>>LA from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019, brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Oh, welcome back. Inside the sands, we continue our coverage here. Live coverage on the cube of AWS. Reinvent 2019. We're in day three at has been wall to wall, a lot of fun here. Tuesday, Wednesday now Thursday. Dave Volante. I'm John Walls and we're joined by Christian Rahman who was the founder and CEO of for Christian. Good morning to you. Good morning. Thanks for having afternoon. If you're watching on the, uh, on the East coast right now. Um, let's talk about sleep a little bit. I know you're all about data, um, but let's go ahead and introduce the company to those at home who might not be familiar with what your, your poor focus was. The primary focus. Absolutely. So athlete is a managed ETL as a service company. ETL is extract, transform, and load basically about getting data from different data sources, like different applications and databases into a place where it can be analyzed. >>Typically a data warehouse or a data Lake. So let's talk about the big picture then. I mean, because this has been all about data, right? I mean, accessing data, coming from the edge, coming from multiple sources, IOT, all of this, right? You had this proliferation of data and applications that come with that. Um, what are you seeing that big picture wise in terms of what people are doing with their data, how they're trying to access their data, how to turn to drive more value from it and how you serve all those masters, if you will. So there are a few trends that we see these days. One is a, you know, an obvious one that data warehouses are moving to the cloud, right? So, you know, uh, companies used to have, uh, data warehouses on premises and now they're in the cloud. They're, uh, cheaper and um, um, and more scalable, right? With services like a Redshift and snowflake in particular on AWS. Um, and then, uh, another trend is that companies have a lot more applications than they used to. You know, in the, um, in the old days you would have maybe a few data ware, sorry, databases, uh, on premises that you would integrate into your data warehouses. Nowadays you have companies have hundreds or even thousands of applications, um, that effectively become data silos, right? Where, um, uh, analysts are seeing value in that data and they want to want to have access to it. >>So, I mean, ETL is obviously not going away. I mean, it's been here forever and it'll, it'll be here forever. The challenge with ETL has always been it's cumbersome and it's expensive. It's, and now we have this new cloud era. Um, how are you guys changing ETL? >>Yeah. ETL is something that everybody would like to see go away. Everybody would just like, not to do it, but I just want to get access to their data and it should be very unfortunate for you. Right. Well, so we started, uh, we started athlete because we saw that ETL is not going away. In fact, with all the, uh, all these applications and all these needs that analysts have, it's actually becoming a bigger problem than it used to be. Um, and so, uh, what we wanted to do is basically take, take some of that pain out, right? So that companies can get to analyzing their data faster and with less engineering effort. >>Yeah. I mean, you hear this, you know, the typical story is that data scientists spend 80% of their time wrangling data and it's, and it's true in any situation. So, um, are you trying to simplify, uh, or Cloudify ETL? And if so, how are you doing that? >>So with, uh, with the growth in the number of data analysts and the number of data analytics projects that companies wants to take on the, the traditional model of having a few engineers that know how to basically make the data available for analysts, that that model is essentially now broken. And so, uh, just like you want to democratize, uh, BI and democratize analytics, you essentially have to democratize ETL as well, right? Basically that process of making the data ready for analysis. And, uh, and that is really what we're doing at athlete. We're, we're opening up ETL to a much broader audience. >>So I'm interested in how I, so I'm in pain. It's expensive. It's time consuming. Help me Christian, how, how can you help me, sir? >>So, so first of all, we're, we're, um, uh, at least specifically we're a hundred percent AWS, so we're deeply focused on, uh, Redshift data warehouses and S3 and good data lakes. Uh, and you know, there's tremendous amount of innovation. Um, those two sort of sets of technologies now, um, Redshift made a bunch of very cool announcements era at AWS reinvent this year. Um, and so what we do is we take the, uh, the infrastructure piece out, you know, so you can deploy athlete as a hosted service, uh, where we manage all the infrastructure for you or you can deploy it within your VPC. Um, again, you know, in a much, much simplified way, uh, compared to a traditional ETL technologies. Um, and then, you know, beyond that taking, uh, building pipelines, you know, building data pipelines used to be something that would take engineers six months to 18 months, something like that. But, um, but now what we, what we see is companies using athlete, they're able to do it much faster often, um, often an hours or days. >>A couple of questions there. So it's exclusively red shift, is that right? Or other analytic databases and make is >>a hundred percent AWS we're deeply focused on, on integrating well with, with AWS technologies and services. So, um, so on the data warehousing side, we support Redshift and snowflake. >>Okay, great. So I was going to ask you if snowflake was part of that. So, well you saw red shift kind of, I sort of tongue in cheek joke. They took a page out of snowflake separating compute and storage that's going to make customers very happen so they get happy. So they can scale that independently. But there's a big trend going on. I wonder if you can address it in your, you were pointing out before that there's more data sources now because of the cloud. We were just having that conversation and you're seeing the data exchange, more data sources, things like Redshift and snowflake, uh, machine intelligence, other tools like Databricks coming in at the Sage maker, a Sage maker studios, making it simpler. So it's just going to keep going faster and faster and faster, which creates opportunities for you guys. So are you seeing that trend? It's almost like a new wave of compute and workload coming into the cloud? >>Yeah, it's, it's super interesting. Companies can now access, um, a lot more data, more varied data, bigger volumes of data that they could before and um, and they want faster access to it, both in terms of the time that it takes to, you know, to, to bite zero, right? Like the time, the time that it takes to get to the first, uh, first analysis. Um, and also, um, and also in terms of the, the, the data flow itself, right? They, they not want, um, up to the second or up to the millisecond, um, uh, essentially fresh data, uh, in their dashboards and for interactive analysis. And what about the analytics side of this then when we were talking about, you know, warehousing but, but also having access to it and doing something with it. Um, what's that evolution looking like now in this new world? So lots of, um, lots of new interesting technologies there to, um, um, you know, on the, on the BI side and, um, and our focus is on, on integrating really well with the warehouses and lakes so that those, those BI tools can plug in and, and, um, um, and, and, you know, um, get access to the data straight away. Okay. >>So architecturally, why are you, uh, how are you solving the problem? Why are you able to simplify? I'm presuming it's all built in the cloud. That's been, that's kind of an obvious one. Uh, but I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit because oftentimes when we talk to companies that have started born in the cloud, John furrier has been using this notion of, you know, cloud native. Well, the meme that we've started is you take out the T it cloud native and it's cloud naive. So you're cloud native. Now what happens oftentimes with cloud native guys is much simpler, faster, lower cost, agile, you know, cloud mentality. But maybe some, sometimes it's not as functional as a company that's been around for 40 years. So you have to build that up. What's the state of ETL, you know, in your situation. Can you maybe describe that a little bit? How is it that the architecture is different and how address functionality? >>Yeah, I mean, um, so a couple of things there. Uh, um, you, you mentioned Redshift earlier and how they now announce the separation of storage and compute. I think the same is true for e-tail, right? We can, we can build on, um, on these great services that AWS develops like S three and, and, uh, a database migration service and easy to, um, elastic MapReduce, right? We can, we can take advantage of all these, all these cloud primitives and um, um, and, and so the, the infrastructure becomes operationally, uh, easier that way. Um, and, and less expensive and all, all those good things. >>You know, I wonder, Christian, if I can ask you something, given you where you live in a complicated world, I mean, data's complicated and it's getting more complicated. We heard Andy Jassy on Tuesday really give a message to the, to the enterprise. It wasn't really so much about the startups as it previously been at, at AWS reinvent. I mean, certainly talking to developers, but he, he was messaging CEOs. He had two or three CEOs on stage. But what we're describing here with, with red shift, and I threw in Databricks age maker, uh, elastic MapReduce, uh, your tooling. Uh, we just had a company on that. Does governance and, and builders have to kind of cobble these things together? Do you see an opportunity to actually create solutions for the enterprise or is that antithetical to the AWS cloud model? What, what are your thoughts? >>Oh, absolutely know them. Um, uh, these cloud services are, are fantastic primitives, but um, but enterprises clearly have a lot of, and we, we're seeing a lot of that, right? We started out in venture Bactec and, and, and got, um, a lot of, a lot of venture backed tech companies up and running quickly. But now that we're sort of moving up market and, and uh, and into the enterprise, we're seeing that they have a requirements that go way beyond, uh, beyond what, what venture tech, uh, needs. Right. And in terms of security, governance, you know, in, in ETL specifically, right? That that manifests itself in terms of, uh, not allowing data to flow out of, of the, the company's virtual private cloud for example. That's something that's very important in enterprise, a much less important than in, uh, in, in venture-backed tech. Um, data lineage. Right? That's another one. Understanding how data, uh, makes it from, you know, all those sources into the warehouse. What happens along the way. Right. And, and regulated industries in particular, that's very important. >>Yeah. I mean, I, you know, AWS is mindset is we got engineers, we're going to throw engineers at the problem and solve it. Many enterprises look at it differently. We'll pay money to save time, you know, cause we don't have the time. We don't have the resource, I feel like I, I'd like to see sort of a increasing solutions focus. Maybe it's the big SIS that provide that. Now are you guys in the marketplace today? We are. Yup. That's awesome. So how's that? How's that going? >>Yeah. Um, you mean AWS market? Yes. Yes. Uh, yeah, it's, it's um, um, that's definitely one, one channel that, uh, where there's a lot of, a lot of promise I think both. Um, for, for for enterprise companies. Yeah. >>Cause I mean, you've got to work it obviously it doesn't, just the money just doesn't start rolling in you gotta you gotta market yourselves. >>But that's definitely simplifies that, um, that model. Right? So delivering, delivering solutions to the enterprise for sure. So what's down the road for you then, uh, from, from ETL leaps perspectives here or at leaps perspectives. Um, you've talked about the complexities and what's occurred and you're not going away. ETL is here to say problems are getting bigger. What do you see the next year, 12, 18, 24 months as far as where you want to focus on? What do you think your customers are going to need you to focus on? So the big challenge, right is that, um, um, bigger and bigger companies now are realizing that there is a ton of value in their data, in all these applications, right? But in order to, in order to get value out of it, um, you have to put, uh, engineering effort today into building and maintaining these data pipelines. >>And so, uh, so yeah, so our focus is on reducing that, reducing those engineering requirements. Um, right. So that both in terms of infrastructure, pipeline, operation, pipeline setup, uh, and, and those kinds of things. So where, uh, we believe that a lot of that that's traditionally been done with specialized engineering can be done with great software. So that's, that's what we're focused on building. I love the, you know, the company tagged the perfect data pipeline. I think of like the perfect summer, the guy catching a big wave out in Maui or someplace. Good luck on catching that perfect data pipeline you guys are doing. You're solving a real problem regulations. Yeah. Good to meet you. That cause more. We are alive at AWS reinvent 2019 and you are watching the cube.

>> 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. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. It's the Cube's live coverage here in Las Vegas, at AWS re:Invent 2018. I'm John Furrier, here with Lauren Cooney. Host of the Cube: Amazon web services. There are maybe 2,000 people here at their event, re:Invent annual conference, breaking it all down. Storage, computer networking, part of the main infrastructures involving changing very rapidly and spawning new use cases, new value propositions, it's creating a great ecosystem dynamic. We're here with Erik Kaulburg, who is the vice president of Infinidat, Cube alumni, great to see you again. >> Nice to see you as well. >> Been on the Cube multiple times. I think last time it was at VMWorld, or a studio? >> At, actually, our product launch for the cloud storage solution, as well. >> So, you guys got a great reputation. Take a minute, just, for the folks who might now know Infinidad, explain what you guys do, and your disruptive innovation. >> So, for Infinidad, we're all about tier-one environments, and it's the data piece of that environment, today, although that may not be forever. And, it's consumed through a couple of different modalities, so one of our big pieces of news earlier this year was that we were going beyond just the InfiniBox solution, which we shipped over four exabytes of to enterprises all around the world today, and broadening that to address the secondary storage market with InfiniGuard and Neutrix Cloud, which is a way to consume our capabilities completely as an iAd service in conjunction with other public clouds. >> Let's get that in a second, I want to get to the product in a second, but I want to first get your take on the market conditions, cloud storage, you're seeing pure storage had a big announcement of now they're doing a device, now doing software on premise, Amazon's going to have a device on premise, it's up for the cloud. Like, what the hell is going on? Storage is certainly growing like crazy. What does the market look like? Obviously, API, microservices, these are important things. Data still is the number one opportunity, but still a challenge. You guys are the center of it, what's the market look like to you? >> Absolutely, I couldn't agree more with the idea that data is at the middle of everything, and the lines are getting blurry between on-prem and public cloud environments as well. So, what I'm seeing in general is that companies which used to sell boxes, or primarily sell boxes today, are trying to figure out ways to play in the public cloud environments, and they're taking one of two paths. One is to develop a solution that's kind of leveraging the built-in infrastructure from the major public clouds, and the other is to build alongside it and enable those major public clouds, and potentially do so in a slightly less captive manner. So, that's what I'm kind of seeing across the industry, with regards to the public cloud. >> What's the role of storage here at re:Invent, because, like I said, Holy Trinity is of infrastructures, computer storage, and networking, and as that evolves, with each one having its new capabilities with Cloudify, is enabling new opportunities. What is the storage role now in the modern era of cloud as it is today? What's your view on that? >> Well, part of it is just providing excellent data services that are at the core of so many of these emerging environments. Like, we were listening to Monday Night Live yesterday, and one of the distinguished folks on there from the machine learning team was talking about the importance of getting more training data, so that you can run these more advanced machine learning workflows, and get things done quicker. We use less PHP type resources to get a problem solved, so I think that category of solutions, where you're using more storage capabilities as an enabler for more business value, or more value in the end application, is a trend that's going to absolutely continue for quite a while. >> What's the hottest area in Amazon cloud native world for storage that you see a lot of customers gravitating to? What's the number one? >> Well, I think, in general if you look at the adoption patterns of their block, file, and objects storage offerings, object is still dominating the vast majority of those kinds of use cases, and it comes from the perspective of applications that were written with cloud native services in mind. However, we think, I think, that there's a whole opportunity there, outside of the traditional, traditional cloud native object architectures, in the block and file arena, which has largely been untapped by the data and storage services, and that's an area where we and others in the industry are looking to augment. >> What is the competition? What's, like, NetApp doing? Let me ask, everyone's got to be on mobile clouds. Amazon, clearly the leader. They're making the market, so unless, say Kubernetes doesn't intermediate their services, for the most part, that's the market leader, but you got to play on a lot of clouds, because customers aren't going to have one cloud, they're going to certainly be hybrid on premises and cloud, but certainly be on multiple clouds. What's, like, NetApp and these guys doing? What's the competition doing? >> So, what I see NetApp doing is taking that kind of cloud captive approach, to be honest, what I see is they've got tied immigration, which is very impressive, with several major public cloud vendors. However, the challenge is, when you want cross those silos, you have a little bit more complexity that arises with that approach. >> Like what? >> So, you may have to spin up a separate set of data in Azure. Let's say, if you want to have an application cross the boundaries between AWS and Azure. >> Okay, let's get back to your storage solution. Neutrix Cloud, what is this about? Explain the product at a high level, we drill into it. >> So on a fundamental level, we believe in flexibility of Infinidad, and that's extended through all sorts of aspects of our product portfolio, but specifically, with regards to cloud storage, Neutrix delivers flexibility of having an outside set of infrastructure that's still tightly integrated with the major public clouds, including AWS, of course, and it delivers high resiliency, the five nines SLA, which we've talked about, which we believe is best in class, as well as enterprise-grade capabilities that previously you really had to look to an on-prem array to be able to achieve. Large-scale snapshot operations, asynchronous and synchronous replication natively built in, all these kinds of things, which make it easier to take tier one applications from an on-prem environment and bring those to the public cloud environments. >> And what's the core problem that you solved with this product? >> It's, you can't get tier one cloud storage today. What we would argue, anyway, and our customers are telling us that the features and capabilities, and even business guarantees provisions around the cloud storage offerings in the market today simply don't exist to the level that they need to be to support the last, let's say, 30% of applications that have not yet moved on to the public clouds. So, that's what we're addressing, making it easier for storage to accomplish that. >> You guys always have impressive customers, always see the big names, give some examples of some use cases. >> So, our customers have fallen into two categories, with regards to Neutrix Cloud adoption. The easy case, and the most natural for many of them, since they are buying our on-prem infrastructure at a large scale today, is, well, let's start replicating that infrastructure to the Neutrix cloud environment, maybe do it as a disaster-recovery target, things like that, and we think that there's value there. There's lots of companies which do DR as a service, to be honest, we don't see that as necessarily the core competency, but it's a stepping stone to the second use case, which is cloud adoption for these tier one applications, and bringing them the flexibility of potentially having multiple cloud platforms addressing the same data. >> We talked about the cloud guys, so we don't want to put you on the spot here, because this is the same patterns happening. Old world storage was stack up the storage, and provision the storage, stuff goes on there, block, file, that good stuff. Now, with the cloud, and Amazon, this is where I want to get the Amazon tie-in with you guys, because storage is not necessarily just a magic, quadrant-like thing. Oh, back-up and recovery, this and that, you're starting to see much more of a platform approach. And successful platforms enable things to be successful. It's not like I built it for this, purpose-built kind of storage. Do you guys see yourselves as a data platform, and if so, what does that mean, and what are those key value points that you're creating off that platform? >> I think you said it, actually, better than I did, that ultimately, we want customers to be able to consume our differentiated data services in whatever modality they prefer. So, if that's an on-prem infrastructure piece, if that's a back-up optimizing environment, if that's a public cloud service, we offer all those today, and customers can take their data from one to the other or even view it as a single, kind of, data architecture that crosses all of those traditional silos. >> So, were you looking at, you know, kind of one of the things that I'm listening to you guys chat, and one of the things that I'm thinking of is, how hard is it for a customer to actually adopt your technology and deliver it, you know, utilize it, across multiple environments? >> So, many of the traditional on-prem infrastructure players have great barriers associated with their public cloud services. We're not one of them. We took an intentionally different approach, and learned from companies like AWS on how you can get clients easily onto the solution, how they can pay for it easily, and how, ultimately, they can deploy it in a large scale public cloud environment very easily. That's a huge part of the investment that we put into developing the Neutrix Cloud service. >> Right. >> So we can have clients up and running in less than a day, from initial contact to large scale adoption, and it could be even faster than that as well. >> Now onto your relations with Amazon. What's it like, what's the details of it, what's the value, what's the connection point? >> I think we all agree that tier one applications are the last major bastion for public cloud adoption. These are things which you would have had on legacy big iron infrastructure, and so, to the extent Neutrix Cloud enables those tier one applications to move to the public cloud, to move to AWS, there's a lot of synergy there in the relationship, so we're absolutely an Amazon technology partner. We enjoy great working relationship with them, there are certainly areas where we overlap, but if we all agree on the end goal, we've been able to make some impressive business strategies. >> So, who are you competitors that you're most, kind of, focused on? Well, you shouldn't be focused on your competitors, you should be focused on what you're doing, but who are the competitors that kind of keep you up a little bit at night? >> I would say others that people would lump in this space, include NetApp Solutions in the public cloud environments, we see a couple of small start-ups, like Zadara, for example, from time to time, but to be honest, the biggest competitive kind of scenario that we see is just using the native public cloud services. And customers have to think about, well, I'm planning on replatforming my application, how am I going to design it from a storage perspective and often they don't even think that there are alternatives beyond the native offerings that could potentially add more value to their environments. So, that's when we come into the conversation, and from that point forward, generally, if we have a good enterprise type workload, the value proposition is instant and obvious. >> You know, when you guys came out, we've been following you guys since your founding, Gabe and I would always talk about Infinidat. You got good pedigree of a team. Classic storage. You have a good storage market. You guys take a different approach with this start-up. Founders did this time. How do you describe the key differentiator for you guys? What's the, you mentioned earlier, it's the tier one storage, but what's the secret sauce, what's the culture like? People want to peek inside Infinidad. What are they buying? What are they really getting, besides the product performance? What's the culture like, what's the company's view on the future world, serious insight. >> I think there's several elements to that, of course, but a lot of it comes from that founding DNA. So, Moshe Yanai, who basically defined the enterprise storage category overall back in EMC, had a succession of teams that he's built over the years, and he's really brought all of those key elements together. Three generations of storage expertise. >> Successful, by the way, three generations of exits, >> Absolutely, yeah. Building an organic business, selling a business, and now this is the business that he wants to leave to his grandchildren at some point. >> How's it going so far, how's business in general? >> Well, you know, we're private, so I can't say specifics, but I'd say we're definitely heading in the right direction. Growth has been phenomenal, the adoption of our portfolio solutions, in addition to just the core product, has really put us in a position of a very strong, long-term independence. >> Portfolios in terms of product capabilities or industries you're serving, or both? >> It's, actually, on both fronts. I was referring to the product portfolio but we've definitely broadened from our initial base in the financial services sector, which is a hard nut to crack in general, as a, you know, into a lot of different use cases, because it turns out that industries have a high demand for data across virtually every sector. So, we go where the data is. >> What's next? What's the next milestone for you guys? What're you lookin' to do next? >> Well, we did just have a major product release, so I'm glad that we've that, you know, out there, we're getting customers in the cloud space. I think the end of this year is going to be very, very strong for us from a business perspective and then next year, lots of great product announcements, and then ultimately, you know, we'll say some more on the business momentum there as well. >> All right, Erik, thanks for coming on the Cube show, thanks for the update. Infinidad, check them out, successful exit, multiple ties in the entrepreneurial team there, growing, doing great, storage has been going away, neither is networking, and neither is computing, it's only going to get better, stronger, as the cloud brings in more capabilities with machine learning and more use cases, new work loads, new capabilities. The Cube bringing it down with two sets here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier and Lauren Cooney, on set one. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Everyone, welcome back. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage, here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Stu, this is a wrap-up of the show. This is day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. And, I got to say, I'm surprised at how it's evolved, and the clarity of what's happening is coming into focus. We had a great kickoff, I thought, on day one. I thought we laid it out and kind of predicted and connected the dots on what was going to happen. But some kind of new white spaces were filled in. I want to get your thoughts on it. One, DevNet's success with the number of developers. Clearly a number success. But what's really interesting, after watching all the activity here at DevNet, talking to people in the hallways, is that DevNet is changing the face of Cisco. Because Cisco has an energy and an openness now, that's bringing the momentum and success and proven success of open store software to the networking layer, engaging and energizing the core base of the Cisco constituent, which is the customers, the network engineer, and allowing a path to cloud-native, a path to multi-cloud, and a path to innovation. I mean this is the story, in my opinion, at this event. There are some announcements, certainly, that tie into it, but the notion of what DevNet and DevNet Create are proving, besides being good execution by Susie Wee and the team, is that this is a tell sign that the programmable network is at a seminal moment where, like the iPhone was in 2007, that changed telephony, and created apps, the network is now programmable. New things are going to happen. This is, to me, the biggest story here at DevNet. >> Yeah, and John, in case somebody just listened to our wrap and hadn't heard the three days of coverage here, that number is 500,000. It was up, Chuck Robbins announced it on stage on day one here on Monday. 500,000 developers registered. By the way, Susie said we'd actually, we kept having to scrub the list and bring it down, so we had 300,000, it went down a little bit. She's like, "Are we still growing?" Now the momentum continues, so they're growing. But, you're right John, we've done two of these Cisco Lives. You and I did the Barcelona show and we did this show. And what's been crystallizing, what I learn and, in processing here that actually excites me, is I'm a networking guy, and so many waves that these technologies, remember it was like, "Oh ethernet fabrics are going to change everything", "SDN will totally revolutionize everything." I kind of looked and things and I was like, "You know, we're fixing networking problems, and how do I tie that to the business. Oh, I need to be more agile and I need to move faster." The punchline to what does it matter, this intent-based networking, which it's kind of a wonky term, but really we're building new applications, where the network is how we do that. It's built for microservices, it's this modern environment. And I have to have this DevNet ecosystem to enable it. Because it can't just be I manage my switch and I'm going and okay, I download software and I do some things over here. This is the career path for all of the people that, you know, the 25 years of CCIEs that we had, we've had this huge line next to us here, of everybody's getting their badges and they've got their area where they've got a little bit of special treatment of those CCIEs; there's an army of them and that's been Cisco's strength and can they take that army and get them ready for the new guerrilla warfare that is this modern application building and John, you know, how many times do people say, you know networking, they're just a bunch of plumbers, sitting down in there, wiring closet, they'll be left behind. >> Yeah, and this is the false narrative and that's absolutely the case. There definitely was a lull there. If you look at Cisco and what's going on in the networking world, we've talked. This is our ninth year with theCUBE, so you and I have pontificated and riffed many times about "the network's a bottleneck", and it's always the network, everything comes down to the network, which is why the network guys have always been the most powerful in companies. But here's what's happening here, the gestation period of SDN is an interesting dynamic. So here's what I think no one's yet reported. I think this is the real story. The SDN has been incubating and gestating now for what, four years, give or take, roughly? So SDN's embedded in at the network layer, the network's getting smarter. Then you've got the cloud scale happening, and you've got security issues in cyber, you've got cloud scale in the public cloud accelerating, the valuation of things, this costs this per minute. So, creating the economic kind of disruption. Then you have the Kubernetes on the scene, taking docker containers, making it a global container, it's not just docker, all containers generically as a key vehicle for wrapping around legacy. And it was Kubernetes, and now with Service Mesh on the horizon, there is a clear, visible path to the value creation. Combine that with the continuing explosion of open-source. Open-source has proven that the way to run things in the open is exactly how DevNet's doing it. So, all these things are elements that have just come together at a perfect time, and Cisco is taking advantage of it. And we were critical of Cisco at Barcelona by saying, they'd be crazy not to double down on this. I would quadruple down on it, it's proven. Not, "we own the network, you got to go through us", Blockchain, I sat in the blockchain session today. The central authority model in communities is flattening, this is the new normal. I think Cisco has lightning in a bottle here. Let's see what they do with it, Stu. I don't know what your reaction to that is, but they have an opportunity to make the network programmable, energize their base, it's just really exciting, I got to say. If I worked at Cisco, I would be all over the DevNet, the DevNet Create, get in the cloud scale, and ride that wave. >> Look, John, Cisco has been dominant in networking so long, that there's been so many waves hitting against it, said we were going to overtake Cisco. Open networking is one of those big waves. I've been to many conferences, I know a lot of the companies we've interviewed on theCUBE, many of the companies that are going to go take a chunk out of the monolith that was Cisco. Well, Cisco, you know, they're not deaf, they're listening-- >> They're disrupting themselves. >> They are disrupting themselves, and especially, you know, the line I heard for years was, you know, Cisco was the standard, it's like, oh, well, you know, they're dominating at the standards bodies and trying to push their way through. Well, they've got the customers. And they've got an ecosystem, and while they've invested in open source over the years, and we've talked to many of them, this DevNet activity has really pushed along, and is impressive. Doesn't mean that there aren't some pockets where other people are more advanced with the technology, you know, you can always have the debates as to who is more open than the others, which, you know, you and I have gone down many times, but it is impressive to see how Cisco is changing, what's here, the excitement has been palpable. And it's not just, you know, it's an infrastructure show, it's a networking show, when you and I interviewed Rowan Trollope at the Barcelona show, it's Cisco of the future is a software company, and they are making progress. If you give a little bit of a nudge as to, you know, what they didn't have, it's like, there weren't a ton of announcements, but the ones that they were, they were talking about the progress they've made, the DNA center-- >> Look, if you want to look for critiquing, I mean, you can look anywhere in anyone's life and find faults. There's plenty of things that Cisco's not advanced on, but time is on their side. They don't have to have big-doubt Istio version running on switches, that's coming down the road. They can work with Kubernetes, we saw some great demos in here. So I think time is a good friend for them right now, but they're doing all the right things, so again, it's an opportunity. The other thing I've noticed with the DevNet and the DevNet Create and all of our CUBE coverage, Stu, you know, I've been looking at theCUBE data, the SiliconANGLE, Wikibon data, and a new kind of persona personality is emerging, in, at least in our audience, that kind of is a tell sign to innovation. One, developers are kind of forming two lines of developers. Developers-- well, there's three. Classic developers, who just geek out and program. But two new personas. Business-oriented developers, who are being pulled to the front lines, who are dealing with issues like Capex, Opex, digital transformation. And we're seeing that, people who don't want to get an MBA, but they want to learn business. The other new category that I see developing here at DevNet is the entrepreneurial developer. This is the developer that has all the same attributes that someone starting a company would have. They're resourceful, they're looking at connecting the dots outside the box, they're using their creativity to identify using software to solve problems in the network. So, this is kind of interesting, because those are the ones that are going to jump on the grenades, take the chances, and they're inside the company. So this is going to be a wealth creation opportunity for the networking, because the networking is, right now, been waiting for the network to be scalable and programmable, we've been saying it for how many years. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, boy, John, you know, we lived through, I've said it many times on theCUBE. The decade of making networking work properly in a virtualized environment was kind of painful. When we look at containerization, what's happening to the cloud data space, I think networking understands the networking ecosystem, and especially Cisco, knows what they went through before, and they are attacking the space, and going at it hard to try and make sure that they, you know, get on this next wave, win some mine share, and you know, don't lose these customers. Because, John, something we've said many times is, right now, is probably the ripest time for customers to say, "You know, I've trusted and used this company for a really long time, but it's okay for me to try new things." And therefore, Cisco with its massive-- >> They got to try new things. >> Could be disrupted, if they don't try really hard. >> The customers have to try new things, Stu, that's definitely the case. Okay, let's get into some of the landscape issues. We saw a lot of startups come on, growing startups, so the question is will they be the M&A in the future of Cisco? But we had IBM on, we had NetApp on, Avi Networks, a lot of companies. We also saw Cohesity score a huge round of funding, 250 million dollars. We haven't seen a lot of venture-backed activity, here at the show, we've seen a lot of VC announcements, but you know, the big round for Cohesity crystallizes the competitive landscape. Your thoughts, you got the big players like IBM doing great with storage, Cloudify, NetApp with FlexPod, doing very well with the cloud. I mean, is the tide rising, where everyone's floating, and this is a lot of the competitive? And if so, is the scale attainable for the startups, or will they have to bought by the big players? Your thoughts. >> Well, John, to go back, we were just talking about DevNet, I actually feel like Cisco's pulling some of their ecosystem along. The storage-networking interactions isn't the most exciting thing in the world, and I spent ten years living in these environments. I mean, you know, storage-networking doesn't exactly get most people excited, but it is one of the fundamental things, it needs to make your environment work. Every time you did a bank transaction, or you know, bought a plane ticket, probably that was your storage and the networking underlied that, making that work. >> So what's your point, the ecosystem is going to grow, or? >> The ecosystem is following Cisco's lead, and getting involved in developer and cloud-native activity. So we're not just talking about boxes anymore. That wave towards software. NetApp, really nice story, as to how they fit into the multi-cloud environment. You know, they kind of rode down on the box trend, and as they really focused back on their core, which has always been software, they're making some strong moves there. You mentioned two of the vendors we had on, Cohesity and Avi Networks, both of them, part of their funding is from Cisco. So, you know, Cisco investing in some of the hot areas, you know, Cohesity, data protection-- >> Don't forget LiveAction was bought last Friday, their aperture in the market goes up, so we're seeing the partner network, really interesting dynamic. We're growing, we're going to see more people come in, what's your vision on this? >> No, the ecosystem's very dynamic. So, really good show floor here, you can feel the energy when you walk through this place and you go see what's happening. Big ecosystem, it showed. By the way, we didn't say it on the intro, but the number I heard was 26,000, which, this is a good size show. Bigger than a VN World, smaller than an AWS reinvent. But you know, really, much more, it's not-- >> It was my first time, it was my first show, at Cisco Live in North America. I got to say, I wasn't expecting the show floor to be that good. I mean, I was like, okay, Cisco, we have the vendors out there, partners, you know, a lot of people, you know, typical enterprise show. I was blown away, blown away by the energy of the future of creating value. I mean, the stories, it wasn't just people mailing it in. These real, compelling use cases of cloud scale. Not just selling boxes, Stu. >> Yeah, and John, you know, talk about community. You know, you and I both have a lot of networking DNA in our backgrounds. I love this community, it's people that, they love to collaborate, they love to share, they love to dig in. Lots of bloggers, there was a big podcasting going on. We brought some of those people on the program, and I loved, some of them are working for cool new startups. They're doing coding, they're doing developer activity. A section of this felt a lot like a KubeCon, or even, you know, some of the AWS and Google kind of mojo that we see at the cloud show. Which, I enjoyed Barcelona, but that was my critique, they're not as in that multi-cloud world. They were talking about it, but they're kind of stuck in this transition. It's not like they're fully there. Cisco still sells a lot of kit, and everybody makes money too. But we know this transition's going to take a long time. >> Chuck Robbins said at the keynote, that there'd be no cloud without networking. Networking and cloud people have a symbiotic relationship because networking people are inherently smart. You may argue, someone sitting at a desk, you know, doing networks, some of them have different personas inside that, but most of them are pretty smart, right. Networking people aren't dumbasses, generally speaking. The cloud people are innovating on the app side with the scale piece, also smart people, so when you get networking people with cloud, I just see a nice fit there, and I think, Kubernetes, and the Istio, and the service mesh, I think that's where it connects, because if you're a networking guy, using Ansible, using Python, you're going to naturally gravitate towards Kubernetes. It's the same concept. So, I'm watching that very closely, I think you and I have been talking about this at Linux Foundation, that's going to be the tell sign. If the network engineers can adopt the Kubernetes concept, and take the service mesh to the next level, that, to me, is going to be a tell sign. >> Yeah, and John, you know, we go to a lot of shows, we've got some really smart people who came on the program, we're a bit of intellectual snobs sometimes, and when we come on this program-- >> Speak for yourself, Stu. (laughs) >> No, I mean we love to talk to smart people. As I always say, John, if I'm the smartest person in the room, I'm in the wrong room. And I'm really excited, most of the time we're on theCUBE, we bring some really smart and interesting people on. >> Alright, let's wrap this up. Obviously the big story is DevNet. I think the community approach is great. Christine Heckart came on, she's the new senior executive, just started at Cisco. When we were at Barcelona, we saw her there. She saw DevNet, kind of a fresh eyes in Cisco, what impressed me about my observing her, on theCUBE and then watching her walk around was, she's fresh eyes. She's been in the industry, her eyes were lighting up. She sees DevNet, she understands. She came on and talked about network effects. Stu, our business is community-driven, theCUBE is very community-oriented with the content, we have network effects in our business. And I think she hit on something that I think is the next conversation point, is, the network effects is a technical and business dynamic and I think she's got her hands on a very successful narrative around where the value will go, and then when the engineering and the business come together to create value. I think DevNet has done the right thing with the open-source model, being welcoming, not elite. And I think that is worth noting. >> Yeah, and a lot of hard work went into reaching where we are with DevNet today. I love, we dug in with Susie, with Mandy. One of the interviews I did, John Apostolopoulos. You know, he's one of the ones in the labs inside of Cisco. So, it took, he walked me through, John, you know, the basically five years that led to this new DNA solution that we had. We of course had some great VIPs on the program, like Lynn Lucas, the CMO of Cohesity, Lee Howard, and of course, Zoginsash himself, Eric Herzog, who, both of those gentlemen, when you walked around this show, they are everywhere. They're plastered on the screen before the keynote, they're walking around and talking to them, so we love, as part of our community, to get to talk to those as well as, you know, all different aspects in our about 30 interviews we did this week. >> Well, we're looking forward to more coverage, Stu, I want to thank you for great coverage, thank the guys here, we're going to be going and covering Cisco like a blanket, we're going to hit all their events, Cisco Lives in Barcelona and the US. We'll continue, got a great thing going on here with the DevNet and the DevNet Create events, look for those. Check out thecube.net for theCUBE schedule. But I also want to put a shout-out for the sponsors, if it wasn't for sponsors, we wouldn't be able to bring the great crew here. Want to thank NetApp as the headline sponsor. NetApp's FlexPod, great stuff, check it out, those guys got a new mojo going on with cloud, and on premise really creating a software model. And also, Cisco, IBM, LiveAction, and Avi Networks. Thanks so much for that community support, that sends a signal that you're investing in the codevelopment of content, it's great stuff. >> And John, yeah, actually, Cohesity and Presidio helping round that up, John. One of the highlights of the show had to be the Ludacris party. >> Yep, Cohesity's new funding, great concert. >> 250 million dollars, it's a ludicrous round. >> (laughs) Stu Miniman with his own meme. Thanks for watching, we are here at Cisco Live, that's a wrap-up for the show here on day three, I'm John here with Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. (electronic music)