of cases where we're adding value, as a result of it this week. We announced EMC as one of our EVO:RAIL partners. We announced the ViPR-based object service for the vCloud Air service, that we announced this week. Announcing new solutions that we're doing with them, so lots of different areas that we're just demonstrating the value that comes from the Federation. >> Well, we know Joe a little bit, we know that's not going to happen anytime soon. So what kinds of things did come up? Were they nitty gritty things around enterprise license agreements, 2015 guidance, share with us what you guys-- >> Lots of questions around 2015. >> And you guys shared a little bit more, maybe, than in the last-- >> We gave them framework to go look at 2015, lots of questions about the strategies that we've laid out. How well this NSX thing play out? How rapidly is that going to grow? vSAN, how rapidly are you seeing that grow, as well? vCloud Air, how are you going to win in that business, and do it in a margined, effective way for VMware? And how does this vCloud Air network partnership work? Based on that, how should we look at your growth profile going forward, with your traditional business, as well as these new business areas, and what's that going to look like over 15 and beyond? So those are sort of the nature of the questions. >> The Air piece is interesting to John and me because we've been trying to parse through, on a long-term basis, you guys are software everything, you talked about that, at quite some length, and the business model's great. Marginal economics, go to zero. You see some of that happening with the public cloud. The traditional outsourcing is starting to fall, that software marginal economics line. My question relates specifically to how your, whatever it is, 4,000 partners, can you replicate that kind of marginal economics at volume, or is it more of a high touch belly-to-belly model? >> We definitely are viewing this as the potential for a very scalable model, working with service providers who invest substantial capital, who have data centers, who have networks, have unique, governed assets in their own countries that they participate in, as well. We're building the stack, being prescriptive in the hardware, building the software layer that we need to go with it, so that we can operationalize the seven by 24 service that scales, and do so with this hybrid model. Not be over here in the race to the bottom, with Amazon's and Google's, we're over here focused on enterprise customers to deliver value of how these things work across the boundary of on and off premise, the Hybrid Cloud, and enable which enterprise-class services on top of the platform. We're going to do so with what we do, we're going to leverage partnerships, like Savvis, CenturyLink, like the SoftBank partnership, and we're going to enable those 3,900 partners with additional service offerings, as well. It's a very effective business model. >> But you will build out your own data centers, or... >> No, we're not building our own concrete, air conditioning, and networks, we're doing Colo for the core vCloud Air offerings for those, but we're enabling our partners to do that, as well. Here are the recipes, you go build it, and operate it, as well. >> So that's a technology transfer, IP transfer? >> For that, we get a recurring revenue stream as they go run our software in their data centers and services. The combination of the two, we think, gives us a very effective business model for the future. >> Pat, last year, I asked you about the, you announced the Hybrid Cloud, all in. I made a comment, kind of off the cuff, that's a halfway house, got you agitated. Halfway house? (laughs) And you said no, it's the final destination. I took a lot of heat for that, I fall on my sword, I'll eat my own words there, but it turns out absolutely correct, right? That's absolutely the destination. That is the number one conversation, it's Hybrid Cloud, certainly on-prem, off-premise, new economics, value creation. I got to ask you, and the question from Twitter has come in, along the same lines, is ask Pat about moving up the Stack. And I also want to hear about the end-user piece, but inside the Hybrid Cloud destination, what is the VMware vision of moving up the Stack mean, and what does that mean to you? >> Anybody who lays out a strategy, to me, it's more important to answer what you're not doing, than what you are doing. For us, we're not doing hardware, making that clear, we're enabling hardware partners. We're not doing consumer, we're focused on the enterprise customer, and we're not doing apps. We are enabling more services, enterprise services, like DR-as-a-Service, Desktop-as-a-Service, but we're not going into the app space. That's the line that we're trying to draw. Everything that's an enterprise-class service, where people need enterprise capabilities, an identity, a DR, storage capabilities, things that really are common services for apps to utilize, that's what we're doing, but that's as far north, or far up the Stack that we'll go. >> I asked Steve Herod on our Crowd Chat pregame on Friday, what the hot opportunities are for startups, he said security, or mainly, not getting caught at this perimeter-base security. What's your view on that? >> The hard, crusty exterior, and the soft, gooey inside is how I described it this morning. My morning breakfast everyday, and with it, this whole idea of micro-segmentation, NSX, really redefines how you build networks, and that's going to allow us to re-factor every aspect of security, every aspect of routing, and load balancing, et cetera. We announced the five partnership. The Palo Alto Networks partnership is really enabling us to execute on the micro-segmentation use case. It's transformational about how services and networks are operated inside of data centers, and we have the poll position here with the NSX platform. >> One of the most common question we're getting from the crowd, is when are you going to get a Twitter handle? (groans) (laughs) >> I've never been a good social guy. (talking over each other) >> We'll show you the engagement container-- >> Thank you, you can help me out with that. That'll be good, thanks. I appreciate it. (laughs) >> On end-user computing, let's go to the part because Sanjay is onboard, the acquisition, give us the update, what's coming through that? >> What a team. Sanjay has been a great leader, we brought together a great leadership team, Sumit and John Marshall. Their passionate and aggressive in that space. The combination of the new assets, the AirWatch team, Revitalization of Horizon, DaaS as a service on the platform, we just announced Cloud Volumes. It's a very cool, dynamic app capability, so overall, really coming together. Momentum increasing in the marketplace, Sanjay's done a really fine job at driving us in that area. What a difference a year makes. >> Pat, I wish we had 34 minutes, which was your record on theCUBE-- >> We're just getting started, John. (laughter drowns out speaker) >> We appreciate your time, but I want to give you the final word, and we talked about this briefly earlier, everyone always wants to ask, is this a defensive move, what's the strategy? I've never seen you as a defensive player. In all the interviews we've done, knowing your history, you're an offensive player. You talked about, years ago, get out in front of that next wave, or you'll be driftwood. I don't see that defensive. What is the VMware offense? If you could describe the offense for VMware, as a company. And answer the question, offense, defense? Are you making defensive moves, or am I off-base by categorizing it offense? >> I think we're absolutely playing offense. If you think about it, we're transforming networking, we're transforming the entire data center operation, we're delivering the first, truly hybrid cloud, enabling secure, managed environments on those devices. Unquestionably, overall, we are playing offense. Now, some things I think we should've done sooner. We should've been in the public cloud space earlier, and we're having to catch up in that space. The moves that we've taken in OpenStack, I think they're pretty well-timed. The moves that we're taking in containers, I think we are way ahead of anybody else, in terms of delivering enterprise container environments, in that respect. >> M&A activity looking good right now? (laughs) >> I just announced one last week, I got more in the pipeline, we're never finished. Organic innovation, inorganic innovation, we're playing both, and we're absolutely playing offense 'cause here, we're playing to win because our customers want the very disruptive nature of the products that we deliver with the quality, the brand of VMware. That's what they want from us. >> And more open source is part of that playbook? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Seeing that grow? >> Absolutely, we will use open source every place that we can to accelerate the offerings that we bring to our customers. We don't mind fundamentally changing our business model, but we can add open source components to it, and we will, and today's OpenStack announcement is a great demonstration of that. >> Pat, put the bumper sticker on this to end the segment. What's the bumper sticker say for this year's VMWorld? What's on the bumper right now? What's it say for VMWorld-- >> Enabling brave, new IT. >> Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware here, inside theCUBE. Always great to have him. Our fifth year, we love having him on. Great tech athlete. This is theCUBE, be right back after a short break. (dull dinging)