>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP. Discover Virtual experience Brought to you by HP. >>Welcome to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020 Virtual Experience. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to be joined by two guests from HP longtime partner Tech Data. We have calling Blair the vice president of sales and marketing of I. O. T. And Data Solutions and David Smith, H P E Pre Sales Field Solutions are common. And David, Welcome to the Cube. Thanks, Lisa. Great to see. So let's start with the calling. HP and Technical have been partners for over 40 years, but tell our audience a little bit about tech data before we get into the specifics of what you're doing and some of the cool I o. T. Stuff with HP. I >>think that the Tech data is a Fortune 100 distributor. We continued to evolved to be a solutions aggregator in these next generation technology businesses. As you've mentioned, we've been serving the I T distribution markets globally for for 40 plus years, and we're now moving into next generation technologies like Wild Analytics, I O. T and Security bubble Lifecycle Management services. But to be able todo position ourselves with our customer base and the needs of their clients have. So I'm excited to be here today to talk a little bit about what we're doing in I, O. T. And Analytics with David on the HPC side >>and in addition to the 40 plus years of partnership calling that you mentioned that Detected and HP have you've got over 200 plus hp. Resource is David, you're one of those guys in the field. Talk to us about some of the things that you're working on with Channel Partners Table David to enable them, especially during such crazy times of living and now >>absolutely, absolutely so. What we can do is we can provide strong sales and technical enablement if your team, for example, wants to better understand how to position HP portfolio if they require assistance and architect ing a secure performance i o t. Solution. We can help ensure that you're technical team is fully capable of having that conversation, and it's one that they're able to have of confidence, weaken validate the proposed HP solutions with the customers, technical requirements and proposed use case. We can even exist on a customer calls, if it would, would benefit our partner to kind of extend out to that. We also have a a a deep technical bench that Colin can speak to in the OT space toe lean on as well. For so solution is that kind of span into the space beyond where HP typically operates, which would be edge, compute computing and network. Sic security. >>Excellent call and tell me a little bit about Tech Data's investments in I o. T. When did this start? What are you guys doing today? >>Sure, we started in the cloud space. First tackle this opportunity in data center modernization and hybrid cloud. That was about seven years ago. Shortly thereafter we started investing very materially in the security cyber security space. And then we follow that with Data Analytics and then the Internet of things. Now we've been in those spaces with our long term partners for some time. But now that we're seeing this movement to the intelligent edge and a real focus on business outcomes and specialization, we've kind of tracked with the market, and we feel like we've invested a little bit ahead of where the channel is in terms of supporting our ecosystem of partners in this space. >>So the intelligent edge has been growing for quite some time. Poland in the very unique times that we're living in in 2020 how are you seeing that intelligent edge expand even more? And what are some of the pressing opportunities that tech data and HPC i O T solutions together can address? >>So a couple. So the first is a Xai mentioned earlier just data center modernization. And so, in the middle of code 19 and perhaps postcode 19 we're going to see a lot of clients that are really focused on monetizing the things that they've got. But doing so to drive business outcomes. We believe that increasingly, the predominance of use cases and compute and analytics is going to move to the edge. And HP has got a great portfolio for not just on premise high performance computing but also hybrid cloud computing. And then when we get into the edge with edge line and networking with Aruba and devices that need to be a digitized and sense arised, it's a really great partnership. And then what we're able to do also, Lisa, is we've been investing in vertical markets since 2000 and seven, and I've been a long the ride with that team, most all of that way. So we've got deep specialization and healthcare and industrial manufacturing, retail and then public sector. And then the last thing we've kind of turned on here recently just last month is a strategic partnership in the smarter cities space. So we're able to leverage a lot of those vertical market capabilities. Couple that with our HP organization and really drive specialized repeatable solutions in these vertical markets, where we believe increasingly, customers are going to be more interested in a repeatable solutions that can drive quick proof of value proof of concepts with minimal viable what kinds of products. And that's that's kind of the apartment today with RHB Organization and the HP Corporation >>David. Let's double click into some of those of vertical markets that Colin mentioned some of the things that pop into minor healthcare manufacturing. As we know, supply chains have been very challenged during covered. Give us an insight into what you're hearing from channel partners now virtually, but what are some of the things that are pressing importance? >>So from a pressing and important to Collins exact point, and your exact point as well is really it's all about the edge computing space now from a product perspective Azaz Colin had mentioned earlier. HP has their edge line converged systems, which is kind of taking the functionality of OT and edge T Excuse me of OT and I t and combine it into a single edge processing compute solution. You kind of couple that with the ability to configure components such as Tesla GP, use in specific excellent offerings to offer an aid and things like realtime, video processing and analytics. Uh, and a perfect example of this is, ah so for dissing and covert space. If if I need to be able to analyze a group of people to ensure they're staying as far apart as possible or, you know within self distant guidelines, that is where kind of the real time that's like an aspect of things can be taken advantage of same things with with the leveraging cameras where you could actually take temperature detection as as well, so it's really kind of best to think of Edge Lines Solutions is data center computing at the edge kind of transition into the Aruba space. Uh Rubio says offerings aid in the island Security is such a clear pass device inside, which allows for device discovery of network and monitoring of wired and wireless devices. There's also Aruba asset tracking and real time location of solutions, and that's particularly important in the healthcare space as well. If I have a lot of high value assets, things like wheelchairs, things like ventilation devices, where these things low located within my facilities and how can I keep keep track of them? They also, and by that I mean HP. They also kind of leveraging expanse ecosystem of partners. As an example, they leverage thing works allow their i o t solutions as well, when you kind of tying it all together with HP Point. Next to the end, customers provided with comprehensive loyalty solution. >>So, Colin, how ready? Our channel partners and the end user customers to rapidly pivot and start either deploying more technologies at the edge to be able to deliver some of the capabilities that David talked about in terms of analytics and sensors for social distancing. How ready are the channel partners and customers to be able to understand, adopt and execute this technology. >>So I think on the understanding side, I think the partners are there. We've been talking about digital transformation in the channel for a couple of years now, and I think what's happened through the 19 Pandemic is that it's been a real spotlight on the need for those business outcomes to to solve for very specific problems. And that's one of the values that we serve in the channel. So we've got a solution offering that we call our solution factory. And what we do really says is we leverage a process to look outside the industry. At Gartner, Magic Quadrant Solutions forced a Wave G two crowd. You know, top leaders, visionaries and understand What are those solutions that are in demand in these vertical markets that we talked about? And then we do a lot of work with David and his team internally in the HP organization to be able to do that and then build out that reference architectures so that we know that there's a solution that drives a bill of materials and a reference architecture that's going to work that clients are going to need and then we can do it quickly. You know, Tech data. Everything's about being bold, acting now getting scale. And we've got a large ecosystem partners that already have great relationships. So we pride ourselves on being able to identify what are those solutions that we can take to our partners that they can quickly take to their end users where you know we've We've kind of developed out what we think the 70 or 80% of that solution is going to look like. And then we drive point next and other services capabilities to be able to complete that last mile, if you will, of some of the customization. So we're helping them. For those who aren't ready, we're helping them. For those who already have very specific use cases and a practice that they drive with repeatable solutions were coming alongside them and understanding. What can we do? Using a practice builder approach, which is our consultative approach to understand where our partners are going in the market, who their clients are, what skill sets do they have? What supplier affinities do they want to drive? What brand marketing or demand generation support do they need? And that's where we can take some of these solutions, bring them to bear and engage in that consultative engagement to accelerate being ready as, as you rightly say, >>so tech. It has a lot of partners. You in general. You also have a lot of partners in the i o T space calling What? How do you from a marketing hat perspective? How do you describe the differentiation that Tech data and HP ease Iot solutions delivered to the channel to the end user? >>A couple of different things? I think that's that's differentiation. And that's one of the things that we strive for in the channel is to be specialized and to be competitively differentiated. And so the first part, I say to all of my team, Lisa, is you know, whether it's our solution consultants or our technical consultants, our solutions to the developers or the software development team that works my organization. Our goal is to be specialized in such a way that we're having relevant value added conversations not only our channel partners, but also end users of our partners want to bring us into those conversations, and many do. The next is really education and enablement as you would expect. And so there's a lot of things that are specialized in our technical. We drive education certification programs, roadshows, seminars, one of the things that we're seeing a lot of interest now. Lisa is for a digital marketing, and we're driving. Some really need offerings around digital marketing platforms that not only educate our partners but also allow our partners to bring their end users and tour some of this some of these technologies. So whether it's at our Clearwater office, where we've got an I. O T. Solution center, that we we take our partners and their clients through or we're using our facilities Teoh to do executive briefings and ideation as a service that, you know, kind of understanding the art of the possible. With both our resellers and their clients work, we're using our solution. Our solution catalogs that we've built an interactive pdf that allows our partners to understand over 50 solutions that we've got and then be able to identify. Where would they like to bring in David and his team and then my consultants to do that, that deep planning on business development, uh, that we talked about a little bit earlier. >>So the engagement right now is maybe even more important than it has been in a while because it's all hands off and virtual David. Talk to me about some of the engagement and the enablement piece that call and talked about. How are you able to really keep a channel partner and their end user customers engaged and interested in what you're able to deliver through this from New Virtual World? >>That's a great, great question. And we work in conjunction with our marketing teams to make sure that as new technologies and quite in I O. T space as well as within the HP East base as well that that our channel partners are educated and aware that these solutions exist. I know for a fact that for the majority of them you kind of get this consistent bombardment of new technology. But being able to actually have someone go out and explain it and then being able to correspondingly position it's use case and it's functionality and why it would provide value for your end customer is one of the benefits of tech data ads to kind of build upon that previous statement. The fact that We have such a huge portfolio of partners, so you kind of have HP and the edge compute space. But we have so many different partners in the OT space where it's really just a phone call, an email, a Skype message, a way to have that conversation around interoperability and then provide those responses back to our partners. >>Excellent. One more question before we go. Colin for you, A lot of partners. Why HP fry Mt. >>So a couple of reasons? One of the one of the biggest reasons as HP is just a great partner. And so when you look at evaluating I. O. T solutions that tend to be pretty comprehensive in many cases, Lisa it takes 10 or 12 partners to complete a really i o t solution and address that use case that that's in the field. And so when you have a partner like HP who's investing in these programs, investing in demand generation, investing in the spectrum of technology, whether it's hybrid Cloud Data Center, compute storage or your edge devices and Iot gateways, then to be able to contextualize those into what we call market ready solutions in each one of these vertical markets where there's references and there's use cases. And there were coupling education that specific rest of solutions. You know HP can do all of those things, and that's very important. Because in this new world, no one can go it alone anymore. It takes it takes partnerships, and we're all better together. And HP really does embrace that philosophy. And they've been a great partner for us in the Iot space. >>Excellent. Well, Colin and David, thank you so much for joining me today on the Cube Tech data. H p e i o t better together. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking with you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. Lisa. >>And four Collet and David. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's virtual coverage of HP Discover 2020. Thanks for watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>It's the queue covering the virtual vertical Big Data Conference 2020. Brought to you by vertical. >>Hello, everybody. Welcome to the new Normal. You're watching the Cube, and it's remote coverage of the vertical big data event on digital or gone Virtual. My name is Dave Volante, and I'm here with Colin Mahoney, who's a senior vice president at Micro Focus and the GM of Vertical Colin. Well, strange times, but the show goes on. Great to see you again. >>Good to see you too, Dave. Yeah, strange times indeed. Obviously, Safety first of everyone that we made >>a >>decision to go Virtual. I think it was absolutely the right all made it in advance of how things have transpired, but we're making the best of it and appreciate your time here, going virtual with us. >>Well, Joe and we're super excited to be here. As you know, the Cube has been at every single BDC since its inception. It's a great event. You just you just presented the key note to your to your audience, You know, it was remote. You didn't have that that live vibe. And you have a lot of fans in the vertical community But could you feel the love? >>Yeah, you know, it's >>it's hard to >>feel the love virtually, but I'll tell you what. The silver lining in all this is the reach that we have for this event now is much broader than it would have been a Z you know, you know, we brought this event back. It's been a few years since we've done it. We're super excited to do it, obviously, you know, in Boston, where it was supposed to be on location, but there wouldn't have been as many people that could participate. So the silver lining in all of this is that I think there's there's a lot of love out there we're getting, too. I have a lot of participants who otherwise would not have been able to participate in this. Both live as well. It's a lot of these assets that we're gonna have available. So, um, you know, it's out there. We've got an amazing customers and of practitioners with vertical. We've got so many have been with us for a long time. We've of course, have a lot of new customers as well that we're welcoming, so it's exciting. >>Well, it's been a while. Since you've had the BDC event, a lot of transpired. You're now part of micro focus, but I know you and I know the vertical team you guys have have not stopped. You've kept the innovation going. We've been following the announcements, but but bridge the gap between the last time. You know, we had coverage of this event and where we are today. A lot has changed. >>Oh, yeah, a lot. A lot has changed. I mean, you know, it's it's the software industry, right? So nothing stays the same. We constantly have Teoh keep going. Probably the only thing that stays the same is the name Vertical. Um and, uh, you know, you're not spending 10 which is just a phenomenal released for us. So, you know, overall, the the organization continues to grow. The dedication and commitment to this great form of vertical continues every single release we do as you know, and this hasn't changed. It's always about performance and scale and adding a whole bunch of new capabilities on that front. But it's also about are our main road map and direction that we're going towards. And I think one of the things have been great about it is that we've stayed true that from day one we haven't tried to deviate too much and get into things that are barred to outside your box. But we've really done, I think, a great job of extending vertical into places where people need a lot of help. And with vertical 10 we know we're going to talk more about that. But we've done a lot of that. It's super exciting for our customers, and all of this, of course, is driven by our customers. But back to the big data conference. You know, everybody has been saying this for years. It was one of the best conferences we've been to just so really it's. It's developers giving tech talks, its customers giving talks. And we have more customers that wanted to give talks than we had slots to fill this year at the event, which is another benefit, a little bit of going virtually accommodate a little bit more about obviously still a tight schedule. But it really was an opportunity for our community to come together and talk about not just America, but how to deal with data, you know, we know the volumes are slowing down. We know the complexity isn't slowing down. The things that people want to do with AI and machine learning are moving forward in a rapid pace as well. There's a lot talk about and share, and that's really huge part of what we try to do with it. >>Well, let's get into some of that. Um, your customers are making bets. Micro focus is actually making a bet on one vertical. I wanna get your perspective on one of the waves that you're riding and where are you placing your bets? >>Yeah, No, it's great. So, you know, I think that one of the waves that we've been writing for a long time, obviously Vertical started out as a sequel platform for analytics as a sequel, database engine, relational engine. But we always knew that was just sort of takes that we wanted to do. People were going to trust us to put enormous amounts of data in our platform and what we owe everyone else's lots of analytics to take advantage of that data in the lots of tools and capabilities to shape that data to get into the right format. The operational reporting but also in this day and age for machine learning and from some pretty advanced regressions and other techniques of things. So a huge part of vertical 10 is just doubling down on that commitment to what we call in database machine learning and ai. Um, And to do that, you know, we know that we're not going to come up with the world's best algorithms. Nor is that our focus to do. Our advantage is we have this massively parallel platform to ingest store, manage and analyze the data. So we made some announcements about incorporating PM ML models into the product. We continue to deepen our python integration. Building off of a new open source project we started with uber has been a great customer and partner on This is one of our great talks here at the event. So you know, we're continuing to do that, and it turns out that when it comes to anything analytics machine learning, certainly so much of what you have to do is actually prepare the big shape the data get the data in the right format, apply the model, fit the model test a model operationalized model and is a great platform to do that. So that's a huge bet that were, um, continuing to ride on, taking advantage of and then some of the other things that we've just been seeing. You continue. I'll take object. Storage is an example on, I think Hadoop and what would you point through ultimately was a huge part of this, but there's just a massive disruption going on in the world around object storage. You know, we've made several bets on S three early we created America Yang mode, which separates computing story. And so for us that separation is not just about being able to take care of your take advantage of cloud economics as we do, or the economics of object storage. It's also about being able to truly isolate workloads and start to set the sort of platform to be able to do very autonomous things in the databases in the database could actually start self analysing without impacting many operational workloads, and so that continues with our partnership with pure storage. On premise, we just announced that we're supporting beyond Google Cloud now. In addition to Amazon, we supported on we've got a CFS now being supported by are you on mode. So we continue to ride on that mega trend as well. Just the clouds in general. Whether it's a public cloud, it's a private cloud on premise. Giving our customers the flexibility and choice to run wherever it makes sense for them is something that we are very committed to. From a flexibility standpoint. There's a lot of lock in products out there. There's a lot of cloud only products now more than ever. We're hearing our customers that they want that flexibility to be able to run anywhere. They want the ease of use and simplicity of native cloud experiences, which we're giving them as well. >>I want to stay in that architectural component for a minute. Talk about separating compute from storage is not just about economics. I mean apart Is that you, you know, green, really scale compute separate from storage as opposed to in chunks. It's more efficient, but you're saying there's other advantages to operational and workload. Specificity. Um, what is unique about vertical In this regard, however, many others separate compute from storage? What's different about vertical? >>Yeah, I think you know, there's a lot of differences about how we do it. It's one thing if you're a cloud native company, you do it and you have a shared catalog. That's key value store that all of your customers are using and are on the same one. Frankly, it's probably more of a security concern than anything. But it's another thing. When you give that capability to each customer on their own, they're fully protected. They're not sharing it with any other customers. And that's something that we hear a lot of insights from our customers. They want to be able to separate compute and storage. But they want to be able to do this in their own environment so that they know that in their data catalog there's no one else is. You share in that catalog, there's no single point of failure. So, um, that's one huge advantage that we have. And frankly, I think it just comes from being a company that's operating on premise and, uh, up in the cloud. I think another huge advantages for us is we don't know what object storage platform is gonna win, nor do we necessarily have. We designed the young vote so that it's an sdk. We started with us three, but it could be anything. It's DFS. That's three. Who knows what what object storage formats were going to be there and then finally, beyond just the object storage. We're really one of the only database companies that actually allows our customers to natively operate on data in very different formats, like parquet and or if you're familiar with those in the Hadoop community. So we not only embrace this kind of object storage disruption, but we really embrace the different data formats. And what that means is our customers that have data pipelines that you know, fully automated, putting this information in different places. They don't have to completely reload everything to take advantage of the Arctic analytics. We can go where the data is connected into it, and we offer them a lot of different ways to take advantage of those analytics. So there are a couple of unique differences with verdict, and again, I think are really advance. You know, in many ways, by not being a cloud native platform is that we're very good at operating in different environments with different formats that changing formats over time. And I don't think a lot of the other companies out there that I think many, particularly many of the SAS companies were scrambling. They even have challenges moving from saying Amazon environment to a Microsoft azure environment with their office because they've got so much unique Band Aid. Excuse me in the background. Just holding the system up that is native to any of those. >>Good. I'm gonna summarize. I'm hearing from you your Ferrari of databases that we've always known. Your your object store agnostic? Um, it's any. It's the cloud experience that you can bring on Prem to virtually any cloud. All the popular clouds hybrid. You know, aws, azure, now Google or on Prem and in a variety of different data formats. And that is, I think, you know, you need the combination of those I think is unique in the marketplace. Um, before we get into the news, I want to ask you about data silos and data silos. You mentioned H DFs where you and I met back in the early days of big data. You know, in some respects, you know, Hadoop help break down the silos with distributing the date and leave it in place, and in other respects, they created Data Lakes, which became silos. And so we have. Yet all these other sales people are trying to get to, Ah, digital transformation meeting, putting data at their core virtually obviously, and leave it in place. What's your thoughts on that in terms of data being a silo buster Buster, How does verdict of way there? >>Yeah, so And you're absolutely right, I think if even if you look at his due for all the new data that gets into the do. In many ways, it's created yet another large island of data that many organizations are struggling with because it's separate from their core traditional data warehouse. It's separate from some of the operational systems that they have, and so there might be a lot of data in there, but they're still struggling with How do I break it out of that large silo and or combine it again? I think some some of the things that verdict it doesn't part of the announcement just attend his migration tools to make it really easy. If you do want to move it from one platform to another inter vertical, but you don't have to move it, you can actually take advantage of a lot of the data where it resides with vertical, especially in the Hadoop brown with our external table storage with our building or compartment natively. So we're very pragmatic about how our customers go about this. Very few customers, Many of them tried it with Hadoop and realize that didn't work. But very few customers want a wholesale. Just say we're going to throw everything out. We're gonna get rid of our data warehouse. We're gonna hit the pause button and we're going to go from there. Just it's not possible to do that. So we've spent a lot of time investing in the product, really work with them to go where the data is and then seamlessly migrate. And when it makes sense to migrate, you mentioned the performance of America. Um, and you talked about it is the variety. It definitely is. And one other thing that we're really proud of this is that it actually is not a gas guzzler. Easy either One of the things that we're seeing, a lot of the other cloud databases pound for pound you get on the 10th the hardware vertical running up there. You get over 10 x performance. We're seeing that a lot, so it's Ah, it's not just about the performance, but it's about the efficiency as well. And I think that efficiency is really important when it comes to silos. Because there's there's just only so much horsepower out there. And it's easier for companies to play tricks and lots of servers environment when they start up for so many organizations and cloud and frankly, looking at the bills they're getting from these cloud workloads that are running. They really conscious of that. >>Yeah. The big, big energy companies love the gas guzzlers. A lot of a lot of cloud. Cute. But let's get into the news. Uh, 10 dot io you shared with your the audience in your keynote. One of the one of the highlights of data. What do we need to know? >>Yeah, so, you know, again doubling down on these mega trends, I'll start with Machine Learning and ai. We've done a lot of work to integrate so that you can take native PM ml models, bring them into vertical, run them massively parallel and help shape you know your data and prepare it. Do all the work that we know is required true machine learning. And for all the hype that there is around it, this is really you know, people want to do a lot of unsupervised machine learning, whether it's for healthcare fraud, detection, financial services. So we've doubled down on that. We now also support things like Tensorflow and, you know, as I mentioned, we're not going to come up with the best algorithms. Our job is really to ensure that those algorithms that people coming up with could be incorporated, that we can run them against massive data sets super efficiently. So that's that's number one number two on object storage. We continue to support Mawr object storage platforms for ya mode in the cloud we're expanding to Google G CPI, Google's cloud beyond just Amazon on premise or in the cloud. Now we're also supporting HD fs with beyond. Of course, we continue to have a great relationship with our partners, your storage on premise. Well, what we continue to invest in the eon mode, especially. I'm not gonna go through all the different things here, but it's not just sort of Hey, you support this and then you move on. There's so many different things that we learn about AP I calls and how to save our customers money and tricks on performance and things on the third areas. We definitely continue to build on that flexibility of deployment, which is related to young vote with. Some are described, but it's also about simplicity. It's also about some of the migration tools that we've announced to make it easy to go from one platform to another. We have a great road map on these abuse on security, on performance and scale. I mean, for us. Those are the things that we're working on every single release. We probably don't talk about them as much as we need to, but obviously they're critically important. And so we constantly look at every component in this product, you know, Version 10 is. It is a huge release for any product, especially an analytic database platform. And so there's We're just constantly revisiting you know, some of the code base and figuring out how we can do it in new and better ways. And that's a big part of 10 as well. >>I'm glad you brought up the machine Intelligence, the machine Learning and AI piece because we would agree that it is really one of the things we've noticed is that you know the new innovation cocktail. It's not being driven by Moore's law anymore. It's really a combination of you. You've collected all this data over the last 10 years through Hadoop and other data stores, object stores, etcetera. And now you're applying machine intelligence to that. And then you've got the cloud for scale. And of course, we talked about you bringing the cloud experience, whether it's on Prem or hybrid etcetera. The reason why I think this is important I wanted to get your take on this is because you do see a lot of emerging analytic databases. Cloud Native. Yes, they do suck up, you know, a lot of compute. Yeah, but they also had a lot of value. And I really wanted to understand how you guys play in that new trend, that sort of cloud database, high performance, bringing in machine learning and AI and ML tools and then driving, you know, turning data into insights and from what I'm hearing is you played directly in that and your differentiation is a lot of the things that we talk about including the ability to do that on from and in the cloud and across clouds. >>Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great point. We were a great cloud database. We run very well upon three major clouds, and you could argue some of the other plants as well in other parts of the world. Um, if you talk to our customers and we have hundreds of customers who are running vertical in the cloud, the experience is very good. I think it would always be better. We've invested a lot in taking advantage of the native cloud ecosystem, so that provisioning and managing vertical is seamless when you're in that environment will continue to do that. But vertical excuse me as a cloud platform is phenomenal. And, um, you know, there's a There's a lot of confusion out there, you know? I think there's a lot of marketing dollars spent that won't name many of the companies here. You know who they are, You know, the cloud Native Data Warehouse and it's true, you know their their software as a service. But if you talk to a lot of our customers, they're getting very good and very similar. experiences with Bernie comic. We stopped short of saying where software is a service because ultimately our customers have that control of flexibility there. They're putting verdict on whichever cloud they want to run it on, managing it. Stay tuned on that. I think you'll you'll hear from or more from us about, you know, that going going even further. But, um, you know, we do really well in the cloud, and I think he on so much of yang. And, you know, this has really been a sort of 2.5 years and never for us. But so much of eon is was designed around. The cloud was designed around Cloud Data Lakes s three, separation of compute and storage on. And if you look at the work that we're doing around container ization and a lot of these other elements, it just takes that to the next level. And, um, there's a lot of great work, so I think we're gonna get continue to get better at cloud. But I would argue that we're already and have been for some time very good at being a cloud analytic data platform. >>Well, since you open the door I got to ask you. So it's e. I hear you from a performance and architectural perspective, but you're also alluding two. I think something else. I don't know what you can share with us. You said stay tuned on that. But I think you're talking about Optionality, maybe different consumption models. That am I getting that right and you share >>your difficult in that right? And actually, I'm glad you wrote something. I think a huge part of Cloud is also has nothing to do with the technology. I think it's how you and seeing the product. Some companies want to rent the product and they want to rent it for a certain period of time. And so we allow our customers to do that. We have incredibly flexible models of how you provision and purchase our product, and I think that helps a lot. You know, I am opening the door Ah, a little bit. But look, we have customers that ask us that we're in offer them or, you know, we can offer them platforms, brawl in. We've had customers come to us and say please take over systems, um, and offer something as a distribution as I said, though I think one thing that we've been really good at is focusing on on what is our core and where we really offer offer value. But I can tell you that, um, we introduced something called the Verdict Advisor Tool this year. One of the things that the Advisor Tool does is it collects information from our customer environments on premise or the cloud, and we run through our own machine learning. We analyze the customer's environment and we make some recommendations automatically. And a lot of our customers have said to us, You know, it's funny. We've tried managed service, tried SAS off, and you guys blow them away in terms of your ability to help us, like automatically managed the verdict, environment and the system. Why don't you guys just take this product and converted into a SAS offering, so I won't go much further than that? But you can imagine that there's a lot of innovation and a lot of thoughts going into how we can do that. But there's no reason that we have to wait and do that today and being able to offer our customers on premise customers that same sort of experience from a managed capability is something that we spend a lot of time thinking about as well. So again, just back to the automation that ease of use, the going above and beyond. Its really excited to have an analytic platform because we can do so much automation off ourselves. And just like we're doing with Perfect Advisor Tool, we're leveraging our own Kool Aid or Champagne Dawn. However you want to say Teoh, in fact, tune up and solve, um, some optimization for our customers automatically, and I think you're going to see that continue. And I think that could work really well in a bunch of different wallets. >>Welcome. Just on a personal note, I've always enjoyed our conversations. I've learned a lot from you over the years. I'm bummed that we can't hang out in Boston, but hopefully soon, uh, this will blow over. I loved last summer when we got together. We had the verdict throwback. We had Stone Breaker, Palmer, Lynch and Mahoney. We did a great series, and that was a lot of fun. So it's really it's a pleasure. And thanks so much. Stay safe out there and, uh, we'll talk to you soon. >>Yeah, you too did stay safe. I really appreciate it up. Unity and, you know, this is what it's all about. It's Ah, it's a lot of fun. I know we're going to see each other in person soon, and it's the people in the community that really make this happen. So looking forward to that, but I really appreciate it. >>Alright. And thank you, everybody for watching. This is the Cube coverage of the verdict. Big data conference gone, virtual going digital. I'm Dave Volante. We'll be right back right after this short break. >>Yeah.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. >>This is a cube conversation. >>Hi, everybody. Dave Vellante here with the Cube. And we're getting ready for the verdict. A big data conference. 2020. The conference has gone virtual, and this is our digital presentation of the conference. I'm here with Colin Mahoney. Who's the general manager of Vertical? How you doing, Colin? >>Great day. Great to see you. >>Hey, let's set it up. What should we expect? That BBC 2020 get people excited? >>Yeah. So look, I mean, it's it's part of the times. We made the decision to go Virtual way made that decision a little bit earlier, and now we know it was absolutely the right thing to do. And as much as we love getting everybody together and the community around vertical being together first and look at the bright side, we've got the opportunity to hear bring the critical big data conference virtual to a lot of people in the comfort of whatever they are right now. That's exciting, But we're still gonna have great presentations. Speakers true to form, way don't really allow any marketing into the critical big data conference. It's all presentations given by either our engineering team for our customers on how you can actually take advantage and use the father. Then, I think, on years past it's been a few years since we've done it, but we got great agenda. The team is doing an incredible job, as we were to virtual as you could imagine. It's never easy to pull off one of these events, and it's certainly not easy to do change course a few weeks before they get virtual. But everybody's doing a great job of customers, have been so supportive and you're going to help. And like I said, the good news is our reach is going through the roof in terms of the numbers and the number of people that actually participate. So it's gonna be fun. It's It's all about data. It's not just about the data itself. We all know that may be boring. If you're just talking about is really about what you can do with data, how you can take advantage of some of the incredible things that our customers are hearing with data to change the world for the better and no type of it. Now, I think we all understand how critically important that it's >>That's awesome. Colin and I understand from talking books the vertical team that registrations are are going to the roof. So Goto find vertical BDC 2020. Just Google it. You'll find it. Sign up, um, And then give us the last word. >>Yeah. Come, come, come see it. And you know what? It's going to be on demand as well, Which is one of the benefits of, uh, you know, vertical going virtual for the big data conference. But come and learn. Come learn about data. Come to see the community we hear from our customers directly and enjoy. Have fun. We can forward to seeing you there. Thanks, Dave. >>Yeah, awesome. And then, you know that's the thing to the Cube Will be. There will be streaming ah of interviews all throughout the next several weeks and months, so check it out. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you at the verdict of Big Data Conference. 2020. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to Cambridge, Massachusetts everybody, you're watching The Cube, the leader in tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante here with my cohost Paul Gillin. This is day one of our two day coverage of the MIT CDOIQ conferences. CDO, Chief Data Officer, IQ, information quality. Colin Mahoney is here, he's a good friend and long time CUBE alum. I haven't seen you in awhile, >> I know >> But thank you so much for taking some time, you're like a special guest here >> Thank you, yeah it's great to be here, thank you. >> Yeah, so, this is not, you know, something that you would normally attend. I caught up with you, invited you in. This conference has started as, like back office governance, information quality, kind of wonky stuff, hidden. And then when the big data meme took off, kind of around the time we met. The Chief Data Officer role emerged, the whole Hadoop thing exploded, and then this conference kind of got bigger and bigger and bigger. Still intimate, but very high level, very senior. It's kind of come full circle as we've been saying, you know, information quality still matters. You have been in this data business forever, so I wanted to invite you in just to get your perspectives, we'll talk about what's new with what's going on in your company, but let's go back a little bit. When we first met and even before, you saw it coming, you kind of invested your whole career into data. So, take us back 10 years, I mean it was so different, remember it was Batch, it was Hadoop, but it was cool. There was a lot of cool >> It's still cool. (laughs) projects going on, and it's still cool. But, take a look back. >> Yeah, so it's changed a lot, look, I got into it a while ago, I've always loved data, I had no idea, the explosion and the three V's of data that we've seen over the last decade. But, data's really important, and it's just going to get more and more important. But as I look back I think what's really changed, and even if you just go back a decade I mean, there's an insatiable appetite for data. And that is not slowing down, it hasn't slowed down at all, and I think everybody wants that perfect solution that they can ask any question and get an immediate answers to. We went through the Hadoop boom, I'd argue that we're going through the Hadoop bust, but what people actually want is still the same. You know, they want real answers, accurate answers, they want them quickly, and they want it against all their information and all their data. And I think that Hadoop evolved a lot as well, you know, it started as one thing 10 years ago, with MapReduce and I think in the end what it's really been about is disrupting the storage market. But if you really look at what's disrupting storage right now, public clouds, S3, right? That's the new data league. So there's always a lot of hype cycles, everybody talks about you know, now it's Cloud, everything, for maybe the last 10 years it was a lot of Hadoop, but at the end of the day I think what people want to do with data is still very much the same. And a lot of companies are still struggling with it, hence the role for Chief Data Officers to really figure out how do I monetize data on the one hand and how to I protect that asset on the other hand. >> Well so, and the cool this is, so this conference is not a tech conference, really. And we love tech, we love talking about this, this is why I love having you on. We kind of have a little Vertica thread that I've created here, so Colin essentially, is the current CEO of Vertica, I know that's not your title, you're GM and Senior Vice President, but you're running Vertica. So, Michael Stonebreaker's coming on tomorrow, >> Yeah, excellent. >> Chris Lynch is coming on tomorrow, >> Oh, great, yeah. >> we've got Andy Palmer >> Awesome, yeah. >> coming up as well. >> Pretty cool. (laughs) >> So we have this connection, why is that important? It's because, you know, Vertica is a very cool company and is all about data, and it was all about disrupting, sort of the traditional relational database. It's kind of doing more with data, and if you go back to the roots of Vertica, it was like how do you do things faster? How do you really take advantage of data to really drive new business? And that's kind of what it's all about. And the tech behind it is really cool, we did your conference for many, many years. >> It's coming back by the way. >> Is it? >> Yeah, this March, so March 30th. >> Oh, wow, mark that down. >> At Boston, at the new Encore Hotel. >> Well we better have theCUBE there, bro. (laughs) >> Yeah, that's great. And yeah, you've done that conference >> Yep. >> haven't you before? So very cool customers, kind of leading edge, so I want to get to some of that, but let's talk the disruption for a minute. So you guys started with the whole architecture, MPP and so forth. And you talked about Cloud, Cloud really disrupted Hadoop. What are some of the other technology disruptions that you're seeing in the market space? >> I think, I mean, you know, it's hard not to talk about AI machine learning, and what one means versus the other, who knows right? But I think one thing that is definitely happening is people are leveraging the volumes of data and they're trying to use all the processing power and storage power that we have to do things that humans either are too expensive to do or simply can't do at the same speed and scale. And so, I think we're going through a renaissance where a lot more is being automated, certainly on the Vertica roadmap, and our path has always been initially to get the data in and then we want the platform to do a lot more for our customers, lots more analytics, lots more machine-learning in the platform. So that's definitely been a lot of the buzz around, but what's really funny is when you talk to a lot of customers they're still struggling with just some basic stuff. Forget about the predictive thing, first you've got to get to what happened in the past. Let's give accurate reporting on what's actually happening. The other big thing I think as a disruption is, I think IOT, for all the hype that it's getting it's very real. And every device is kicking off lots of information, the feedback loop of AB testing or quality testing for predictive maintenance, it's happening almost instantly. And so you're getting massive amounts of new data coming in, it's all this machine sensor type data, you got to figure out what it means really quick, and then you actually have to do something and act on it within seconds. And that's a whole new area for so many people. It's not their traditional enterprise data network warehouse and you know, back to you comment on Stonebreaker, he got a lot of this right from the beginning, you know, and I think he looked at the architectures, he took a lot of the best in class designs, we didn't necessarily invent everything, but we put a lot of that together. And then I think the other you've got to do is constantly re-invent your platform. We came out with our Eon Mode to run cloud native, we just got rated the best cloud data warehouse from a net promoter score rating perspective, so, but we got to keep going you know, we got to keep re-inventing ourselves, but leverage everything that we've done in the past as well. >> So one of the things that you said, which is kind of relevant for here, Paul, is you're still seeing a real data quality issue that customers are wrestling with, and that's a big theme here, isn't it? >> Absolutely, and the, what goes around comes around, as Dave said earlier, we're still talking about information quality 13 years after this conference began. Have the tools to improve quality improved all that much? >> I think the tools have improved, I think that's another area where machine learning, if you look at Tamr, and I know you're going to have Andy here tomorrow, they're leveraging a lot of the augmented things you can do with the processing to make it better. But I think one thing that makes the problem worse now, is it's gotten really easy to pour data in. It's gotten really easy to store data without having to have the right structure, the right quality, you know, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, everything was perfect before it got into the platform. Right, everything was, there was quality, everything was there. What's been happening over the last decade is you're pumping data into these systems, nobody knows if it's redundant data, nobody knows if the quality's any good, and the amount of data is massive. >> And it's cheap to store >> Very cheap to store. >> So people keep pumping it in. >> But I think that creates a lot of issues when it comes to data quality. So, I do think the technology's gotten better, I think there's a lot of companies that are doing a great job with it, but I think the challenge has definitely upped. >> So, go ahead. >> I'm sorry. You mentioned earlier that we're seeing the death of Hadoop, but I'd like you to elaborate on that becuase (Dave laughs) Hadoop actually came up this morning in the keynote, it's part of what GlaxoSmithKline did. Came up in a conversation I had with the CEO of Experian last week, I mean, it's still out there, why do you think it's in decline? >> I think, I mean first of all if you look at the Hadoop vendors that are out there, they've all been struggling. I mean some of them are shutting down, two of them have merged and they've got killed lately. I think there are some very successful implementations of Hadoop. I think Hadoop as a storage environment is wonderful, I think you can process a lot of data on Hadoop, but the problem with Hadoop is it became the panacea that was going to solve all things data. It was going to be the database, it was going to be the data warehouse, it was going to do everything. >> That's usually the kiss of death, isn't it? >> It's the kiss of death. And it, you know, the killer app on Hadoop, ironically, became SQL. I mean, SQL's the killer app on Hadoop. If you want to SQL engine, you don't need Hadoop. But what we did was, in the beginning Mike sort of made fun of it, Stonebreaker, and joked a lot about he's heard of MapReduce, it's called Group By, (Dave laughs) and that created a lot of tension between the early Vertica and Hadoop. I think, in the end, we embraced it. We sit next to Hadoop, we sit on top of Hadoop, we sit behind it, we sit in front of it, it's there. But I think what the reality check of the industry has been, certainly by the business folks in these companies is it has not fulfilled all the promises, it has not fulfilled a fraction on the promises that they bet on, and so they need to figure those things out. So I don't think it's going to go away completely, but I think its best success has been disrupting the storage market, and I think there's some much larger disruptions of technologies that frankly are better than HTFS to do that. >> And the Cloud was a gamechanger >> And a lot of them are in the cloud. >> Which is ironic, 'cause you know, cloud era, (Colin laughs) they didn't really have a cloud strategy, neither did Hortonworks, neither did MapR and, it just so happened Amazon had one, Google had one, and Microsoft has one, so, it's just convenient to-- >> Well, how is that affecting your business? We've seen this massive migration to the cloud (mumbles) >> It's actually been great for us, so one of the things about Vertica is we run everywhere, and we made a decision a while ago, we had our own data warehouse as a service offering. It might have been ahead of its time, never really took off, what we did instead is we pivoted and we say "you know what? "We're going to invest in that experience "so it's a SaaS-like experience, "but we're going to let our customers "have full control over the cloud. "And if they want to go to Amazon they can, "if they want to go to Google they can, "if they want to go to Azure they can." And we really invested in that and that experience. We're up on the Amazon marketplace, we have lots of customers running up on Amazon Cloud as well as Google and Azure now, and then about two years ago we went down and did this endeavor to completely re-architect our product so that we could separate compute and storage so that our customers could actually take advantage of the cloud economics as well. That's been huge for us, >> So you scale independent-- >> Scale independently, cloud native, add compute, take away compute, and for our existing customers, they're loving the hybrid aspect, they love that they can still run on Premise, they love that they can run up on a public cloud, they love that they can run in both places. So we will continue to invest a lot in that. And it is really, really important, and frankly, I think cloud has helped Vertica a lot, because being able to provision hardware quickly, being able to tie in to these public clouds, into our customers' accounts, give them control, has been great and we're going to continue on that path. >> Because Vertica's an ISV, I mean you're a software company. >> We're a software company. >> I know you were a part of HP for a while, and HP wanted to mash that in and run it on it's hardware, but software runs great in the cloud. And then to you it's another hardware platform. >> It's another hardware platform, exactly. >> So give us the update on Micro Focus, Micro Focus acquired Vertica as part of the HPE software business, how many years ago now? Two years ago? >> Less than two years ago. >> Okay, so how's that going, >> It's going great. >> Give us the update there. >> Yeah, so first of all it is great, HPE and HP were wonderful to Vertica, but it's great being part of a software company. Micro Focus is a software company. And more than just a software company it's a company that has a lot of experience bridging the old and the new. Leveraging all of the investments that you've made but also thinking about cloud and all these other things that are coming down the pike. I think for Vertica it's been really great because, as you've seen Vertica has gotten its identity back again. And that's something that Micro Focus is very good at. You can look at what Micro Focus did with SUSE, the Linux company, which actually you know, now just recently spun out of Micro Focus but, letting organizations like Vertica that have this culture, have this product, have this passion, really focus on our market and our customers and doing the right thing by them has been just really great for us and operating as a software company. The other nice thing is that we do integrate with a lot of other products, some of which came from the HPE side, some of which came from Micro Focus, security products is an example. The other really nice thing is we've been doing this insource thing at Micro Focus where we open up our source code to some of the other teams in Micro Focus and they've been contributing now in amazing ways to the product. In ways that we would just never be able to scale, but with 4,000 engineers strong in Micro Focus, we've got a much larger development organization that can actually contribute to the things that Vertica needs to do. And as we go into the cloud and as we do a lot more operational aspects, the experience that these teams have has been incredible, and security's another great example there. So overall it's been great, we've had four different owners of Vertica, our job is to continue what we do on the innovation side in the culture, but so far Micro Focus has been terrific. >> Well, I'd like to say, you're kind of getting that mojo back, because you guys as an independent company were doing your own thing, and then you did for a while inside of HP, >> We did. >> And that obviously changed, 'cause they wanted more integration, but, and Micro Focus, they know what they're doing, they know how to do acquisitions, they've been very successful. >> It's a very well run company, operationally. >> The SUSE piece was really interesting, spinning that out, because now RHEL is part of IBM, so now you've got SUSE as the lone independent. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> But I want to ask you, go back to a technology question, is NoSQL the next Hadoop? Are these databases, it seems to be that the hot fad now is NoSQL, it can do anything. Is the promise overblown? >> I think, I mean NoSQL has been out almost as long as Hadoop, and I, we always say not only SQL, right? Mike's said this from day one, best tool for the job. Nothing is going to do every job well, so I think that there are, whether it's key value stores or other types of NoSQL engines, document DB's, now you have some of these DB's that are running on different chips, >> Graph, yeah. >> there's always, yeah, graph DBs, there's always going to be specialty things. I think one of the things about our analytic platform is we can do, time series is a great example. Vertica's a great time series database. We can compete with specialized time series databases. But we also offer a lot of, the other things that you can do with Vertica that you wouldn't be able to do on a database like that. So, I always think there's going to be specialty products, I also think some of these can do a lot more workloads than you might think, but I don't see as much around the NoSQL movement as say I did a few years ago. >> But so, and you mentioned the cloud before as kind of, your position on it I think is a tailwind, not to put words in your mouth, >> Yeah, yeah, it's a great tailwind. >> You're in the Amazon marketplace, I mean they have products that are competitive, right? >> They do, they do. >> But, so how are you differentiating there? >> I think the way we differentiate, whether it's Redshift from Amazon, or BigQuery from Google, or even what Azure DB does is, first of all, Vertica, I think from, feature functionality and performance standpoint is ahead. Number one, I think the second thing, and we hear this from a lot of customers, especially at the C-level is they don't want to be locked into these full stacks of the clouds. Having the ability to take a product and run it across multiple clouds is a big thing, because the stack lock-in now, the full stack lock-in of these clouds is scary. It's really easy to develop in their ecosystems but you get very locked into them, and I think a lot of people are concerned about that. So that works really well for Vertica, but I think at the end of the day it's just, it's the robustness of the product, we continue to innovate, when you look at separating compute and storage, believe it or not, a lot of these cloud-native databases don't do that. And so we can actually leverage a lot of the cloud hardware better than the native cloud databases do themselves. So, like I said, we have to keep going, those guys aren't going to stop, and we actually have great relationships with those companies, we work really well with the clouds, they seem to care just as much about their cloud ecosystem as their own database products, and so I think that's going to continue as well. >> Well, Colin, congratulations on all the success >> Yeah, thank you, yeah. >> It's awesome to see you again and really appreciate you coming to >> Oh thank you, it's great, I appreciate the invite, >> MIT. >> it's great to be here. >> All right, keep it right there everybody, Paul and I will be back with our next guest from MIT, you're watching theCUBE. (electronic jingle)

(upbeat digital music) >> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy, Atlanta, 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE, our coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019, day one, continues. Lisa Martin here with Keith Townsend, in Atlanta, Georgia, and we're pleased to welcome the SVP of Sales and Services from Citrix APJ, Colin Brookes. Colin, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, Lisa, great to be here. >> So Keith and I, excited to have you here, as well. This has been a really exciting start to our day. >> Colin: Yes. The keynote this morning kicked off with David, PJ was there, Microsoft was there, there were some customers featured. Employee experience is so critical to a business's digital transformation, but we often, and theCUBE covers tech innovation all over the world, we don't hear it as a leading edge for companies who really can't transform digitally and be competitive, and identify new products and new services, if the employees don't have access to the apps they need, whether they're SaaS, mobile, web. Talk to us about employee experience, and particularly as it relates to customers down in APJ, as a critical factor in businesses success. >> Yeah sure, it's a great question, and the employee experience is just as you described, it's almost overwhelming the amount of technology that's thrown at people. Which initially is all there to try and make life easier, but it's just adding on top of existing applications and existing systems, and it isn't really making life easier. So what we found is that the employee experience is actually getting more and more frustrating, which means less productivity, which doesn't help the bottom line and the production of the organization, obviously. So our solutions are all around trying to enhance that employee experience, making sure that people have got absolute choice of anything they need, such as the applications that you mentioned on any device that they're using, and also, wherever they happen to be. So it's normally around the future of work, when we're talking about employee experience. And we're trying to make sure that no matter where you are, not just the office which is the traditional workplace of the past, if you're at home, if you're in the library, if you're on a plane, in the car, you should be able to work exactly the same way. And those are the types of solutions that we're bringing to market, to make just that thing happen. >> So Colin, talk to us about, your team is the tip of the spear. They are the first to hear the customer's success stories, they are the first to hear the frustrations. We're in an environment that Citrix is trying to solve a $7,000,000,000,000 challenge of becoming more efficient. IT is a huge part of that. Your frontline, your Sales Engineers, your AEs are having these kind of conversations. Talk to us about their experience of moving the conversation beyond IT into these new areas that Citrix is entering. >> Yeah, again, another great, great question, and that's one of the pitfalls that we normally fall into talking about products all of the time rather than the outcome, which is what we're trying to help our customers with. So perhaps, if I give you an example of some of the places that I travel around in APJ. So, I look after the APJ region, Asia, Pacific, and Japan. It's a huge, vast geography, with multiple cultures, obviously, very heterogenous. An example, say, for Japan, where I was in Japan last week, the Olympics are coming there in 2020. People who have seen Japan, or been to Japan, you'll know about the huge commute that people have to do. There's millions of people in Tokyo, for example, and their business day is long anyway, but when you add on to that one to two hours commute in the morning, and then the same at the end of the day, the normal everyday stressors are just magnified exponentially. And then with the Olympics coming along, you can imagine an extra few hundred thousand, or an extra couple of million people being in Tokyo, that commute is just going to get worse. So the government have actually launched something, I think it was actually in 2017, whereby we're trying to enable employees to work more remotely, which might not sound too new, but it's amazing how many organizations still feel the employees need to be in the office to work. So we're helping them to make sure that people can work just as efficiently at home as they can in the office. And it doesn't just have to be at home. We were talking earlier, Lisa, that traditional office used to be a place, and work, a place you went to, whereas now it can be at home, in the library, traveling in the car. It can be on the plane on the way to countries. I'm in a plane most of the time, every other week at least, but I'm still able and lucky enough to work extremely productively no matter where I am, and on any device. So that's the other thing that we're trying to bring to our customers. it's the ability to have access to any application that we want, so we have complete choice, on any device that we want. So whether I'm on my phone, whether I'm on my tablet, or I'm on my iPad, it should look and feel the same, and I should be able to get the same types of productivity levels. And now you can, with the solutions that we provide. So, in answer to you question, our customers are trying to find solutions to enable their employees to feel they have the best possible experience, and stay productive anywhere they are in the world. >> Well, and really, Citrix is taking it farther than that. It isn't just delivering the same experience on mobile versus desktop, versus tablet, and ensuring that you can do your job, Colin, from anywhere in the world in an airline seat, whatnot. It's also making that experience, the productivity apps, so much more connected. And the video example that David Henshall showed this morning, I thought, was fantastic. >> Colin: Right, wasn't it, yeah? >> It was showing a Senior Marketing Manager, whose a Marketing Manager, whose responsible for Rockstar marketing campaigns, who might be a people manager, and she logs in and goes to check email, and then all these other things pop up over the course of a couple of minutes, and she's in and out of seven to 10 apps, not connected. >> Colin: Exactly. >> Tell our audience a little bit more about how Citrix Workspace Intelligent Experience is really transforming that experience, allowing those workers to get back to their daily responsibilities. >> You need to come in work in APJ, that was perfect. (laughing) >> Lisa: Okay! (chuckling) >> I've got job just for you. Yeah, so, the day to day activities that we all go through, the lady in the video was the Head of Marketing, I believe it was, but most of her day is spent being distracted. I think the statistics that David gave was that something like 85% of the workforce are distracted throughout the day. You flip that around, that means only 15% or so are actually being productive. It's frightening, isn't it? So the examples that you saw were her signing some simple expenses, but that isn't as simple as it sounds. She needs to be almost an expert in the application that signs off the expenses. What we do with the Intelligent Workspace from Citrix is we pick out the bit's that actually she only every really needs to use, which are probably a small percentage, one, two, three, maybe five percent of the full, wonderful application that that expense report may be, she doesn't need to use all of that. so what we do with the Intelligent Workspace is we just bring forward onto her workspace the buttons that she needs, a summary of the expense, an accept or an approve, or a reject, and she can carry on straight away. And what you saw was about a 10 minute session within an application to approve an expense, reduced to less that 30 seconds. When you do that across the whole day, I think the numbers that David gave was our ambition, is to probably give people one day back of their week. That's 20%, that's a huge amount that we'll be able to find. Almost thinking of it like a time machine. We're going to give you some of your time back to actually be productive and do the things that you've been employed to do. She'd been employed to be creative in marketing, and now she can. >> So, you gave us the use case of the remote worker in Japan, great use case, but APJ, huge region. >> Colin: Yes. >> And you're not IT, and IT Vanders are not the only ones that have APJ regions, so talk to us about the importance of the relationship with Ajour and Google. David shared one stat, he said we're entering the yoda bite, which was a new word for even me... >> Lisa: Yeah! >> I'm a geek, the yoda bite era, and as data sets grow and the need to perform analysis against that data, but yet, we're in a very dispersed region. >> Colin: Sure. >> Keith: How important is the relationships with Microsoft and Google to enable that type of analysis of data? >> Yeah, sure. So look, the relationship with all of our partners is extremely important, especially within the APJ region. As you mention, it's such a vast geography, and I think people that have not actually lived in the APJ region just don't realize how vast it is. I'm often asked if I can go from where I am, where I'm based in Singapore, to nip over to Japan or down to Sydney to go and sort out some problems. >> Keith: It's only an eight hour flight. >> It's 10, 12 hours, but it's also a different time zone, and you know, then you talk back to the UK or the States, you lose a day with the time zone there. So, I mean, I love it, don't get me wrong, but it is a vast, and it's not just the geography, it's such a diverse culture area, as well. So everybody behaves slightly differently. Coming back to your Microsoft and Google, we're not a database company, we're not a data center organization, our solutions are going to provide these wonderful experiences for people. But we need the help and support, and we're very lucky to have it of the likes of the Microsoft, and the Google, and all of our other partners that have this infrastructure in place, and that effectively, shrink that geography for us, does that make sense? >> It does. >> So let's dig into the Citrix Workspace Intelligent Experience a little bit further, 'cause you talked about something that really struck me, saying with this video example that which David shared, and we were both talking about it here. So for our audience, it was this great video of a Marketing Manager's daily activities, I kind of mentioned on it a minute ago, but you mentioned that with Intelligent Experience, you're going to surface. Say, I'm a marketing person... >> Colin: Yep. >> And I need to get into Sales Force, 'cause like in this video, my boss has asked me the status of a deal that maybe marketing influenced, and I don't want to have to know a ton about Sales Force. What, how is Citrix using AI and data to evaluate per user what components of each of those applications should be shown to say, me, that Marketing Manager? >> Yeah, I think he gave the great example of the photocopier, didn't he? Whereby you walk up to these machines these days and they've a hundred different buttons on them. (laughs) >> Yes. >> And we basically just want to take a photocopy, and they make it simply one large, green button, and that's probably the one that we always use. It's the one percent of the functionality on the photocopier, and it's the same with the applications. That you and I are not super users, but these applications are wonderful applications, but they're built for the super user a lot of the times, with every part of the functionality within them, which makes it quite complicated for you and I to use when we want very simple tasks. So the Artificial Intelligence of the machine learning is used to, each time we go into one of the applications, to figure out what do we do on a day to day basis, what's normally the thing that we're trying to process? And the more and more that we do that, the smarter and smarter the application becomes. And it also, instead of just guiding us along the way, it's almost starting to think for us, and put the things in front of us that we only need for that day, which is great. So rather than me having to now look at my to do list, it's there for me already in the the Intelligent Workspace, and I can just go through things, skim across the applications where I need to be without going deep, four, five, six different layers, and I'm wasting time on things that I'm not really being paid to do. So, that's how it works. The more I go in, the more it learns about me and my behaviors, and if I go in one particular application, it probably means that I'm also going to be looking at another application that's connected, moving forward, and that's the sort of intelligence that we've built into the system. >> So going from that marketing person being reactive or staring at the copier, that brought back some memories today, I'm like, whoa, I haven't seen one of those in a while, but being reactive, to proactive, to eventually predictive. >> Absolutely, that's a great way of putting it. You definitely need to come to APJ. (laughs) >> Okay! >> Need to start writing these sound bites down. Yeah, that's exactly it, and not only, like, she's using the example of the lady, she's feeling less stressed, she's able to have more time being creative, which is what she's been employed for. So this is what turns 'round into the employee experience, which equates to better productivity, which is the bottom line for the organizations. And this is what it's all about at the end of the day. The organizations want to be more efficient, and they want to be more productive, and they want to make more profit. And we're enabling them to do that via enabling the user experience to be the absolute best that it can possibly be, whilst at the same time, making sure that everything is extremely secure. (crosstalk) >> Oh, sorry, Keith, go ahead. >> I want to get into a question around culture when it comes to APJ. You know, we have, to your point, very different cultures. There's Japan, whose embracing the concept of robots, so we've seen, like, software robots in different industries, and Japan embracing that idea of automating and making these tasks simpler. But yet, culturally, Australia's very different. There's maybe a little bit more hesitation to embrace robotics. How is your Sales Force bringing along the two different cultures so that, you know, you can have full experiences from one region, and bring that to, bring the best of class to...? >> Yeah, that's another great question. I think we have 57 different nationalities in our Australia and New Zealand team. The culture within Australia is multinational, as well, because of that. So although it's Australia, it's not just Australians that are there, and you find that across the whole of APJ, every office that I happen to work into has got a multitude of different nationalities. A bit less so in Japan and South Korea, but all of the others are very very mixed. So it helps that you're bringing people from different parts of the organization, even from the States or from the Mir, into the APJ region, so that they can cross culture and learn from other people. But it is one of the fascinating things of living in APJ that they're diverse cultures, and one of the reasons why I choose to live down in that part of the world. I have to act, sometimes, as the buffer between the North American mentality of everything's the same, and everybody speaks the same language, and why can they do it this way? And how I then have to translate that for the boys and girls in Japan, and the same in Australia and New Zealand. So it's a thing that's you're learning about every single day, and every single year. It is a fascinating place to live, fascinating place to live. >> Well, I imagine that really can be used as an internal engine for Citrix in the APJ region, because you mention, what, 57 nationalities in two countries alone represented on your team? About leveraging that as an opportunity for even maybe the rest of Citrix and your partners, too, to understand the nuances, why it's important to understand cultural differences as they relate to how technology is used, different security and compliance regulations. It's got to be an advantage. >> It is an advantage, and you also find that depending on the country that you're working, when they're at different stages of their journey, so moving to the cloud, for instance, it's as people have been moving to the cloud for many, many years, but you'll be amazed how many of the largest organizations in the world are still on that journey. And it's not a journey of you're suddenly have an unpremixed application on a Friday, and now we're in the cloud on a Monday, it just carries on going. I think there was a statistic that David mentioned this morning, that something like 95% of the applications that we currently have today are still going to be here in four or five years, plus all of the new applications that we're building every single day. So it is an advantage to be in such a melting pot of cultures and different personalities, you're absolutely right. >> And I'm sure having a boy from Manchester is a facilitator of all of that, right? >> There you go, there you go, I slot straight in. I think I'm the 58th nationality to go in there from Manchester. (laughs) >> There you go. Well, Colin, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE at Synergy. We're excited to hear about what you guys are doing down in APJ, and excited to hear more of what's to come from Synergy 2019. >> Thank you so much. >> We appreciate it. So, for Keith Townsend, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching us on theCUBE live, day one of our two day coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida it's the CUBE covering VeeamON 2019 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody, you're watching the CUBE the leader in live tech coverage as we go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise, this is day one of VeeamON 2019 the CUBE's third year covering Veeam first year we were in New Orleans, last year Chicago, very cool and hip location here at the Fontainebleau Hotel, I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Peter Boroughs. Colin Chatelier is here, he's the manager of storage and compute for Europe at Rabobank, Colin thanks for coming on the CUBE it's good to see you. >> Yeah glad to be here. >> So tell us about Rabobank, what are you guys all about? >> Okay, so Rabobank is obviously a bank we have two main focuses, first of all we're trying to be the biggest high street bank in the Netherlands, biggest retail bank in the Netherlands and we've got 7.3 million customers there, in an adult population of 14 million so that's not bad. And secondly the Netherlands is only of certain size and we're not going to grow it that much so the biggest part of our new business is international. And that's the bank is all focused on providing food and agriculture expertise loans, FX, spot work, anything that can help people or help businesses improve their efficiencies and get more food from spade to plate. >> So what are some of your, the drivers in your business that are affecting your technology strategy? >> Drivers in a business I guess again we've got two different parts of the bank I should probably explain, so two years ago we brought the IT of those two different parts of the bank together. >> [Dave} That's the Retail And The International? >> The retail and the international and if you think about it the international is all wholesale work, the retail is all high street banking so the retail those people really want to see their data, they want to see it on the, on the web, their check and balances, transferring pocket money to their kids and if that doesn't happen, that's a tragedy and embarrassing. So we can't be responsible for that as a result one of our watch words is always on, so we need to make sure that data is always available and we need to make sure that systems are always up for them. Part of that really is, occasionally it won't always be on so you need to be able to recover very quickly and getting a product that's simple to use for recovery and fast to recover was really part of that strategy, that's where Veeam came in. >> So when you had to merge those two IT operations, obviously it was more than the data protection side of things, but talk generally about what the challenges were but then specifically about the data protection piece. >> Okay, so bringing two IT departments together of course gives you a choice, "am I going to use product A or product B?" "Or sometimes product A and product B and not C." That gave us an opportunity to really do something that's not that common in the backup world and introduce a bit of churn, especially in retail environments, we have monthly backups, sorry especially in wholesale we have monthly backups. And those monthly backups go for anything from one year to ten years. So trying to get away from a backup product where there's ten years worth of legacy there, to recover, it's very tricky. But bringing the two banks together gave us that opportunity to say, okay well we'll invest in in a move and we really put a whole series of criteria together to try and figure out which one we were going to use. We moved from vmware and Hyper-V we're moving everything to vmware and from, we have a number of other backup products which I won't name because we're moving away from them. And Veeam was the winner there. Now, why? We needed something that would recover quickly we needed something that would scale to the enterprise, we have 13 thousand VMs being backed up today. We needed something that we could deploy reasonably quickly and without too much effort and actually when we deployed Veeam, we started off in November last year and by the end of January we were finished. Now there were a couple of thousand VMs on Veeam at that point >> Hold on, I'm sorry so it took you two months to effectively move out an old backup infrastructure and move in a new one? >> Sort of correct yes, for dailies. For monthly's we haven't touched that yet so we decide to just bite off one chunk at a time. >> Because you've got ten years of legacies with your monthly's... >> We have at least ten years, yeah >> All right but still >> That's pretty quick >> Yeah, yeah yeah >> Now what about cloud, every conference you go to you see the sign, cloud data management everything is cloud, cloud, cloud it used to be in your business, the financial services business, that cloud was an evil word >> Yeah >> Is it still? What's your clod strategy and how does data protection fit in? >> Well we have a strategy of public cloud first, that's a lot easier to do for new applications than it is for existing applications of course. So it tends to be that the existing applications are waiting for a technical refresh or are waiting for a an application re-write and new applications are going straight into the cloud. How we are protecting that, at the moment most of our data is held on prem where as a lot of our applications which can easily be refreshed and re-published is held on the cloud so we, those guys, the dev ops teams are performing their own backup, their own recovery. >> So are you able to sort of, for the on prem stuff are you trying to sort of make that cloud-like so it'll substantially mimic the cloud are you able to do that? You know, Peter you're always talking about bringing the cloud experience to your data, is that something that you're able to do or is that just sort of good marketing tagline? >> It's something that we are just starting to do again, so a year ago we had a private cloud that was just on the verge of being deployed, but we decided then that strategically we'd mothball that and encourage everybody to go to public cloud, and not confuse them with two different choices. That's proving a little difficult so one of the things that we find is development teams who are currently in the cloud can develop things with software defined infrastructure but when they try and interface with the data or with some of the systems that are on prem, then they come to a dramatic holt and they have to wait for the normal on prem processes to kick through. So what we're looking at doing now is we just started a new process or a new project an on prem, proof of concept, on prem cloud that will interact with the off prem cloud and give the cloud-like experience. So we'll see. >> So you have that challenge of agile meets waterfall and now you're trying to create some kind of equilibrium or really trying to modernize the on prem, what's the strategy there? >> Well I don't think it's agile meets waterfall I think its dev ops meets traditional process. It's and, yeah... (laughter) But how are we going to do it you say? >> Yeah, well I guess what I'm getting to is are you gong to find sort of a common ground or are you really going to try to drive that sort of dev ops mentality into the legacy process? >> We'll, continue to have a traditional or legacy, depending on what you want to call it, environment there, but we'll also have a software to find infrastructure environment on prem, if this proof of concept works, it's being built at the moment or being designed at the moment based on a vmware stack. >> What role will containers and microservices play in terms of facilitating that transformation? >> At the moment we have containers on prem which are coming with applications but we don't have a specific container platform which we're offering as a service on prem That's just where, there's containers off prem of course you know as Euro Cloud. >> Right, right, so for the on prem stuff what does that do for you and where do you see that going? >> For containers? >> Yeah >> At the moment we have a policy of not providing a container service on prem >> Oh, oh, oh, sorry, I heard wrong, sorry. Okay so that's not a direction that you're going currently? >> No but it maybe, because we're feeling our way forward I think. >> As you think about, for example banks or financial services companies have been at the Vanguard of a lot of digital business practices because you're core offering is data and how it gets used so is your overall business starting to rethink this notion of backup and restore from something that's just there to you know, make sure the data's available to becoming an essential strategic capability that can span between the two modes that you're describing but a common approach to making sure the data assets aren't compromised by vendor relationships, by application development style, by locations, is that, are you thinking in those terms of a federated approach to ensure the services on the data that you need? >> Okay well that was a very long question >> Yes >> But it's quite a short answer, yes we're thinking about it, no we haven't done it yet. So, but I think you're absolutely right, one of the problems could be for example we deploy in I don't know as your AWS, Google, and we fall out with one of those cloud providers and we try and move our backup data from provider A to provider B, is it transportable? You know, is, have we got the same policy that's been deployed in each of them so that whole thing needs to be... >> You don't want to recreate that problem that you got with those ten years of monthly backups with the new stuff too? >> Exactly, yeah yeah, we've already made that mistake. >> What are the other challenges, well but you made it for good reason, that was the state of the technology at the time and you had to have hardened processes and that was how you did it you know, ten or fifteen years ago. What are the other problems or challenges that you hear from when we talk to financial services organizations is if their data exists, they're data companies as Peter said but their data exits in hardened silos, again for good reason, you had to protect that data it was mission critical family jewels type of stuff >> Regulatory reasons >> Now as you transform into the so-called digital business everybody wants access to that data and so you've got that tough balancing act so, is that obviously a challenge for you, how are you dealing with that challenge and data protection generally was unique to each of those silos, so how are you thinking about data protection going forward in terms of busting those silos? >> Well, I don't think we've eve had silos in data protection, I think we've, our data protection has been uniform across the two banks of course >> Yeah, right. >> So now we've brought them together again, we have what, different retention characteristics, different ways of using the product. But over the last year and a half, two years we've pretty much brought in the same processes. But I don't think that any application on prem or any that will be on the private cloud or on the prem cloud will have anything different. It will use the same product, the same processes and perhaps have more access by the development teams, dev ops teams to be able to fire off their own backups at the right time. >> You're talking from a data protection perspective >> Perspective, yeah >> And then potentially other things like microservices or containers over time? >> Yeah >> Yeah, okay what's happening at the show here? Things you've learned, anything you've seen that's exciting you? Any announcements? >> Well, it's early days isn't it? It's early days so I think the, the best thing for the show so far was last night when it, going on the boat, meeting some of the other execs and sharing some experiences with them. I think, you know one of the things I always think is the best practice comes from worst experience and I don't want to have all that worst experience myself I wouldn't mind it from everybody else. (laughter) So I think you can learn more in an hour in a social situation then you can perhaps in two hours in the conference room there. >> So what are yo hearing from your peers, what are they doing, some of the challenges they're facing this digital business stuff is it real? How are they dealing with it? >> Okay, my peers, I think what they're feeling is that the traditional backup solution, the traditional backup providers are just not quick enough on their feet, agile in a real sense rather than a >> Quotes >> Quotes and marketing sense yeah, and I think the traditional providers tend to be, less grateful for the business perhaps. You know I heard about the number of new customers that Veeam are getting today but they seem to give a lot of attention to those new customers. Now deploying 13 thousand vms in a relatively short period of time we needed a lot of help from Veeam to overcome the obstacles as we hear them and they were there when we needed them and you know that makes a difference I think especially when you're protecting your data and you need to be ale to restore that data you need a partner not a vendor. >> So it's as much the relationship as the technology is what I'm hearing? >> I don't think we would get into bed with a vendor who wasn't a partner as well. >> Or in manner respects it's almost like Veeam understands how to solve the problem and their technology is a way of doing it easily, and simply, and reliably? >> Exactly yeah. >> I want to follow up on that because some of the large companies that can infer what you're talking about, they might have big established direct sales forces, meat eating guys that are in the field that just go belly to belly. You know Veeam all channel, all indirect how are they successfully partnering with you in ways that the other guys may not be with that type of go to market model? >> So we used a company called Pro*Act a reseller to buy into Veeam, I guess Veeam trained them up well because they had all the information at their finger tips and they represented us in the negotiation with Veeam, so it took away perhaps some of the conflict that you would get in an early situation. And then when we needed the direct help from Veeam, Veeam stepped up to the board and started giving that direct help and not cut out the reseller but the reseller wasn't needed anymore at that point. >> And that was help from a technology stand point or a business terms stand point or both? >> Technology, just over coming the problems, you know a big organization has got a lot of networks a lot of lans, v-lans, and we need to be able to punch holes through those v-lans so it's quite interesting to be able to be told up front where we need to punch. >> Make this work >> Yeah >> Great, all right Colin, well thanks very much for coming to the CUBE, it was great having you, give your final thoughts on Miami, you're coming in from out of town and you got the tour last night on the boat, and what'd you think and impressions of the conference? >> Well Miami first of all, it looks like a nice place to live as we cruised past all of those gigantic homes, I didn't notice anyone in them so, perhaps one's going cheap. The conference it looks good, I am always surprised by how big it is, it's my second event and yeah, they've got a hell of a lot of customers and seem to be loyal customers as well, nobody has a bad thing to say. >> Were you here in Chicago last year? >> I wasn't I was here in New Orleans >> New Orleans, yeah, two years ago, all right great well thanks very much of coming to the CUBE we appreciate it >> Thank you >> All right keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest you're watching the CUBE live from VeeamON 2019, be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2018. (upbeat music) Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of VMworld 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Hey Dave! >> Hey Lisa, how's it going? >> Good, day two. >> Good to see you back here again. >> Exactly! >> Bouncin' between the sets. >> I am. >> 94 guests, it's good. >> In three days, yeah. We've learned a lot already and we're nearing the end of day two. Excited to welcome two new guys to theCUBE, we've got Colin Durocher, Project Manager from Dell EMC, and Sandro Bercelli, Global Product Manager at Telefonica. Gentlemen, it's nice to have you here. >> Great to be here, first time on theCUBE. >> So first time on theCUBE, 20th anniversary of VMware, lots to celebrate, lots going on. From an announcement perspective, momentum perspective, Colin, let's start with you. What are some of the market trends, the customer voices that you were hearing regarding data protection and it's criticality in this multi-cloud world, in which all these enterprises now live? >> Sure, I think we have to put it into context with the growth of the cloud. The cloud is growing exponentially and data protection is one of the leading use cases. I think IDC did a survey recently, 58% of people using the cloud are doing data protection in the cloud. Backup and recovery is the number one use case. So that's one trend. Another trend is more specific to VMworld and VMware. Their vCloud provider program is, or the business unit is one of the fastest growing business units at VMware. They're having incredible success built on the back of fantastic products. And so what we've done is, about a year ago actually, at VMworld last year we formed a three-way partnership between Telefonica, VMware and Dell EMC, to provide a turnkey solution for cloud providers to deliver data protection as a service. >> So I wonder if we can talk a little bit about Telefonica and your business and how it's evolved, say, over the last, I don't know, pick a time frame, decade, better part of a decade. How is it evolving and changing? >> It's a long partnership that you have between Dell EMC and Telefonica and VMware. So we start many years ago, launching new versions of it to see 2.0, 3.0, and now moving to 4.0. So was not so easy doing this journey to improve our service catalog to our customers. And right now, with the VDC 4.0 with the new interface of the cloud director 9.x (mumbles) in data protection software of VMC, but increasing a lot the functionalities show our customers, increasing the user experience of our customers. It is our very valuable to our customers in this new approach of the VDC 4.0. >> So if you think about, if you go back to the early days of virtualization, everybody sort of, you know, took 10 servers, and brought them down to one, which is great, because all the compute power was under-utilized. But of course the one job that needed all that compute power was backup. >> [Colin And Sandro] Sure. >> Then you saw data protection change to accommodate that. Okay, and customers re-architected, et cetera. Now we enter the cloud era, we're knee-deep in it. How is data protection changing, whether it's architecturally, or processes to accommodate multi-cloud? Maybe Colin, you can start. >> Well, so I think another trend that we're seeing is the move from managed services to more of a self service delivery. So providers like Telefonica want to enable their tenants to access data protection as a service, and that has certainly some architectural impacts to it. And, you know, I think that's what's really behind this announcement that we're making here at VMworld. >> The most important part you mentioned is talking about the VDC. It's not just infrastructure as a service platform, it's everything as a service platform. So more than this, you're putting to our customers they're developed services, for example, data protection. Data protection is very important. So our idea in the user experience is to change the customer's life easy. So with the new port, self-serve support or for data protection, the customers right now can do everything in the VDC. This was possible with the partnership between VMworld and WMC. Developing together the new integration of a mod integration using the API for the cloud director, for the new version, is very valuable to us. >> So in terms of impact, give us an example, Sandro, of how this three-way partnership that Telefonica has with Dell EMC and VMware, how is it impacting, not just your customers business, but Telefonica's business? How is it enabling your transformation, from a top line perspective? >> Sure. I think that what we are thinking right now, with Dell EMC and VMware, is a model that must be followed by the other manufacturers. Because they're creating the future, if there's integration between data protection software of Dell EMC and VMware, it impacts directly to our customer, because now our oldest versions, the customer needs to require some... For example, historic procedures, you just talk to someone in Telefonica to asking them. So right now, is immediately through the self-service portal. And this is very important to us to increase the user experience and our customer experience, which is very valuable to us. >> So customer experience improves. How have you been able to expand your customer base globally leveraging this partnership. >> For example, VDC and Telefonica talking about our business. We are the most important deployments of VM around the world. We are more than 80 countries around the world, in South America and Europe, running the VDC software. This is very valuable to us because if opening our global catalog and using the VMware data protection software producing the TCO to us and to our customers using for example the data duplication and the new functions in the solution is very good to us and to our customers. >> So vCloud director, maybe we could drill into that a little bit in terms of how it's impacted your business. Talk more about the value that it brings to not just you, but your customers. >> Jesus Christ, it was not so easy during that time, you know, we are using vCloud director since the beginning of our global brothers and global structures, so following, during these years, we have the oldest version, we have a lot of limits in the vCloud directory interface. So right now, using the vCloud director nine in the cloud's extension, the cloud director availability, so this is very valuable to us because the VMware changes a lot, the user exchange interface. The old user interface was very ugly to our customers. So right now, vCloud director 9.1 and 9.x is very good interface. In the same way, improving the user experience in the quality of our services. >> So the business impact is that it's simpler to manage, so saving time so people can... >> Sure. And integration. >> Well, I think you have to think about how do service providers like Telefonica differentiate themselves, right? A cloud provider that only offers infrastructure as a service, they're getting their margins squeezed, right? So they have to bring in these value added services. How do they do that better than the others? They differentiate themselves through a better user experience, which means, you know, the way the user interacts with the product. Also it means, it comes down to the cost, right? So that goes directly to the service provider's bottom line. They're able to pass that on to their customers. Then also, performance and scale. Right, so these are really very, very, important points, and that's what I think our partnership is all about. >> How do you guys go to market? Is it a three way? Two way? What's the go-to-market strategy? >> So, our strategy do not compete for the hyperscale providers. >> Right. >> Our VDC, you have our own services running in our own data centers and combining with our global network infrastructure. We can provide a better service to our customers in local perspective, local billing, local support. In this partnership with Dell EMC, consuming the software and technologies many years ago, so we are evolving our services this way and this is the right thing to do right now, to differentiate us from the hyperscale providers. >> And you were.. I'm sorry, go ahead, Colin. >> Well, I was just going to add to that that in terms of our go-to-market, we've made a very big announcement here at VMworld 2018, which is that VMware, the VCPP business unit is actually selling Dell EMC data protection to their service providers. So this is actually our goal, is to really make it a native feature of vCloud director built right in. >> So the VMware cloud, provider business unit is essentially OEM-ing, reselling, your product... >> Yep. >> Which ultimately makes it into Telefonica. >> Sure. And the way that they're doing that, is actually really interesting because it adds value for us in the sense that they allow service providers to pay by the drip. So the way that we sell it is very different than other routes to market that we have and something that I think is of a lot of value to service providers like Telefonica. >> So it's paid by the drip, by that you mean it's a monthly service? >> It's a monthly per-protected VM, very simple, very simple business model. They pay a certain number of cloud provider points for one offering, a different amount for the other offering, and it's paid in arrears on a monthly basis based on what they've consumed. >> And I can cancel any time, it's not like I got to buy three years in advance, or? >> No, absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> So we've been hearing a lot, we hear this a lot, "better together," right, David? At every event and every aspect of life, there's a lot of things that are better together. What, I'm curious, Colin, from your perspective, Dell EMC, VMware, lots of change in the last few years... >> Absolutely. >> How is this, you know, we talked about value streams that go to market, how are you seeing your customers embracing and feeling what Dell EMC and VMware are doing as really better together? How do you simplify the complexities that all these customers are living in with this partnership? >> So, I can say that over the course of history we've had a lot of co-engineering partnerships. Right, between Dell EMC and VMware. I mean, I could probably name five or six of them, and there's a number of them happening right now. This partnership, this aspect of it, is a little bit different because there's a sales and marketing aspect to it, so that's taking the partnership to the next level. Never before has VMware sold Dell EMC product. Right, so that's.... >> Pretty groundbreaking. >> Yeah. This is the next step in better together. For our customers, I mean, there's been an incredible response. We had service provider round tables on Sunday. Lot of excitement about this and actually, I heard two service providers have actually decided to go with this, based on the fact that we have this partnership. So, that's amazing for us. >> Awesome. >> Yeah. >> And then in terms of the evolution of the partnership of the technology, what's the customer feedback loop, if you will, how are they helping to influence the direction the technology goes. >> I think that evolving the catalog and making the customer's life easy and providing the new functionalities, the new features, in the easiest mold, is very valuable to our customers. It's more than providing the (mumbles) in platform service. For more added value of service to the customers, the (mumbles) services, the multi-cloud environments. So our goal is to put all together, providing the hybrid cloud ship, multi-cloud solutions to our customers, is valuable, just as our customers asking to us and claiming to us today. Around the world. >> Well you mentioned your presence in 80 countries? >> Our virtual data centers are present in 80 countries, serving the Americas and Europe. >> Was this possible before the VMware, Dell EMC, Telefonica? >> No, no, we are evolving together. It was not built easy before. Not possible to doing alone before. >> So a lot of growth, what's next? Where do you go from there? You got 80! >> (laughs) >> Where do you go from there? >> I believe that our strategy should evolve in the cataloging freezing the partnership with Dell EMC and VMware, and increasing the... Putting together this new ecosystem and the integration between vCloud director API, ecologic stations in the protection software. I think that is the way, this is the goal, this is our... The processes that are moving now should do... Manufactures are the big parts of our ecostystem is the VDC 4.0. >> So you got a couple of breakout sessions tomorrow? >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Give us the top three takeaways that the attendees will glean from your session. >> Oh gosh. The attendances? >> The key takeaways. What are they going to learn? >> So I think at least one of the sessions that Sandro's participating in is a data protection session. So it's a general session covering all of our recent announcements, our technology, kind of a thought leadership type of thing, and using Telefonica's experience with the vCloud director extensions as a testimonial, an example, to share with the... >> The validation. >> The validation to share with the other customers. >> Bringing together some of the hot topics at the show, obviously, cloud, data protection, walk around the floor, everybody's talking about data protection. >> That's what it's all about, yeah. >> Great! Congratulations! >> Thank you so much. >> Colin, Sandro, thanks so much for joining Dave and me on theCUBE and sharing with us what you guys are doing with this partnership. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you! >> Thank you so much, thank you. >> Thank you, Dave. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are continuing day two of VMworld 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Stick around, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From New York, it's The Cube! Covering Blockchain Week. Now here's John Furrier. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back. I'm John Furrier with The Cube. I'm your host here in New York City for Blockchain Week, Consensus 2018, as well. We're here with Colin Pape, founder of Presearch.org. It's got a search engine trying to replace Google, decentralized Google, decentralized search. Love this project, very ambitious. Colin, thanks for joining me. >> Great, thanks for having us, John. >> So I love the ambition of the project. Obviously love the search engine. But I've been ranting on The Cube. Everyone who knows me knows what I've been saying. Search is broken. >> Yeah. >> We still, Google's the only open search. At least they use, they're open. >> Facebook's closed. >> Yeah. >> Amazon's closed. >> Yeah. >> LinkedIn, Twitter, they're all closed platforms. >> Right, right. >> Plus the DNS needs to be modernized for the network effect. >> Right. >> It doesn't exist. >> Yes. >> So you can't actually have an effective search engine... >> ...in the new networks. >> That's right. >> The silos, yeah. >> There's no network search. You can't say, hey, what Colin said on The Cube, can you search that for me? Like, I like what he said, so give me some stuff. >> That's right. >> There's no keywords for that. >> Right, right. >> Search is dead, dying. >> Dying, yeah. >> You think, you agree? >> Yeah, there's been a lack of innovation. I mean, it's a service a lot of people don't recognize needs to be improved, but I think those who are really thinking about it from an innovative standpoint realize there's still a ton of upside, ton of opportunity, and some really original takes still to be had, so... >> What's your approach? In all seriousness, we love search, we love, we think it's got to change. You agree. Check, check. What's different? What do you, what's your approach? What's your strategy? How do you see it playing out? >> Sure, so we've got basically a short term and then a long term. So long term is actually building out a framework that different members of the community will be able to participate in. So teams of data scientists creating algorithms, feeding them into the system, getting traffic, testing if it's working, being able to share in the monetization, subject matter experts being able to assist with the curation of community content. And so that's kind of, you know, an actual search engine. Right now what we're doing is more of a search tool enabling different partners to come together to work against the search monopoly and to have their content discovered through the interfaces that they actually create with us providing an incentivization and a reward layer to get people to actually switch off of the Google search field. >> What I like about your idea, and I think why I like it so much is about the search, sites to search, 'cause I love search stories, is that open source has shown us a path. >> Yeah. >> Open source software has proven the model. >> That's right. >> Upstream projects worked by the community. >> Yeah. >> Downstream productization. You're essentially applying open source principles to solving the search problem by getting everyone in on the creation and then the ability to productize it on their own. >> That's right. >> Is that the way you're thinking about it? >> Yeah, very much. And that's really kind of what the framework will facilitate so that that reward and the sharing of the monetization, enabling people to have standards that they can build upon and have active personalization so people who are utilizing the engine will be able to specify, not just have everything kind of driven by their behavior, but what they want to see and who they actually want to support. >> So you saw our little video search engine. I gave you a demo of that. What'd you think? >> Amazing, amazing. That is really innovative, really exciting, and I'm hoping that that can be one of the options within Preserach to start. >> John: Yeah. >> And I think what you guys are doing with that is going to be phenomenal. >> Great. So how would we take that? So we have technology, you've got a collaborative mindset? >> Yes. >> Open door? >> Yes. >> Do I just go in and talk to you? Where do you live, Toronto? Where I'm living in Palo Alto? Is it a decentralized team? What's going on with your organization? How do you engage with people that want to work with you? >> Yeah, so we do have a decentralized team. We're kind of all over the world in various capacities. Main headquarters is in Toronto area, and then we have our tech team actually in Palo Alto, Rich Strenta, Greg Lindel, some guys that you probably know. >> Yup, I've interviewed them. Great guys. They know search. >> Definitely. So we're working with them on the technology side of things. But yeah, basically anybody can go to Presearch.org, sign up for an account, top right corner, there's a send feedback form. >> Did you raise any money, tokens money? >> We did, yeah, we did do a token sale last year, brought in 16 million. >> Sixteen. >> Yeah. >> Great, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Security or utility token? >> Yeah, it's a utility or a consumptive token. >> And you do that out of Toronto or the US? >> We did it out of Toronto, yeah. >> Okay, cool. And can I get tokens now, or... How does it work? >> So we ended our token sale. You can earn tokens if you just go onto Presearch.org and start searching. So we're paying basically up to eight tokens per day for people to run their searches through us, and we are working on a model where advertisers, basically people who have the need for the token will be able to come into the platform again and buy 'em. >> Got it, cool. Great, awesome. Colin, what else is new? What else are you working on? What's next? >> What's next? Yeah, I think there's a lot of innovation obviously coming out of the blockchain space. We want to basically just collaborate with any of these different projects that really, I think there's a mindset in blockchain. People that are actually a little bit altruistic, they're trying to build a truly better world. The kind of capital structure of a lot of these projects is really unique. It's not just about the exit, which is fantastic. More of a long-term mindset. And so we're just looking for, yeah, anybody who's got a project that we can partner up with, create a more compelling offering than some of the centralized services. >> And where can they find information? Website, URL? >> Yeah, Presearch.org, P-R-E-S-E-A-R-C-H dot org. >> Awesome. Colin, thanks for joining me. Search engines are being disrupted. Everything's disrupted. Crypto, blockchain, token economics changes the nature of the people involved and also the data that can be used. This is the phenomenon called token economics. We're covering it here, Blockchain Week. I'm John Furrier. Stay with us for more coverage from New York City after this break. >> Aw- (sound cuts out) (musical sting)

>> Announcer: From the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, Dave Vellante. I'm here with Colin Gallagher, who's the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Dell EMC. And we're talking about next generation VxRail product came out almost two years ago. Colin, I want to poke at it a little bit and challenge you somewhat. A lot of people would say great, you know, you've got a great portfolio, awesome company, you're number one, but you're really trying to lock me into VMware at your sister company. You know, Michael Dell owns both companies, what do you say to that? >> Well, I mean, VxRail is jointly developed with VMware. That's a fact. It is the, as such, is the best hyper-converged appliance for VMware environments. And it does require you to run vSphere. But, that isn't necessarily a lock-in. When I talk to customers about this, I always phrase it as, it's a matter of ecosystem choice. And whatever product you purchase today, be it a laptop, be it a phone, you're not just choosing that product, you're choosing the ecosystem behind it. And, the VMware ecosystem is incredible. It's huge, the number of developers, the number of third-party applications, all the support for it is incredible. So, it's not about vendor lock-in, it's about are you choosing an ecosystem that is large enough to support you? Are you choosing an ecosystem that has all of the other third-party vendors? You know, to go to the phone analogy, right, I mean there are phones that die. You know, we can talk about Blackberry or some of the Microsoft phones, that die because there was no app ecosystem for them, right. And again, you want to buy into the ecosystem that gives you the best choice. And VMware certainly is that, and that's why it's the market leader in hypervisors. >> Okay, great, okay let's talk about networking. So, one of the concepts that we talk about a lot at Wikibon is this notion of a single-managed entity, fluid pools of infrastructure, whether it's compute or storage or networking. Now when I think about VxRail, am I correct that you're basically, the networking is not fully-integrated using top-of-rack switch choice, but it's not this sort of hyper-converged infrastructure as I just described it with this single manage entity. Can you address that? >> Absolutely, the network is not included by design. What we find when talking to customers is that not all of them are ready to transform the network. So for customers who want to get started with hyperconverge, who want to consolidate their compute and storage, we have our appliance line, including VxRail. That allows customers a tremendous amount of transformation and tremendous amount of benefit. When customers are ready to transform their network as well, or if they're ready today, we have a sister product, VxRack that allows them to do that. So it's not, unlike other competitors, where they have one solution and they're pushing that one solution, we have a range of products on our portfolio that tailor where customers are along their HCI journey. >> Okay, great, another sort of knock off, if you will, is file support. It's not been something that you've offered before. Where is file? >> It has been a ding on us today. There are customers that want to do file on top of hyper-converge. And some of our competitors have beat us to market on that. However, we're announcing, along with this announcement, the ability to run IsilonSD Edge on top of VxRail. Isilon is the leading file solution on the market. Their SD Edge capability runs on top of VxRail, seamlessly integrates with the VMware environment there. Key use cases for this are edge deployments, where customers want to run compute and file together. And SD Edge has a unique advantage that no one else on the market has, is if you want to do file to core replication, you want to have a bunch of file sites in various remote locations and then you want to consolidate all back to a core location, you can do that running SD Edge on VxRail at the edge and Isilon at your core data center. >> Well, that's awesome, okay, great. I'll give you the last word. What should we know, take aways, why Dell EMC? Wherever you'd like to go. >> We didn't get to be number one in this market by accident. We started out two years ago not number two, not number three, woefully behind. And in the course of two years, through our rapid pace of innovation, really focusing on key customer requirements, not getting distracted by some of the noise in the market, and leveraging the power of our portfolio, we've delivered solutions that customers are adopting, and that are driving us to be number one on the market. >> Excellent, well Colin, thanks for your honest assessment and addressing some of these critical questions. Appreciate it. All right, thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time.

>> Voiceover: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts it's theCUBE. (upbeat techno music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. (upbeat techno music) >> The research analysts at Wikibon tell us that the market for what they call true private cloud, that is on-prem infrastructure that substantially mimics public cloud infrastructure, the market for true private cloud is growing at 30% compound annual growth rate. Twice the rate of infrastructure as a service in public cloud. Why is that? It's because HCI is really a foundation for IT transformation and private cloud, true private cloud as we call it at Wikibon. Hi, everybody, my name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Colin Gallagher who's the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Dell EMC. Colin, good to see you again. >> Thanks, good to be here again, Dave. >> So, we're going to get into it, and we're going to talk a lot about VxRail, which was announced well over a year ago. Give us the update on VxRail. >> So, yeah. It's actually almost been two years. It'll be two years this coming February. And it's been a tremendous ride. We have seen tremendous customer adoption, primary for some of the reasons you just mentioned. Customers looking to build private cloud on an agile, kind of modern transformative infrastructure. And to date we've sold over 17,000 nodes. That's over a whopping 165,000 cores, and over 190 petabytes of storage. So, tremendous amount of success. All of this great customer interest has helped propel Dell EMC to be number one in hyperconverged. And we haven't just been selling the same product for the last two years. We've been continually innovating over the course of these last two years driving a tremendous pace of innovation. We've introduced new software capabilities. We had hybrid-only configurations to start and rapidly introduced all flash. After Dell acquired EMC, we moved to a Dell-based hardware infrastructure, obviously. >> Quickly. >> Very quickly, very quickly. >> Almost as fast as the logos changed. >> Yes, almost. (laughter) Within two months. And what we're announcing today is that we're building the next generation and selling the next generation of VxRail appliances based on the 14th generation PowerEdge servers. >> Okay, so you mentioned a lot of that was driven by, of course, the acquisition. But tell us more about 14G sort of and VxRail. What's the synergy? People say, "Eh, it's just another server." Is that the case? >> Absolutely not, Dave. By leveraging the 14th generation PowerEdge servers, we are able to deliver a tremendously powerful, a tremendously purposeful, and tremendously polished appliance experience. What do I mean by powerful? With VxRail we can deliver two times the IOPS than we could on previous generation servers. That allows us to power tremendous mission-critical workloads. But what do we mean by purposeful? We can deliver over a million combinations of configurations for customers. And yes, it's over a million. Me and my team counted, and they hate me for it. (laughs) Yes. >> Really? Did you use a supercomputer to do all that counting? >> No, just Excel spreadsheets and a lot of elbow grease. But by tailoring this, by delivering allows customers to buy exactly what they need to master specific configurations. And by polished we can deliver a highly predictable system. We can deliver over nine times more predictable system than we could in previous generations. And we can maintain sub-millisecond latency for a wide variety of workloads. >> So, I'm interested in this specific contribution of PowerEdge. You're basically saying that it's essentially built for this type of environment. It's not just a generic sort of server that you're popping in. >> Absolutely. You know, the fallacy that people assume when we talk about hyperconverge, which is built on top of software-defined storage, is that hardware doesn't matter. And while yes, a tremendous amount of the power comes from the software, hardware does make a difference. You know, you get a very different experience when you have purpose-built hardware that takes advantage and integrates well with the software-defined layer than if you just throw it on top of a white box server. Think about the hard thing we used to do for storage array. Someone still needs to do that work. You know, software isn't going to cover all of that. And these PowerEdge 14th generation servers have over 150 custom requirements from us, the software-defining ACI teams. Things like how you boot. That needs to be done differently in hyperconverge appliances. The drive choices that we select, they need to be very different than you would find in just a standard server. Even things like power and cooling are slightly different based on the needs of hyperconverge. So, what you've got with a 14th gen server is purpose-built hardware for hyperconverge. You know, the net-net is hardware matters. >> So, you mentioned a lot of permutations. What are some of the configuration options that people should know about here? >> So, I believe we have one of the widest if not the widest selection of CPU choices. Again, why does that matter? Customers want to buy the CPUs that match their specific needs. Nothing more, nothing less, right? If you buy more, you're overspending. If you buy less, you have to buy two or three nodes to get the same level of performance. By offering this tremendous breadth of CPU capability, we allow customers to fine tune their needs to exactly what they want. We also offer an additional set of drive types now. We're doubling our drive choices by offering SATA SSDs as an addition to SAS. SATA allows us to offer lower price points yet still deliver an all flash experience. And because in hyperconverge networking matters, we are significantly increasing our network connectivity options, allowing customers to get more granular control and/or more ports as needed. Oh, and we're introducing 25 gig networking as well. >> Okay, great. I want to maybe come back and talk about some of those points. But before we do that, I talked about at the top of the segment about how this all fits into cloud, and our true private cloud definition, and so forth. What makes this offering cloud? Can you give us some detail or an example or two? >> Yeah, I think when you go and buy a cloud service, you are specifying a certain configuration that's based on, hey, I want this number of IOPS, this capacity. You're not specifying drive types. You're not specifying network connectivity, ports options. You know, that's something you can only ... And when you want to replicate that experience on-prem, you need an infrastructure that consolidates all those things together. Trying to build on-prem cloud infrastructure on top of traditional infrastructure is a huge hurdle. By going to hyperconverge where you've consolidated storage and compute together, you can build a very simple experience on top of it, layer your service catalog on top of it, and not have to worry about managing the underlying components separately. >> You know, I want to talk about the guys who aren't doing hyperconverge. I mean when you see it ... We were early on looking at the market, and understanding the benefits. But still, there's still a lot of folks who want to roll their own. You know, maybe it's a channel affinity. Or maybe it's some server affinity Or maybe they just like doing heavy lifting. I don't know. But what are you seeing in the marketplace in terms of why people aren't moving to hyperconverge? And what would you tell those people? >> Well, I think I'll disagree with you on that, Dave. You know, depending on which analyst you listen to, somewhere between two-thirds to three-quarters of customers are actively looking at deploying hyperconverge in the near future, within one to two years. So, people are interested. But you're right. That's one-third or a quarter of the market who's not. And for both of them, when I talk to them I say that the key benefits are that you cannot do IT transformation without buying a transformative product. If you're still buying the same, old components piece by piece and assembling themselves, you're going to be spending all of your time doing that assembly and the maintenance of that yourself. You need an infrastructure product that frees up those resources to deliver better business value. What we do with hyperconverge appliances like VxRail is that we take on that burden of integration. We take on that burden of testing. Yeah, you know longer need to maintain a full test lab because we've done the full certification ourselves. And we deliver that lower TCO, fully-automated experience that you can't get by doing it yourself. Some of our competitors focus on doing the same thing, but they focus a lot on the day zero value. You know, how fast it is to install. You know, how fast it is to get the first VM. What we found in hyperconverge is the real benefit is the lifecycle and automation that comes from day one, day two, and beyond. By building that automation lifecycle management qualification, testing, allows us to deliver a truly transformative experience. Buying VxRail can lower your TCO by 30%. That's a three-year TCO. This isn't marketing magic, marketing numbers. This is a full three-year TCO lowers by 30%, and can lower your support costs by 42% You know, that's something you can't get by buying servers and building your own. >> Well, I would totally agree with that because our data suggests that there's over $100 billion over the next 10 years. 150 billion, actually, that's coming out of sort of undifferentiated heavy lifting of deployment of infrastructure. But again, people still ... You know, it's like you said, a third of the market. I don't know. Is it because old habits die hard? What do you think it is? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm giving a secret away. I'm writing a blog post on this, but I've been late on it. So, I'll use it here now, >> Great. >> and then maybe it'll force me to actually publish the post by the time this comes out. (laughter) You know, I get those questions when I talk to customers. There's always one in four customers says, "Well, I can do that. I know how to do it. I've got the processes down." And my response to them is always. What does it say on your resume? On your resume does it say rack and stack servers? Does it say deploy vCenter and vSphere? Does it say cable networking? I doubt it. Your job description today on your resume probably says, "I develop applications as support, and x revenue business." You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. >> Digital transformation. >> Colin: Digital transformation. Exactly right. >> Enabler. >> So, if you're not doing that, and you're saying your value is racking and stacking, cabling, installing software, right? You're lying on your resume. (Dave laughs) What I'm giving you on VxRail is the ability not to lie on your resume. (laughter) It'll allow you to actually focus on the digital transformation. >> Well, I think every customer we talk to is going through some kind of, not only transformation, IT transformation, but a big digital transformation. They're trying to move resources up the stack. There's this sort of bromide. But it's true. To whatever, AI, data, analytics, or application development that's going to drive revenue. >> Yeah, and hyperconverge is perfect for all that. You know I used to say either hyperconverge was ready for all virtualized workloads. That you could buy a VxRail and run any virtualized workload on it. With the power that we get, the predictability, and the configurations that we get from 14th generation PowerEdge servers, we're not just ready for virtualized workload, we're ready for any workloads, mission-critical workloads, anything customers want to deploy on it. >> Yeah, this is really important. Look, IT is a very labor-intensive business that's too labor intensive. And that has actually stifled some innovation. And now we're finally seeing some light at the end of that tunnel. And hyperconverge infrastructure is an enabler there. Okay, when can I buy this stuff? >> We are actively taking orders right now. It's available to order now. And it will be shipping within 30 days. >> Dave: Okay, great. Let's see, a little commercial for a CrowdChat that's coming up, #nextgenhci which is on December 1st. Where else can I get info? >> You can go to dellemc.com/hci. That's a full page where you can find out about all of our HCI solutions, including VxRail. >> All right. >> And we've got some great there. We're going to have some cool videos, including this. And hopefully, some other ones. But yep. >> Well, Colin, congratulations on this success. A massive number, 17,000 nodes, 165,000 cores, 190 petabytes, and presumably more to come. So, well done. >> Looking forward. >> All right, thanks for coming on. >> Colin: Thanks, Dave. >> All right. Thanks for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE Conversation with Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C. it's theCUBE, covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. (techno music) >> Well welcome back here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage at .conf2017. Splunks get together here in the nation's capital, Washington D.C. We are live here on theCUBE along with Dave Vellante. I'm John Walls. Glad to have you with us here for two days of coverage. We're joined now by Team Dell EMC I guess you could say. Colin Gallagher, who's the Senior Director of VxRail Product Marketing. Colin, good to see you, sir. >> Likewise. >> And Cory Minton, many time Cuber. Colin, you're a Cuber, as well. Principle Engineer, Data Analytical Leader at Dell EMC, and BigDataBeard.com, right? >> Yes, sir. >> Alright, and just in case, you have a special session going on. They're going to be handing these out a little bit later. So, I'm going to let you know that I'm prepared >> Cory: I love that, that's perfect. >> With you and your many legions of fans, allow me to join the club. >> That's awesome. Well welcome, we're so glad to have you. You've got a big data beard. You don't have to have a beard to talk big data at Dell EMC, but it certainly is not frowned upon if you do. >> John: Alright, well this would be the only way I'd ever grow one. >> There you go. >> I can promise you that. >> Looks good on you. >> I like the color, though, too. Anyway, they'll be handing these out at the special session. That'll be a lot of fun. Fellows, big announcement last week where you've got a marriage of sorts with Splunk technology and what Dell EMC is offering on VxRail. Tell us a little bit about that. Ready Systems is how you're branding this new offer. >> So we announced our Ready Systems for Splunk. These are turnkey offerings of Dell EMC technology pre-certified and pre-validated with Splunk and pre-sized. So we give you the option to buy from us both your Splunk solution and the underlying infrastructure that's been certified and validated in a wide variety of flavors based on top of VxRail, based on top of VxRack, based on top of some of our other storage products, as well, that gives you a full turnkey implementation for Splunk. So as Splunk is moving from the land of the hoodies and the experimenters to more mainstream running the business, these are the solutions that IT professionals can trust from both brands that IT professionals (mumbles). >> So you're both a Splunk reseller and a seller of infrastructure, is that right? >> Indeed. So we actually, we joined Splunk in a partnership as a strategic alliance partner a little over a year ago. And that gave us the opportunity to act as a reseller for Splunk. And we've recently gone through a rationalization of their catalog, so we actually have now an expanded offering. So, customers have more choice with us in terms of the offers that we provide from Splunk. And then part of our alliance relationship is that not only are we a reseller, but because of our relationship they now commit engineering and resources to us to help validate our solutions. So we actually work hand in hand with their partner engineering team to make sure that the solutions that we're designing from an infrastructure perspective at least meet or exceed the hardware requirements that Splunk wants to see their platform run on top of. >> Dave: Okay, cool. So you're a data guy. >> Indeed. >> You've been watching the evolution of things like Hadoop. When I look at the way in which customers deal with Hadoop, you know, ingest, you know, clean or transform, analyze, etc., etc., operationalize, there seem to be a lot of parallels between what goes on in that big data world and then the Splunk world, although Splunk is a package, it seems to be an integrated system. What are the similarities? What are the differences? And, what are the requirements for infrastructure? >> I think that the ecosystems, like you said, it's open source versus a commercial platform with a specific objective. And if you look at Splunk's deployment and their development over the years they've really started going from what was really a Google search for log, as Doug talked about today in the kickoff, to really being a robust analytics platform. So I think there's a lot of parallels in terms of technology. We're still ... It's designed to do many of the same things, which is I need to ingest data into somewhere, I need to make sense of it. So, we index it or do some sort of curation process to where then I can ask questions of it. And whether you choose to go the open source route, which is a very popular route, or you choose to go a commercial platform like Splunk, it really depends on your underlying call it ethos, right? It's that fundamental buy versus build, right? For somebody to achieve some of the business outcomes of like deploying a security event and information management tool like Splunk can do, to do that in open source may require some development, some integration of disparate open source platforms. I think Splunk is really good about focusing specifically on the business outcome that they're trying to drive and speeding their customers' time to value with that specific outcome in mind, whereas I think the open source community, like the Hadoop community, I think it offers maybe some ability to do some things that Splunk maybe wouldn't be interested in, things like rich media analytics, things that aren't good for Splunk indexing. >> Are there unique attributes of a data rich workload that you've accommodated that's maybe different from a traditional enterprise workload, and what are those? >> Yeah, so at the end of the day any application is going to have specific bottlenecks, right? One of the basis of performance engineering is move the bottleneck, right? In enterprise applications we had this evolution of originally they were kind of deployed in a server, and then we saw virtualization and shared storage really come in vogue for a number of years. And that's true in these applications, these data rich applications, as well. I think what we're starting to see is that regardless of what the workload is, whether it's a traditional business application like Oracle, SAP, or Microsoft or it's a data application like Splunk, anytime it becomes critical to the operation of a business organizations have to start to do things that we've done to every enterprise IT app in the past, which is we align it to our strategy. Is it highly available? Is it redundant? Is it built on hardware that we can be confident in that's going to be up and running when we need it? So I think from a performance and an engineering perspective, we treat each workload special, right? So we look at what Splunk requirements are and we understand that their requirements may be slightly different than running SAP or Oracle, and that's why we build the bespoke systems like our Ready System for Splunk specifically, right? It's not a catch all that hey it works for everything. It is a specifically designed platform to run Splunk exceptionally well. >> So Colin, a lot of the data practitioners that I talk to at this show and other data oriented shows like, "Ah, infrastructure. "I don't care about infrastructure." Why should they care about infrastructure? Why does infrastructure matter, and what are the things that they should know? >> Infrastructure does matter. I mean infrastructure, if youre infrastructure isn't there, if your infrastructure isn't highly available, as Cory said, if it lets you down in the middle of something, your business is going to shut down, right? Any user can say, "Talk about what happened "the last time you had a data center event, "and how long were you offline, "and what did that really mean for your business? "What's the cost of downtime for you?" And everything we build at an application level and a software level really rests on an infrastructure foundation, right? Infrastructure is the foundation of your data center and the foundation of your IT, and so infrastructure does matter in the sense that, as Cory said, as you build mission critical platforms on it the infrastructure needs to be highly reliable, highly available, and trusted, and that's what we really focus on bringing. And as applications like Splunk evolve more into that mainstream world, they need to be built on that mission critical, reliable, managed infrastructure, right? It's one thing for infrastructure development, and this kind of happens in the history of IT, as well. It happened in client server back in the day. You know, new applications ... Even the web environment I remember a company was running, one of my clients was running a web server under their secretary's desk, and she was administering in half time. You would never have a large company doing that. >> They'd be back up (mumbles). Before you leave. >> As it becomes more important it becomes more central, but also it becomes more important to centrally manage those, right? I'm a 15 year storage veteran, for good or for worse, and what we really sell in storage is selling centralized management of that storage. That's the value that we bring from centralized infrastructure versus a bunch of servers that are sitting distributed around the environment under someone's desk is that centralized management, the ability to share the resources across them, the ability to take one down while the others keep running, shift that workload over and shift it back. And that's what we can do with our Ready Systems. We can bring that level of shared management, shared performance management, to the Splunk world. >> I'll tell you, one of the things that we talked about, we talked about in a number of sessions this week, is application owners, specifically the folks that are here at this conference, need to understand that when they decide to make changes at the application level, whether they like infrastructure or they think it's valuable or not, what they need to understand is that there are impacts, and that if you look at the exciting things that were announced today around Enterprise Security updates, right? Enterprise Security is an interesting app from Splunk, but if a customer goes from just having Splunk Enterprise to running Enterprise Security as a premium application, there's significant downstream impacts on infrastructure that if the application team doesn't account for they can basically put themselves in a corner from a performance and a capacity perspective that can cause serious problems and slow down the business outcome that they're trying to achieve because they didn't think about the infrastructure impacts. >> Well, and what they want really is they want infrastructure that they can code, right? And we talked about this at VMworld we were talking about off camera that cloud model, bringing that cloud model to your data as oppose to trying to force your business into the cloud. So what about Ready Systems mimics that cloud model? Is it a cloud like infrastructure? Wondering if you could talk-- >> Yeah, I think it's that cloud like experience. Because we know we're in a multi cloud world, right? Cloud is not a place, cloud is an operating model, right? And so I think that the Ready Systems specifically provides a couple of things that are that cloud like experience, which is simple ordering and configuration and consumption that is aligned to the application, right? So we actually align the sizing of the system to the license size and the expected experience that this one customer would have so they get that very curated bespoke system that's designed specifically for them, but in a very easy to consume fashion that's also validated by the software vendor, in this case Splunk, that they say, "These are known good configurations "that you will be successful with." So we give customers that comfort that, "Hey, this is a proven way "to deploy this application successfully, "and you don't have to go through "a significant architecture design concept "to get to that cloud like experience." Then you layer in the fact that what makes up the Ready System, which is it is a platform powered by, in the VxRail case powered by VMware, right, ESX and vSAN, which obviously if you look at any of the cloud providers everything is virtualized at the end of the day for the most part, or at least most of the environments are. And so we give, and VMware has been focused on that for years and years of giving that cloud like experience to their customers. >> You talk about, you mentioned selling, sort of reseller, you've got this partnership growing, you're a customer. So, you have all these hats, right, and connections with Splunk. What does that do for you you think just in general? What kind of value do you put on that having these multiple perspectives to how they operate whether it's in your environment or what you're doing for your customers using their insights? >> Yeah, I think at the end of the day we're here to make it simpler for customers. So if we do the work, and we invest the time and energy and resources in this partnership, and we go do the validation, we do the joint engineering, we do the joint certification, that's work that customers don't have to do, and that's value that we can deliver to them that whatever reason they buy Splunk for whatever workload or business outcome they're trying to achieve, we accelerate it. That's one of the biggest values, right? And then you look at who do they interact with in the field? Well, it's engineers from our awesome presales team from around the world that we've actually trained in Splunk. So we have now north of 25 folks that have Splunk SE certifications that are actually Dell EMC employees that are out working with Splunk customers to build platforms and achieve that value very, very quickly. And then them understanding that, "Oh, by the way, Dell EMC is also a user of Splunk, "a great customer of Splunk "and a number of interesting use cases "that we're actually replatforming now "and drinking our own Kool Aid so to say," that I think it just lends credibility to it. And that's a lot of the reason why we've made the investments in being part of this awesome show, but also in doing things like providing the applications. So we actually have four apps in Splunkbase that are available to monitor Dell EMC platforms using Splunk. So I think customers just get a wholistic experience that they've got a technology partner that wants to see them be successful deploying Splunk. >> I wonder if we could talk about stacks, because I've heard Chad Sack-edge talk about stack wars, tongue and cheek, but his point is that customers have to make bets. You've heard him talk about this. You've got the cloud stacks, whether it's Azure or AWS or Google. Obviously VMware has a prominent stack, maybe the most prominent stack. And there's still the open source, whether it's Hadoop or OpenStack. Should we be thinking about the Splunk stack? Is that emerging as a stack, or is it a combination of Splunk and these other? >> You know, we actually had that conversation today with some of the partner engineering team, and I don't know that I would today. I think Splunk continues to be, it's its own application in many cases. And I actually think that a lot of what Splunk is about is actually making sure that those stacks all work. So there was even announcements made today about a new app. So they have a new app for Pivotal Cloud Foundry, right? So if you think about stacks for application development, if you're going to hit push on a new application you're going to need to monitor it. Splunk is one of those things that persistent. The data is persistent. You want to keep large amounts of data for long periods of time so that you can build your models, understand what's really going on in the background, but then you need that real time reporting of, "Hey, if I hit push on a Cloud Foundry app "and all of a sudden I have an impact "to the service that's underlying it "because there's some microservice that gets broken, "if I don't have that monitoring platform "that can tell me that and correlate that event "and give me the guidance to not only alert against it "but actually go investigate it and act against it, "I'm in trouble." The stacks, I think many of them have their own monitoring capabilities, but I think Splunk has proven it that they are invested in being the monitoring and the data fabric that I think is wanting to help all the stacks be successful. So I don't necessarily put it in the stack. And I kind of don't put Hadoop in its own stack, either, because I think at the end of the day Hadoop needs a stack for deployment models. So you may see it go from a physical construct of being, a bit trying to be its own software that controls the underlying hardware, but I think you're seeing abstraction layers happen everywhere. They're containerizing Hadoop now. Virtualization of Hadoop is legit. Most of the big cloud providers talk about the decoupling of compute from storage in Hadoop for persistent and transient clusters. So I think the stacks will be interesting for application development, and applications like Splunk will be one of two things. They'll either consume one of those stacks for deployment or they'll be a standalone monitoring tool that makes us successful. >> So you don't see in the near term anyway Splunk becoming an application development platform the way that a lot of the-- >> Cory: They may have visions of it. That's not, yeah. >> They haven't laid that out there. It's something that we've been bounding around here. >> Yeah, I think it's interesting. Again, I think it goes back to .. Because the flexibility in what you can do with Splunk. I mean we've developed some of our own applications to help monitor Dell EMC storage platforms, and that's, it's interesting. But in terms of building what we'd I guess we'd consider like traditional seven factor app development, I don't know that it provides it. >> Yeah, well it's interesting because, I'm noodling here, Doug Merritt said, "Hey, we think we're going to be the next five billion, "10 billion, 20 billion dollar ecosystem slash company," and so you start to wonder, "Okay, how does that TAM grow to that point? That's one avenue that we considered. I want to talk about the anatomy of a transaction and how that's evolved. Colin, you mentioned Client Server, and you think about data rich applications going from sort of systems of record and the transactions associated with that. And while there were many going to Client Server and HTTP, and then now mobile apps really escalated that. And now with containers, with microservices, the amount of data and the complexity of transactions is greater and greater and greater. As a technologist, I wonder if you could sort of add some color to that. >> Yeah, I think as we kind of go down a path of application stacks are interesting, but at the end of the day we're still delivering a service, right? At the end of the day it's always about how do I deliver service, whether it's a business service, it's a mobile application, which is a service where I could get closer to my customer, I could transact business with them on a different model, I think all of it ... Because everything has gone digital, everything we do is digital, you're seeing more and more machines get created, there's more and more IP addressed devices out there on the planet that are creating data, and this machine generated data deluge that we're under right now it ain't slowing down, right? And so as we create these additional devices, somebody has got to make sense of this stuff. And if you listen to a lot of the analysts they talk about machine data is the most target rich in terms of business value, and it's their fastest growing. And it's now at a scale because we've now created so many devices that are creating their own logs, creating their own transactional data, right, there's just not that many tools that out of the box make it simple to collect the data, search the data, and derive value from it in the way that Splunk does. You can get to a lot of the things that Splunk can deliver from an outcome other ways with other platforms, but the simplicity and the ability to do it with a platform that out of the box does it and has a vibrant community of folks that will help you get there, it's a pretty big deal. So I think it's, you know, it's interesting. I don't know, like under the covers microservices are certainly interesting. They're still services. They're just smaller and packaged slightly differently and shared in a different way. >> And a lot more of them. >> Yeah, and scaled differently, right? And I totally get that, but at the end of the day we're still from a Splunk perspective and from a data perspective, we've still got to make sense of all of it. >> Right, well, I think the difference is just the amount of data. You talked about kind of new computing models, serverless sort of, stateless, IoT coming into play. It's just the data curve is reshaping. >> Well, it's not just the amount of data, it's the number of sources. The data is exploding, but also, as Cory mentioned, it's exploding because it's coming from so many places. Your refrigerator can generate data for you now, right? Every single ... Everything that generates Internet, anything doing anything now really has a microprocessor in it. I don't know if you guys saw my escape room at VMworld. There were 12 microprocessors running this escape room. So one of the things we played about doing was bring it here and trying to Splunk the escape room to actually see real time what the data was doing. And we weren't able to ship it back from Barcelona in time, but it would've been interesting to see, because you can see just the centers that are in that room real time and being able to correlate all that. And that's the value of Splunk is being able to pull that from those disparate sources altogether and give you those analytics. >> Yeah, it's funny you talk about an IoT use case. So we've got these... Our partner, who's a joint partner of both Dell EMC and Splunk, we actually have these Misfit devices that are activity trackers. And we're actually-- >> Misfit device? >> Misfit. Yeah, it's a brand. >> John: Love it. >> It's fitting, I think. But we have these devices that we gave away to a number of the attendees here, and we actually asked them if they're willing to participate. They can actually use the app on your phone to grab the data. And by simply going to a website they can allow us to pull the data from their device about their activity, about their sleep. And so we actually have in our booth and in Arrow's booth we're Splunking Conf and it's called How Happy is Conf? And so you can actually see Splunk running, and by the way, it's running in Arrow's lab. It's running on top of Dell EMC infrastructure designed for Splunk. You can actually see us Splunking how happy conf attendees are. And we're measuring happiness by their sleep. How much sleep-- >> John: Sleep quality and-- >> The exercise, the number of steps, right? So we have a little battle going between-- >> Is more sleep or less sleep happy? >> Are consumption behaviors also tracked on that? I just want to know. I'm curious. >> It's voluntary. You'd have to provide that. >> Alright, because that's another measure of happiness. >> It certainly is. But it's just a great use case where we talk about IoT and the number of sources of data that Splunk as a platform ... It's very, very simple to deploy that platform, have a web service that's able to pull that data from an API from a platform that's not ours, right, but bring that data into our environment, use Splunk to ingest and index that data, then actually create some interesting dashboards. It's a real world use case, right? Now, how much people really want to (mumbles) Splunk health devices we'll determine, but in the IoT context it's an absolute analog for what a lot of organizations are trying to do. >> Interesting, good stuff. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us. We appreciate that. Cory, it's probably not the real deal, but as close as I'm going to go. Good luck with your session. We appreciate the time to both of you, and you and your Misfit. Back with more here on theCUBE coming up in just a bit here in Washington D.C. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is VMworld 2017, and this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm with my co-host, Peter Burr. Colin Gallagher is back. He's the senior director of hyper-converged infrastructure marketing at Dell EMC and he's joined by Josh Holst, who's the vice president of information services at Hills Bank and Trust Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube. Good to see you. >> Thanks for having me back. >> So Colin, give us the update from when we last talked. What's happening at the show, a bunch of parties last night. How's the vibe? >> Colin: Huh, were there? >> Responses from customers to your announcements, give us the update. >> Nah, I couldn't go to any parties because I knew I had to be with you guys today. Had to keep my voice. Shame. >> Dave: I went, I just didn't talk. >> Smart man. No, I mean, I've been talking to a lot of customers, talking to customers about what they think of the show, and what the messages are and how they're resonating with them. I think so far, you know, most of the keynotes and topics have been really on point with what customers' concerns are. Also been talking to a lot of people about hyper-converge, because that's what I do for a living. You know, and I brought Josh along to talk about his experiences with hyper-converged. But I've been having a really great time at the show, hearing what people are concerned about, and hearing how a lot of what we're delivering at the show is really resonating with them. >> So Josh, tell us about Hills Bank and Trust. What are they all about, what's your role? >> Sure. Hills Bank and Trust was founded in 1904. We're still headquartered in Hills, Iowa, if anybody's familiar with that. We're a full services bank. We provide all the services we can to our customers. And we primarily serve those out of eastern Iowa, but we have customers throughout the U.S. as well. >> And your role? >> I'm a VP of information systems, so I oversee IT infrastructure. >> Okay. So maybe paint a picture, well, let me start here. What do you think about the business challenges and the drivers of your business, and how they ripple through to IT? What are those drivers and how are you responding? >> Yeah, what we're seeing a lot is a big shift within the financial services world, with the FinTechs, the brick and mortarless banking, robo-advisories, digital currencies, and just an increased demand of what our customers want. So what we're trying to do from an IT infrastructure standpoint is build that solid foundation, where we can quickly adapt and move where our industry's taking us. >> Yeah, so things like Blockchain and Crypto, and you guys launching your own currency any time soon? >> Josh: Nope. We are monitoring it, but nothing like that. >> So how do those, I mean somebody said to me one time, it was a banking executive, you know, we think about, we know our customers need banking, but do they need banks? I was like wow, that's a pretty radical statement. And everybody talks about digital transformation. How does that affect your decisions in IT? Is it requiring you to speed things up, change your skill profile, maybe paint a picture there. >> Yeah, what we're seeing from the digital space within banking is that we definitely have to speed things up. We need to be more nimble and quicker within the IT infrastructure side, and be able to, again, address those customer demands and needs as they arise. And plus also we've got an increase government's regulations and compliance we have to deal with, so staying on top of that, and then cybersecurity is huge within the banking field. >> So maybe paint a picture of your infrastructure for us if you could. >> Sure. You know, prior to VxRail, we were traditional IT stack, server, storage, dedicated networking specific for that. As we were going through a review of Refresh, hyper-converged came out and it just really made a lot of sense. The simplified infrastructure to allow us to run our business and be able to operate in the way we need to. >> So can you talk a little bit more about that? Maybe the before and the after. What did things look like before in terms of maybe the complexity, and how many of these and those, or whatever detail you're comfortable with. >> Josh: Sure. >> And what happened afterwards? >> Yeah, before the VxRail platform, I mean, we just had racks of servers and storage. We co-located our data center facilities, so that was becoming a pretty hefty expense as we continued to grow within that type of simplified, or that traditional environment. By moving to the VxRail platform, we've been able to reduce rack space. I think at my last calculation, we went from about 34 to 40 U of rack space down to four, and we're running the exact same work load at a higher performance. >> How hard was it to get the business to buy into what you wanted to do? >> It was a lengthy process to kind of go through the review, the discussions, the expense associated with it. But I think being able to sell the concept of a simpler IT infrastructure, meaning that IT can provide quicker services, and not always be the in the weeds, or the break fix type group. We want to be able to provide more services back to our business. >> So you went to somebody, CFO, business, whoever, to ask for money, because you had a new project. But you would have had to do that anyway, correct? >> Josh: Yes, yes. >> Okay, so... >> Was it easier? >> Was it easier with the business case or were you nervous about that, because you were sticking your neck out? >> No, I think it was easier from the business line. That executive team does trust kind of my judgment with it, so what I brought forward was well-vetted, definitely had our partners involved, the relationship we have with Dell EMC, and they just really were there the entire step of the way. >> And what was the business impact? Or the IT impact, from your standpoint? >> Well, the IT impact is we are performing at a faster pace right now. You know, we're getting things done quicker within that environment. Our data protection has gotten a lot better with the addition of data domain, and the data protection software. >> Peter: Is that important in banking? >> (laughs) You want to make sure that people check your data, right? >> If it's my bank, yeah. >> So it's very important to how we operate and how we do things. >> So one of the things we've heard from our other CIO clients who like the idea of hyper-converged or converged, is that, yeah, I can see how the technology can be converged, but how do I converge the people? That it's not easy for them that they launch little range wars inside. Who's going to win? How did that play out at Hills Bank and Trust? >> You know, it wasn't that big of a shift within our environment. We're a very small IT team. I've got a systems group, a networking group, and a security group, so transforming or doing things differently within that IT space with the help of VxRail just wasn't a large impact. The knowledge transfer and the ramp-up time to get VxRail up and running was very minimal. >> You still have a systems group, a network group and a security group? >> At this point, we're still kind of evaluating that, and what's the right approach, right structure for IT within the bank? But at this point we're still operating within that. >> Did the move to VxRail affect in any way your allocation of labor? Whether it's FTE's, or how they spent their time? >> We're spending a little less time actually managing that infrastructure, and more focusing in on our critical line of business applications. And that's kind of been my whole goal with this, is to be able to introduce an infrastructure set that allows IT to become more of a service provider, and not just an operational group that fixes servers and storage. >> So you're saying a little less? >> A little less. >> It wasn't a dramatic change? >> We're still transforming though, so we still have this traditional IT structure within our group, so I do expect as we start to transform IT more, we'll get there, but I had to start with that hardware layer first. >> What do you think is achievable and what do you want to do in terms of freeing up resource, and what do you want to do with that resource? >> Again, I just want to be able to provide those services back to the bank. We have a lot of applications owned within the line of businesses. I'd like to be able to free up resources on my team to bring those back into IT. Again, more for the control and the structure around it, change management, compliance, making sure we're patching systems appropriately, things along those lines. >> And any desire to get more of your weekends back, or spend more time with your family, or maybe golf a little bit more? >> Exactly. Golf is always good. You know, we've actually seen a reduction in the amount of time we do have to spend managing these platforms, or at least the hardware standpoint, firmware upgrades, and doing the VxRail platform upgrades have gone really well with this, compared to upgrading our server firmware, making sure it matches the storage firmware, and then we've got to appropriately match the storage side or the networking side of it. >> And the backup comment. Easier to back up, more integrated? >> It's definitely more integrated and a lot easier. We've seen tremendous improvements in backup performance by implementing data domain with the data protection software, and it's just really simplified it, so backup is just a service that runs. It's not something we really manage anymore. >> Are you guys getting excited about being able to target their talents and attentions to some other problems that might serve the business? >> Exactly. You know, one of the themes I've picked up here at VMworld has been the digital workspace transformation. That's huge within our realm. We're very traditional banking, but there is a lot of demand internally and from our customers to be more mobile and provide more services in a channel they prefer. >> We're out of time, but two quick questions. Why Dell EMC? Why that choice? >> You know, we had an existing relationship with EMC pre-merger, and it was a solid relationship. They'd been there the entire way during the merger, every question was answered. It wasn't anything that was, oh, let me go check on this. They had everything down. We felt very comfortable with it. And again, it's the entire ecosystem within our data center. >> So trust, really. >> Josh: Absolutely. >> And then if you had to do it over again, anything you'd do differently, any advice you'd give your fellow peers? >> You know, I don't think so. Again, it's just the entire relationship, the process we went through was very well done. The engagement we had from the management team with Dell EMC was just spot on. >> Why do you think that was, sorry, third question. Why do you think that was so successful, then? What did you do up front that led to that success? >> You know, it was just a lot of relationship-building. In Iowa, we're all about building relationships and trust. We do that with our customers at the bank as well. We want to build long-lasting, trusting relationships, and Dell EMC does that exact same thing. >> All right, gents. Thanks very much for coming back to The Cube. >> Josh: Thanks, guys. Good to be here. >> Thanks, Josh, take care. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, you're welcome. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be right back with our next guest at The Cube. We're live from Vmworld 2017. Be right back.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017, brought to you by VM Ware, and it's eco system partners. >> Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris and we are here at VM World 2017 in Las Vegas. This is the eighth year of the Cube doing VM World, it started in Moscow and Moscow is under construction. So we're here back in Vegas. Although they've had VM World in Vegas a couple times. Collin Gallagher is here. He's the senior director of product marketing for Hyper Converged Infrastructure at Dell EMC. Collin, great to see you, thanks for coming to the Cube. >> Thanks Dave, thanks for having me. >> So first of all, how's the show going for you? >> Fantastic. Incredibly busy. As you can see, Hyper Converged is the hot thing yet again. I think last year was a big thing. But it's nice to see it's being... Customers are asking about it, you're seeing it in the keynotes. You know, the products being mentioned, Vsan, VXrail, et cetera. And just being swamped and busy and having a little bit of fun as well. >> So before we get into the announcements and we want to do that and give you the opportunity to talk about that, Peter and I and folks in the Cube have been talking all week, really all year. >> Peter: Yeah. >> About how customers are coming to the reality that I can't just reform my business and try to stuff it into the cloud, I really got to understand the realities of my business and bring the cloud model to the extent that I can, to the business. So what role does Hyper Converged play, in that context of bringing the cloud to my business? >> Well, I think Hyper Converged is the technology that allows you to do that. But as you bring out, as you mentioned, you have to also rethink about how you maintain your business, right? Because Hyper Converged consolidates you compute, your storage, your networking into one system. But that means that you may have to think about consolidating your storage teams, your compute teams and your networking teams as well. Right? And if you're going to keep them separate but merge the technology, there's going to be some impedance mismatched there. So Hyper Converged is an enabler for that, but it requires you to transform not just the technology, but also how you manage and staff your business as well. >> So I remember, I guess it was three years ago now, at VM World, you guys made the sort of first announcement of sort of software defined true Hyper Converged product and it's really evolved quite dramatically from then so maybe bring us up to where we are today and talk about some of the announcements that you made. >> Yeah, so... Yes, when Hyper Converged was announced a couple years ago, in a couple different products, but the point I was making a little bit earlier is that Hyper Converged is not just a single product. It's enabling technology. And much like Flash was five to seven year ago, it's going everywhere. >> Peter: It's a design approach. >> It's a design, exactly. >> Yeah, it's a design approach. And you're seeing it in appliances that have been very successful today, you're seeing it in larger rack scale systems, you're seeing it in software only systems, it depends on how and much, as you said, Dave, you want to transform right? You can do some of your build your own Hyper Converged stuff and not transform very much at all. You can do full turn-key cloud built on Hyper Converged, but that's going to require a vast degree of not just infrastructure transformation, but also work force transformation to go with it. >> Now, one of the things we've observed, Collin, and get some feedback from you on this is that... Cause we totally agree. In fact, we wrote a piece of research we called the Iron Triangle of IT and the fact that there is this very tight linking between people with skills, the automation that they use to manage products, that dictate the skills that dictate the automation, and breaking that as well. And a lot of our CIO clients are telling us, that you guy don't understand. The biggest problem I got is getting my people to work differently together. New processes, new approach to doing things. So one of the forcing funtions has been is historically when we think about designing systems to run work loads, we started with the CPU. We sized the CPU and then we did everything else. Now we start thinking about a lot of these data driven, digital oriented kinds of systems. We're thinking about something different. That catalyzed with this enormous performance improvements and storage over the last few year through Flash, vSAN related types of things. What are some of the new design principles that people have to factor as they start thinking about the role that Hyper Converged is going to play? >> So let me play off that. So yes, people design for the CPU because that was the bottle neck, right? Then as CPU performance grew, 5X, 10X, et cetera, they started designing for storage because that became the bottle neck, right? So part of your question is what's going to be the next bottleneck? Right? And I think you just had Chad talking on before. I think the network may be that upcoming bottleneck right now. You know, particularly in the Hyper Converged world where everything is connected through the network. That's your back plan. It's a different approach to storage. So designing around your network capabilities or your network infrastructure, you know, deploying Hyper Converged in a branch office with one GIG is very different than deploying Hyper Converged in a data center with 25 GIG and how you do it. So that's one, but I think Hyper Converged is all about balance in general, right. There's a fixed ratio depending on the product implementation of storage to compute, right? And generally they like to be in the Goldilocks zone, right? Not too much CPU, just... Not too CPU heavy or not too much storage heavy. And I think as Hyper Converged is going more mainstream and more normal, it's pushing those subtle boundaries there. And I think things like flexing out to the cloud when you need additional storage or additional compute capability, is one of those design considerations you need to take into account as you're deploying Hyper Converged because, as you said, you're designing around constraints and there's some physical constraints you have to manage and you have to figure out how you can tap into some of the extra ones. >> So literally it's start with the outcomes, identify the data that's associated with those outcomes, figure out the physical characteristics necessary to apply and process and move that data or not move it. And use that as the starting point for the design considerations. Being very cognitive, going back to what Chad was talking about, that at the end of the day, it's the network that's binding these things and how far out is a protocol going to go, local versus wide area. >> I'm going to steal something that I read on Twitter the other day, that data is the new oil. Alright, and that's how you run your business. And just like how you ship oil to and from, from a well to a refinery, to finally to your gas station pump, you have to think of it, what's your data chain and how you get it and where you need to move it. >> So that's a term that we started using in the Cube in, I don't know, 2010. But what we found is that data is plentiful, but insights aren't. And so you see organizations really spending a lot of time, money, energy, trying to get to those insights, to give them competitive advantage and a new infrastructure emerging to support those. So I wonder, Collin, if you could talk about the portfolio, the products that you sort of look after and tie it into some of the things that you've announced this week. >> Yeah. So I look after our VM or Hyper Converged systems so Vxrail and Vxrack SDDC. You know, both jointly developed with VM Ware. I'm sure you've heard Pat and everybody else talk about them so if you've been watching any of the keynotes. But we also have a much larger portfolio. We have our Vsan ready nodes for customers who want to do it themselves, want to build their own systems. And again, that's, as we talk about degree of transformation, that allows customers to get into the Hyper Converged space, but not significantly transform how they're managing their business. We have the appliances. Obviously our Vxrail systems. So by the way, the news with the Vsan ready nodes is we're announcing them available on the Dell Poweredge 14G Platforms. Those are available now to order. On our Vxrail appliances, and the rest of the portfolio that'll be out on the 14G platform by the end of the year. But what's new with Vxrail, we're announcing Vxrail 4 dot 5, which provides life cycle management orchestration for the latest and greatest VM Ware software stacks. So Vsan, 6 dot 5, Vsan 6 dot 6 Vsphere 6 dot 5. So both of those are out now and available. With all the great goodness that you've seen and heard about them. We're also announcing new configuration options for our Vxrack SDDC platform. So that's our much larger, it's the big brother to Vxrail, fully turn-key, you know, software defined data center infrastructure including NSX, all managed under one umbrella. >> So a higher-end solution? >> It's a much higher-end solution. Much higher for larger... Not necessarily scale because you know, it's not necessarily scale because you can start pretty small. As low as-- >> Peter: But still organized, coherent, well-packaged. >> But you have to, again, if we're talking about degrees of transformation, if you go with an appliance, okay you manage your compute and storage together. If you're going with a rack scale system, your managing the network as part of that as well. So that's another degree of transformation you have to be willing to make. So that's what's really the big difference between the two. New configuration options, up to 40 different hardware configs available now for that so really driven by customer choice. I want lower powered CPU's for certain workloads, I want higher powered CPU's, I want more all Flash choices, so really flush that portfolio out. And then lastly, we're announcing, our EHC and NHC platforms from Dell EMC are available built on Vxrack SDDC as well. >> EHC acronym? >> Collin: Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. >> And? >> Native Hybrid Cloud. EHC and NHC, sorry. Both of those two systems, which had run on our Vblock infrastructure before, are now running on Vxrack SDDC as well. So you get fully turn-key hybrid cloud built on top of an HCI system. >> And when you think of a EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, and Native Hybrid Cloud, NHC, can you talk about the work loads? That customers should think about putting on each? >> Yeah, so EHC is much more for traditional workloads. For customers who are looking to get into hybrid cloud. Actually, we see a lot of, our number one customer for someone who buys EHC, is they've tried to build cloud on their own and failed. They want something turn-key, they don't want to make the same mistakes again, they have the scars, and they want something easier and simpler than building it themselves. But that is traditional workloads, your traditional data center workloads managed in a cloud environment. NHC, our Native Hybrid Cloud product is for cloud native workloads, it's actually turn-key pivotal systems. So it's PSC based so if you're deploying workloads that will run in pivotal and you want it as a test dev system in house, or you want to run that in house and then migrate it later to the cloud, that's what NHC is for. >> Okay, we got to leave it there. But I'll give you a last word on VM World 2017, cloud, Hyper Converged, a lot of new innovation. What's your bumper sticker, Collin, on the show? >> My bumper sticker is again, HCI is primetime, it's here, I used to say that, customers, when I started this job two years ago would tell me, "tell me why I need HCI?" And what customers are asking me now is, last year was, "tell me how I use HCI?" and this year it's "tell me where I can't use HCI?" So there's been this waterfall shift in how they're looking at doing it. >> Dave: So they like it, they're trying to apply it. >> Peter: What is it? How it works? And what's the impact? >> Dave: And I want to apply it in as many places as possible. Where are my blind spots? >> Yeah, where doesn't it fit? What are the constraints where it doesn't fit? >> Collin Gallagher, thanks so much for coming back in the Cube. >> Oh, my pleasure. Thanks, Dave. >> Keep right there, everybody. We'll be back, this is Dave Vellante. For Peter Burris, this is the Cube. We're live at VM World 2017 and we'll be right back.

>> Narrator: Live from The Wigwam in Phoenix, Arizona, it's the CUBE. Covering Data Platforms 2017. Brought to you by Qubole. (techno music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the CUBE. We are in The Wigwam Resort, historic Wigwam Resort, just outside of Phoenix, Arizona at Data Platforms 2017. It's a new Big Data event. You might say, god there's already a lot of Big Data events, but Qubole's taken a different approach to Big Data. Cloud-first, cloud-native, you're integrated with all the big public clouds and they all come from Big Data backgrounds, practitioner backgrounds. So it's a really cool thing and we're really excited to have our next guest, Colin Ridell, he's a Big Data architect from Epic Games, was up on a panel earlier today. Colin, Welcome. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, so, enjoyed your panel, a lot of topics that you guys covered. One of the ones we hear over and over again is get early wins. How do you drive adoption, change people's behaviors, it's not really a technology story. It's a human factors and behaviors story. So I wonder if you can share some of your experience, some best practices, some stories. >> So I don't know if there's really a rule book on best practices for that. Every environment is different, every company is different. But one thing that seems to be constant is resistance to change in a lot of the places, so... >> Jeff: That is consistent. >> We had some challenges when I came in. We were running a system that was on it's last legs basically, and we had to replace it. There was really no choice. There was no fixing it. And so, I did actually encounter a fair bit of resistance with regards to that when I started at Epic. >> Now it's interesting, you said a fair amount of resistance. Another one of your lessons was start slow, find some early wins, but you said, that you were thrown into a big project right off the bat. >> Colin: So, we were, yeah. >> I'm curious, how did the big project go, but when you do start slow, how small does it need to be where you can start to get these wins to break down the resistance. >> I think what we, the way we approached it was we looked at what was the most crucial process, or the most crucial set of processes. And that's where we started. So that was what we tried to convert first and then make that data available to people via an alternative method, which was Hive. And once people started using it and learned how to interact with it properly the barriers start to fall. >> What were some of the difficult change management issues? Where did you come from in terms of the technology platform and what resistance did you hit? >> So it was really a user interface was the main factor of resistance. So we were running a Hadoop cluster. It was fixed sized, it wasn't on PRaM, but it was in a private cloud. It was basically, simply being overloaded. We had to do constant maintenance on it. We had to prop it up. And it was, the performance was degrading and degrading and degrading. The idea behind the replacement was really to give us something that was scalable, that would grow in the future, that wouldn't run into these performance blockers that we were having. But again, like I said, the hardest factor was the user interface differences. People were used to the tool set that they were working with, they liked the way it worked. >> What was the tool set? >> I would rather not actually say that on camera, >> Jeff: That's fine. >> Does it source itself in Redmond or something? >> No, no it doesn't, they're not from Redmond. I just don't want to cast aspersions. >> No, you don't need to cast aspersions. The conflict was really just around familiarity with the tool, it wasn't really about a wholesale change in behavior and becoming more data-centric. >> No, because the tool that we replaced was an effort to become more data-centric to begin with. There definitely was a corporate culture of we want to be more data-informed. So that was not one of the factors that we had to overcome. It was really tool-based. >> But the games market is so competitive, right? You guys have to be on your game all the time and you got to keep an eye on what everybody else is doing in their games, and make course corrections as I understand, something becomes hot, or new, so you guys have to be super nimble on your feet. How does taking this approach help you be more nimble in the way that you guys get new code out, new functionality? >> It's really, really very easy for us now to inject new events into the game, we basically can break those events out and report on them or analyze what's going on in the game for free with the architecture that we have now. >> Does that mean it's the equivalent of, in IT operations, we instrument everything from the applications, to the middleware, down to the hardware. Are you essentially doing the same to the game so you can follow the pathway of a gamer, or the hotspots of all the gamers, that sort of thing? >> I'm not sure I fully understand your question. >> When you're running analytics on a massively multi-player game, what questions are you seeking to answer? >> Really what we are seeking to answer at the moment is what brings people back? What behaviors can we foster in-- >> Engagement. >> in our players. Yeah, engagement, exactly. >> And that's how you measure engagement, it's just as simple as, do they come back or time on game? >> That's the most simple measure that we use for it, yeah. >> So Colin, we're short on time, want to give you the last word. When you come to a conference like this, there's a lot of peer interaction, there's some great questions coming out of the panel, around specifically, how do you measure success? It wasn't technical at all. It's, what are the things that you're using to measure whether stuff is working. I wonder if you can talk to the power of being in an ecosystem of peers here. Any surprises or great insights that you've got. I know we've only been here for a couple days. >> I would say that one of the biggest values, obviously the sessions and the breakouts are great, but I think one of the greatest values of here is simply the networking aspect of it. The being able to speak to people who are facing similar challenges, or doing similar things. Even although they're in a completely different domain, the problems are constant. Or common at least. How do you do machine learning to categorize player behaviors in our case and in other cases it's categorization of feedback that people get from websites, stuff like that. I really think the networking aspect is the most valuable thing to conferences like this. >> Alright, awesome. Well, Colin Ridell, Epic Games, thanks for taking a few minutes to stop by the CUBE. >> You're welcome, more than welcome, thank you very much. >> Absolutely, alright, George Gilbert, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching the CUBE from Data Platforms 2017 at the historic Wigwam Resort. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: The cube presents, the Kubecon and Cloudnativecon Europe, 2022 brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Valencia, Spain in Kubecon and Cloudnativecon Europe, 2022. I'm your host Keith Townsend. It's been a amazing day, three days of coverage 7,500 people, 170 sponsors, a good mix of end user organizations, vendors, just people with open source at large. I've loved the conversations. We're not going to stop that coverage just because this is the last session of the conference. Colin Murphy, senior software engineer, Adobe, >> Adobe. >> Oh, wow. This is going to be fun. And then Liam Randall, the chair of CNCF Cloud Native WebAssembly Day. >> That's correct. >> And CNCF & CEO of Cosmonic. >> That's right. >> All right. First off, let's talk about the show. How has this been different than other, if at all of other Kubecons? >> Well, first I think we all have to do a tremendous round of applause, not only for the vendors, but the CNC staff and all the attendees for coming out. And you have to say, Kubecon is back. The online experiences have been awesome but this was the first one, where Hallwaycon was in full effect. And you had the opportunity to sit down and meet with so many intelligent and inspiring peers and really have a chance to learn about all the exciting innovations that have happened over the last year. >> Colin. >> Yeah, it's been my most enjoyable Kubecon I've ever been to. And I've been to a bunch of them over the last few years. Just the quality of people. The problems that we're solving right now, everywhere from this newer stuff that we're talking about today with WebAssembly but then all these big enterprises trying to getting involved in Kubernetes >> Colin, to your point about the problems that we're solving, in many ways the pandemic has dramatically accelerated the pace of innovation, especially inside the CNCF, which is by far the most critical repository of open source projects that enterprises, governments and individuals rely on around the world, in order to deliver new experiences and to have coped and scaled out within the pandemic over the last few years. >> Yeah, I'm getting this feel, this vibe of the overall show that feels like we're on the cuff for something. There's other shows throughout the year, that's more vendor focused that talk about cloud native. But I think this is going to be the industry conference where we're just getting together and talking about it and it's going to probably be, in the next couple of years, the biggest conference of the year, that's just my personal opinion. >> I actually really strongly agree with you. And I think that the reason for that is the diversity that we get from the open source focus of Kubecon Kubecon has started where the industry really started which was in shared community projects. And I was the executive at Capital One that led the donation of cloud custodian into the CNCF. And I've started and put many projects here. And one of the reasons that you do that is so that you can build real scalable communities, Vendors that oftentimes even have competing interest but it gives us a place where we can truly collaborate where we can set aside our personal agendas and our company's agendas. And we can focus on the problems at hand. And how do we really raise the bar for technology for everybody. >> Now you two are representing a project that, you know as we look at kind of, how the web has evolved the past few decades, there's standards, there's things that we know that work, there's things that we know that don't work and we're beyond cloud native, we're kind of resistant to change. Funny enough. >> That's right. >> So WebAssembly, talk to me about what problem is WebAssembly solving that need solving? >> I think it's fitting that here on the last day of Kubecon, we're starting with the newest standard for the web and for background, there's only four languages that make up what we think of as the modern web. There's JavaScript, there's HTML, there's CSS, and now there's a new idea that's WebAssembly. And it's maybe not a new idea but it's certainly a new standard, that's got massive adoption and acceleration. WebAssembly is best thought of as almost like a portable little virtual machine. And like a lot of great ideas like JavaScript, it was originally designed to bring new experiences to browsers everywhere. And as organizations looked at the portability and security value props that come from this tiny little virtual machine, it's made a wonderful addition to backend servers and as a platform for portability to bring solutions all the way out to the edge. >> So what are some of the business cases for WebAssembly? Like what problem, what business problem are we solving? >> So it, you know, we would not have been able to bring Photoshop to the web without WASM. >> Wow. >> And just to be clear, I had nothing to do with that effort. So I want to make sure everybody understands, but if you have a lot of C++ or C code and you want to bring that experience to the web browser which is a great cost savings, cause it's running on the client's machines, really low latency, high performance experiences in the browser, WASM, really the only way to go. >> So I'm getting hints of fruit berry, Java. >> Liam: Yeah, absolutely. >> Colin: Definitely. >> You know, the look, WebAssembly sounds similar to promises you've heard before, right ones, run anywhere. The difference is, is that WebAssembly is not driven by any one particular vendor. So there's no one vendor that's trying to bring a plug in to every single device. WebAssembly was a recognition, much like Kubecon, the point that we started with around the diversity of thought ideas and representation of shared interest, of how do we have a platform that's polyglot? Many people can bring languages to it, and solutions that we can share and then build from there. And it is unlocking some of the most amazing and innovative experiences, both on the web backend servers and all the way to the edge. Because WebAssembly is a tiny little virtual machine that runs everywhere. Adobe's leadership is absolutely incredible with the things that they're doing with WebAssembly. They did this awesome blog post with the Google Chrome team that talked about other performance improvements that were brought into Chrome and other browsers, in order to enable that kind of experience. >> So I get the general concept of WebAssembly and it's one of those things that I have to ask the question, and I appreciate that Adobe uses it but without the community, I mean, I've dedicated some of my team's resources over the years to some really cool projects and products that just died on the buying cause there was no community around. >> Yeah. >> Who else uses WebAssembly? >> Yeah, I think so. We actually, inside the CNCF now, have an entire day devoted just to WebAssembly and as the co-chair of the CNCF Cloud Native WebAssembly Day, we really focus on bringing those case studies to the forefront. So some of the more interesting talks that we had here and at some of the precursor weekend conferences were from BMW, for example, they talked about how they were excited about not only WebAssembly, but a framework that they use on WebAssembly called WASM cloud, that lets them a flexibly scale machine learning models from their own edge, in their own vehicles through to their developer's workstations and even take that data onto their regular cloud Kubernetes and scale analysis and analytics. They invested and they just released a machine learning framework for one of the many great WebAssembly projects called WASM cloud, which is a CNCF project, a member project here in the CNCF. >> So how does that fit in overall landscape? >> So think of WebAssembly, like you think of HTML. It's a technology that gives you a lot of concept and to accelerate your journey on those technologies, people create frameworks. For example, if you were going to write a UI, you would not very likely start with an empty document you'd start with a react or view. And in a similar vein, if you were going to start a new microservice or backend application, project for WebAssembly, you might use WASM cloud or you might use ATMO or you might use a Spin. Those are three different types of projects. They all have their own different value props and their own different opinions that they bring to them. But the point is is that this is a quickly evolving space and it's going to dramatically change the type of experiences that we bring, not only to web browsers but to servers and edges everywhere. >> So Colin, you mentioned C+ >> Colin: Yeah. >> And other coding. Well , talk to me about the ramp up. >> Oh, well, so, yeah, so, C++ there was a lot of work done in scripting, at Adobe. Taking our C++ code and bringing it into the browser. A lot of new instructions, Cimdi, that were brought to make a really powerful experience, but what's new now is the server side aspect of things. So, just what kind of, what Liam was talking about. Now we can run this stuff in the data center. It's not just for people's browsers anymore. And then we can also bring it out to the edge too, which is a new space that we can take advantage of really almost only through WebAssembly and some JavaScript. >> So wait, let me get this kind of under hook. Before, if I wanted a rich experience, I have to run a heavy VDI instance on the back end so that I'm basically getting remote desktop calls from a light thin client back to my backend server, that's heavy. >> That is heavy. >> WebAssembly is alternative to that? >> Yes, absolutely. Think of WebAssembly as a tiny little CPU that is a shim, that we can take the places that don't even traditionally have a concept of a processor. So inside the browser, for example, traditionally cloud native development on the backend has been dominated by things like Docker and Docker is a wonderful technology and Container is a wonderful technology that really drove the last 10 years of cloud native with the great lift and shift, if you will. Take our existing applications, package them up in this virtual desktop and then deliver them. But to deliver the next 10 years of experiences, we need solutions that let us have portability first and a security model that's portable across the entire landscape. So this isn't just browsers and servers on the back end, WebAssembly creates an a layer of equality from truly edge to edge. It's can transcend different CPUs, different operating systems. So where containers have this lower bound off you need to be running Linux and you need to be in a place where you're going to bring Kubernetes. WebAssembly is so small and portable, it transcends that lower bound. It can go to places like iOS. It can go to places like web browsers. It can even go to teeny tiny CPUs that don't even traditionally have a full on operating systems inside them. >> Colin: Right, places where you can't run Docker. >> So as I think about that, and I'm a developer and I'm running my back end and I'm running whatever web stack that I want, how does this work? Like, how do I get started with it? >> Well, there's some great stuff Liam already mentioned with WASM cloud and Frmion Spin. Microsoft is heavily involved now on providing cloud products that can take advantage of WebAssembly. So we've got a lot of languages, new languages coming in.net and Ruby, Rust is a big one, TinyGo, really just a lot of places to get involved. A lot of places to get started. >> At the highest level Finton Ryan, when he was at Gartner, he's a really well known analyst. He wrote something profound a few years ago. He said, WebAssembly is the one technology, You don't need a strategy to adopt. >> Mm. >> Because frankly you're already using it because there's so many wonderful experiences and products that are out there, like what Adobe's doing. This virtual CPU is not just a platform to run on cloud native and to build applications towards the edge. You can embed this virtual CPU inside of applications. So cases where you would want to allow your users to customize an application or to extend functionality. Give you an example, Shopify is a big believer in WebAssembly because while their platform covers, two standard deviations or 80% of the use cases, they have a wonderful marketplace of extensions that folks can use in order to customize the checkout process or apply specialized discounts or integrate into a partner ecosystem. So when you think about the requirements for those scenarios, they line up to the same requirements that we have in browsers and servers. I want real security. I want portability. I want reuseability. And ultimately I want to save money and go faster. So organizations everywhere should take a few minutes and do a heads up and think about one, where WebAssembly is already in their environment, inside of places like Envoy and Istio, some of the most popular projects in the cloud native ecosystem, outside of Kubernetes. And they should perhaps consider studying, how WebAssembly can help them to transform the experiences that they're delivering for their customers. This may be the last day of Kubecon, but this is certainly not the last time we're going to be talking about WebAssembly, I'll tell you that. >> So, last question, we've talked a lot about how to get started. How about day two, when I'm thinking about performance troubleshooting and ensuring clients have a great experience what's day two operation like? >> That's a really good question. So there's, I know that each language kind of brings their own tool chain and their, and you know we saw some great stuff on, on WASM day. You can look it up around the .net experience for debugging, They really tried to make it as seamless and the same as it was for native code. So, yeah, I think that's a great question. I mean, right now it's still trying to figure out server side, It's still, as Liam said, a shifting landscape. But we've got some great stuff out here already >> You know, I'd make an even bigger call than that. When I think about the last 20 years as computing has evolved, we've continued to move through these epics of tech that were dominated by a key abstraction. Think about the rise of virtualization with VMware and the transition to the cloud. The rise of containerization, we virtualized to OS. The rise of Kubernetes and CNCF itself, where we virtualize cloud APIs. I firmly believe that WebAssembly represents the next epic of tech. So I think that day two WebAssembly continues to become one of the dominant themes, not only across cloud native but across the entire technical computing landscape. And it represents a fundamentally gigantic opportunity for organizations such as Adobe, that are always market leading and at the cutting edge of tech, to bring new experiences to their customers and for vendors to bring new platforms and tools to companies that want to execute on that opportunity. >> Colin Murphy, Liam Randall, I want to thank you for joining the Cube at Kubecon Cloudnativecon 2022. I'm now having a JavaScript based app that I want to re-look at, and maybe re-platforming that to WebAssembly. It's some lot of good stuff there. We want to thank you for tuning in to our coverage of Kubecon Cloudnativecon. And we want to thank the organization for hosting us, here from Valencia, Spain. I'm Keith Townsend, and you're watching the Cube, the leader in high tech coverage. (bright music)

>>Hi, everyone. My name is my uncle. My uncle Poor I worked with Geo reminds you in India. We call ourselves Geo Platforms. Now on. We've been recently in the news. You've raised a lot off funding from one of the largest, most of the largest tech companies in the world. And I'm here to talk about Geos Cloud Journey, Onda Mantis Partnership. I've titled it the story often, Underdog becoming the largest telecom company in India within four years, which is really special. And we're, of course, held by the cloud. So quick disclaimer. Right. The content shared here is only for informational purposes. Um, it's only for this event. And if you want to share it outside, especially on social media platforms, we need permission from Geo Platforms limited. Okay, quick intro about myself. I am a VP of engineering a geo. I lead the Cloud Services and Platforms team with NGO Andi. I mean the geo since the beginning, since it started, and I've seen our cloud footprint grow from a handful of their models to now eight large application data centers across three regions in India. And we'll talk about how we went here. All right, Let's give you an introduction on Geo, right? Giorgio is on how we became the largest telecom campaign, India within four years from 0 to 400 million subscribers. And I think there are There are a lot of events that defined Geo and that will give you an understanding off. How do you things and what you did to overcome massive problems in India. So the slide that I want to talkto is this one and, uh, I The headline I've given is, It's the Geo is the fastest growing tech company in the world, which is not a new understatement. It's eggs, actually, quite literally true, because very few companies in the world have grown from zero to 400 million subscribers within four years paying subscribers. And I consider Geo Geos growth in three phases, which I have shown on top. The first phase we'll talk about is how geo grew in the smartphone market in India, right? And what we did to, um to really disrupt the telecom space in India in that market. Then we'll talk about the feature phone phase in India and how Geo grew there in the future for market in India. and then we'll talk about what we're doing now, which we call the Geo Platforms phase. Right. So Geo is a default four g lt. Network. Right. So there's no to geo three g networks that Joe has, Um it's a state of the art four g lt voiceover lt Network and because it was designed fresh right without any two D and three G um, legacy technologies, there were also a lot of challenges Lawn geo when we were starting up. One of the main challenges waas that all the smart phones being sold in India NGOs launching right in 2000 and 16. They did not have the voice or lt chip set embedded in the smartphone because the chips it's far costlier to embed in smartphones and India is a very price and central market. So none of the manufacturers were embedding the four g will teach upset in the smartphones. But geos are on Lee a volte in network, right for the all the network. So we faced a massive problem where we said, Look there no smartphones that can support geo. So how will we grow Geo? So in order to solve that problem, we launched our own brand of smartphones called the Life um, smartphones. And those phones were really high value devices. So there were $50 and for $50 you get you You At that time, you got a four g B storage space. A nice big display for inch display. Dual cameras, Andi. Most importantly, they had volte chip sets embedded in them. Right? And that got us our initial customers the initial for the launch customers when we launched. But more importantly, what that enabled other oh, EMS. What that forced the audience to do is that they also had to launch similar smartphones competing smartphones with voltage upset embedded in the same price range. Right. So within a few months, 3 to 4 months, um, all the other way EMS, all the other smartphone manufacturers, the Samsung's the Micromax is Micromax in India, they all had volte smartphones out in the market, right? And I think that was one key step We took off, launching our own brand of smartphone life that helped us to overcome this problem that no smartphone had. We'll teach upsets in India and then in order. So when when we were launching there were about 13 telecom companies in India. It was a very crowded space on demand. In order to gain a foothold in that market, we really made a few decisions. Ah, phew. Key product announcement that really disrupted this entire industry. Right? So, um, Geo is a default for GLT network itself. All I p network Internet protocol in everything. All data. It's an all data network and everything from voice to data to Internet traffic. Everything goes over this. I'll goes over Internet protocol, and the cost to carry voice on our smartphone network is very low, right? The bandwidth voice consumes is very low in the entire Lt band. Right? So what we did Waas In order to gain a foothold in the market, we made voice completely free, right? He said you will not pay anything for boys and across India, we will not charge any roaming charges across India. Right? So we made voice free completely and we offer the lowest data rates in the world. We could do that because we had the largest capacity or to carry data in India off all the other telecom operators. And these data rates were unheard off in the world, right? So when we launched, we offered a $2 per month or $3 per month plan with unlimited data, you could consume 10 gigabytes of data all day if you wanted to, and some of our subscriber day. Right? So that's the first phase off the overgrowth and smartphones and that really disorders. We hit 100 million subscribers in 170 days, which was very, very fast. And then after the smartphone faith, we found that India still has 500 million feature phones. And in order to grow in that market, we launched our own phone, the geo phone, and we made it free. Right? So if you take if you took a geo subscription and you carried you stayed with us for three years, we would make this phone tree for your refund. The initial deposit that you paid for this phone and this phone had also had quite a few innovations tailored for the Indian market. It had all of our digital services for free, which I will talk about soon. And for example, you could plug in. You could use a cable right on RCR HDMI cable plug into the geo phone and you could watch TV on your big screen TV from the geophones. You didn't need a separate cable subscription toe watch TV, right? So that really helped us grow. And Geo Phone is now the largest selling feature phone in India on it. 100 million feature phones in India now. So now now we're in what I call the geo platforms phase. We're growing of a geo fiber fiber to the home fiber toe the office, um, space. And we've also launched our new commerce initiatives over e commerce initiatives and were steadily building platforms that other companies can leverage other companies can use in the Jeon o'clock. Right? So this is how a small startup not a small start, but a start of nonetheless least 400 million subscribers within four years the fastest growing tech company in the world. Next, Geo also helped a systemic change in India, and this is massive. A lot of startups are building on this India stack, as people call it, and I consider this India stack has made up off three things, and the acronym I use is jam. Trinity, right. So, um, in India, systemic change happened recently because the Indian government made bank accounts free for all one billion Indians. There were no service charges to store money in bank accounts. This is called the Jonathan. The J. GenDyn Bank accounts. The J out off the jam, then India is one of the few countries in the world toe have a digital biometric identity, which can be used to verify anyone online, which is huge. So you can simply go online and say, I am my ankle poor on duh. I verify that this is indeed me who's doing this transaction. This is the A in the jam and the last M stands for Mobil's, which which were held by Geo Mobile Internet in a plus. It is also it is. It also stands for something called the U. P I. The United Unified Payments Interface. This was launched by the Indian government, where you can carry digital transactions for free. You can transfer money from one person to the to another, essentially for free for no fee, right so I can transfer one group, even Indian rupee to my friend without paying any charges. That is huge, right? So you have a country now, which, with a with a billion people who are bank accounts, money in the bank, who you can verify online, right and who can pay online without any problems through their mobile connections held by G right. So suddenly our market, our Internet market, exploded from a few million users to now 506 106 100 million mobile Internet users. So that that I think, was a massive such a systemic change that happened in India. There are some really large hail, um, numbers for this India stack, right? In one month. There were 1.6 billion nuclear transactions in the last month, which is phenomenal. So next What is the impact of geo in India before you started, we were 155th in the world in terms off mobile in terms of broadband data consumption. Right. But after geo, India went from one 55th to the first in the world in terms of broadband data, largely consumed on mobile devices were a mobile first country, right? We have a habit off skipping technology generation, so we skip fixed line broadband and basically consuming Internet on our mobile phones. On average, Geo subscribers consumed 12 gigabytes of data per month, which is one of the highest rates in the world. So Geo has a huge role to play in making India the number one country in terms off broad banded consumption and geo responsible for quite a few industry first in the telecom space and in fact, in the India space, I would say so before Geo. To get a SIM card, you had to fill a form off the physical paper form. It used to go toe Ah, local distributor. And that local distributor is to check the farm that you feel incorrectly for your SIM card and then that used to go to the head office and everything took about 48 hours or so, um, to get your SIM card. And sometimes there were problems there also with a hard biometric authentication. We enable something, uh, India enable something called E K Y C Elektronik. Know your customer? We took a fingerprint scan at our point of Sale Reliance Digital stores, and within 15 minutes we could verify within a few minutes. Within a few seconds we could verify that person is indeed my hunk, right, buying the same car, Elektronik Lee on we activated the SIM card in 15 minutes. That was a massive deal for our growth. Initially right toe onboard 100 million customers. Within our and 70 days. We couldn't have done it without be K. I see that was a massive deal for us and that is huge for any company starting a business or start up in India. We also made voice free, no roaming charges and the lowest data rates in the world. Plus, we gave a full suite of cloud services for free toe all geo customers. For example, we give goTV essentially for free. We give GOTV it'll law for free, which people, when we have a launching, told us that no one would see no one would use because the Indians like watching TV in the living rooms, um, with the family on a big screen television. But when we actually launched, they found that GOTV is one off our most used app. It's like 70,000,080 million monthly active users, and now we've basically been changing culture in India where culture is on demand. You can watch TV on the goal and you can pause it and you can resume whenever you have some free time. So really changed culture in India, India on we help people liver, digital life online. Right, So that was massive. So >>I'm now I'd like to talk about our cloud >>journey on board Animal Minorities Partnership. We've been partners that since 2014 since the beginning. So Geo has been using open stack since 2014 when we started with 14 note luster. I'll be one production environment One right? And that was I call it the first wave off our cloud where we're just understanding open stack, understanding the capabilities, understanding what it could do. Now we're in our second wave. Where were about 4000 bare metal servers in our open stack cloud multiple regions, Um, on that around 100,000 CPU cores, right. So it's a which is one of the bigger clouds in the world, I would say on almost all teams, with Ngor leveraging the cloud and soon I think we're going to hit about 10,000 Bama tools in our cloud, which is massive and just to give you a scale off our network, our in French, our data center footprint. Our network introduction is about 30 network data centers that carry just network traffic across there are there across India and we're about eight application data centers across three regions. Data Center is like a five story building filled with servers. So we're talking really significant scale in India. And we had to do this because when we were launching, there are the government regulation and try it. They've gotten regulatory authority of India, mandates that any telecom company they have to store customer data inside India and none of the other cloud providers were big enough to host our clothes. Right. So we we made all this intellectual for ourselves, and we're still growing next. I love to show you how we grown with together with Moran says we started in 2014 with the fuel deployment pipelines, right? And then we went on to the NK deployment. Pipelines are cloud started growing. We started understanding the clouds and we picked up M C p, which has really been a game changer for us in automation, right on DNA. Now we are in the latest release, ofem CPM CPI $2019 to on open stack queens, which on we've just upgraded all of our clouds or the last few months. Couple of months, 2 to 3 months. So we've done about nine production clouds and there are about 50 internal, um, teams consuming cloud. We call as our tenants, right. We have open stack clouds and we have communities clusters running on top of open stack. There are several production grade will close that run on this cloud. The Geo phone, for example, runs on our cloud private cloud Geo Cloud, which is a backup service like Google Drive and collaboration service. It runs out of a cloud. Geo adds G o g S t, which is a tax filing system for small and medium enterprises, our retail post service. There are all these production services running on our private clouds. We're also empaneled with the government off India to provide cloud services to the government to any State Department that needs cloud services. So we were empaneled by Maiti right in their ego initiative. And our clouds are also Easter. 20,000 certified 20,000 Colin one certified for software processes on 27,001 and said 27,017 slash 18 certified for security processes. Our clouds are also P our data centers Alsop a 942 be certified. So significant effort and investment have gone toe These data centers next. So this is where I think we've really valued the partnership with Morantes. Morantes has has trained us on using the concepts of get offs and in fries cold, right, an automated deployments and the tool change that come with the M C P Morantes product. Right? So, um, one of the key things that has happened from a couple of years ago to today is that the deployment time to deploy a new 100 north production cloud has decreased for us from about 55 days to do it in 2015 to now, we're down to about five days to deploy a cloud after the bear metals a racked and stacked. And the network is also the physical network is also configured, right? So after that, our automated pipelines can deploy 100 0 clock in five days flight, which is a massive deal for someone for a company that there's adding bear metals to their infrastructure so fast, right? It helps us utilize our investment, our assets really well. By the time it takes to deploy a cloud control plane for us is about 19 hours. It takes us two hours to deploy a compu track and it takes us three hours to deploy a storage rack. Right? And we really leverage the re class model off M C. P. We've configured re class model to suit almost every type of cloud that we have, right, and we've kept it fairly generous. It can be, um, Taylor to deploy any type of cloud, any type of story, nor any type of compute north. Andi. It just helps us automate our deployments by putting every configuration everything that we have in to get into using infra introduction at school, right plus M. C. P also comes with pipelines that help us run automated tests, automated validation pipelines on our cloud. We also have tempest pipelines running every few hours every three hours. If I recall correctly which run integration test on our clouds to make sure the clouds are running properly right, that that is also automated. The re class model and the pipelines helpers automate day to operations and changes as well. There are very few seventh now, compared toa a few years ago. It very rare. It's actually the exception and that may be because off mainly some user letter as opposed to a cloud problem. We also have contributed auto healing, Prometheus and Manager, and we integrate parameters and manager with our even driven automation framework. Currently, we're using Stack Storm, but you could use anyone or any event driven automation framework out there so that it indicates really well. So it helps us step away from constantly monitoring our cloud control control planes and clothes. So this has been very fruitful for us and it has actually apps killed our engineers also to use these best in class practices like get off like in France cord. So just to give you a flavor on what stacks our internal teams are running on these clouds, Um, we have a multi data center open stack cloud, and on >>top of that, >>teams use automation tools like terra form to create the environments. They also create their own Cuba these clusters and you'll see you'll see in the next slide also that we have our own community that the service platform that we built on top of open stack to give developers development teams NGO um, easy to create an easy to destroy Cuban. It is environment and sometimes leverage the Murano application catalog to deploy using heats templates to deploy their own stacks. Geo is largely a micro services driven, Um um company. So all of our applications are micro services, multiple micro services talking to each other, and the leverage develops. Two sets, like danceable Prometheus, Stack stone from for Otto Healing and driven, not commission. Big Data's tax are already there Kafka, Patches, Park Cassandra and other other tools as well. We're also now using service meshes. Almost everything now uses service mesh, sometimes use link. Erred sometimes are experimenting. This is Theo. So So this is where we are and we have multiple clients with NGO, so our products and services are available on Android IOS, our own Geo phone, Windows Macs, Web, Mobile Web based off them. So any client you can use our services and there's no lock in. It's always often with geo, so our sources have to be really good to compete in the open Internet. And last but not least, I think I love toe talk to you about our container journey. So a couple of years ago, almost every team started experimenting with containers and communities and they were demand for as a platform team. They were demanding community that the service from us a manage service. Right? So we built for us, it was much more comfortable, much more easier toe build on top of open stack with cloud FBI s as opposed to doing this on bare metal. So we built a fully managed community that a service which was, ah, self service portal, where you could click a button and get a community cluster deployed in your own tenant on Do the >>things that we did are quite interesting. We also handle some geo specific use cases. So we have because it was a >>manage service. We deployed the city notes in our own management tenant, right? We didn't give access to the customer to the city. Notes. We deployed the master control plane notes in the tenant's tenant and our customers tenant, but we didn't give them access to the Masters. We didn't give them the ssh key the workers that the our customers had full access to. And because people in Genova learning and experimenting, we gave them full admin rights to communities customers as well. So that way that really helped on board communities with NGO. And now we have, like 15 different teams running multiple communities clusters on top, off our open stack clouds. We even handle the fact that there are non profiting. I people separate non profiting I peoples and separate production 49 p pools NGO. So you could create these clusters in whatever environment that non prod environment with more open access or a prod environment with more limited access. So we had to handle these geo specific cases as well in this communities as a service. So on the whole, I think open stack because of the isolation it provides. I think it made a lot of sense for us to do communities our service on top off open stack. We even did it on bare metal, but that not many people use the Cuban, indeed a service environmental, because it is just so much easier to work with. Cloud FBI STO provision much of machines and covering these clusters. That's it from me. I think I've said a mouthful, and now I love for you toe. I'd love to have your questions. If you want to reach out to me. My email is mine dot capulet r l dot com. I'm also you can also message me on Twitter at my uncouple. So thank you. And it was a pleasure talking to you, Andre. Let let me hear your questions.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hey welcome back to ready Jeff Rick here with the cube we're on Apollo Alto studios today for a cute conversation with some of our friends from VMware big announcement today and we're excited to have a kick Kolbert come on he is the VP at CTO of cloud platform business unit kid great to see you again I'm gonna be here absolutely so big announcement it's the second generation of the VMware cloud on Dell EMC now you guys just brought this to market barely a year ago tell us about about the new announcement and some of the excitement around the changes that you guys put in place yeah absolutely yeah so this has been a project that's been in the making for a few years now we first announced the product version of this in April of last year and then we announced the general availability of it in August at our VMworld conference and so as we've been engaging with customers since we went GA what we've seen and heard from them was that you know they're looking for more data center style options traditionally when we first started this project you may remember it was called project dimension before in the product of VMware Colin Dell AMC beccarose project dimension we had more of an edge computing focus we were focused on how can we get compute in our VMware infrastructure out to factories and retail settings and so on and so forth and so we designed the system for those types of environments a half rack configuration smaller number of servers things like a power supply and UPS built in but as we heard back from customers what they said was hey this is great but we have a lot of needs in our data center today and so the idea there was let's rethink this offering for the data center and actually produced the types of rack architectures and server types that customers are looking for just goes to show you try to give them yin and they want yang right it's yeah so so it's a very different kind of challenge than going into the data center environment and you know one of the promises of cloud is is obviously provisioning right and spinning things up so that's a really important piece of the puzzle how are you guys addressing you know letting people add capacity and kind of changes configuration if it's actually you know in my data center yeah yeah so you seen a number of different things that we're doing here really yeah enhancing the maturity across the board of this offering so it's important to realize that this is a cloud service yes even though the physical servers in the rack reside on premises for a customer again in their data center at a retail location it is a cloud service and that we are running this and managing this like cloud service and so like any good cloud service merge have to interact with any human being right they can just call any guy and indeed that's the way it works either through an API or through our UI workflow today a customer can come on and order a new esidisi rack for their environment and that initial provisioning you know we fully automated that we had a dell service technician coming out you know actually figure the hardware on on-site but then after that and you know we didn't have many options for customers let's say that they started out with maybe four nodes on-site but then they realize Oh Ashley needs six or eight nodes right they're getting more applications on there greater usage and they just need more capacity and so what we support now is this ability to actually again use an API using the UI request additional servers or their existing racks and this is again something very simple to do in just a few weeks that those things will arrive the the service ignition will be there to install them and get that customer up right so I was gonna say you know typically it's order and then you got you got to put the stuff in and deploy it right and then support it so you just touched a little bit on the deployment did you basically take that order and then just with your existing process get into the data center and and light up that additional hardware yeah so we're doing a lot to really automate this whole process and the powerful thing here is that you know this partnership that we have between VMware and difficult runs really deep so we've actually engaged and integrated into their manufacturing process so that as we get that order through the API through the UI from a user we can ship that over to Dell tell them specifics of what that customer ordered and Dell can get started manufacturing that we actually again as for that manufacturing process integration we can get the latest version of our cloud software onto those servers we can install unique cryptographic keys on those servers so we can identify them and then we work with the Dell shipping and the Dell service technicians to actually meet those physical servers when they arrive and properly set them up and configure them taking the customer it's a completely hands-off experience I think that's a really powerful they're not you know they don't need to give the nitty-gritty of hardware configuration and installing our software and managing the lifecycle of it it's much much simpler than that and so you know I think we've really taken that and extended it here both with the additional rack type scene we have for a full rack now for the data center new host types a new host type that's much beefier better for datacenter workloads and finally for that expanded capacity that we just talked about as well right and then on the support side I assume you know even though it's it's VMware cloud on Dell EMC that probably the first line of support is still VMware it's still the software on top of the infrastructure yeah that's a good question and yeah you're right it is it's a VMware on VMware operated service and absolutely VMware provides that first line of support so it's not one of these situations where you've got two different vendors pointing the finger at each other and the customer has to figure all that out now it's on VMware and we need to figure it out we obviously work with Dell on the backend we've also integrated with their telemetry systems so we can pull all the different sort of hardware telemetry monitoring data that they that they're getting so we can understand the health of those servers that are running and when we detect a problem is that something that we can fix remotely by just accessing it with our engineers or do we need a service technician to actually go out there and it's this whole issue right right so it's just interesting you guys launched this really thinking more edge and you're getting drawn into more of a data center so why are you getting drawn in what are some of the advantages you know that the sky O's and the CTOs are seeing with this type of a deployment yeah so the data center part is really interesting and again sir processing they thought we thought there would be more need at the edge initially just because hey these edge environments are really difficult to manage and they're kind of distributed and people don't have IT staff there but we're surprised to hear about is the very urgent need customers have their data centers now again they have servers in the data centers that they're running these things today but what they find is that it just doesn't work that well and that they're spending a lot of time and resources on just keeping the lights on and it's you know these things don't differentiate them as a business you know one of things I talk to customers a lot about is that no customer has ever differentiated itself by how well they run VMware infrastructure and that might sound kind of crazy at first right but yeah it's true I can differentiate themselves negatively by how poorly and they run an infrastructure and then you know their apps don't work very well but some degrees have been working VMware infrastructure is just table sticks right and then what they do in an app level is what differentiates them and so this idea that we can come in with VMware cloud on Dell EMC just take care of all of that operational overhead is really really powerful and so as you see folks and customers and companies going through these digital transformation cycles modernizing their applications they're like oh man I need to actually modernize my infrastructure as well and so that's a compelling event that we say it's like oh there's gonna be think this right as are we thinking that they're like well why am i doing all this work in the first place let's actually rethink the whole thing and take them better fundamentally better approach ie a cloud approach and so that's where VM were caught in delians he comes in again I think that's why we're seeing so much interest from customers and again we're CIA knows and CTOs can really see a lot of benefits right I'm just curious you're taking from kind of a product development a product release point of view right is this kind of a typical VMware you know kind of speed and pacing or is this really you know getting to the second gen and this shift you know kind of in your data market has really more of a response to the market because again as as I was preparing and looking up when the initial launch was it really wasn't that long ago - so - to kind of pivot and call it second gen and include features and functions that are coming back from the market would you say that's kind of typical or you guys get it a little bit more agile in your own you know kind of product development cycle and getting away from those massive PR d's and mr d's and actually you know trying to respond more quickly to the to the pace of the marketplace yeah that's a great point and yeah you're right we are going through our own digital transformation here at VMware all right now we are shifting from a company that primarily sold shrink-wrapped software to a company that sells all services and so you know as you look at that it actually changes a lot of what we can do we can respond much much more quickly much quicker to this sort of customer feedback now we can ship new updates much more frequently and so you know if you look at our traditional vSphere release cycles those were what every 12 months 18 months may be at most but what we can do now with our con releases is actually update and do major updates every three months and so we call this kind of the second you know major advance of VMware kondalian see but in reality it's our third our fourth actual release of our underlying software and so we're actually doing these underlying releases much much quicker I think the reason that we're focusing on this launch in particular is because of the fact that again customers have been asking for this data center level support and really optimizing this solution for the data center and so now we've gone and done that and again I think we're gonna see a lot more interest from the customers on the data center side because of it great well okay thanks for giving us the quick update congratulations on the release and just keep rolling it let's listen to those customers and they'll tell you what they want definitely yeah we're excited - thank you alright kit thanks again he's kid I'm Jeff you're watching the cube thanks for watching we'll see you next time you [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: It's theCUBE, covering the Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference 2020. Brought to you by Vertica. >> Dave Vellante: Hello everyone, and welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Vertica Virtual Big Data Conference. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in digital event tech coverage. And we're broadcasting remotely from our studios in Palo Alto and Boston. And, we're pleased to be covering wall-to-wall this digital event. Now, as you know, originally BDC was scheduled this week at the new Encore Hotel and Casino in Boston. Their theme was "Win big with big data". Oh sorry, "Win big with data". That's right, got it. And, I know the community was really looking forward to that, you know, meet up. But look, we're making the best of it, given these uncertain times. We wish you and your families good health and safety. And this is the way that we're going to broadcast for the next several months. Now, we want to unpack Colin Mahony's keynote, but, before we do that, I want to give a little context on the market. First, theCUBE has covered every BDC since its inception, since the BDC's inception that is. It's a very intimate event, with a heavy emphasis on user content. Now, historically, the data engineers and DBAs in the Vertica community, they comprised the majority of the content at this event. And, that's going to be the same for this virtual, or digital, production. Now, theCUBE is going to be broadcasting for two days. What we're doing, is we're going to be concurrent with the Virtual BDC. We got practitioners that are coming on the show, DBAs, data engineers, database gurus, we got a security experts coming on, and really a great line up. And, of course, we'll also be hearing from Vertica Execs, Colin Mahony himself right of the keynote, folks from product marketing, partners, and a number of experts, including some from Micro Focus, which is the, of course, owner of Vertica. But I want to take a moment to share a little bit about the history of Vertica. The company, as you know, was founded by Michael Stonebraker. And, Verica started, really they started out as a SQL platform for analytics. It was the first, or at least one of the first, to really nail the MPP column store trend. Not only did Vertica have an early mover advantage in MPP, but the efficiency and scale of its software, relative to traditional DBMS, and also other MPP players, is underscored by the fact that Vertica, and the Vertica brand, really thrives to this day. But, I have to tell you, it wasn't without some pain. And, I'll talk a little bit about that, and really talk about how we got here today. So first, you know, you think about traditional transaction databases, like Oracle or IMBDB tour, or even enterprise data warehouse platforms like Teradata. They were simply not purpose-built for big data. Vertica was. Along with a whole bunch of other players, like Netezza, which was bought by IBM, Aster Data, which is now Teradata, Actian, ParAccel, which was the basis for Redshift, Amazon's Redshift, Greenplum was bought, in the early days, by EMC. And, these companies were really designed to run as massively parallel systems that smoked traditional RDBMS and EDW for particular analytic applications. You know, back in the big data days, I often joked that, like an NFL draft, there was run on MPP players, like when you see a run on polling guards. You know, once one goes, they all start to fall. And that's what you saw with the MPP columnar stores, IBM, EMC, and then HP getting into the game. So, it was like 2011, and Leo Apotheker, he was the new CEO of HP. Frankly, he has no clue, in my opinion, with what to do with Vertica, and totally missed one the biggest trends of the last decade, the data trend, the big data trend. HP picked up Vertica for a song, it wasn't disclosed, but my guess is that it was around 200 million. So, rather than build a bunch of smart tokens around Vertica, which I always call the diamond in the rough, Apotheker basically permanently altered HP for years. He kind of ruined HP, in my view, with a 12 billion dollar purchase of Autonomy, which turned out to be one of the biggest disasters in recent M&A history. HP was forced to spin merge, and ended up selling most of its software to Microsoft, Micro Focus. (laughs) Luckily, during its time at HP, CEO Meg Whitman, largely was distracted with what to do with the mess that she inherited form Apotheker. So, Vertica was left alone. Now, the upshot is Colin Mahony, who was then the GM of Vertica, and still is. By the way, he's really the CEO, and he just doesn't have the title, I actually think they should give that to him. But anyway, he's been at the helm the whole time. And Colin, as you'll see in our interview, is a rockstar, he's got technical and business jobs, people love him in the community. Vertica's culture is really engineering driven and they're all about data. Despite the fact that Vertica is a 15-year-old company, they've really kept pace, and not been polluted by legacy baggage. Vertica, early on, embraced Hadoop and the whole open-source movement. And that helped give it tailwinds. It leaned heavily into cloud, as we're going to talk about further this week. And they got a good story around machine intelligence and AI. So, whereas many traditional database players are really getting hurt, and some are getting killed, by cloud database providers, Vertica's actually doing a pretty good job of servicing its install base, and is in a reasonable position to compete for new workloads. On its last earnings call, the Micro Focus CFO, Stephen Murdoch, he said they're investing 70 to 80 million dollars in two key growth areas, security and Vertica. Now, Micro Focus is running its Suse play on these two parts of its business. What I mean by that, is they're investing and allowing them to be semi-autonomous, spending on R&D and go to market. And, they have no hardware agenda, unlike when Vertica was part of HP, or HPE, I guess HP, before the spin out. Now, let me come back to the big trend in the market today. And there's something going on around analytic databases in the cloud. You've got companies like Snowflake and AWS with Redshift, as we've reported numerous times, and they're doing quite well, they're gaining share, especially of new workloads that are merging, particularly in the cloud native space. They combine scalable compute, storage, and machine learning, and, importantly, they're allowing customers to scale, compute, and storage independent of each other. Why is that important? Because you don't have to buy storage every time you buy compute, or vice versa, in chunks. So, if you can scale them independently, you've got granularity. Vertica is keeping pace. In talking to customers, Vertica is leaning heavily into the cloud, supporting all the major cloud platforms, as we heard from Colin earlier today, adding Google. And, why my research shows that Vertica has some work to do in cloud and cloud native, to simplify the experience, it's more robust in motor stack, which supports many different environments, you know deep SQL, acid properties, and DNA that allows Vertica to compete with these cloud-native database suppliers. Now, Vertica might lose out in some of those native workloads. But, I have to say, my experience in talking with customers, if you're looking for a great MMP column store that scales and runs in the cloud, or on-prem, Vertica is in a very strong position. Vertica claims to be the only MPP columnar store to allow customers to scale, compute, and storage independently, both in the cloud and in hybrid environments on-prem, et cetera, cross clouds, as well. So, while Vertica may be at a disadvantage in a pure cloud native bake-off, it's more robust in motor stack, combined with its multi-cloud strategy, gives Vertica a compelling set of advantages. So, we heard a lot of this from Colin Mahony, who announced Vertica 10.0 in his keynote. He really emphasized Vertica's multi-cloud affinity, it's Eon Mode, which really allows that separation, or scaling of compute, independent of storage, both in the cloud and on-prem. Vertica 10, according to Mahony, is making big bets on in-database machine learning, he talked about that, AI, and along with some advanced regression techniques. He talked about PMML models, Python integration, which was actually something that they talked about doing with Uber and some other customers. Now, Mahony also stressed the trend toward object stores. And, Vertica now supports, let's see S3, with Eon, S3 Eon in Google Cloud, in addition to AWS, and then Pure and HDFS, as well, they all support Eon Mode. Mahony also stressed, as I mentioned earlier, a big commitment to on-prem and the whole cloud optionality thing. So 10.0, according to Colin Mahony, is all about really doubling down on these industry waves. As they say, enabling native PMML models, running them in Vertica, and really doing all the work that's required around ML and AI, they also announced support for TensorFlow. So, object store optionality is important, is what he talked about in Eon Mode, with the news of support for Google Cloud and, as well as HTFS. And finally, a big focus on deployment flexibility. Migration tools, which are a critical focus really on improving ease of use, and you hear this from a lot of customers. So, these are the critical aspects of Vertica 10.0, and an announcement that we're going to be unpacking all week, with some of the experts that I talked about. So, I'm going to close with this. My long-time co-host, John Furrier, and I have talked some time about this new cocktail of innovation. No longer is Moore's law the, really, mainspring of innovation. It's now about taking all these data troves, bringing machine learning and AI into that data to extract insights, and then operationalizing those insights at scale, leveraging cloud. And, one of the things I always look for from cloud is, if you've got a cloud play, you can attract innovation in the form of startups. It's part of the success equation, certainly for AWS, and I think it's one of the challenges for a lot of the legacy on-prem players. Vertica, I think, has done a pretty good job in this regard. And, you know, we're going to look this week for evidence of that innovation. One of the interviews that I'm personally excited about this week, is a new-ish company, I would consider them a startup, called Zebrium. What they're doing, is they're applying AI to do autonomous log monitoring for IT ops. And, I'm interviewing Larry Lancaster, who's their CEO, this week, and I'm going to press him on why he chose to run on Vertica and not a cloud database. This guy is a hardcore tech guru and I want to hear his opinion. Okay, so keep it right there, stay with us. We're all over the Vertica Virtual Big Data Conference, covering in-depth interviews and following all the news. So, theCUBE is going to be interviewing these folks, two days, wall-to-wall coverage, so keep it right there. We're going to be right back with our next guest, right after this short break. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)