>>Welcome back to Falcon 2022. This is Dave LAN. We get a special presentation segment for you today. This is Walter Wall day one of day two's cube coverage, JC Herrera. Here's my designated cohost. Who's the chief human resource officer at CrowdStrike. Craig Neri is to my left. He's the beneficiary and the beneficiary trustee and ambassador of, of operation Motorsport and former us air force. Thank you for your service. Thank you. And Deel Lauder, who is CEO and co-founder of operation Motorsport. Jen, welcome to the cube. Thanks so much for coming on. Great to be JC set this up for us. Explain your role, explain the corporate giving the whole student connection and the veterans take us through that. >>Yeah, sure. Yeah. So as, as head of HR, one of the, one of the things that we do is, is help manage part of the corporate giving strategy. And, and one of those things that, that we love to do is to also invest in students and in our veterans, it's just a part of our giving program. So this partnership with operation Motorsport is really critical to that. And if you want to dive a little bit deeper into that, we just see that there's a gigantic skills gap in cyber security. And so when we, when there's over millions of open roles around the world and 700,000 of 'em in the us alone, we've gotta go close that gap. And so our next gen scholarships that come out of the, that are giving funds are, are awarded to students who are studying cyber security or AI. And the other side of that is that this partnership with operation motor sport, then we get the opportunity to do some internships with veterans through operation motor sport as well, the >>Number 700,000 now, but pre pandemic. I remember number 3 50, 300 50,000. It's it's doubled now just in the us. Amazing. All right, diesel, tell us about the mission of operation motor sport, like who are the beneficiaries let's get into it. >>So operation motor sport engages ill, injured, wounded service members, those that are medically retiring from the service or disabled veterans, these individuals be taken out of their units. They lose their team identity, their purpose. And, and what we do is those that apply to the program and have a desire to work around shiny objects and fast cars and all the great smells or just car guys or gals that we have some of those as well. They, we, we bring them onto the teams as beneficiaries. So embed them into a race team and give them opportunity to find something new. We're a recovery program. We're not about, you know, finding jobs for these folks. It's about networking and getting outta that, you know, outta the dark places where some of them end up going, because this is a, a huge change for them. And, and in doing so, we now expose them to crowd strike. You know, that's, that's one of the new relationships that, that we have where potentially if they want to, they can pursue new opportunities in areas like cyber security. >>And they're chosen through an application process. You're I'm, I'm inferring. >>Yeah. They just go online and say, you know, through word of mouth or through a friend or through the, the USO and other organizations, they go online and they click the apply here and they fill it out. And our beneficiary trustee, Craig, and calls 'em up and says, Hey, tell me about what you're looking for. And, and we, we pair them up with the race team and Craig, >>You're also a, a beneficiary in addition to being the beneficiary trustee. So explain that, what's your story? >>Right. So I started in this organization as a beneficiary. I was the one that hit the button on the website. And, and then a few minutes later, I got a phone call from then Tiffany Lader, diesel's wife, who's our executive director in the organization. And, and I had that same conversation that I now have with beneficiaries today. I did a, I did a full season with them last year in 2021 as a beneficiary. But at the end I realized how big of an impact that this has with folks. Transition can be very difficult, especially if they're ill injured or wounded. And so I asked if I could help if I could give back, cuz it meant such it had such a big impact on me. I'd like to, to help other veterans as well. Can I >>Ask you what made you hit that button? What made you apply? >>That's a great question. So I was one of the very fortunate ones that had a transition coach. I was in the military for 29 years and had a lot of great connections in the military and, and was connected to a coach, a transition coach and just exploring, you know, what that, what that would look like. And she was the one who said, Hey, why don't we, why don't we explore this passion of Motorsports that you have? My family had been going to, to Motorsports events for, you know, 50 years. And so, so I thought back, all right, this is, I like this idea. Let's, let's pursue this. So a quick Google search and operation Motorsport popped up and I hit the button and >>What programs are available in operation >>Motorsport? Yeah. So diesel kind of outline outlined it. We have basically three different programs. We have the, our immersion program, which is exactly what diesel described, where we take that veteran. And we actually immerse them in a race team. They're doing the, exactly what I was doing, doing tires and fuel and whatever the team needs them to do. We also have our emo sports program where folks who can't do the immersion program, immersion program is takes a pretty big time commitment sometimes. And so they just don't have the capacity or abilities to be able to do those. We could put 'em in our emo sports program where they can do it all virtually we're actually, we have a season going on right now where we, we have veterans racing in that emo sports program. And then we have a, a diversionary therapy program where we have a, a Patriot car corral set up at all these tracks. So they can go out with like-minded individuals and spend the day out there with those folks, other veterans. And we do pit pit tours and, and we get 'em out on the track for a little bit of a, you know, highway speeds, nothing ridiculous. But we, we did doing some highway speeds. So we have a, a few, few different ways for them to be >>Involved. So, so the number three is like a splash in the pond, whereas number ones, the, to like full immersion. Right? Correct. And so what are you doing in the full immersion? What is, what is that like? I mean, you're literally changing tires and, and, and you're >>Yeah. You name it. You're >>In the you're you're you're in that sort of sphere of battle, if you will. Right. >>The beauty of this is we could take somebody's capabilities and skill set and we can match it to whatever that looks like on a race team. Some people come in and have no experience whatsoever. And so we find a team that needs, you know, that has a development opportunities where they could come in, their, their initial job might be to fuel fuel cans or, you know, take tires off the car, wipe the car down, it's little things in the beginning. And then slowly as they start to grow and learn, then they take on bigger roles. But we also have different positions. They can be immersed in, in teams, but they can also be immersed in the series. So we have folks that are doing like tech inspections. We have folks that are doing race control up in the, up in the tower, directing race operations. So we have lots of opportunities, tons of potential. We, we foster those relationships and take the folks, whatever their capabilities and, and abilities are and find the right position for >>'em think, thinking about your personal experience, how, how did it, how would you say it affected you? >>Yeah. To understand that you really have to understand military transition. And I think that's where a lot of the folks that have never experienced this really struggle transition from the military is really difficult. And it's really difficult, even if you're, if you're not broken or you don't have some kind of illness or injury, but you add that factor into at the same time and it could be extremely difficult. And that's why we see like the 22, a day suicide rates with veterans, it's very, very high. Right? And so when you, when you come into this program, it, it is a little bit of a leap of faith, right? This is very new experience for somebody, right? For somebody like myself who had 29 years of experience in the military, very senior person in the military. And now you're at the bottom of the totem pole and trying to figure it all out again, it's, it's a, it's a big jump. But what you realize really quickly is a lot of the things that you experience in the military, you experience in that Pata, same exact things, lots of small team environment, lots of diversity, lots of challenges, lots of roadblocks ups downs, you, you deploy just like you would deploy in, in the military, you bring the cars to a track, you execute a mission, then you pack it up and bring it home. So it's, there's so many similarities in >>The process. I mean, yeah. Diesel hearing Craig explained that there are the similarities sound very clear, but, but, but how did how'd you come up with this idea? It makes sense now in retrospect, but somebody just said, Hey, you know, we have this and we have this and we can marry him or no, not >>Really. And it it's a funny story because I always said, I, I, I don't believe in reinventing the wheel, I believe in stealing the car. And so there's a sister organization that we have in the UK called mission Motorsport. And, and, and they invented this five years before we did. And, and they were successful. And I was, you know, through, through friendships and opportunities, I got to witness it in, in 2016. So went over to, to Wales in the UK and, and watched it in action. And we were there for one race weekend, race of remembrance, which is where we go back to, we'll be going back to November, taking 13 beneficiaries over to race in our own race team for a 12 hour race. And that's a whole other story, but that's where it all started. You know, we, we saw the opportunities and said, wow, they're changing lives through recovery, you know, through motor sport and the similarities and what they were achieving. >>Our initial goal was let's just come back and do this again next year, because we need to bring north American transitioning members over to, to witness this and take part. And then fast forward, we said, why stop there? And we stood up an organization. Now I'll tell you that the organization is not what it was, the, the initial vision. This is not where, I mean, I never imagine that we get to this point this day, especially with the announcement this morning, you know, with the partnership with CrowdStrike, it it's huge for us, but we've evolved into something that was very similar to the initial vision. And that was helping, helping medically transitioning service members with their own personal struggles and recovery. You know, the reason we call it operation Motorsport is because operations have no beginning and no end and our, and what we do makes us so different in that we're not a one and done, we take care of these guys. Even when they become alumni, they, they still come back. They, they come back to volunteer, they come back to check in their friends and, and all kinds. It's really, really neat. And, >>And JC of course, CrowdStrike has an affinity for Motorsports, right? You got the logo on the Mercedes. You you've got the safety car at, this is, I think it's called the safety car. Right. That's it? Yeah. So, okay. So that's an obvious connection, but, but where did the idea germinate for this partnership? >>There's so many things, but first and foremost, I think that the, the values of CrowdStrike and those of operation motors were very much aligned. If you think about it, we, we focus a lot on teamwork. There's no way we do these jobs without the teamwork part. We all love data. These guys are all in the data all the time, trying to figure out, you know, what your adversaries are doing. So there's that kind of component to it. And I'd say the last bit is critical thinking. So when we think about our organizations and how well aligned they are, that was a, that was a no brainer. And into the other side of it, we get the opportunity to do mentorship programs. I mean, I think both ways, hopefully I get invited to the Patriot corral. At some point I can go, go work on a car, but we'll do those both ways or mentorship opportunities. If folks from operation motor sport win a team up with a crowd striker. So >>Do you ever get to drive the car? Or is that just an awful question? No, that's >>A good question. Actually I do from the, from the track to the pits, very slow >>Speeds. They don't let you out in the train. That's right. No, I don't get to go out on the track. Diesel, you ever, you ever drive one >>Of these? I, I, I I've been on, on the track on, on different cars, not in the race cars that, that, that, that are on the team, but something that's unique in the Patriot corral, for instance, because JC brought that up is that when we do these Patriot corrals, part of that program at lunchtime is, is taking the individuals and doing parade laps. And now, you know, a parade lap. Well, what's the fun in that, but you drive highway speeds on a racetrack and your own personal car, following a pace car. That's a pretty cool experience. Cool. >>Yeah, that's very cool guys. Congratulations on this program and all your success and all the, the giving that you do for the community and, and your peers really appreciate you guys coming on the cube and telling me great story. Thanks >>For having, thanks for the opportunity. You're very >>Welcome. All right. Keep it right there. Everybody. Dave ante and Dave Nicholson, we'll be back from Falcon 2022 at the area in Las Vegas. You watching the cube.

>> Welcome back to FalCon 2022. This is Dave Vellante. We get a special presentation segment for you today. This is Walter Wall day one of day two's cube coverage. JC Herrera is here, he's my designated cohost. He's the chief human resource officer at CrowdStrike. Craig Neri is to my left. He's the beneficiary and the beneficiary trustee and ambassador of, of operation Motorsport and former US air force. Thank you for your service. >> Thank you. >> And Diezel Lodder, who is CEO and co-founder of operation Motorsport. Gents, welcome to the cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you, Great to be here >> JC, set this up for us. Explain your role, explain the corporate giving, the whole student connection, and the veterans, take us through that. >> Yeah, sure. Yeah, so as, as head of HR, one of the one of the things that we do is, is help manage part of the corporate giving strategy. And, and one of those things that, that we love to do is to also invest in students and in our veterans, it's just a part of our giving program. So this partnership with operation Motorsport is really critical to that. And if you want to dive a little bit deeper into that we just see that there's a gigantic skills gap in cybersecurity. And so when we, when there's over millions of open roles around the world and 700,000 of them in the us alone, we've got to go close that gap. And so our next gen scholarships that come out of the, are giving funds are, are awarded to students who are studying cyber security or AI. And the other side of that, is that this partnership with operation Motorsport then, we get the opportunity to do some internships with veterans through operation Motorsport as well. >> The number is 700,000 now, but pre pandemic I remember number 350, 350,000. It's, it's doubled now just in the US, amazing. All right, diezel, tell us about the mission of operation Motorsport like who are the beneficiaries let's get into it. >> So operation Motorsport engages ill, injured wounded service members, those that are medically retiring from the service or disabled veterans these individuals will be taken out of their units. They lose their team identity, their purpose. And, and what we do is those that apply to the program and have a desire to work around shiny objects and fast cars and all the great smells or just car guys or gals that we have some of those as well. They, we, we bring them onto the teams as beneficiaries. So embed them into a race team and give them opportunity to find something new. We're a recovery program. We're not about, you know, finding jobs for these folks. It's about networking and getting out of that, you know out of the dark places where some of them end up going because this is a, a huge change for them. And, and in doing so, we now expose them to CrowdStrike. You know, that's, that's one of the new relationships that, that we have where potentially if they want to they can pursue new opportunities in areas like cybersecurity. >> And they're chosen through an application process you're, I, I'm inferring. >> Yep. They just go online and say, you know through word of mouth or through a friend or through the, the USO and other organizations, they go online and they click the apply here and they fill it out. And, our beneficiary trustee Craig, and calls them up and says, Hey, tell me about what you're looking for. And, and we, we pair them up with the race team. >> And Craig you're also a, a beneficiary in addition to being the beneficiary trustee. So explain that, what's your story? >> Right. So I started in this organization as a beneficiary. I was the one that hit the button on the website. And, and then a few minutes later, I got a phone call from then Tiffany Lodder, Diezel's wife, who's our executive director in the organization. And, and I had that same conversation that I now have with beneficiaries today. I did a, I did a full season with them last year in 2021 as a beneficiary. But at the end I realized how big of an impact that this has with folks. Transition can be very difficult, especially if they're ill injured or wounded. And so I asked if I could help if I could give back cause it meant such, it had such a big impact on me. I'd like to, to help other veterans as well. >> Can I ask you what made you hit that button? What made you apply? >> Oh, that's a great question. So I was one of the very fortunate ones that had a transition coach. I was in the military for 29 years and had a lot of great connections in the military and, and was connected to a coach, a transition coach and just exploring, you know what that, what that would look like and she was the one who say, why don't we, why don't we explore this passion of Motorsports that you have? My family had been going to, to Motorsports events for you know, 50 years. And so, so I thought back, all right, this is I like this idea. Let's, let's pursue this. So a quick Google search and operation Motorsport popped up and I hit the button. >> And what programs are available in operation Motorsport? >> And so, Diezel kind of outline, outlined it. We have basically three different programs. We have the, our immersion program, which is exactly what Diezel described, where we take that veteran and we actually immerse them in a race team they're doing the, exactly what I was doing, doing tires and fuel and whatever the team needs them to do. We also have our E-motor sports program where folks who can't do the immersion program, immersion program is takes a pretty big time commitment sometimes. And so, they just don't have the capacity or abilities to be able to do those. We could put them in our E-motor sports program where they can do it all virtually. we're actually, we have a season going on right now where we're, we have veterans racing in that E-motor sports program. And then we have a, the diversionary therapy program where we have a, a Patriot car corral set up at all these tracks so, they can go out with like-minded individuals and spend the day out there with those folks, other veterans. And we do pit, pit tours and, and we get 'em out on the track for a little bit of a, you know, highway speeds nothing ridiculous, but we, we been doing some highway speeds. So we have a, a few, few different ways for them to be involved. >> So, so the number three is like a splash in the pond whereas number one's the, like full immersion. >> Yeah, correct, yes. >> And so what are you doing in the full immersion? What is, what is that like? I mean you're literally changing tires and, and you're, >> Yeah. You name it. >> In the, you're, you're in that sort of sphere of battle, if you will. >> The beauty of this is we could take somebody's capabilities and skill set and we can match it to whatever that looks like on a race team. Some people come in and have no experience whatsoever. And so we find a team that needs, you know, that has a development opportunities where they could come in, their, their initial job might be to fuel fuel cans or, you know, take tires off the car or wipe the car down, it's little things in the beginning. And then slowly as they start to grow and learn then they take on bigger roles. But we also have different positions. They can be immersed in, in teams, but they can also be immersed in the series. So we have folks that are doing like tech inspections. We have folks that are doing race control up in the, up in the tower, directing race operations. So, we have lots of opportunities, tons of potential. We, we foster those relationships and take the folks and whatever their capabilities and, and abilities are and find the right position for them. >> Think, thinking about your personal experience, how, how did it, how would you say it affected you? >> Yeah, um, to understand that you really have to understand military transition. And I think that's where a lot of the folks that have never experienced this really struggle. transition from the military is really difficult. And it's really difficult, even if you're, if you're not broke and, or you don't have some kind of illness or injury but, you add that factor into it at the same time and it could be extremely difficult. And that's why we see like the 22 a day suicide rates with veterans, it's very, very high, Right? And so when you, when you come into this program, it's, it is a little bit of a leap of faith, right? This is very new experience for somebody, right? For somebody like myself who had 29 years of experience in the military, very senior person in the military. And now you're at the bottom of the totem pole and trying to figure it all out again, it's, it's a it's a big jump. But, what you realize really quickly is a lot of the things that you experience in the military you experience in that paddock, same exact things, lots of, small team environment, lots of diversity, lots of challenges, lots of roadblocks ups downs, you, you'd deploy just like you would deploy in, in the military you bring the cars to a track, you execute a mission then you pack it up and bring it home. So it's, there's so many similarities in the process. >> I mean, yeah. Diezel hear, hearing Craig explained that there are, the similarities sound very clear, but, but, but how did how'd you come up with this idea? (Diezel laughs) It makes sense now in retrospect, but, somebody just said Hey, you know, we have this and we have this and we can marry them or... >> No, not really. And it, it's a funny story because I always said, I, I, I don't believe in reinventing the wheel I believe in stealing the car. And so there's a sister organization that we have in the UK called mission Motorsport. And, and, and they invented this five years before we did. And, and they were successful. And I was, you know, through, through friendships and opportunities, I got to witness it in, in 2016. So went over to, to Wales in, in the UK and, and watched it in action. And we were there for one race weekend, race of remembrance which is where we go back to we'll be going back to November, taking 13 beneficiaries over to race in our own race team for a 12 hour race. And that's a whole other story but that's where it all started. You know, we, we saw the opportunities and said, wow they're changing lives through recovery, you know through Motorsport and the similarities and what they were achieving, our initial goal was let's just come back and do this again next year, because we need to bring north American transitioning members over to, to witness this and take part. And then fast forward, we said, why stop there? And we, stood up an organization. Now, I'll tell you that the organization is not what it was the initial vision, this not where, I mean I never imagine that we get to this point this day especially with the announcement this morning, you know with the partnership with CrowdStrike, it it's huge for us but, we've evolved into something that was very similar to the initial vision. And that was, helping, helping medically transitioning service members with their own personal struggles and recovery. You know, the reason we call it operation Motorsport is because operations have no beginning and no end and our, and what we do makes us so different in that we're not a one and done, we take care of these guys. Even when they become alumni, they, they still come back. They, they come back to volunteer they come back to check in their friends and, and all kinds, it's really, really neat. >> And, and JC of course CrowdStrike has an affinity for Motorsports, right? You got the logo on the Mercedes. You, you've got the safety car at this. I think it's called the safety car, right? >> That's it, yeah. >> So, okay. So that's an obvious connection, but, but where did the idea germinate for this partnership? >> There's so many things, but first and foremost, I think that the, the values of CrowdStrike and those of operation motors were very much aligned. If you think about it, we, we focus a lot on teamwork. There's no way we do these jobs without the teamwork part. We all love data. These guys are all in the data all the time trying to figure out, you know, what your adversaries are doing. So there's that kind of component to it. And I'd say the last bit is critical thinking. So when we think about our organizations and how well aligned they are, that was a, that was a no brainer. And into the other side of it, we get the opportunity to do mentorship programs. I mean, I think both ways, hopefully I get invited to the Patriot corral at some point I can go, go work on a car but, we'll do those both ways or mentorship opportunities. If folks from operation Motorsport win a team up with a CrowdStrikers. >> Do you ever get to drive the car? Or is that just an awful question? >> No, it's a good question. Actually I do from the from the track to the pits at, you know, very slow speeds. >> They don't let you out on the track? >> That's right, no, I don't get to go out the track. >> Diezel You ever, you ever drive one of these? >> I, I, I, I've been on, on the track on, on different cars not in the race cars that, that, that that are on the team, but something that's unique in the Patriot corral, for instance, because JC brought that up, is that when we do these Patriot corrals part of that program at lunchtime is, is taking the individuals and doing parade laps. And I'll, you know, a parade lap, well, what's the fun in that? but you drive highway speeds on a racetrack and your own personal car following a pace car, that's a pretty cool experience. >> Yeah, that's very cool. Guys, congratulations on this program and all your success and all the, the giving that you do for the community and, and your peers, really appreciate you guys coming on The Cube and telling your story. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for the opportunity. >> You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody. Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson, we'll be back from FalCon 2022, at the ARIA in Las Vegas. You're watching the cube. (relaxing music)

(upbeat intro music) >> More than a decade ago, the team at Wikibon coined the term Server SAN. We saw the opportunity to dramatically change the storage infrastructure layer and predicted a major change in technologies that would hit the market. Server SAN had three fundamental attributes. First of all, it was software led. So all the traditionally expensive controller functions like snapshots and clones and de-dupe and replication, compression, encryption, et cetera, they were done in software directly challenging a two to three decade long storage controller paradigm. The second principle was it leveraged and shared storage inside of servers. And the third it enabled any-to-any typology between servers and storage. Now, at the time we defined this coming trend in a relatively narrow sense inside of a data center location, for example, but in the past decade, two additional major trends have emerged. First the software defined data center became the dominant model, thanks to VMware and others. And while this eliminated a lot of overhead, it also exposed another problem. Specifically data centers today allocate probably we estimate around 35% of CPU cores and cycles to managing things like storage and network and security, offloading those functions. This is wasted cores and doing this with traditional general purpose x86 processors is expensive and it's not efficient. This is why we've been reporting so aggressively on ARM's ascendancy into the enterprise. It's not only coming it's here and we're going to talk about that today. The second mega trend is cloud computing. Hyperscale infrastructure has allowed technology companies to put a management and control plane into the cloud and expand beyond our narrow server SAN scope within a single data center and support the management of distributed data at massive scale. And today we're on the cusp of a new era of infrastructure. And one of the startups in this space is Nebulon. Hello everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this Cube Conversation where we welcome in two great guests, Craig Nunes, Cube alum, co-founder and COO at Nebulon and Tobias Flitsch who's director of product management at Nebulon. Guys, welcome. Great to see you. >> So good to be here Dave. Feels awesome. >> Soon, face to face. Craig, I'm heading your way. >> I can't wait. >> Craig, you heard my narrative upfront and I'm wondering are those the trends that you guys saw when you, when you started the company, what are the major shifts in the world today that, that caused you and your co-founders to launch Nebulon? >> Yeah, I'll give you sort of the way we think about the world, which I think aligns super right with, with what you're talking about, you know, over the last several years, organizations have had a great deal of experience with public cloud data centers. And I think like any platform or technology that is, you know, gets its use in a variety of ways, you know, a bit of savvy is being developed by organizations on, you know, what do I put where, how do I manage things in the most efficient way possible? And there are, in terms of the types of folks we're focused on in Nebulon's business, we see now kind of three groups of people emerging, and, and we sort of simply coined three terms, the returners, the removers, and the remainers. I'll explain what I mean by each of those, the returners are folks who maybe early on, you know, hit the gas on cloud, moved, you know, everything in, a lot in, and realize that while it's awesome for some things, for other things, it was less optimal. Maybe cost became a factor or visibility into what was going on with their data was a factor, security, service levels, whatever. And they've decided to move some of those workloads back. Returners. There are what I call the removers that are taking workloads from, you know, born in the cloud. On-prem, you know, and this was talked a lot about in Martine's blog that, you know, talked about a lot of the growth companies that built up such a large footprint in the public cloud, that economics were kind of working against them. You can, depending on the knobs you turn, you know, you're probably spending two and a half X, two X, what you might spend if you own your own factory. And you can argue about, you know, where your leverage is in negotiating your pricing with the cloud vendors, but there's a big gap. The last one is, and I think probably the most significant in terms of who we've engaged with is the remainers. And the remainers are, you know, hybrid IT organizations. They've got assets in the cloud and on-prem, they aspire to an operational model that is consistent across everything and, you know, leveraging all the best stuff that they observed in their cloud-based assets. And it's kind of our view that frankly we take from, from this constituency that, when people talk about cloud or cloud first, they're moving to something that is really more an operating model versus a destination or data center choice. And so, we get people on the phone every day, talking about cloud first. And when you kind of dig into what they're after, it's operating model characteristics, not which data center do I put it in, and those, those decisions are separating. And so that, you know, it's really that focus for us is where, we believe we're doing something unique for that group of customers. >> Yeah. Cloud first doesn't doesn't mean cloud only. And of course followers of this program know, we talk a lot about this, this definition of cloud is changing, it's evolving, It's moving to the edge, it's moving to data centers, data centers are moving to the cloud. Cross-cloud, it's that big layer that's expanding. And so I think the definition of cloud, even particularly in customer's minds is evolving. There's no question about it. People, they'll look at what VMware is doing in AWS and say, okay, that's cloud, but they'll also look at things like VMware cloud foundation and say oh yeah, that's cloud too. So to me, the beauty of cloud is in the eye of the customer beholder. So I buy that. Tobias. I wonder if you could talk about how this all translates into product, because you guys start up, you got to sell stuff, you use this term smart infrastructure, what is that? How does this all turn into stuff you can sell? >> Right. Yeah. So let me back up a little bit and talk a little bit about, you know, what we at Nebulon do. So we are a cloud based software company, and we're delivering sort of a new category of smart infrastructure. And if you think about things that you would know from your everyday surroundings, smart infrastructure is really all around us. Think smart home technology like Google Nest as an example. And what this all has in common is that there's a cloud control plane that is managing some IOT end points and smart devices in various locations. And by doing that, customers gain benefits like easy remote management, right? You can manage your thermostat, your temperature from anywhere in the world basically. You don't have to worry about automated software updates anymore, and you can easily automate your home, your infrastructure, through this cloud control plane and translating this idea to the data center, right? This idea is not necessarily new, right? If you look into the networking space with Meraki networks, now Cisco or Mist Systems now Juniper, they've really pioneered efforts in cloud management. So smart network infrastructure, and the key problem that they solved there is, you know, managing these vast amount of access points and switches that are scattered across the data centers across campuses, and, you know, the data center. Now, if you translate that to what Nebulon does, it's really applying this smart infrastructure idea, this methodology to application infrastructure, specifically to compute and storage infrastructure. And that's essentially what we're doing. So with smart infrastructure, basically our offering it at Nebulon, the product, that comes with the benefits of this cloud experience, public cloud operating model, as we've talked about, some of our customers look at the cloud as an operating model rather than a destination, a physical location. And with that, we bring to us this model, this, this experience as operating a model to on-premises application infrastructure, and really what you get with this broad offering from Nebulon and the benefits are really circling it out, you know, four areas, first of all, rapid time to value, right? So application owners think people that are not specialists or experts when it comes to IT infrastructure, but more generalists, they can provision on-premise application infrastructure in less than 10 minutes, right? It can go from, from just bare metal physical racks to the full application stack in less than 10 minutes, so they're up and running a lot quicker. And they can immediately deliver services to their end customers, cloud-like operations, this, this notion of zero touch remote management, which now with the last couple of months with this strange time that we're with COVID is, you know, turnout is becoming more and more relevant really as in remotely administrating and management of infrastructure that scales from just hundreds of nodes to thousands of nodes. It doesn't really matter with behind the scenes software updates, with global AI analytics and insights, and basically overall combined reduce the operational overhead when it comes to on-premises infrastructure by up to 75%, right? The other thing is support for any application, whether it's containerized, virtualized, or even bare metal applications. And the idea here is really consistent leveraging server-based storage that doesn't require any Nebulon-specific software on the server. So you get the full power of your application servers for your applications. Again, as the servers intended. And then the fourth benefit when it comes to smart infrastructure is, is of course doing this all at a lower cost and with better data center density. And that is really comparing it to three-tier architectures where you have your server, your SAN fabric, and then you have an external storage, but also when you compare it with hyper-converged infrastructure software, right, that is consuming resources of the application servers, think CPU, think memory and networking. So basically you get a lot more density with that approach compared to those architectures. >> Okay, I want to dig into some of that differentiation too, but what exactly do I buy from you? Do I buy a software subscription? Is that right? Can you explain that a little bit? >> Right. So basically the way we do this is it's really leveraging two key new innovations, right? So, and you see why I made the bridge to smart home technology, because the approach is civil, right? The one is, you know, the introduction of a cloud control plane that basically manage this on-premise application infrastructure, of course, that is delivered to customers as a service. The second one is, you know, a new infrastructure model that uses IOT endpoint technology, and that is embedded into standard application servers and the storage within this application servers. Let me add a couple of words to that to explain a little bit more, so really at the heart of smart infrastructure, in order to deliver this public cloud experience for any on-prem application is this cloud-based control plane, right? So we've built this, how we recommend our customers to use a public cloud, and that is built, you know, building your software on modern technologies that are vendor-agnostic. So it could essentially run anywhere, whether it is, you know, any public cloud vendor, or if we want to run in our own data centers, when regulatory requirements change, it's massively scalable and responsive, no matter how large the managed infrastructure is. But really the interesting part here, Dave, is that the customer doesn't really have to worry about any of that, it's delivered as a service. So what a customer gets from this cloud control plane is a single API end point, how they get it with a public cloud. They get a web user interface, from which they can manage all of their infrastructure, no matter how many devices, no matter where it is, can be in the data center, can be in an edge location anywhere in the world, they get template-based provisioning much like a marketplace in a public cloud. They get analytics, predictive support services, and super easy automation capabilities. Now the second thing that I mentioned is this server embedded software, the server embedded infrastructure software, and that is running on a PCIE based offload engine. And that is really acting as this managed IOT endpoint within the application server that I managed that I mentioned earlier. And that approach really further converges modern application infrastructure. And it really replaces the software defined storage approach that you'll find in hyper-converged infrastructure software. And that is really by embedding the data services, the storage data service into silicon within the server. Now this offload engine, we call that a services processing unit or SPU in short. And that is really what differentiates us from hyper-converged infrastructure. And it's quite different than a regular accelerator card that you get with some of the hyper-converged infrastructure offerings. And it's different in the sense that the SPU runs basically all of the shared and local data services, and it's not just accelerating individual algorithms, individual functions. And it basically provides all of these services aside the CPU with the boot drive, with data drives. And in essence provides you with this a separate fall domain from the service, so for example, if you reboot your server, the data plan remains intact. You know, it's not impacted for that. >> Okay. So I want to stay on that for just a second, Craig, if I could, I get very clear how you're different from, as Tobias said, the three-tier server SAN fabric, external array, the HCI thing's interesting because in some respects, the HCI has, you know, guys take Nutanix, they talk about cloud and becoming more friendly with developers and API piece, but what's your point of view Craig on how you position relative to say HCI? >> Yeah, absolutely. So everyone gets what three-tier architecture is and was, and HCI software, you know, emerged as an alternative to the three-tier architectures. Everyone I think today understands that data services are, you know, SDS is software hosted in the operating system of each HCI device and consume some amount of CPU, memory, network, whatever. And it's typically constrained to a hypervisor environment, kind of where we're most of that stuff is done. And over time, these platforms have added some monitoring capabilities, predictive analytics, typically provided by the vendor's cloud, right? And as Tobias mentioned, some HCIS vendors have augmented this approach by adding an accelerator to make things like compression and dedupe go faster, right? Think SimpliVity or something like that. The difference that we're talking about here is, the infrastructure software that we deliver as a service is embedded right into server silicon. So it's not sitting in the operating system of choice. And what that means is you get the full power of the server you bought for your workloads. It's not constrained to a hypervisor-only environment, it's OS agnostic. And, you know, it's entirely controlled and administered by the cloud versus with, you know, most HCIS is an on-prem console that manages a cluster or two on-prem. And, you know, think of it from a automation perspective. When you automate something, you've got to set up your playbook kind of cluster by cluster. And depending what versions they're on, APIs are changing, behaviors are changing. So a very different approach at scale. And so again, for us, we're talking about something that gives you a much more efficient infrastructure that is then managed by the cloud and gives you this full kind of operational model you would expect for any kind of cloud-based deployment. >> You know, I got to go back, you guys obviously have some three-part DNA hanging around and you know, of course you remember well, the three-part ASIC, it was kind of famous at the time and it was unique. And I bring that up only because you've mentioned a couple of times the silicon and a lot of people yeah, whatever, but we have been on this, especially, particularly with ARM. And I want to share with the audience, if you follow my breaking analysis, you know this. If you look at the historical curve of Moore's law with x86, it's the doubling of performance every two years, roughly, that comes out to about 40% a year. That's moderated down to about 30% a year now, if you look at the ARM ecosystem and take for instance, apple A15, and the previous series, for example, over the last five years, the performance, when you combine the CPU, GPU, NPU, the accelerators, the DSPs, which by the way, are all customizable. That's growing at 110% a year, and the SOC costs 50 bucks. So my point is that you guys are riding perfect example of doing offloads with a way more efficient architecture. You're now on that curve, that's growing at 100% plus per year. Whereas a lot of the legacy storage is still on that 30% a year curve, and so cheaper, lower power. That's why I love to buy, as you were bringing in the IOT and the smart infrastructure, this is the future of storage and infrastructure. >> Absolutely. And the thing I would emphasize is it's not limited to storage, storage is a big issue, but we're talking about your application infrastructure and you brought up something interesting on the GPU, the SmartNIC of things, and just to kind of level set with everybody there, there's the HCI world, and then there's this SmartNIC DPU world, whatever you want to call it, where it's effectively a network card, it's got that specialized processing onboard and firmware to provide some network security storage services, and think of it as a PCIE card in your server. It connects to an external storage system, so think Nvidia Bluefield 2 connecting to an external NVME storage device. And the interesting thing about that is, you know, storage processing is offloaded from the server. So as we said earlier, good, right, you get the server back to your application, but storage moves out of the server. And it starts to look a little bit like an external storage approach versus a server based approach. And infrastructure management is done by, you know, the server SmartNIC with some monitoring and analytics coming from, you know, your supplier's cloud support service. So complexity creeps back in, if you start to lose that, you know, heavily converged approach. Again, we are taking advantage of storage within the server and, you know, keeping this a real server based approach, but distinguishing ourselves from the HCI approach. Cause there's a real ROI there. And when we talked to folks who are looking at new and different ways, we talk a lot about the cloud and I think we've done a bit of that already, but then at the end of the day, folks are trying to figure out well, okay, but then what do I buy to enable this? And what you buy is your standard server recipe. So think your favorite HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro, whatever, whatever your brand, and it's going to come enabled with this IOT end point within it, so it's really a smart server, if you will, that can then be controlled by our cloud. And so you're effectively buying, you know, from your favorite server vendor, a server option that is this endpoint and a subscription. You don't buy any of this from us, by the way, it's all coming from them. And that's the way we deliver this. >> You know, sorry to get into the plumbing, but this is something we've been on and a facet of it. Is that silicon custom designed or is it pretty much off the shelf, do you guys add any value to it? >> No, there are off the shelf options that can deliver tremendous horsepower on that form factor. And so we take advantage of that to, you know, do what we do in terms of, you know, creating these sort of smart servers with our end point. And so that's where we're at. >> Yeah. Awesome. So guys, what's your sweet spot, you know, why are customers, you know, what are you seeing customers adopting? Maybe some examples you guys can share? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think Tobias mentioned that because of the architectural approach, there's a lot of flexibility there, you can run virtualized, containerized, bare metal applications. The question is where are folks choosing to get started? And those use cases with our existing customers revolved heavily around virtualization modernization. So they're going back in to their virtualized environment, whether their existing infrastructure is array-based or HCI-based. And they're looking to streamline that, save money, automate more, the usual things. The second area is the distributed edge. You know, the edge is going through tremendous transformation with IOT devices, 5g, and trying to get processing closer to where customers are doing work. And so that distributed edge is a real opportunity because again, it's a more cost-effective, more dense infrastructure. The cloud effectively can manage across all of these sites through a single API. And then the third area is cloud service provider transformation. We do a fair bit of business with, you know, cloud service providers, CTOs, who are looking at trying to build top line growth, trying to create new services and, and drive better bottom line. And so this is really, you know, as much as a revenue opportunity for them as cost saving opportunity. And then the last one is this notion of, you know, bringing the cloud on-prem, we've done a cloud repatriation deal. And I know you've seen a little of that, but maybe not a lot of it. And, you know, I can tell you in our first deals, we've already seen it, so it's out there. Those are the places where people are getting started with us today. >> It's just interesting, you're right. I don't see a ton of it, but if I'm going to repatriate, I don't want to go backwards. I don't want to repatriate to legacy. So it actually does kind of make sense that I repatriate to essentially a component of on-prem cloud that's managed in the cloud, that makes sense to me to buy. But today you're managing from the cloud, you're managing on-prem infrastructure. Maybe you could show us a little leg, share a little roadmap, I mean, where are you guys headed from a product standpoint? >> Right, so I'm not going to go too far on the limb there, but obviously, right. So one of the key benefits of a cloud managed platform is this notion of a single API, right. We talked about the distributed edge where, you know, think of retailer that has, you know, thousands of stores, each store having local infrastructure. And, you know, if you think about the challenges that come with, you know, just administrating those systems, rolling out firmware updates, rolling out updates in general, monitoring those systems, et cetera. So having a single console, a cloud console to administrate all of that infrastructure, obviously, you know, the benefits are easy now. If you think about, if you're thinking about that and spin it further, right? So from the use cases and the types of users that we've see, and Craig talked about them at the very beginning, you can think about this as this is a hybrid world, right. Customers will have data that they'll have in the public cloud. They will have data and applications in their data centers and at the edge, obviously it is our objective to deliver the same experience that they gained from the public cloud on-prem, and eventually, you know, those two things can come closer together. Apart from that, we're constantly improving the data services. And as you mentioned, ARM is, is on a path that is becoming stronger and faster. So obviously we're going to leverage on that and build out our data storage services and become faster. But really the key thing that I'd like to, to mention all the time, and this is related to roadmap, but rather feature delivery, right? So the majority of what we do is in the cloud, our business logic in the cloud, the capabilities, the things that make infrastructure work are delivered in the cloud. And, you know, it's provided as a service. So compared with your Gmail, you know, your cloud services, one day, you don't have a feature, the next day you have a feature, so we're continuously rolling out new capabilities through our cloud. >> And that's about feature acceleration as opposed to technical debt, which is what you get with legacy features, feature creep. >> Absolutely. The other thing I would say too, is a big focus for us now is to help our customers more easily consume this new concept. And we've already got, you know, SDKs for things like Python and PowerShell and some of those things, but we've got, I think, nearly ready, an Ansible SDK. We're trying to help folks better kind of use case by use case, spin this stuff up within their organization, their infrastructure. Because again, part of our objective, we know that IT professionals have, you know, a lot of inertia when they're, you know, moving stuff around in their own data center. And we're aiming to make this, you know, a much simpler, more agile experience to deploy and grow over time. >> We've got to go, but Craig, quick company stats. Am I correct, you've raised just under 20 million. Where are you on funding? What's your head count today? >> I am going to plead the fifth on all of that. >> Oh, okay. Keep it stealth. Staying a little stealthy, I love it. Really excited for you. I love what you're doing. It's really starting to come into focus. And so congratulations. You know, you got a ways to go, but Tobias and Craig, appreciate you coming on The Cube today. And thank you for watching this Cube Conversation. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat outro music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with that leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello and welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here for a special series, Leading with Observability, and this segment is: End-to-end observability drives great digital experiences. We've got a great guest here, Craig Hyde, senior director of product management for Splunk. Craig, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> And thanks for having me. This is great. >> So this series, Leading with Observability is a super hot topic obviously with cloud native. In the pandemic, COVID-19 has really kind of shown cloud native trend has been a tailwind for people who invested in it, who have been architecting for cloud on premises where data is a key part of that value proposition and then there's people who haven't been doing it. So, and out of this trend, the word observability has become a hot segment. And for us insiders in the industry, we know observability is just kind of network management on steroids in the cloud, so it's about data and all this. But at the end of the day, there's value that's enabled from observability. So I want to talk to you about that value that's enabled in the experience of the end user whether it's in a modern application or user inside the enterprise. Tell us what you think about this end user perspective. >> Sure, yeah thanks a lot for that intro. And I would actually argue that observability wouldn't even just be machine data or network data, it's more of a broader context where you can see everything that's going on inside the application and the digital user experience. From a user experience or a digital experience management perspective, I believe the metrics that you pull from such a thing are the most useful and ubiquitous metrics that you have and visibility in all of technology. And when done right, it can tell you what the actual end result of all this technology that you're piecing together, the end result of what's getting delivered to the user, both quantitatively and qualitatively. So, my background, I actually started a company in this domain. It was called Rigor and we focused purely on looking at user experience and digital experience. And the idea was that, you know, this was 10 years ago, we were just thinking, look, 10 years from now, more and more people are going to do business digitally, they're going to work more digitally and at the same time we saw the legacy data centers being shut down and things were moving to the cloud. So we said, look, the future is in the users, and where it all comes together is on the user's desktop or on their phone, and so we set out to focus specifically on that space. Fast forward 10 years, we're now a part of Splunk and we're really excited to bolt this onto an overall observability strategy. You know, I believe that it's becoming more and more popular, like you said, with the pandemic and COVID-19, it was already on a tear from a digital perspective, the adoption was going through the roof and people were doing more and more remote, they were buying more and more offline, but the pandemic has just pushed it through the roof. And I mean, wow, like the digital business genie's out of the bottle and there's no putting it back now. But, you know, there's also other things that are driving the need for this and the importance of it and part of it comes with the way technology is growing. It's becoming much more complex in terms of moving parts. Where an app used to be run off three different tiers in a data center, now it could be across hundreds of machines and opaque networks, opaque data centers all over the world, and the only time you often see things, how they come together, is on the user's desktop. And so that's where we really think you got to start from the user experience and work back. And, you know, all the drive in computing is all about making things better, faster and cheaper, but without this context of the user, often the customer and the experience gets left out from reaping the rewards from all these gains. So that's sort of like encapsulates my overall view of the space and why we got into it and why I'm so excited about it. >> Well Craig, I got to ask on a personal level. I mean, you look at what happened with the pandemic, I mean, you're a pioneer, you had a vision. Folks that are on the entrepreneurial side say, hey digital businesses is coming and they get it and it's slowly gets known in the real world, becomes more certain, but with the pandemic, it just happened all of a sudden so fast for everybody because everyone's impacted. Teachers, students, families, work, everyone's at home. So the entire user experience was impacted in the entire world. What was going through your mind when you saw all this happening and you see the winners obviously were people had invested in cloud native and data-driven technologies, what was your take on all this when you saw this coming? >> Well, the overall trend has been going on for decades, right? And so the direction of it isn't that surprising, but the magnitude and the acceleration, there's some stats out there from Forbes where the e-commerce adoption doubled within the first six months of the pandemic. So we're talking, you know, 10, 12 years of things ticking up and then within six months, a doubling of the adoption of e-commerce. And so like anybody else, you first freeze and say, what does this mean? But when people start working remote and people start ordering things from Amazon and all the other websites, it's quick to see like, aha! It no longer matters what chairs somebody is sitting in when they're doing work or that they're close to a store and you have a physical storefront when you're trying to buy something, it's all about that digital experience and it needs to be ubiquitous. So it's been interesting to see the change over the past few months for sure. But again, it doesn't change the trend, it just magnified it and I don't see it going back anytime soon. >> Yeah I mean, digital transformation has always been a buzz word that everyone kind of uses as a way to kind of talk about the big picture. >> Right. >> It's actually transforming and there's also share shifts that happen in every transformation, in any market shift. Obviously that's happening with cloud. Cloud native edge is becoming super important. In all of these, and by the way, in all the applications that sit on that infrastructure which is now infrastructure as code, has a data requirement that observability piece becomes super critical, not just from identifying and resolving, but also for training machine learning and AI, right? So, again, you have this new flywheel observability that's really at the heart of digital transformation. What should companies think about when they associate observability to digital transformation as they're sitting around whether they're CXOs or CSOs or solution architects going, okay, how does observability plug into my plans? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my recommendation and the approach that I would take is that you want to start with the end in mind and it's all about how you set your goals when you're setting out in getting into digital transformation. And, you know, the late Steve Jobs, to borrow one of his quotes, he said that you have to start with the customer experience in mind and work backwards to the technology. And so I think that applies when you get into an observability strategy. So without understanding what the actual user experience is, you don't have a good enough yardstick to go out there and start working towards. So availability on a server or CPU time or transaction time in a database, like, those are all great, but without the context of what is the goal you're actually going after, it's kind of useless. So, like I said, it's not uptime, it's not server time, it's not any of that stuff, and it's user experience and these things are different. So they're like visual metrics, right? So what a user sees, because all kinds of things are going on in the background, but if it can see that the person can see and their experience is that they're getting some kind of response from the machine, then that's how you measure where the end point is and what the overall goal is. And so like to keep kind of going on with that, it's like you start with the end in mind, you use that end to set your goals, you use that domain and that visibility to troubleshoot faster. So when the calls start rolling in then they say, hey, I'm stuck at home and I'm on a slow internet connection, I can't get on the app and core IT is taking a phone call, You can quickly look and instrument that user and see exactly what they're seeing. So when you're troubleshooting, you're looking at the data from their perspective and then working backwards to the technology. >> That's super exciting. I want to get your thoughts on that. So just to double down on that because I think this highlights the trend that we were just talking about. But I'll break it down into three areas that I see happening in the marketplace. Number one, availability and performance. That's on everyone's mind. You just hit that, right? Number two, integrations. There's more integrations going on within platforms or tools or systems, whether it's an API over here, people are working together digitally, right? And you're seeing e-commerce. And third is the user patterns and the expectations are changing. So when you unpack those kinds of like trends, there's features of observability underneath each. Could you talk about that because I think that seems to be the common pattern that I'm seeing? Okay, high availability, okay, check. Everyone has to have that. Almost table stakes. But it's hard when you're scaling, right? And then integrations, all kinds of API is being slinged around. You've got microservices, you've got Kubernetes, people are integrating data flows, control planes, whatever, and then finally users. They want new things. New patterns emerge, which is new data. >> Yeah, absolutely. And to just kind of talk about that, it reminds me of like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs of visibility, right? Like, okay, the machine is on, check. Like you said, it's table stakes, make sure it's up and running. That's great. Then you want to see sort of the applications that are running on the machine, how they're talking to each other, are other components that you're making API calls to, are they timing out or are they breaking things? And so you get that visibility of like, okay, they're on, what's going on top of those machines are inside of them or in the containers or the virtual machines or whatever segment of computing that you're looking at, And then that cherry on top, the highest point is like, how is that stack of technology serving your customer? How's it serving the user and what's the experience? So those are sort of the three levels that we kind of look at when we're thinking of user experience. And so, it's a different way to look at it, but it's sort of the way that kind of we see the world is that three tier, that three layer cake. >> It's interesting. >> And you need all the layers. >> It's super relevant. And again, it's better together, but you can mix and match and have product in there. So I want to get into the Splunk solution. You guys have the digital experience monitoring solution. Can you explain what that is and how that fits into all this and what's in it for the customers, what's the benefit? >> Right, sure. So with the digital experience monitoring and the platform that we have, we're giving people the ability to basically do what I was talking about, where it enables you to take a look at what the user's experience are and pull metrics and then correlate them from the user all the way through the technical journey to the back end, through the different tiers of the application and so on. So that technology is called real user monitoring where we instrument the users. And then we also layer in synthetic monitoring which is the sort of robot users that are always on for when you're in lower level environments and you want to see, you know, what experience is going to look like when you push out new software, or when nobody's on the application, did something break? So a couple of those two together and then we feed that into our overall observability platform that's fed with machine data, we have all the metrics from all the components that you're looking at in that single pane of glass. And the idea is that we're also bringing you not only just the metrics and the events from logs and all the happenings, but we're also trying to help tease out some of these problems for you. So many problems that happen in technology have happened before, and we've got a catalog with our optimization platform of 300 plus things that go wrong when webpages or web applications or API calls start acting funky. And so we can provide, based on our intelligence that's built into the platform, basically run books for people to fix things faster and build those playbooks into the release process so you don't break the applications to begin with and you can set flags to where people understand what performance is before when it's being delivered to the customer, and if there are problems, let's fix them before we break the experience and lose the trust of the user. So again, it's the metrics from the stats that are coming across the wire of everything all the way to the users, it's the events from the logs that are coming in so you can see context, and then it's that user experience, it's a trace level data from where you can double click into each of the tiers and say, like, what's going on in here? What's going on in the browser? What's going on in the application? What's going on in the backend? And so you can sort of pool all that together in a single pane of glass and find problems faster, fix them faster and prevent users from having problems to begin with. And to do this properly, you really need it all under one roof and so that's why we're so excited to bring this all together. >> Yeah, I've been sitting on theCUBE for 10 years now. We've been 11 years, on our 11th year doing theCUBE. Digital you can measure everything. So why not? There should be no debate if done properly. So that brings up this whole concept that you guys are talking about full fidelity. Can you just take a minute to explain what that is? What is full fidelity mean? >> Sure, you know, full fidelity really comes down to a lot about these traces. So when we talk about metrics, logs and traces, it's all about getting all the activity that goes on in an application and looking at it. So when you or I interact with our company's app online and there's problems, that the person who's going to fix this problem, they can actually see specifically me. They can look at my experience and look at what it would look like in my browser, you know, what were all the services that I was interacting with and what was going on in the application, what code was being called, what services were being called, and look at specifically me as opposed to an aggregate of all the domains all put together. And it really is important from a troubleshooting standpoint. It's really important from an understanding of the actuals because without full fidelity and capturing all of the data, you're kind of going, you know, you're taking guesses and it eliminates a lot of the guesswork. And so that's something that's special with our platform is that ability to have the full fidelity. >> When does a client, a customer not have full fidelity? I might think I have it, someone sold me a product, What's the tell sign that I don't have full fidelity? >> Oh yeah, well with observability, there's a lot of tricks in the game. And so you see a lot of summary data that looks like, hey, this is that one call, but usually it's knitted together from a bunch of different calls. So that summary data just from, because this stuff takes up a lot of storage and there's a lot of problems with scale, and so when you might see something that looks like it's this call, it's actually like, in general, when a call like this happens, this is what it looks like. And so you've got to say like, is this the exact call? And, you know, it makes a big difference from a troubleshooting perspective and it's really hard to implement and that's something that Splunk's very good at, right? It's data at scale. It's the 800 pound gorilla in collecting and slicing apart machine data. So like, you have to have something of that scale in order to ingest all this information. It's a hard problem for sure. >> Yeah, totally. And I appreciate that. While I got you here, you're an expert, I got to ask you about Open Telemetry. We've heard that term kicked around. What does that mean? Is it an open source thing, is it an open framework? What is Open Telemetry and what does it mean for your customers or the marketplace? >> Yeah, I think of Open Telemetry as finally creating a standard for how we're collecting data from applications across AP- In the past, it's been onesie-twosie, here and there each company coming up with it themselves and there are never any standards of how to look at transactions across data, across applications and across tiers. And so Open Telemetry is the attempt and it's a consortium, so there's many people involved in pushing this together, but think of like a W3C, which creates the standards for how websites operate, and without it, the web wouldn't be what it is today. And now Open Telemetry is coming behind and doing that same thing from an observability standpoint. So you're not just totally locked into one vendor in the way that they do it and you're held hostage to only looking at that visibility. We're trying to set the standards to lower the barrier of entry into getting to application performance monitoring, network performance monitoring and just getting that telemetry where there are standards across the board. And so it's an open source project. We commit to it, and it's a really important project for observability in general. >> So does that speak to like, the whole more data you have, the less blind spots you might have? Is that the same concept? Is that some of the thinking behind this? >> It enables you to get more data faster. Now, if you think about, if there are no standards and there are no rules on the road and everybody can get on the road and they can decide if they want to drive in the left lane or the right lane today, it makes getting places a lot harder. And the same is true with Open Telemetry. without the standards of what, you know, the naming conventions, where you instrument, how you instrument, it becomes very hard to put some things in a single pane of glass because they just look differently everywhere. And so that's the idea behind it. >> Well Craig, great to have you on. You're super smart on this, and Leading with Observability, it's a hot topic. It's super cool and relevant right now with digital transformation as companies are looking to rearchitect and change how they're going to flip the script on software development, modern applications, modern infrastructure, edge, all of this is on top of mind of everyone's thing on their plans. And we certainly want to have you back in some of our conversations that we have around this on our editorial side as well with when we have these clubhouses we are going to start doing a lot of those. We definitely want to bring you in. I'll give you a final word here. Tell us what you're most excited about. Put the commercial for Splunk. Why Splunk? Why you guys are excited. Take a minute to get the plug in. >> It's so easy. Splunk has the base to make this possible. Splunk is, like I said, it's an 800 pound gorilla in machine data and taking in data at scale. And when you start going off into the observability abyss, the really, really hard part about it is having the scale to not only go broad in the levels of technology that you can collect, but also go deep. And that depth, when we talked about that full fidelity, it's really important when you get down to brass tacks and you start implementing changes and troubleshooting things and turning that data that you have in to doing, so understanding what you can do with it. And Splunk is fully committed to going, not only broad to get everything under one roof, but also deep so that you can make all of the information that you collect actionable and useful. And it's something that I haven't seen anybody even attempt and I'm really excited to be a part of building towards that vision. >> Well, I've been covering Splunk for, man, many, many years. 10 years plus, I think, since it's been founded, and really the growth and the vision and the mission still is the same. Leveraging data, making use of it, unlocking the power of data as it evolves and there's more of it. And it gets more complicated when data is involved in the user experience end-to-end from cybersecurity to user flows and new expectations. So congratulations. Great product. Thanks for coming on and sharing. >> Thanks again for having us. >> Okay, this is John Furrier in theCUBE. Leading with Observability is the theme of this series and this topic was End-to-end observability to enable great digital experiences. Thanks for watching. (lighthearted music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by A. W s Global Partner Network. Welcome back to the cubes Coverage Cube. Virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. We're not in person this year. We have to do the all the Cube interviews remote. But we've got two great guests from the Amazon Web Services Partner Network A W s a p N. Craig Wicks, senior manager of AWS Satisfactory. Todd Golden, Principal Cloud Architect, Global SAS Tech Lead Gentlemen, Thanks for joining the Cube. Appreciate it. >>Thanks, John. >>Um, first of all, I want to get in Craig with you and just take them in to explain what is the satisfactory. Because this is a unique and growing team within AWS. Um, we've been saying it for years, but the moves to the cloud houses has been obvious is mainstream. But your team, your role is doing some interesting things. Explain. What is the satisfactory? What do you guys do? >>Yeah, Thanks, John. Really delighted to be here today. Yeah, the satisfactory. Maybe for those that may be somewhat disappointing. There's no factory, no sort of easy button for SAS. There's no templates. There's no machinery. We wish we had it. But we're really a global team of subject matter. Experts in SAS that really help AWS partners transform their business right both business and technical to the Saas model and help them do that faster with greater confidence and all the best practices that our team has learned over the years. >>And Todd, your solution architect. So you're the partner. You have to help your customers get their, um, you know, being a solution architect really is like the mechanic of the business. You gotta lay out the engine of innovation and this is what clients are trying to strive for. Can you take him and explain how your role is involved in this? Obviously, SAS is not. It makes sense on paper, but making it happen is not trivial. What do you What do you what? Your role. >>Yeah, so I'm very much, in fact, connected to Craig. We're all part of the same organization, and we're sort of very much deeply involved with these organizations. We get very much, um, embedded with these these partners that we work with and really helped them through sort of the nuts and bolts of what it means to transform an application thio multi tenant sort of SAS models. That means helping them figure out how to map that two different AWS services. It means helping them figure out how to realize the sort of the business objective objectives of transforming to sass. But really, our goal is to sort of just get into the weeds with them, figure out their specific domain because there's no one size fits all. Versace figure out how that really connects toe, where they're at in their trajectory, in terms of where they're trying to get to end of the journey is a business and then find that alignment with a W S services. So there's sort of that trifecta of lining all those bits up and sort of formulating, Ah, technical strategy that really brings all those pieces together for them. >>Craig, I want to get your thoughts on the trends, and Todd, you can weigh in to want to get your reaction. Over the weekend, I was picking some folks on on the Internet, linked in and whatnot from eight years ago when that we did our first cube at reinvent with second year of reinvent, and nobody was there in the industry press, wasn't there were the first I think press to be there. Um and a lot of people have either moved on to big positions or companies have gone public. I bought me. Major things have happened in 2013 clouds certainly rose there. SAS became the business model. Everyone kind of knows that. But the dynamics today are different when you think about the on premises and you got the edge. A big part of the themes this week in the next couple weeks as we unfold here reinvent. This >>is >>different, but the same Can you share? What is the trend that people are riding on? What's the What's the wind of innovation? >>Yeah, and certainly I would say, First of all, just personally, I've been in SAS for some time. It was involved early on, in sort of, ah, model. We called the application service provider model, which was sort of a predecessor assassin, you know, the gray hairs out to remember that one. But, uh, you know, I think first of all, I would say SAS is everywhere and people wanted to be everywhere And so there's just We just see insatiable demand for sass from from customers out there, right? And I think the challenge problem we see is that organizations that we work with just can't transition fast enough, right? The rial technical challenges that air in front of them in terms of how they build an architect, Assaf solution and but most importantly, the business model that sort of underpins. That is a huge transformation for companies that they're going through. And that's one of the things that we just see. You know, Justin, my time in satisfactory native us. The range of organizations we worked with has just changed. So, you know, early on we're working with companies and infrastructure around security and storage and those areas, and the last few years it's just expanded to all sorts of industries, from public sector oil and gas. Um, sort of financial services. You know, everyone really wants to build this model, and that's really, you know, born around the customer demand they're seeing for South. >>That's interesting. You mention challenge. I wanna get your thoughts. You mentioned a SP application service provided you remember those days, you know, vividly, mainly a tech thing, but it's really a consumption model around delivery of software and services. And, you know, Web services came on in 2000. The rest is history. We've got Amazon Web services, but now, as you get more vertically expanded oil and gas and go mainstream. But what >>are some >>of the challenges? Because as people get smarter, it's not just about self service or buy as you go. It's a business model you mentioned. Is it a managed services itself? Services has been embedded into the application. Can you share some of the new things that are emerging on the business model side that people should pay attention to? What, some of those challenges? Yeah, I >>think one of the first things is just a fundamentally are operating service, right? So that changes the dynamics to everything, for in terms of how you engage with customers to how you deliver. You know, the kind of simple thing E I often tell people is you know who's answering the pager now. If someone goes, if something goes wrong, it's not your customer. That's you right, and you have to manage and sustain that service and and really continue Thio provide innovation and value to customers. Right? That's one of the challenges we see is is organizations are now on a treadmill in terms of innovation where customers expect something from South model and you really have to deliver on that. And then one of the final points I would say is it really transforms how you think about going to market right sales and marketing your fundamentally transformed. And, um, you know, traditional ways of really selling software and technology. Um, largely go away and go away and some good ways. And SAS, where you can really put customers in experience right and have them evaluate your technology in a manner where they can have a trial experience, right in a way, toe really introduce them to technology very slowly. And then, um, they grow over time, right? As they see value in that software, which is very aligned, how we think about, you know, a AWS our own technology. >>Okay, Todd, I gotta ask you out. So you want to drive that car? The SAS car, What's under the hood with the right tires? What's the conditions? And it's a technical issues here. If I'm a customer, I'm in a PM, partner. Okay, I'm in there. I got a traditional business pandemic hits or just my business models forcing me. What's your advice? What have I got to do? What's the playbook on the technical side? How doe I go to the next level? >>Well, uh, you know, we're obviously gonna ask a lot of questions and probably the answer to that, sadly, like most technical people will say to you is it depends which is never the answer anybody wants to hear. But so we're definitely gonna ask a lot of questions you about, like where you're at. What are the immediate sort of pressures in your business? This is where the technical team people on our team tended wearing a little bit of a business hat here where we want to know before we sort of guide you down any one particular technical path, like water. Sort of the key sort of dimensions of getting you to a SAS till every model, but but probably as a theme generally were saying to people is, Let's look at how we can get you there incrementally. Let's get you into a SAS model as fast as we possibly can. So we have a lot of different sort of patterns and strategies will use that air about sort of incremental adoption of SAS, which are how can I sort of lift my existing environment, move it into a SAS model, present a SAS offering to the business, Let me operate and run, get the metrics and analytics, get the sort of operational efficiency and the Dev ops goodness of sass, and then sort of move after that into the insides of that sass application. And think about now, how can I begin to move that two more modern constructs? How can I move that into containers? Potentially? Or how can I begin to adopt server list technologies? How can I apply? I am another constructs to achieve Tenet isolation. Eso We're really just trying to put them in a position where they can sort of incrementally modernize their applications while still realizing the benefits of getting to market on a saas model. >>So you're saying that the the playbook is come in low hanging fruit is used existing core building blocks, you see two s three dynamo whatever and then hit the higher level services as you get more experience Or is there a certain recipe that you see working for customers? >>So it's it's probably less about that. It's probably It's not about necessarily where you're out in the service continuum and which services you're using. Um, well, we're gonna move you to a set of services that are probably a good set of services that are that way to move your monolith in most effectively into a saas model as a beginning point that could land you in to that could land you in containers. The more important thing we're going to do here is we're going to surround the that sort of experience with all the other moving parts that you have tow have billing metrics. We're gonna We're gonna build in on boarding so that you could get frictionless on boarding. Those are all gonna be net new things you have to build. We're probably gonna change your identity model and connect that up with cognito or one of our partners solutions eso for us. It's it's sort of grabbing your existing environment. Can we move it over effectively, maybe modernize it a little bit along the way, but more importantly, build all those horizontal concepts in leveraging the right AWS services for you, uh, to bring that to life. >>That's actually smart, aleck. The way you described it that way, it's almost as if it's the core tenant of what Amazon stood for. You standing up fast and you get value, right? So what you're saying is, whatever it takes is a variety of tools to stand it up. I mean, this is interesting, Craig, and talk if you can comment on this because one of the things that we've been reporting on, I've done probably a dozen interviews specifically around companies that have moved to the cloud early, proactively kind of in this way, not in a major radical way. But, you know, operationally they have been transforming, you know, piece by piece. How Todd you laid it out and then pandemic it. And they've had successfully position themselves to take advantage of the forcing function of necessity of dealing with, you know, remote work and all these things that just clobbered him so and again. They were on the wave at the right time. Kind of because they had to because they did the right work. This >>is a >>factor. This is gonna tell sign. Can you guys share your reaction? What you've seen with satisfactory because this >>is the >>benefit of moving to the club. Being positioned needs pandemic today. Tomorrow, its edge. What's after that? Right space. I mean, there's a lot of things. This is kind of the playbook. What's your reaction to that? Correct. >>Yeah. I certainly see, you know, organizations that we work with that have really delivering the SAS model, being more agile, right. The ability to sort of flex resource is and change the way they sell and work with customers and find ways to, um, sort of delivered to them. Um, that don't require, um, some of the things that we're really maybe some of the things that are holding them back from traditional software in terms of how fast they deliver new features and services and, you know, changing to sort of market and world dynamics very quickly. Right is a big part of that. And, you know, one of the things we talked about in the SAS model is really not just getting to sass, but being to deliver in that model, right? And dr Innovations to customers very quickly. Um, s O that you really getting sort of securing, you know, sort of them is the loyal customers and sort of a lifetime customer. Hopefully, um, you know, that's a big part of status. >>Yeah. And there's two types of organizations that you guys have been successful with. The startup, obviously, you know, category creators or disruptors will come in, you know, come in with a nap. Born in the cloud, kick some ass you've seen that movie happens all the time still going on. And then you got the existing organizations that have to stay in that innovation wave and not get crushed by the by the change can you guys share how the factories working? The satisfactory from a mix of of clients is Atmore establishes its startups in between. Give us a taste of What's the makeup? >>Yeah, it's range just to give you a range of some of the companies worked with from kind of legacy technology companies or companies that have been around in some time, like BMC, you know, f five alfresco we've all worked with over the past few years, and they've launched products with our team on a W s. You know, to kind of start ups like Matile. Ian. You know, Cloud zero. Cokie City, which just launched a data management service announced here at Reinvent um, two very kind of specific industry players. I think this is a trend we've seen most recently where, you know, we work with organizations like NASDAQ. I based tea in the aerospace, you know, area Emerson in oil and gas. We've seen in a number of oil and gas companies really come to us based on sort of dynamics, their industry and the constraints the customers are in in terms of how they could deliver the value they provide, >>is there. Is there a key thing that's popping out of all these deals that kind of has a is a tale sign of pattern or, um, a specific thing That's obvious on then, when you look at the data, when you zoom out, >>Yeah, I think one thing I would just say people underestimate the transformation. They have to go through continually. And we still have organizations that come to us, and maybe they come to Todd or others, and they're really they're envisioning This is a technical transformation, right? And they sort of want to talk all about the application and and sort of the new architecture er they they want to move to. But we really see theon pertinent A line business and technology around sass is a model, and that's really fundamental to getting it right. And so, you know, often we see organizations that really have unrealistic launch dates, you know, which is pretty common in software and services these days, but particularly a staff model. We just see that, you know, they underestimate the work in front of them and kind of what they need to bring with that >>Todd real quick for it against the announcements which are cool. Um, technical things that pop out of these organizations is there, Uh, the cream kind of rises to the top. When you look at the value proposition, what do they focused on? Technically, >>um, you know, it's interesting because to me, ah, lot of the focus tends to be more on the things that would surprise you. Like a lot of people are wanna sort of think about how to design the ins Thea click ation on the business logic of their application and take advantage of this scale on the sizing of AWS and those things, they're still all true. But but really an assassin organization with a really successful SAS organizations will see ah, lot more shift to the agility and the operational efficiency, right? So really good organizations will say we're going to invest in all the metrics and all the land analytics, all the tooling that lets us really have our finger on the pulse of what our customers are doing. And then they'll derive all their tech and their business strategy based on this really data driven experience. And I see that as the trend and the thing we certainly advocate a ton inside of the satisfactory is don't under invest in that data because that data is really especially in a multi 10 environment where everybody's running in this sort of shared environment. That data is essential to understanding how to morph your business, how to innovate, understand how your cost profile is really evolving. And so I see the really strong organizations building lots of the sort of foundational bits here, even ahead sometimes of building features and functions into their own products. >>It's not only moving fast and deploying tech is moving fast on the business model innovation as well. You're basically saying, Don't overplay your hand and try toe lock in the business model logic because it's gonna change with the data that what you're saying. >>Yeah, they're playing for for the innovation. They're playing for the agility they're playing for new markets, new segments that may evolve. And so they're really trying to put themselves in the position of being able to pivot and move. And they're really taking pride in the fact that their technology lets them do that. >>You know, that's not that's a business model That's not for the faint of heart. You know, when you have a market that has a lot of competitiveness to it and certainly was seeing the sea change happening over this year in the past few years, with cloud completely changing the playing field, winners and losers air emerging. And that's I think, this key it's you know, as I said in The Godfather, you know, you need a wartime conciliatory for these kind of times, and this is kind of what we're seeing, and I think that's a great point. Todd. Good stuff there. Um Okay. So announcements. You guys had some things on stage. Talked about Craig. You guys launching some new stuff? New programs? >>Yeah, absolutely mhm. Yeah, John, I guess our model is really to learn from a range of partners and experiences we have and then, you know, build tools and approaches to help everyone go faster, right? Because we certainly can't work with thousands organizations. And one of things that our team has had the opportunity over the last few years is published ton of articles, Blog's white papers, you know, very specific approaches to building SAS solutions. If you search Todd Golding out there on YouTube or anything, you'll find a bunch of things. But we wanted to bring on the altogether. And so we've created Central directory called Satisfactory Insights. Hug. And there's a right now over 70 unique pieces of content that our team is produced and curated. Whether you're starting on your staff journey right, you need socks one on one and business planning to level 400 right? 10 10 in isolation from Todd Golding, right. That's all there and available to you on the satisfactory program page. >>What? Some of the interesting things that came out of that that data from the insights you can share. >>Yeah, a couple things that we have we published most recently I would point to are really interesting. We just recently published a five case study where we go deeper in terms of their transformation. To really understand what was, you know, behind the scenes and that, um, we also published a white paper called the SAS Journey Framework, where for the first time, our team really broke down the journey. And what are the steps required? And what are some of the key questions you need to ask Onda Final piece I'd point to for people that Todd talks to is, we have, ah, white paper on SAS tended isolation strategies where we really go deep on on that particular challenge and what's there and that's also published and available on our satisfactory inside sub. Could you >>just define what is that mean tenant isolation strategies? What does that >>go to Todd with that for sure? >>Let's get that on the record. What is the definition of SAS tenant isolation? >>Sure, sure. So, you know, I think I've been in the room and with a lot of people that reinvent and basically have been in Chuck talks and said, You know what's tended isolation to you, and a lot of people will say Oh, that's authentication. Essentially, somebody got into the system. So now I know my system is isolated, but and a multi tenant environment right where we're running all this. These resource is in this data all co mingled from all of these different tenants. Um, it would be a huge blow to the business if one tenant somehow inadvertently exposed the resource or exposed to the resource is of another tenant. And so, fundamentally 10 of isolation is all of these techniques and strategies and architectural patterns that you use to ensure that one tenant can inadvertently get access to the resource is of another tenant s. So it's a sort of a layer of protection and security that goes beyond just the authentication and authorization schemes that you'll typically see in a cess architectures. >>So that's basically like having your own room lock and key doorway not just getting in, but no one can access your your stuff. >>Yeah, so it's a whole set of measures you could imagine. Identity and access management and other policies sort of defining tenant boundaries and saying, as each tenant is trying to access a resource or trying toe, interact with the system in some way, you've put these extra walls up to ensure that you can't cross those boundaries. >>Todd, I want to get your thoughts on this. Well, architected sas lens piece. What is this all about? >>Well, um, a WS has had for a long time the sort of the well architected framework, which has been a really great set of sort of guiding principles and best practices around how to design an architect solutions on top of AWS. And certainly SAS providers have been using that all along the way to sort of ask foundational questions of their architecture. Er But there's always been this layer of additional sort of SAS considerations that have set on top of that are that air SAS specific architectural patterns. And so what we've done is we've used this mechanism called the well architected lens that lets us essentially take our SAS architectural principles and extend the well architected framework and introduce all these concepts into the SAS and to the architecture pillars that really ask the hard SAS architecture questions so security operations reliability all the sort of classic pillars that are part of the well architected framework now have a SAS specific context added to them. Thio to really go after those areas that are unique to sass providers. And this really gives developers, architects, consultants the ability to sit down and look at a SAS application and evaluate its alignment with these best practices. And so far we can really positive response. Thio the content. >>Great job, guys doing great work. Finally, there's something new that you guys are announcing today to make life easier. Preview building SAS on a bus. What's that? What's that about? >>Sure. Eso You know you can imagine. We've been working with thes SAS providers for a number of years now, and as we've worked with them, we've seen a number of different themes emerge on and and we've run into this pattern That's pretty common where we'll see these, uh, these customers that have a classic sort of installed software model. They're installing it on premises or in the cloud, but basically each customer's sort of has their own version of the product. They have one off versions. They have their potentially have customization that are different. And while this works for some time for these businesses, what they find is they sort of run into this operational efficiency and cost wall. Whereas they're trying to grow their businesses, they they just really can't. They can't sort of keep up based on the way that they're running their current systems, and this is sort of a natural draw to move them to sass. But the other pattern that we've seen here is that these organizations are sometimes not in a position where they have the luxury of sort of going away and just saying, Hey, I'll rewrite my system or modernize it and make all of these changes. There could be any number of factors competitive pressures, market realities, cost that just make that too much of, ah, difficult process for them to be able to just take the application and rewrite it. And so what we did is sort of try to acknowledge that and say, What could we do to give you, ah, more prescriptive solution of this, the sort of turn key, easy button, if you will to say, Take my existing monolithic application that I deliver in this classic way and plug it into an existing pre built framework. An environment that is essentially includes all these foundational bits of assassin Vyron mint. And let me just take my monolith, move it into that environment and begin toe offer a SAS product to to the universe. And so what we've done is we've printed something and were introduced. We've introduced this thing called a W s SAS boost So a W s ass boost. It's not on a W s service. It is an open source reference environment. So you essentially download it. You install it into your own A W s account. And then this installs all these building blocks of sass that we've talked about. And it gives you all this sort of prescriptive ability to say, How can I now take my existing monolithic environment lifted into this experience and begin toe offer that to the market as a sash products. So it has, you know, it has billing. It has metrics and analytics. All the things we've been kind of talked about here they're all baked into that from the ground up on. We've also offered this an open source model. So our hope here is that this is really just the starting point of this solution, which, which will solve one business case. But our hope is that essentially the open source community will lean in with us, help us figure out how to evolve and make this into something that addresses a broader set of needs. >>Well, I love the SAS boost. Firstly, I wanna take the energy drink business there. Right there. It sounds like an energy drink. Give me some of that sass boost by that at 7. 11. Craig, I wanna get the final word with you. You've been the SAS business for over 20 years. You've seen this movie before. There are a lot of people who know the SAS business, and some people are learning it. You guys are helping people get there. It's different, though. Now what's different today? Because it's it's It's not just your grandfather's sass. As the expression goes, it's different. It's new dynamics. What is, uh, the most important thing people should pay attention to Whether they have a SAS legacy kind of mindset or they're new to the game. Take us >>home. Yeah, I >>think certainly, you know, getting disaster is not the end of the journey. You know, we see really successful fast provider. Just continue to differentiate, right? And then one of the things that I think we've seen successful SAT providers do is really take advantage of AWS services to go faster. Right? And that's really key, I think in this model is to really find a way to accelerate your business and deliver value faster. Andi just sort of keep that differentiation innovation there. Um, but I would just say now that there's more information out there available than ever, you know, and not only from from our team, but from a host of people that really are our SAS experts and follow the space. And so lots of resources available. Everyone >>All right, gentlemen, Thanks for coming on. Great insight. Great segment on getting to sass, sass boost Just the landscape. You guys are helping customers get there, and that's really the top priority. It's necessity is the mother of all invention during this pandemic. More than ever, uh, keeping business model going and establishing new ones. So thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having us, John. >>Okay, It's the cubes. Virtual coverage. We are a SAS business. Now we're virtual bringing you remote. Uh, SAS Cube and, uh, more coverage with reinvent next few weeks. Thanks for watching. Okay, yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back. I'm stew Minuteman. And this is the Cube coverage of VM World 2020 our 11th year covering the show. And of course, networking has been a big growth story. Four vm where for a number years, going back to the Neisseria acquisition for over billion dollars. Really leveraging all of the virtual networking and SD wins been another hot topic. A couple years ago, it was the Velo Cloud acquisition. And now happy to welcome to the program two of the Velo Cloud business executives. First of all, we have Sanjay you Paul. He is the senior vice president and general manager of that mentioned division of VM Ware. Enjoining him is Craig Connors, whose the vice president and chief technology officer for that same division he was the chief architect of fellow Cloud Craig Sanjay. Thank you for joining us. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Alright, So, Sanjay, first of all nice, you know, call outs and a lot of news that we're gonna get to dig into in the morning Keynote you know Pat Sanjay the team. Uh, you know, a couple of years ago, Pat talked about, you know, the next billion dollar businesses networking your team helping toe add to that. And, ah, a new term thrown out that we're gonna get to talk a little bit about. Our friends at Gartner termed it sassy. So I'll let you, you know, explain a little bit the news that this wonderful new four letter acronym that the Gartner spots that us. Um, why don't you start us there? >>Yeah. I couldn't be more excited to be here at VM World announcing this expansion of what's going on in Ste. Van. So I see Van was all about bringing branch office users to their applications and doing that in a really efficient manner, throwing out all those complex hardware appliances and simplifying everything with software, increasing the quality of experience for the user. But now what has happened is, you know they want security to be dealt off in the same way. Same simplicity and automation, same great user experience. And at the same time, you know, blocking all these attacks that are coming in from various places and covert has just driven that even more meaning that you need to get to networking and network security to be brought together in this simple and automated way while keeping the end user experience be great on while giving I t what they need, which is high security and good manageability. So this acronym sassy, secure access Service edge It really is the bringing together off net networking and network security both as a service. That service angle is really important. And the exciting part about what we're announcing at the at we'd be involved. Here is the expansion off the S, Stephen Pops and Gateways into becoming Sassy pops. And now customers can get a whole slew of services both networking and network security services from the anyway. So that's the announcement. >>Wonderful, Craig. You know, since since since you've helped with so much of the architecture here, I wanna kick out a little bit. When? When it comes to the security stuff that Sandy was talking about. I remember dealing back with land optimization solutions, trying to remember. Okay, wait. When can I compress? When can I encrypt? You know what do I lay on top of it? Um, SD when you know fits into this story, help us understand. What does you Novello Cloud do? What is it from the partner ecosystem? You know, So you know there's there's some good partners that you have helping us. Help us understand. You know what exactly we mean because security is such a broad term. >>Yeah, thanks. So there's four components in the sassy pop that we're bringing together. Obviously, VM Ware Ston is one of those Sanjay mentioned the changing workforce. We have off net users that aren't coming from behind Stu and Branch Mawr and Mawr today. So we also have secure access powered by our workspace. One solution that's bringing those remote users into the sassy pop and then two different security solutions. Secure Web gateway functionality. And that is the next generation secure Web gateway that includes things like DLP and remote browser isolation. And as you saw in the news today that's powered through ROM agreement with Menlo Security. And then we have next Gen firewall ing for securing corporate traffic. And that's powered by our own VM Ware NSX firewall, which has been recently augmented with our last line acquisition. So those are the four key components coming together within our sassy pop. And of course, we also have our continued partnership with the scaler for our our large joint via Mersey Scaler customer base to facilitate that security solution as well. >>Yeah. So, Sanjay, maybe it would make sense. As you said, you've got ah, portfolio now in this market, Uh, got v d I You've got edge walk us. Or if you could, some of the most important use cases for your business. >>Yeah. So you know the use case that has taken off in the last several years since the advent of SD. When is to get sites? So these would be branch offices and a branch office could be an agricultural field. It could be a plane. It could be an oil rig. You know, it could be any one of these. This is a branch office. So these sites how to get them connected to the applications that they need to get access to so telemedicine example. So how do you get doctors, diagnosticians and all that that are sitting in their clinics and hospitals? You get great access to the applications on the applications can be anywhere they don't have to be back in your data centers. You know, after data center consolidation happened, some of the apse you know, we're in the data centers. But then, after the cloud advent came, then the apse were everywhere there in the public cloud, both in I s as well as in SAS. And then now they're moving back towards the edge because of the advent of edge computing. So that's really the primary use case that s Stephen has been all about. And that's where you know, we have staked a claim to be the leader in that space. Now, with Covic, the use cases are expanding and obviously with work from home, you take the same telemedicine example. The doctors and diagnosticians who used to work from hospitals and clinics now have to get it done when they're working from the home. And, of course, this is a business critical app. And so what do you do? How do you get these folks who are at home to get the same quality of experience, the same security, the same manageability, but at the same time, you cannot disturb the other people who are working from home because that is an entire ecosystem. You serve the business user, but you also serve the needs off the home users keeping privacy in mind. So these two cases branch access and then remote access, which great talked about these are the primary use cases, and then they break down by vertical. So depending on whether it's health or it's federal or its manufacturing or its finance, then you have sub use cases underneath that. But this is how we from a from a V C n standpoint, you know, claimed to have 17,000 customers that have deployed our networking solutions. Ah, large fraction of those being our stu and solutions today. >>Yeah. Okay, Craig, one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot in the industry iss scale. I look at certain parts of the market, you know, say kubernetes kubernetes was about, you know, bringing together lots of sites. But now we're spending a lot of time talking about edge, which is a whole different scale. Same thing if you talk about devices and I o t can you speak to us a little bit about, you know, fundamentally, You know that branch architecture, I think, set you up well, but when I start thinking about EJ, it probably is. You know, uh, you know, larger number and some different challenges. So So maybe maybe some differences that happen to happen in the code to make that happen? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you know, we've been fortunate in the success that we've had in RST ran deployments. More than 280,000 branches deployed with RST ran solution. So scale is something that's been near and dear to our heart from the beginning. How do you build a multi tenant service in the cloud? How do you build cloud scale? And we brought that aspect into all of these components through container ization, as you mentioned through horizontal scalability, bringing them into our own dedicated pops. Where we control the hardware we control the hyper visor, obviously built on top of the m r E. S s. I that allows us to deliver scale in a way that other competitors may not be able to achieve. >>Yeah, son Sanjay, it's been a couple of years since the acquisition by VM Ware. Give us a little bit of an update, if you would as to, you know, what I'm sure. Obviously, customer reach on adoption greatly increased by by the channel and go to market. But, you know, directionally And you know, any difference in use cases that that you've seen now being part of the M R. >>Yeah, absolutely. No. There's there's been an expansion in the use cases, which is why this fit was very good, meaning Vela Cloud being a part of VM way. So if you look at it, what the wider network does, where the place where you know ties, we tie it all together and tie walk together. If you look at the end User computing, which Greg was mentioning, the clients are digital workspace, workspace. One client. Well, those clients now will connect to our sassy pop. So that's one tie in that obviously we couldn't have and we were an independent company. The other side of it, when you go from the sassy pop into the data center, then we tie into NSX. Not just that the Cloud firewall, but in the data center itself so we can extend micro segmentation. So that's another kid use case that is becoming prevalent. Then the third aspect of this is really when you run inside telecom operators and VM Ware has a very robust business as it goes after telcos with the software stack and so running our gateways running our sassy pops at the telco environment, then gets us to integrate with what's going on with our telecom business unit. We also have what we're doing on our visibility and Tellem entry perspective. So we had acquired a company called Neons A, which were crafting into on edge network intelligence product that then fits into VM Ware's overall. For in the space we have, ah, product suite called We Realize Network Insight. And so that network inside, combined with what we're doing from from a business unit standpoint, gives customers an end to end view from from an individual client through the cloud, even up to an individual container. And so we call this client to cloud to container. All of this is possible because we're part of VM Ware. In the last piece of this is something that's gonna happen. We believe next year, which is edge computing when edge computing comes in. You know, I jokingly say to my team this acronym of Sassy, which is s a s e you gotta insert of sea in the middle. So it becomes s a CSE and out of that pronounced that says sacks E. So I know it sounds a little bit awkward, but that c stands for the compute. So as you put compute in the computer is going to run in the edge, the computer that's going to run in the pop and the sassy is gonna become, you know, sexy. And who better to give that to you than VM Ware? Because, you know, we have that management stack that controls compute for customers today. >>Well, definitely. I think you're you're you're drawing from the Elon Musk school of You know how to name acronyms in products Do so sometimes It's really interesting. Uh, Craig, talk us a little a little bit about that vision to get there, you know? What do we need to do as an industry? How's the product mature? Give us a little bit of that. That that roadmap forward, if you would >>Yeah, I think you know Sassy is really the convergence of five key things. One is this distributed pop architecture. Er So how do you deliver this? Compute and these services near to the customers premise. And that's something that companies like us have have had years of experience and building out. And then the four key components of sassy that we have, you know, zero trust access S t u N next generation firewall ing and secure Web Gateway. We're fortunate, as Sanjay said, to be part of the M where where we don't have to invent some of these components because we already have a works based one and we already have the NSX distributed firewall. And we already have the m r s d when and so ah, lot of companies you'll see are trying to to put all of these parts together. We already had them in house. We're putting them under one umbrella, the one place where we didn't have a technology within VM Ware. That's where we're leveraging these partnerships with memo and see scaler to get it done. >>Sanjay e think the telco use case that you talked about is really important One we've definitely seen, you know, really good adoption from from VM Ware working in those spaces. One place I I wanna understand, though, if you look at vcf and how that moves. Thio ws toe Azure, even toe Oracle's talked about in the keynote this morning. How does SD win fit into just that kind of traditional hybrid cloud deployment we've been talking about for the last couple of years? >>Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, when you look at Ste Van, that name can notes software defined, but it doesn't. It's not specific to branch office access at all. And when you look at DCF, what VCF is doing is really modernizing your compute stack. And now you can run this modern compute stack of your own data centers. You can run it in the private cloud. You can run it on the public cloud as well, right? So you can put these tax on Amazon, azure, Google and and then run them. So what an STV in architecture allows you to do is not just get your branch and secure users to access the applications that are running on those computes tax. But you can also intermediate between them. So when customers come in and they say that they want simplified networking and security between two public cloud providers, this is the multi cloud use case, then getting that networking toe work in a seamless fashion with high security can be done by an S Stephen architectures. And our sassy pop is perfectly situated to do that. And all you would need to do is add virtual services at the sassy pop. An enterprise customer would come in and they say they want some peanuts here and some VP CS there they want to look at them in an automated fashion. They want to set it up, you know, with the point and click architectures and not have to do all this manual work, and we can get that done. So there's a there's a really good fit between Sassy s Stephen and where VCF is going to solve the multi cloud problem that people are having right now. >>Excellent. I really appreciate that. That that explanation last thing, I guess I'll ask is, you know, here at VM World, I'm sure you've got a lot of breakouts. You've probably got some good customers sharing some of their stories. So anonymous if it has to be. But we would love if you've got either views of some examples, uh, to help bring home that the value that your solutions are delivering. >>Great. When I start with one and then creek and fill in the other one, eso let me start off with the telemedicine example. So we have, you know, customer called M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. And these are the folks in in Texas, and they provide a really, really important service. And that service is, you know, providing patients who are critically ill to give them all the kinds of services, whether they come into the clinic or whether they're across a network connection. And they're radiologists and doctors air sitting at home. So I think it's very important use case and, you know, we started off by deploying in the hospitals and the clinics. But when Cove, it hit there to send a lot of these folks to work from home, and then when they work from home, it's really this device that goes in which you can see here. This is our Belo cloud edge. And this, um, has said in one of the my my favorite song says, There's nothing this box can't do. All right, so this box goes home into the, you know, doctors home, and then they are talking to their patient, getting telemedicine done because it solves the problem off performance. Um, you know that some of those folks have literally said that this thing was a God sent. That's not very often that networking people, you know, have been told that their products are like godsend. So I'll take that to the limit of grain of salt. But we are solving a very important problems increasing the performance were also this is a secure device, so it's not gonna be hacked into and then makes things much more manageable from a nightie standpoint. So this is one of those use cases, and there's plenty of them. But Craig has his favorites all turn it over to him. >>There's so many I could bore you. I think you know one really interesting. One is a new investment banking company that we have is a customer, and they used to go work in the office five days a week, and everything that they did was on their computer in the office and with this pivot to work from home post Kobe, did they think their future is a flexible work workforce where sometimes there in the office and sometimes they're remote. And when the remote there are deep peeing into their desktop, that is sting in their office and with their like to remote access VPN solution, they had to connect, Say, I'm a user sitting in Southern California. I'm connecting my VPN to Chicago to then come across the network back to Los Angeles to get to my desktop so that I can work from home. And now with Sassy, my secure access client from workspace one connects to the closest asi pop I get to my desktop in my office. Tremendously lower, Leighton see tremendously higher quality to experience for the users, whether they're, you know, at home, on the road anywhere they need to access that device. >>Craig Sanjay, thank you so much. Love the customer example. Sanjay. Good job bringing out the box. Uh, show people It's a software world. But the sassy hardware is still needed at times, too. Thanks for joining us. All >>right. Thank you, Stew. Thanks. Great. Cheers. All >>right. Stay with us for more coverage of VM World 2020. I'm still minimum. Thanks. As always for watching the cube

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of next level network experience event, brought to you by Infoblox. >> Okay, welcome back everyone's to CUBE's coverage and co creation with Infoblox. Next Level networking event, virtual event, I'm John Furrier, your host to theCUBE. We're here with Craig Sanderson, Vice President security products at Infoblox. Talking about securing the borderless enterprise, obviously Infoblox, we had a variety of different conversations. Craig, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. Thanks, it's great to be here. >> Remote CUBE, normally we're in person, but since it's COVID-19, we're doing our best to get the stories out and one of things I want to chat with you is with COVID-19, this shift to remote working is interesting and the word work is interesting you got the work forces which are people work places which are locations, which is now home, workflows and work loads all work related, right? So if you think about the enterprise, you know, just the disruption to business model around this unforeseen, almost 100% VPN usage maybe or you got all this remote action, no one could have foreseen all this coming. How is this shift change the security paradigm and posture for enterprises? >> Yeah, I think for a lot of the customers that we've talked to, a lot of them are thinking about digital transformation for some time. What COVID has really done is rapidly expanded or kind of accelerated the need for them to think about what the digital transformation plans are. And unfortunately for some organizations who may be not as far down the line as others, they've looked at their current implementation for remote access, and their traditional security models of like perimeter based and they found that you know in this current environment where suddenly you've gone from being only a partial set of your workforce or remote to now all of them being remote and their applications, their data, the users, they're all kind of spread anytime, anyplace, anywhere. Their traditional models don't really work. So what it's caused a lot of organizations to do is to really accelerate their digital transformation plans and quite often for some of those organizations, they've realized that they've had to make the move relatively quickly because their traditional architectures have just not been designed for this level of disruption the digital transformation has had on their businesses. >> Give some examples of how companies have either been flat footed or on their heels, kind of push back and saying, well, we got caught off guard to ones that are kind of in place that kind of managed the pandemic well, what's the difference? Can you just give some color commentary around, you know, the the profile who got it right or some were right, and some that have gotten it wrong, or are struggling? >> So I think the ones who got it right are the ones who were already thinking about digital transformation. They're looking at the fact that a lot of the applications that their consumers or their users are consuming are increasingly going to be in the Cloud anyway. So the traditional architecture of all the good stuffs on the inside and the bad stuff on the outside, that simply doesn't work with Cloud and those organizations who were looking at obviously Cloud deployments for their applications, SDN IoT, those organizations have had be thinking about how they can secure those devices, the applications and users in a way that is going to be ubiquitous. The fact that you can deploy the security controls wherever those applications users or devices are going to be. So those organizations are already starting to think about how they can build a networking architecture that is going to be suited for digital transformation, and by extension, they've been recognizing that the security model has to change, 'cause they were much further down the path. Really, this has been an acceleration. For those organizations that well, I'm not really interested in Cloud, are worried about the risks associated with Cloud and things like that, who tended to try and stick or cling to the old traditional model. Where they really run into trouble now, it's like this model just doesn't work. And now the decisions almost been taken out of the hands with COVID, because now their users are not on the corporate network. They can't build a rock wall around those users. They now have to provide protection for a user who's potentially not even using the device that they can control. So for those organizations who are already thinking about cloud and SDN and IoT, because of that digital transformation effect they've been starting to think about security, for those who have not thought about that or who have tried have been pushing that off, they're the ones who've been caught somewhat flat footed and now they're been forced to make a decision which maybe not they're actually feeling comfortable already ready to go off and do. >> You know, Craig, I sat with a friend the other day and we're like briefing on hey, you know, COVID-19 really, kind of, exposes almost like the tide coming out as that tsunami comes. You can see everything, all the scabs and all the problems. And then we started talking about the whole work at home situation, like this is probably the biggest use case of IoT in real life because you can really see it play out, not just a factory or sensor or device at the edge of the network, these are work, people doing work, right? So this whole IoT Edge, it's about addressability. So you know, I have to ask you, 'cause we've talked with you guys earlier in other segments around this next level networking experience, I love the word experience, but next level networking means next level. So DDI has an abstraction, DDI being DNS DHCP, and IP address management. How does the security piece fit in? Because certainly, yes, you got at home, we got a bunch of IoT people running their stuff from their home networks and so remote access, and you got also the business around, which includes everything that's connected to the network now, and literally is borderless. So I like that term. So how does DDI security fit into that? Yeah, I mean, it's part of having the experience, I mean, one of the things that's changed, I mean, I've been in security for over 20 years, probably about 10 or 15 years ago, as a security guy, you could come back and you had a veto, you'd come back and say, well, no, we're not going to roll this thing out, these applications, or these services, because it's a risk to the business. Now in a lot of the CSOs that I've talked to is that veto is going away. If this application is going to get rolled out, we're going to run this service security has to catch up. Now what you can't have is from a seamless experience point of view, is to say well, okay, you've now got wonderful application experience, but then it gets ruined by all the security controls are very invasive. So all organizations are having to do is to think about how you can build a seamless networking architecture that can also seamlessly include the security as part of that. And so you can still have the security of the organization needs without it becoming a massive disruption to the experience. And one of the good examples is, for a lot of organizations their remote access, going back to the COVID example, is based on VPN. VPNs are cumbersome and have got troubles with passwords and all these sort of like traditional issues associated with the user experience from a VPN perspective. I mean, a lot of users have the patience to deal with that, and they don't necessary follow all the necessary security controls. So people are being forced to rethink how they can build the quality application experience underpinned by a digitally transformed network, but at the same time, making sure you could layer in at foundational layer, the security functions as well. And that's where a lot of organizations who are a little bit more forward thinking understood that and start to think about like DNS, is essentially this ubiquitous platform, which is already there it can already provide the sort of security services by default. Because going back to your example about IoT, one of the jokes with one of my friends is, and for every IoT security, sorry, every IoT offering, there's a separate IoT security offering. And one of the things that was a lightbulb moment for us is, if you're trying to secure all these heterogeneous IoT devices, well, one thing they have in common, they're all going to get an IP address, so we're going to use DNS. So what people have to start to do is to try and make security seamless, it has to be built into the foundations. It can't be this extra thing that you kind of glob on the side, because it then ruins the overall experience for the users. The nice thing about DNS is its ubiquitous, and you can apply the security, regardless of what the endpoint and application is, because the common denominator they choose they get an IP address and they use DNS. >> And DNS has such a great track record over the years of having layers of abstractions on top of it to pace with the functionality and it's really been an operating model and you bring up the different security packages and postures for each thing. And you mentioned, you know, the old days security guy, oh, no we're killing that, no we're going this way. That was the operational model, but now with DevOps, you put a Cloud earlier, DevOps has proven that agility, speed scale can work, and how to security catch up? It's an operating model. So this is really kind of the key epiphany is, hey, VPNs, that's not the experience that people want. And, you know, I was just talking with someone from Amazon this morning in another interview segment and the discussion was new expectations, new solutions. So that's kind of what we're seeing right now. So how do you enable that out at speed by not screwing over the operations people, right? So 'cause they got to be, operationally, I need to be really rock solid, so you need automation, you got to have those factors and requirements built in, but you got the agility for development. your reaction> >> Yeah, absolutely. We see that especially is one of the things about 'cause DNS essentially ubiquitous. You can apply similar security controls regardless of the environment. So, right now I'm stuck at home because of the COVID virus. So again, I'm going to use DNS, I go through one of our Cloud platforms, I have DNS applying the security controls there. But within the same thing because DNS works as one ubiquitous system and it's like how the internet works with DNS is quite easily, not only can you block malicious threats for myself, but also you can push that same block mitigation to a DNS server that's running in AWS. So if your workload that may also have been compromised, trying to go to the same malicious domain, you can also be blocked by DNS. And so that ubiquity, the fact that it's built as this ubiquitous system, mean one thing is very different in the networking world standards are great. We can plug different things together, they all kind of fit together nicely. Insecurity is not normally that not only the cases, normally, you've got this jigsaw puzzle, where all the pieces don't really fit together. The nice thing with DNS is is absolutely ubiquitous. So one basic example is, if I try to go to a malicious domain, or I tried to steal data over DNS, not only would we be able to block it, but we'd also be able to dynamically share that mitigation to all of the on prem DNS servers, the DNS servers rather in your public or private Cloud, and for all the other like remote users. So the fact you've got this pre built fabric, and it's not that we're security geniuses, it's just it happens to already be there because of DNS and how DNS has been developed over the last 30 or 40 years. So I think the nice thing about it is a lot of organizations are starting to realize that you've got this foundation already there. Ostensibly, it's there for networking purposes, but the ability to repurpose all the core assets of DNS, the scalability, the flexibility, adaptability, the ubiquity, all those things are there by default. Why don't you use that as the new foundation for that next gen security architecture? >> And you know, you got me as a fan, I'll say that right away, because when we think about the simplicity of going to the low level building block in DNS, it fits for what I said earlier, the future of work, the word Work, workplace, workforce, workload, workflows, no matter what it is, it works across. So it's a consistent, primitive. I mean, it makes total sense. Why would you want to have different things. So again, this brings up the whole foundational level of DDI that's got my interest. And I want you to explain this for folks, because I think it's not obvious. Abstractions are pretty clear, people get abstraction layers, reduce complexity, and increase functionality and capability. But DDI, you guys have from a foundational security standpoint, is kind of the unique thing Infoblox has. How is that different, DDI from other offerings in the security stack? >> Yeah, I think the one thing is pretty unique, especially when it comes to DNS is the fact that it's built together as this ubiquitous system, and it's there by default. I mean, otherwise, the internet just wouldn't work. So the nice thing is, is that if you deploy a DNS system we can deploy as a grid, so whether it's the an appliance running on prem or sitting in a public Cloud, or even for roaming users who are going through one of our points of presence, it works as one big ubiquitous system, whereas you take like traditional firewalls, you're configuring these devices separately, and you have to manually stitch it together. And you take multiple different vendors and you know, it doesn't quite fit neatly together. DNS is based on the standard, you could take a DNS server for master DNS server from another company and because it's based on standards, it will work seamlessly together, in fact, that the threat mitigation mechanism where you distribute threat intelligence to tell the DNS, what is the malicious domains or IP addresses to block is based on so called response policy zones. That's been part of the DNS standard since 2010. And it works seamlessly across multiple vendors, whereas in the security world, as I said, it's kind of like a jigsaw where you get all the pieces together that you think you need and then the burden is always on the customer or the organization to then piece these things together and as a chief source it doesn't fit together. I can see that burden can cause a hell of a lot of issues for a lot of the customers. >> Yeah, I got to ask you since DNS is so foundational to element *and have all internet activities obviously, you know URLs is DNS, it's string actually. So everything's based on DNS, how it resolves. So what what about the, how would you respond if someone said, hey, you know, I don't even know DNS is still around. I know it's palm. It's underneath there somewhere, I don't even have to deal with it, it just runs things, we've been using it for years. What's the big deal? So how do you go in and say, hey, customer, hey, enterprise, you're not borderless, I get a hitch. But they have DNS. How do they modernize it? How do they assess it? How do you go in and some of the young kids don't even know what DNS might even is? I mean, like, it's a new, so like, *what do you go where, how do you approach that and what's the pitch because they got it and as an opportunity to innovate. what's the story there? >> *Is really two aspects to it. The first one is, I mean, DNS is a bit like oxygen. If it's not there, you really need to notice it. You just take when we had the Mirai botnet attack a few years back, all these organizations suddenly realized how important DNS is. And there's a reason why DNS is the number one attack vector for DDoS attacks. If I'm an adversary, I could try and take out individual applications it's going to take me forever. I take out your DNS, everything's going to stop. I mean, it's that *foundational z. But because its been >> *Hackers no problem, yeah. >> Exactly, so and for that reason, that's why it's constantly targeted. So firstly, my first pitch to customers is, you've got to take this stuff seriously, because when it goes down, everything is down. And the impact to your organization, not just from a brand reputation, but just from running your business is going to be huge. But on top of that, the way to think of DNS is, the nice thing is is you don't have to change your network architecture. If you think about a typical user who clicks on a phishing link. When they click on a phishing link, who's going to see the malicious requests first? Is it your firewall? No, your DNS server. Because you made the request, you have to resolve the malicious domain that you're going to try and connect to. You need to find out the IP address of it. So your DNS server and it's been proven multiple studies that, the vast majority of malware uses DNS as its control plane. So if you want to understand what the bad guys are doing, you know, your DNS servers got a front row seat to exactly what the bad guys are doing. And to implement security on it is you don't have to change your network architecture, because your DNS is already there by default. All you need to do is infuse it with security knowledge, whether that is machine learning, analytics or threat intelligence. But those DNS servers are ideally positioned. They're going to see the malicious activity, regardless of what the application is. So it's foundational, not just in terms of, if it's not there, it's going to cause a massive issue to your field or environment anyway. But even if you secure the DNS, the DNS is also this wonderful tool that is in all the right places and it's also deeper into the network. One of the challenges you mentioned about operations is the challenges is okay, you can block malware but if you don't know the source address of the device that is actually trying to make the request, you don't know what to go and clean up, where's your DNS server, your DHCP server knows exactly who it is because we handed out the IP address, we know the MAC address, we know the IP address, we know the user name, we have all that information that is going to be critical for security operations. And now you can see what *it's or about maybe the first report, you start to see that organizations are waking up to the fact that you have this treasure trove of security operations data that you haven't tapped largely for political reasons, because the security guys can't reach over and grab the necessary DDI network context from those DNS platforms, because typically they're owned by the networking or the server team. >> Before we get into that *force reports, I think that had some threat investigation data. What you're getting at about this DNS is that basically, it's critical infrastructure. And if you try to forget about it, 'cause it works, you lose sight of the real opportunity, which is, if it's critical infrastructure, you got to treat it like critical infrastructure, and make sure it's modernized, refreshed in the right position to manage all this, right? >> Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. It's unfortunate With the Mirai botnet attack. A lot of organizations, as they said well, okay, we'll just outsource this, we don't have to worry about it. But when it wasn't there, and it wasn't the fact that, I mean, it was an attempt to take out like Minecraft servers. Nothing to do with most of the businesses who were impacted, but there was a lot of collateral damage. And unfortunate is like one of those things is because DNS is a victim of its own success. The fact that is reliable, it is consistent. You don't have lots of DNS outages typically. As a result of that people tend to forget about how critical it is as the role it plays in serving all of your applications and your users. >> Let's get into the *fourth report 'cause they surveyed a bunch of hundreds of security and risk management leaders, both compliance and also security pros that are using DNS, what were your key thoughts on the takeaways from that study? What should people know about it? >> It's very encouraging as up in Infoblox about five years when I first joined, the usage of DNS as a network context as a way to help with security operations is very, very low. And that causes all sorts of issues for organizations when it comes to doing security operations. I mean, a prime example is, the guys who work in security operations, that is the biggest issue for customers right now. They've bought almost too much security gear. And each of those security tools and platforms, they're generating security events. So again, security events from your firewall, or from your IPS or from your neck system, or whatever it happens to be and the burden now falls on the security operations teams. And it's been proven that there's huge amounts of open opportunities because there just, isn't enough trained security operations staff and the ones who are already in the business, are massively overworked and struggle to get through all the security events that have been firing from their security operations tools. So for what I was encouraging from the first report is that organizations are realizing that DHCP is going to help* you be able to identify the fact that these two security events seem completely separate. One of them is got a source address of 10.1, the other ones 20.1, well, you know what? This laptop moved from one side the building to the other and got a different address, it's actually the same device. But based on the traditional security events you're getting from the existing tools, you know, you're going to think it's two separate events, and they're not. Likewise, one of the things that's coming out is that people start to use DNS as an audit trail. And one of the challenges for organizations is, if you get a data breach, what's one of the first questions a journalist is going to ask you is like, well, what is the scope of the breach? What was impacted? And quite often organizations are not prepared. They come back and say, well, at this stage, we don't know. That's a great way for a CEO or CFO to get fired. So a smarter way of doing it is, if you think about you got the devices under investigation, the DNS queries that those* machines have been making is a wonderful audit trail of not just the external resources it's been accessing, but also the internal resources as well, what has been potentially exposed. So I think from the forest report, we're certainly seeing people realizing what were their biggest challenges security operations. Essentially, the DDI data is almost like the oil that's going to grease the wheels of security operations. And if you don't do that, buying more security gear, it's not going to make the problem better, it's actually going to make it worse unless you can operationalize it. >> Yeah, at the end of the day, the failures right there in the low level of critical infrastructure and building floors no one cares what happened on the 10th floor foundations. I got to get your thoughts on this because as you guys have DDI abstraction, DNS, you know, as it's growing, had its evolutions with abstractions, you know, as these things kind of flex, used to be an old expression DNS tricks, you know, you would mangle DNS, and it was a naming system. So you use it the way you use it and then new innovation layers create more upside and more, takes away complexities. How does DNS scale enable value? Because now you got Cloud, you got Cloud native, new software's being written and developers want to rely on the DNS as a critical infrastructure, but also want to be enabled to have, you know, really robust applications. >> Yeah and I think with the, given the fact that all the work has been put into DNS over the last 20 or 30 years, work has resolved in a very highly available very resilient system. And so a lot of stuff has to go wrong for DNS to fully go down. And it's easy to just take things like *Anycast, Anycast allows you to connect to the nearest DNS server, that's going to give you the resolution. So it's going to give you the best performance. This also can give you the high availability and resilience that goes along with that. And I think also from the security guys point of view, is if all the things that we've started to realize is that DNS is a great avenue by which you can detect somewhat unique threats. So one of the things that comes up quite a lot, we're starting to see old malware being re weaponized to exfiltrate data over DNS. So if you're a DevOps guy, and you're building your new application, if someone compromises your application, if I tried to extract the data over HTTP or email, you probably have a solution for that. 6But how many organizations have visibility in the billions of DNS queries that's going to come out your network in a day. Which ones are those might be actually data that has been stolen, it gets encoded and corrupted, chopped up and sent out and DNS packets. Is very difficult for traditional security appliances to understand and really differentiate between legitimate DNS requests, the malicious ones are actually the ones who are benign applications that essentially tunnel over DNS because they're trying to bypass firewalls. So increasingly, DNS is a threat vector for basic data loss. It's also important to understand is really gives you a window into what the adversary is doing. So not just when it comes to data exfiltration, but other things like domain generation algorithms that allow adversaries to maintain control of devices that they compromised. So a lot of that stuff is not just about the high availability and the ubiquity of DNS, but also making sure you can be fully on top of the potential impact of DNS being exploited as a potential backdoor out of your network. >> Critical infrastructure, but also that's where you're going to see the footprints of any kind of activity right there, it's a great observation space as well for detection and analysis, great stuff. Craig, thank you for taking the time, great insight, great conversation. DNS is critical infrastructure, get on it, and people are on it, they're going to go the next level. Getting the next level networking experience is about having that security always on high availability, and protecting the bad guys. Craig, thanks for joining me on this CUBE conversation for the Infoblox virtual event. Thank you. >> Pleasure. Thanks for having me. >> Okay, that's the CUBE coverage of Infoblox is next level networking virtual event. I'm John Furrier, your hosts of the CUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hello everyone and welcome to this special presentation we're gonna introduce you to a new kind of company first you might recall we've been reporting extensively on multi cloud and the need to create consistent experiences across cloud at high performance now a key to that outcome is the ability to leave data in place where it belongs not moving it around and bringing a cloud like experience to that data we've talked about kubernetes as a multi cloud enabler but it's an insufficient condition for success latency matters in fact it's critical and the ability to access data at high speeds wherever that data lives well we believe be a fundamental tenet of multi cloud now today I want to introduce you to a company called vicinity V CIN ity the simplest way to think of this company is they turn wide area networks into a global land and with me is Craig Hobart to talk about this he's the VP at vicinity Craig good to see you again thanks a lot thanks Howie middays good to be back so when I first heard about this company I said wow no it can't that breaking the law of physics so first of all tell me a little bit background about the company sure yeah absolutely so about two decades ago this company was formerly known as Bay Microsystems they were they were asked to come up with a solution specific for the United States military and there was a couple of people involved in that that tender fortunately for us Bay Microsystems prevailed and they've had their solution in place with the US military for well over a decade approach in two decades so that is the foundation that is the infrastructure of where we originated so did I get it right it kind of come through what you do can you add some color to that yeah yeah as much as I can right so based on who the the main consumer is so we do some very creative things where we we take the benefits of tcp/ip which is the retransmit the ability to ensure the data arrives there in one piece but we take away all the bad things with it things like dropping packets typically ones are lossy networks and and most people are accustomed to two fiber channel networks which of course which are lossless right and so what we've done is take the beauty of tcp/ip but remove the hindrances to it and that's how we get it to function at the same speeds as Al and overall one so but there's got to be more to it than that I mean it just sounds like magic right so you're able to leave data in place and access it at very low latency very high speeds so you know what's the secret sauce behind that is it is it you know architecture patents I mean yeah absolutely so we have over 30 unique patents that contribute to that we're not just doing those things that I just thought about before is a lot more we're actually shortly in the typical OSI stack the the moving through those layers and using our DMA so a lot of companies users today obviously infinite out uses in between the nodes Dell uses at HP is it's a very ubiquitous technology but typically it has a very short span it's designed for low latency as a 21-foot limitation there's certain things you can do to get around that now so what we did in our earlier iterations is extend that so you could go across the world but utilizing that inside a proprietary sort of l2 a tunneling protocol allows you to reinstate those calls that happened on the local side and bring them up on the other side of the world so presumably that sets up for Rocky it does yeah and rocky to you absolutely so we use that we use it converged Ethernet we can do some magical things where we can go in InfiniBand and potentially come out rocky at the other end there's a lot of really good things that we do obviously if it uh bans expensive converged Ethernet it's a lot more feasible and a lot easier to adapt when we can make sure I understand this so you think InfiniBand you're thinking you know in a data center you know proximate and shocking synchronous distances are you saying that you can extend that we can but extended not extending finna band but you're saying you can you translate it into Ethernet yeah yeah we we translate into we have some proprietary mechanisms obviously that that all the patents on but in essence that's exactly what we're doing yeah we take in the earlier years InfiniBand and extend that to wherever it needed to be over any distance and and now we do it with conversion and infinite in like speeds yeah yeah so obviously you've got that we can't get around physics oh I mean it for instance between our Maryland office and our San Jose office it's a 60 millisecond r/t team we can't get beyond that we can't achieve physics but what we can do is deliver us sometimes a 20x payload inside that same RTT so in essence you could argue that would be due to the speed of light by delivering a higher payload is what's the trade-off I mean there's got to be something here yeah so it's today it's not it's not ideal for every single situation if you were to do a transactional LTP a database at one side of the world to the other it would that would not be great for that something files yeah so so what we actually do I mean some some great examples we have is seismic data we have some companies that are doing seismic exploration and it used to take a lot of time to bring that data back to shore copied to a disk array and then you know copied to multiple disk arrays across the world so people can analyze it in that particularly use case we bring that data back we can even access it via satellite directly from the boats that are doing the the surveys and then we can have multiple people around the world looking at that sample live when we do a demonstration for our customers that shows that so that's one great example of time to market and getting ahead of your competition what's the file system underneath so we have a choice of different file system is a parallel file system we chose spectrum Connect it's a very ubiquitous file system it's well known it has there is no other file system that has the the hours of runtime that that has we off you skate the complexities from the customers we do all of the tuning so it's a custom solution and so they don't see it but we do have some of the hyper scales that want to use lustre and cluster and be GFS and things that we can accommodate those so you have a choice but the preferred is gpfs is a custom one we have you absolutely if somebody wants to use another one we have done that and can certainly have dialogues around it could talk about how this is different from competitors I think of like guys like doing Wayne acceleration sure sure yeah so what acceleration regardless of who you are today with it's predicated upon caching substantial caching and some of the problems with that are obviously once you turn on encryption that compression and those deduplication or data reduction technologies are hampered in that caching based on who our primary customer was we're handed encrypted data from them we encrypted as well so we have double layers of encrypted data and that does not affect our performance so massive underlying technological differences that allow you to adapt to the modern world with encrypted data so we've been talking about I said in the intro a lot about multi cloud can you tell us sooner where do you fit in but first of all how do you see that evolving sure and where do you guys fit in Joe so I actually read to assess very certain dividends I read your article before we had a dialogue last week and there was a good article talking about the complexities around multi cloud and I think you know you look at Google it's got some refactoring involved in it they're all great approaches we think the best way to deal with multi cloud today is to hold your data yourself and bring those services that you want to it and before we came along you couldn't do that so think now a movie studio we have a company in California that needs people working on video editing across the world and typically they would proliferate multiple copies out to storage in India and China and Australia and not only is that costly but it's incredibly time consuming and in one of those instances it opens up security holes and the movies were getting hacked and stolen and of course that's billions of dollars worth of damage to to any movie company so by having one set of security tenants in your in your physical place you can now bring anybody you want to consume that day to bring them all together bid GCP AWS as you for the compute and you maintain your data and that segues well into things like gdpr and things like that where the data isn't moving so you're not affected by those rules and regulations the data stays in one place it's we think it's a huge advantage so has that helped you get some business I mean the fact that you have to move data and you can keep it in you can give us an example yeah it absolutely doesn't mean if you think of companies like pharmaceutical companies that have a lot of data to process whether it's electron microscopy data nano tissue samples they need heavy iron to do that we're talking craze so we can facilitate the ability to rent out supercomputers and the security company of the farmers is happy to do that because it's not leaving the four walls present the data and run it live because we're getting land speeds right we're giving you land speed performance over the wine so it's it's possible we've actually done it for them to do that craze make money by renting the farmers are happy because they can't afford craze it's a great way to accelerate time to marketing in that case they're making drug specific for your genome specific for your body tissue so the efficacy of the drugs is greatly improved as well well as you have been we know the storage business primary storage right now is I've said it's a knife fight yeah and it's a cloud is eating away at it flash was injected and gave people a lot of head rooms and they're not buying spindles for performance anymore but but data protection and backup and and data management is really taking off do you guys fit in there is are there use cases for you you there when you think of companies like cookie City and rubric and and many others that are the cloud seems to be a tailwind for them is it a tailwind for you I think so and I think he just brought up a great point if you look at and again another one of your articles I'm giving you some thanks Rick you know saying I won't forget it is the article you wrote I thought was excellent about how data is changed it's not so much about the primary data now it's about the backup data and what rubric and cohesive tea especially have done is bring value to that data and they've elevated it up the stack for analytics and AI and made available to DevOps and that's brilliant but today that can find it too within the four walls of that company what vicinity can do for those companies has come along and make that data available anywhere in the world at anytime so if they've got different countries that they're trying to sell into that may have diff back up types or different data they can access this and model the data and see how it's relevant to their specific industry right as we say our zeros and ones are different than your zeros and ones so it's a massive expansion it take that richness that they've created and extrapolate that globally and that's what facility brings to the table you know within the days of big data we used to look at high performance computing as an example going more into commercial notes that's clearly happened but mainstream is still VMware is there a VMware play for you guys or opportunity great question great question in q1 of this year so so January end of January 2020 typically in the intro we talked about how we were born on a6 which is incredibly expensive and limited you get one go ahead and then we move to FPGAs we actually wrote a lot of libraries that took the FPGAs into a VMware instance and so what we're doing now with our customers is when we go in and present they say there's no way you can do this and we show them the demo when we actually leave they can log-in download to VMware instances put one in in these case one the west coast or with one of my customers we have now one on the east coast one in London download the VM and see the improvement that we can get over their dedicated lines or even the Internet by using the VM fact we did that in a test with AWS last week and got a 90 percent improvement just using the VM so when you are talking to customers what's the you know what's the the situation that you're looking for the the problem that comes up that you say bone that's vicinity maybe you could show not you do slash call in there so I think a lot of that is people looking to use multi cloud right that aren't sure which way they want to go how they want to do it and for other companies that can't move the data there's a lot of companies that either went to the cloud and came back or cannot go to the cloud because of the sensitivity of the data so and also things like the the seismic exploration right there is no cloud solution that makes that expedient enough to consume it as it's been developed and so anybody that needs movie editing large file transfer dr you know if you're moving a lot of files from one location to another we can't get involved in storage replication but if it's a file share we can do that and one of the great things we do is if you have cysts or NFS shares today we can consume those shares with the with the spectrum scale the gpfs under the cover and make that appear anywhere else in the world and we do that through our proprietary technology of course so now remote offices can collapse a lot of the infrastructure they have and consume the resources from the main data center because we can reach right back here at land space they just become an extension of the land no different than me plug in the laptop into an Ethernet you pay a penalty on first byte we do but it's almost transparent because of the way tcp/ip works very chatty yeah it is so we drop all that and that that's a great question an analogy we use in house is you turn on a garden house and it takes a few seconds for that garden hose to fill but with us that water stream is constant and it's constantly output in water with tcp/ip a bit stop start stop start stop start and if you have to start doing retransmit which is a regular occurrence of tcp/ip and that entire capacity of that garden hose will be dropped and then refilled and this is where our advantage is the ability to keep that full and keep serving data in that what you just described makes people really think twice about multi clouds essentially they want to put the right workload in the right place and kind of leave it there and essentially it's like the old mini computer days they're creating you know silos you're helping sort of bridge those we are that and that is the plot and so you know we have B to B we are B to C I mean if you sit and think about the possibilities I mean it could end up on every one of these right this software you know do we tackle every Wireless point this is this is some of the things that we can do you're an app or do we put vicinity on that to take the the regular tcp/ip and send the communication you know through through our proprietary Network around proprietary configuration so there's a lot of things that we can do we can we can affect everybody and that is that is the goal so divide by hardware from you or software or both that's another great question so if you are in a data center in the analogy I just gave before about being a a big data center you would use a piece of hardware that's got accelerants in it and then the remote office could use a smaller piece of hardware or just the VM with the movie company example I gave you earlier India and Australia is edit in live files on the west coast of the United States of America just using the VM so it depends what we come in as we look at your needs and we don't oversell you we try and sell you the correct solution and that typically is a combination of some hardware in the main data center and some software at the others so I've said you know multi-cloud in many ways creates more problems today than it solves you guys are really in there attacking that multi-cloud is a reality it's it's happening you know I said historically it's been a symptom of multi-vendor but now it's becoming increasingly a strategy and I think frankly I think companies like yours are critical in the ecosystem to really you know drive that transformation for organizations so congratulations thank you thank you we hope so and I'm sure we'll be seeing more of you in the future excellent well thanks for coming in Craig and we'll talk to you soon thank you for watching everybody this is Dave latte for the cube and we'll see you next time

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE. Covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward here at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We are joined by Craig Le Clair, he is the vice president of Forrester and also the author of the book "Invisible Robots in the Quiet of the Night: How AI and Automation will Restructure the Workforce". Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Craig: Thank you! Thanks for having me. >> And congratulations, it's already made #11 on Amazon's AI and automation bestseller list. >> Wow, it's not quite best seller but OK, that's great, thank you, it's doing well. >> So if anyone calls your book a bestseller you just take 'em on that. >> (Craig) I'll just take it. >> So it is a, it's a bleak story right now, I mean there's a lot, there's so many changes going on in the workforce and there's so much anxiety on the part of workers that they're going to lose their job that all these technologies are going to take away their their livelihood, so how are companies managing this? Are they managing it well, would you say, or is the anxiety misplaced? Give us an overview. >> Yeah, so I don't think companies are really aware of the broader implications of the automation and AI that's developing. They tend to focus on the things that companies focus on. They focus on more efficiency and productivity and so forth, and underlying that is this digital anxiety that we call it, and the fact that a lot of the jobs that we, particularly the middle class have, the working class have, are the targets of the invisible robots, and that's really the point of the invisible robot book is that there's a lot of media attention on the hardware aspects of robotics, in fact the Super Bowl last year had 10 commercials with hardware robots. But if you look at this conference you look at the number of people here. What are these people doing? They're going back to their companies and saying "You know, this UiPath, and there are other providers "in the market, we can build software robotics, "we can build bots to do some of these tasks "that a lot of these humans are doing." And while there is elevation of the human capability in spirit for many of them, there's also a comfort level in employees that do things that they have control over, have incited. And when you extract those you are left with a series of more exciting moments, perhaps, but it's not going to make you more relaxed as an employee. And then you look at the overall job numbers, and our estimates are very conservative compared to some of the other reports, that are 45, 50% of workers over 10 years being displaced. We think it's 16%, but still, when you look at just the US numbers, that's of 160 workers today, 160 million workers, that's a lot of people. >> Rebecca: It is indeed. >> So, displaced and then sort of re-targeted or? >> A percentage, >> Vaporized. >> No, no, well the 16% is the automation, is the net loss of jobs. Now in that, automation's expensive, so there are a tremendous number of new jobs that are created by the work that's been going on here. So we have a formula to calculate that for these 12 different work personas, and the work personas have different relationships to AI and automation, so you would be crossed so many knowledge workers and be very well protected for a long time. >> Rebecca: All right, there we go. >> So you're good, but... for coordinators, people that have clip boards in their hands, for those who work in cubicles, they're going to have a lot of people leaving those cubicles that aren't going to be able to migrate to other personas. And so we have a changed management issue, we need to start driving more education from the workplace through certification, and that's a really critical thing I'll talk about tomorrow, that the refresh of technology with automation is 18 months to 24 months, you can't depend on traditional education to keep up, so we need a different way to look at training and education and for many it's going to be a much better life, but there's going to be many that it will not be. >> What was the time frame for your net 16% loss? >> 10 years. >> 10 years, okay, to me a lower net loss number makes sense, and in fact if you can elongate your timeline it probably shows a net job creation, you can make that argument anyway I don't know if you. >> Craig: It's being made. >> Dave: You don't buy it though? >> I don't, the world economic foundation and others are having huge net new numbers for jobs based on AI. Some of the large integration companies that want to build AI platforms for you are talking about trillions of dollars that would be added value to the world economy, I just don't buy it, and you know the reason I wrote this book was because what's going on here is very quietly preparing to displace a lot of efforts starting with relatively small tasks, it's called task automation but then expanding to more and more work and eventually adding a level of intelligence to the task automation going on here, that's going to take a lot of jobs. And for most of those 20 million cubicle workers, they have high school educations. You know, the bigger problem is this level of anxiety, you know, you go into almost any bookstore and there's a whole section For Dummy books, and it's not, is it because we have this sort of cognitive recession or because there's a, it's because the world's getting faster and more complicated. And unless you have the digital skills to adapt to that, the digital skills gap is growing. And we need to have as much focus that you see here and energy on building automation. We need to have an equal amount of focus on the societal problems. >> Yeah, it really comes down to education, too. I mean if I were able to snap my fingers and transform the educational system, there might be a different outcome but that's very unlikely to happen. Craig, one of the things we talked about last year was you had made the statement that some of these moonshot digital transformations aren't happening for a variety of reasons but our PA is kind of a practical way to achieve automation. >> Still very true. >> Have you seen sort of a greater awareness in your client base that, "You know, hey, maybe we should dial down "some of these moonshots and just try to "pick some clear winners." >> Yeah, we have a number of prediction reports coming out from Forrester and they're all saying basically that. I'm doing reports on what I'm calling the intelligent process automation market and that's really our PA plus AI, but not all aspects of AI. You know, it's AI that you can see in ROI around, you know it's AI that deals with unstructured documents and content and email. It's not the moonshot, more transformative AI that we have been very focused on for a number of years. Now all of that's very very important. You're not going to transform your business by doing task automation even if it's a little more intelligent and handles some decision management, you still need to think about "How do I instantiate "my business algorithmically," with AI that's going to make predictions and move decision management and change the customer experience. All that's still true, as true as it was in 2014/2015, we're just seeing a more realistic pull back in terms of the invested profile. >> Well, and so we've been talking about that all day, it is taking automating processes that have been around for a long time, and you, I think identified this as one of the potential blockers before, if you get old processes that are legacy and I think you, you gave the story of "Hey, I flew out here "on American Airlines in the old SABRE system." How old are those processes, you know? We've, you know the old term "paving the cow path." So the question is, given all the hype around RPA, the valuations, et cetera, what role do you see RPA having in those sort of transformative use cases? >> Well here's the interesting thing that was, I think, somewhat accidental by the, you know what really changed from having simple desktop automation? Well you needed some place to house and essentially manage that automation, so the RPA platforms had to build a central management capability. UiPath calls that the orchestrator, others call it the control tower, but when you think of all the categories of AI none of them have a orchestration capability, so the ability to use events to link in machine intelligence and dispatch digital workers or task automation to coordinate various AI building blocks as we call them and apply it to a use case, that orchestration ability is pretty unique to the RPA platforms. So the sort of secret value of RPA is not in everything that's being talked about here but eventually is going to be as a coordinating mechanism for bringing together machine learning that'll begin in the cloud, conversational intelligence that might be in Google. Having the RPA bots work in conjunction with those. >> But if I recall, I mean that's something that you pointed out last year as well that RPA today struggles with unstructured data that... >> Well it can't do it. >> You're right, we've talked about it NLP versus RPA, RPA, given structured data, I can go after it. >> That's the RPA plus AI bit, though. I mean, you take text analytics layer, and you combine it with RPA bots and now you have the unstructured capability plus the structured capability that RPA does so well. And, with the combination of the two, you can reach. I think what the industry needs to do or the buyers of RPA need to take the pressure off this immediacy of the ROI. In a sense, that's what's driven the value. I can deploy something, I can get value in a few months but, to really make it effective and transformative you need to combine it with these AI components, that's going to take a little longer, so this sort of impatience that you see in a lot of companies, they should really step back and take a look at the more end to end capabilities and take a little hit on the ROI immediately so that you can do that. >> No, I mean I can definitely see a step function, okay, great, we've absorbed that value, we get the quick ROI, but there's, to your point there's got to be some patient capital to allow you to truly transform in order for RPA, I don't want to put words in your mouth, to live up to the hype. >> Absolutely, I totally agree. And I am still very, very high on the market, I think it's going to do extremely well. >> Well, if you look at the spending data, it's quite interesting. I mean RPA as a category is off the charts. You know, UiPath, from the, your last wave kind of took the lead but, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism spending, even in traditional incumbents, maybe not even RPA, maybe more "process automation" like Pegasystems. Their spending data suggests that this is the rising tide lifting all boats so, my question to you is, how do you see this all shaking out? I mean, huge evaluations, the bankers are swarming around. You saw them in the media yesterday. You know, at some point there's got to be a winner takes most. The number two guy will do pretty well and then everybody else kind of consolidates. What's your outlook? >> Well, there are a lot of emerging players coming into the market and, part of my life is having to fend them off and talk to them, and the RPA wave is coming out in a week. It's going to have four new players in it. Companies like SAP. >> Well, they acquired a company right? >> They acquired and they built internally, and have some interesting approaches to the market. So you are going to see the big players come into the market. Others I won't mention that'll be in the market in a month It's getting a lot of attention. But also I think that there are domains, business domains that, the different platforms can start to specialize in. The majors, the UiPaths to the world, will be horizontal and remain that way. And depend on partners to tailor it for a particular application area. But you're going to see RPA companies come into the testing market, software testing market. You're going to see them come into the contact centers to deal with attended mode in more sophisticated ways perhaps than those that don't have that background. You're going to see tailored robots that are going to be in these robot communities that are springing up. That'll give a lot of juice to others to come into the market. >> And like you say you're going to see, we've talked about this as well Rebecca, the best of breed versus the suite, right? Whether its SAP, Inforce talking about it, I'm sure Oracle will throw its hat in the ring I mean, why not, right? Hey, we have that too. >> Well, if you're those companies that the RPA bots are feasting on, they're slowing the upgrades to your core platforms, in some ways making them less relevant, because their argument has been, let's integrate, you get self integration when you buy SAP, when you buy Oracle, when you buy these big platforms. Well, the bots actually make that argument less powerful because you can use the bots to give you that integration, as a layer, and so they're going to have to come up with some different stories I think if they're going to continue to move forward on their platforms, move them to the cloud and so forth. >> So, finally, your best advice for workers in this new landscape and how it is going to alter their working lives. And also, your best advice for companies and managers who are, as you said, maybe not quite, they're grappling with this issue but maybe not and they're not being disingenuous to workers about who's going to lose their jobs, but this idea of as they're coming to terms with understanding quite all of the implications of this new world. >> Yeah, I know, I'm presenting data tomorrow that shows that organizations, employees, and leaders are not ready and I have data to show that. They're not understanding it. My best advice, I love the concept of, it's not a Forrester concept, it's called constructive ambition. This is the ability in an employee to want to go a little bit out of the box, and learn, and to challenge themselves, and move into more digital to close that digital skills gap. And, we have to get better at, companies need to get better at identifying constructive ambition in people they're hiring, and also, ways to draw it out. And to walk these employees up the mountain in a way that's good for their career and good for the company. I can tell you, I'll tell a few stories on the main stage last night, I interviewed Walmart employees and machinists that could no longer deal with their machine because they had to put codes into it so they had to set it up with programming steps and the digital anxiety was such that they quit the job. So a clear lack of constructive ambition. On the other hand, a Walmart employee graduated from one of their 200 academies and was able to take on more and more responsibility. Somebody with no high school degree at all. She said, "I've never graduated "from anything in my life. "My kids have never seen me "succeed at anything, and I got this certification "from Walmart that said that I was doing this level "of standard work and that felt really, really good." So, you know, we, companies can take a different view towards this but they have to have some model of future of work of what it's going to look like so they can take a more strategic view. >> Well Craig, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a really great talk. Another plug for the book, "Invisible Robots in the Quiet of the Night" you can buy it on Amazon. >> Craig: Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone, it's theCUBE's coverage of Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019 here in Miami Beach, Florida, at the Fontainebleau hotel. I'm John Furrier hosting theCUBE. We're here with Craig Weir, Director of Cloud Portfolio at Ingram Micro. Welcome to theCUBE. Director of Cloud Portfolio at Ingram Micro Cloud, so you guys have a cloud and you guys have sales, technicals out there? >> We got everything, so we have the platform itself, so we have our own platform that is used by one-third of the world telcos. We have large VAR's, DVAR's, SP's using our platform. We're also a cloud aggregator, so we offer pretty much any vendor solution on there, so today, we have over 200 solutions on our platform. We offer services to help partners grow and expand because jumping from where they are today to where they want to go tomorrow is very difficult, so we offer those services, so it's a full package. >> You know, I'm really impressed with Ingram. I got to tell you, Ingram Micro, you guys have essentially reinvented you guys' self in plain sight, so it's like changing the airplane out of 35,000 feet, it's really hard to do. You guys have done it, you've essentially taken a distribution model to the cloud, maintained that stickiness with your clients and partners, and now have automation built in. >> Yeah, we always talk about: we're building a plane while we fly it. And we've been doing that for 10 years. We were the first to get into cloud, we're the world's largest distributor, we know that, but times are changing and you need to adapt with it. So we want to get ahead of the curve, being that we want to own the platform, so we made large acquisitions to be the number-one platform provider. We also want to do the value-added service because partners today want to make that change. They're starting to make that change, but they're not sure exactly how to do it or how to monetize it correctly. So we realized, earlier on, we need to make a massive investment and DNA change in what we do. The old word of pick, pack, and ship is gone, right? Distributing now means a million things that we do. We're more of a service provider than we are anything else. >> Yeah, it's so funny, and also, gross margin used to be higher in the old days. When they started to get hit, started getting out of that direct distribution, there was margin pressure, and again, channel businesses are very efficient. The weak don't survive very long and the ones that are smart actually evolve. This is a great case where you can wrap services around it and, with the cloud, you get operating leverage. So you have an investment, now you have a business model for the next 10, 20 years. >> Yeah, if you think about distributions' basis points, it's a term that doesn't really exist outside distribution where you're razor-thin on those margins, but to your point on cloud, it's much heavier lift, it's much more cooperative selling, so obviously, we want to focus there where we can have growth at a higher profitable rate. And, if you can wrap around platform services around that and make you more money and give more value to the channel, why not? >> Well, that's what the channel wants. They want profitability, want to keep their customers, and increase their gross profit, and that's from services. Now, with software economic margins coming in, the revenue is higher. Software economics are great. >> Yeah, and I think a lot of partners today, NSP's, LAR's, VAR's, DVAR's, they don't really know what is their company actually worth? What's the multiple, right? And they're trying to do that assessment of how much your businesses are actually services and how much is that just reoccurring on an annuity basis, not managed service in some respect. So, for us, we look at that and say, well, how do we actually help you migrate that business? We want to get you to 60, 50, 70% services-led where you're making an average of 10, 20, 30 points. >> And a lot of your partners too have long-standing relationships with customers. And so, by you innovating, that just trickles down to them. That makes it sticky for you guys, great business model. Craig, talk about your relationship with Acronis. We're here at their Global Cyber Summit 2019. Talk about what you guys are doing with them. >> So we've been with Acronis for six years now. We're their largest distributor worldwide. We operate from pretty much every country we operate. They're one of our leading, actually, they are our leading backup disaster recovery and cybersecurity solution. We've an amazing partnership at every single level. When it comes to how we go to market, how we back its position, how we recruit enable partners, it's really next to none. We've very, very aggressive timelines and goals for next year for where we want to go, and where that means it's actually growth, expansion, service offering, no matter what head count we have towards this initiative. Acronis is our number-one provider. >> They have a similar DNA and they're thinking like you guys do with the cloud, thinking about how that transformation business model evolved for Ingram Micro. They're seeing it now with their unique integrated... Well, it won't be unique for long 'cause I think everyone is going to copy it. This integrated holistic view having a platform that's an enable, not just hardware, the infrastructure, where they got a platform layer which is enabling capabilities for sets of services on top. Theirs and their ISV's and developers, I mean that's just a proven platform formula. What's your feedback on that? Do you see that translating well in the field, in the partner networks? >> Yeah, very well, I think today, you think of backup disaster recovery as legacy backup disaster recovery. Where am I backing up to, why am I backing? It's for that disaster. Not remediation of issues, security risks. You're seeing them go into a completely security play which someone argues and says it makes no sense, your backup disaster recovery, your BDR. But, if you think of the ransomware attacks today, the fact that I can have a safe copy hooked up in minutes, the ransomware is no longer an issue. And how they position that is really a security end-to-end solution. It doesn't mean you don't need any other security. Obviously, you still do. But it comes at a very different angle and I think it provides a bit of clarity to customers who are confused. They said that earlier, they mentioned: how many different security providers are becoming open every single day? >> No one wants to buy another tool. >> No, and there's no more large mega offer. There's no one solution. >> You know, solving the ransomware problem certainly is a great way to get breached in any account. Hey, I get the mousetrap for solving ransomware. In that case, that's when a better mousetrap works. You're right to the front of the line. Then, once you're in there, then you got to figure it out. This is what's interesting to me is that it's a data solution. I think you cracked that nut, it's a winning formula. >> If you think of a really basic, what are we trying to do or who are we trying to protect? Either people or information, right? We're not worrying about protecting people today. We're talking about information, so at the end of the day, what's most vital for a company's organization? You're looking at their customer data, their personal data, financial data, and if you think about would you want them to have access to, how do you want to mediate that? So the ability of end-to-end and how that story, which was really, really important to the customer, to have the clarity on why, is critical. >> Well, you guys do a great job on security. I read your reports every year that go out at VMworld and Reinvent, all the different events you guys go to. You guys have great security groups, props to those guys. I want to get back to this data backup thing that you mentioned earlier 'cause we had some insight from our conversation. I was just on with a Forrester analyst where, if you look at backup and recovery, it was basically because it was some operational disruption. That had nothing to do with security. I was like, lights go out, hurricane, Hurricane Sandy, whatever happens, something's happening. And that was all built around the continuity of its down rollback. But now the disruption is security. So no one's actually thought about it that way. So I think these guys have a great angle. I'm thinking of it like, well, if the disruption's security, that eliminates almost all the current solutions because they're just rolling back bad code. >> I don't think it eliminates all of them, but it's a great point. >> Well, the majority of them. >> You sit there and go, well, why is Acronis a security provider? It makes no sense. And you sit back and start thinking about the approach 'cause, again, we're thinking old BD and R. The new world of backup and disaster recovery is not the disaster being a natural occurrence or something with this were to happen. It's the every-single-day cyberattack and ransomware that's happening on a regular basis. That's the new norm. New norm isn't the hurricane, it isn't the cyclone, it's security attacks every day. >> And, happening weekly, two towns are being taken out. Craig, observations from your standpoint being an industry participant. Got experience out there in the field, talked to a lot of customers. You guys have your own cloud. Just in general, the top story of this whole cyber protection, security, data world, what's the top story in your mind? What's the most important story that needs to be continually covered and talked about? >> I think what we're missing today is a lot of partners aren't protecting their own house. At the end of the day, when an MSP is looking after their end user's data, do they really understand what they're responsible for? Do they have the right system in place, right? It's back to the constant security attacks. We're seeing, time and time again, MSP's, medium to small, are having massive breaches and going out of businesses in no time. You see MSP's who want to go to MSSP, but that requires-- >> John: What's that mean? >> Managed security service provider. >> John: Okay, all right. >> So you're an MSP specializing, dedicated on... And security, you have a SOC, which means you have a security operational center, meaning that you have to either buy that or go and invest on it or maybe partner with somebody. It's incredibly expensive. So MSP's today-- >> John: The compliance and the insurance alone. >> The compliance, insurance, the expertise. There's a massive shortage of people. So we see the MSP's today may be fine. Maybe 10% could go make that leap to MSP so that everyone else is figuring out: how do I manage the security space? I have all these different offers I have and solutions I have. A lot of them are homegrown, they're not very good. So, at the end of the day, when we look at what's missing is, hey, if you're an MSP, is your own house protected? Before you try to put everyone else's. Because, if you're managing all that data from that partner, you better make sure your house is protected. >> Protect your own house and I think that's interesting, what just came out of Acronis is that, it's a little bit of a flashy announcement, but the blockchain notary, they say, hey, we'll protect the data in all forms and we'll encrypt it on a blockchain. So that speaks to this blockchain problem. Well, data's a supply chain. >> It is, and you sit there... Again, let's talk old backup disaster recovery. You have data somewhere, it's a copy of your file. Do you know it's a clean copy, an authentic file? Do you know that something hasn't happened to it? And before, we never would've known that. Now we do. >> Yeah, well, I've always said in theCUBE, Dave Vellante and I talk about storages, not about the storage, CPU's and the hardware, but the data that's being stored. Take care of your own house first before you take on other people's data. I love that analogy. >> Yeah and customers are getting smart these days. Customers are looking, they're doing reading. Most customers look each at a time. They're looking at word-of-mouth, a trusted advisor, and they're doing research online. So they're demanding this. >> Craig, I really appreciate your insights. Thanks for taking time to share. Take a minute to give a plug for what you guys do in the cloud, how does someone get involved and work with you, what's a customer for you? Take a minute to give a plug out for what you guys do. >> So Ingram Micro, so we're the largest cloud organization in the world. We'll talk U.S. specifically. >> John: Cloud? >> U.S. cloud. >> John: Amazon's bigger. >> As a distributor. >> John: Okay, distributor cloud, that's what I thought. Just to make sure, you keep an eye on them. >> Yeah, no, it's a good point. So we actually are, we do distribute AWS, we do distribute Azure. They're largest for both of them in the channel perspective. But partners today, what I would say the opportunity to them is there's those who play very heavily in the space, then those that do not. Everyone is somewhere in the middle. Working with Ingram Micro, the ability to really, what we said, the Cloud Awesomeness Roadmap which we presented earlier, we're taking a partner from infancy maybe doing a handful of SaaS offers today to going 10, 20 offers on a regular basis. We really enable and train them to make that jump both financially and from a skillset perspective. >> Can anyone get involved? You guys have a vetting process? They have a cloud SaaS app? >> Yeah, so cloud marketplace, if you're an Ingram Micro account today, you have a free account into our cloud marketplace, which is our e-commerce buying engine which is built on CloudBlue, which is our platform. Free access to it, online purchasing of any SaaS offer you want, depending on what the authorizations are by the SaaS offer. Free access to our team when it comes to how to enable support them, whether it's security, UCA's, backup disaster recovery, public cloud, Microsoft, you name it. And it's really a team dedicated to help the problem solvers, which is everyone here today, solve the current problem of how to get more of an annuity subscription basis. >> Awesome, well, congratulations. Cloud marketplaces are hot, you guys are number-one channel, distributor, cloud, whatever it's called. Is there a category? >> For making new-- >> Channel cloud. >> Yeah, you could say-- >> Distributor cloud. >> We're a distribution service provider. >> Congratulations Ingram Micro trends. Building the plane while they're flying it, I love that one too. It's theCUBE, we're a-flying here in Miami Beach at the Fontainebleau hotel for Acronis' Global Cyber Summit 2019. We're back with more coverage after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.Next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of .Next Copenhagen Nutanix. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We're joined by Craig Routledge, he is the vice president HPE GreenLake Sales. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, good afternoon. >> So why don't you start by telling our viewers a little bit about HPE and GreenLake. >> So HPE is the part of the old HP empire that's focused specifically on the hybrid computing world. So in the data sensors, the hybrid cloud world, and the edge and we're providing technology and services to our customers and our channel partners. And will continue to do so. And the announcement that we've made this week here in Copenhagen, is the announcement of GreenLake for Nutanix. >> So I'm not sure how much of our audience is very familiar with it. I've got plenty of experience with the various HP cloud initiatives over the years. But this is you know, at it's core, as a service as my understanding and help us understand where that fits in a customers over all kind of cloud portfolio. >> Yeah if you kind of take it back to the go back to real basics, actually almost before cloud. The customers access HP technology and infrastructures through capital purchase, through leasing, and some cases through subscription models, as the industry calls them. And then GreenLake was born about nine years ago in fact to help customers match cost to revenue. So it's a pay-per-use model. And that's where it was originally born. Before really the cloud was almost it was kind of around but not really in any scale. And then over the years, we've adapted GreenLake to be the private cloud solution for many direct customers then for channel customers, for service providers and partners. And now we've added the Nutanix partnership as well which, we've been announced as being ready for sale today onstage. Which is great timing by my engineering team I'm pleased to say. They were up late last night finishing it off. So its gradually evolving but were not just doing the private world, we're increasingly working in an environment where the equipment is installed in a colo. But it's still dedicated to that customer. Its not a shared service. And we're also increasingly, through out analytics portal, connecting to the public cloud world. So we've announced we have significant partnerships with the public cloud providers. And we can meter and monitor the customers usage in that solution. So we can provide a single tool set that gives them the private cloud usage and who's using it, and connect them to the public cloud world so they can get the same functionality in the pubic cloud. So they can see how much our marketing department are spending on computing storage, and networking and virtualization et cetera. >> It's a very different way for customers to think about it and many ways it should become more natural. If I got it right, I heard you say, its by the VM, or the container or by a certain flash increment. Maybe explain that a little bit? And you know, when and where would a customer say, "Oh well I need an increment of something that underneath "has Nutanix." >> Ah well it's interesting, you make in interesting point there actually. It is about customers buying work clothes, its the same way you buy a film on Netflix, or you buy a series or you might choose to buy episodes two, three, five, ten and 12 but not the whole book effectively. Not the whole library. And you buy that by the units of measure. So in Netflix, its a video or something. In the GreenLake world, its by virtual machine, at the VRAM level effectively. It could be by container, so it's the actual kubernetes container level. It can be at the gigabyte of high performing storage level. So we've disconnected the linkage between infrastructures. So the customer doesn't choose that infrastructure. The customer gives us a workload, and then we specify how that workload is designed. We have some recommended architectures. We're just about to launch the second dissertation of our quoting tools, so that a customer can get a quote on their smartphone, or our sales people in the pilot stages will be able to produce a quote on the phone. Now when that moves into operation, its our service team that are monitoring the customers usage 24 by seven. We own the metering and the management technologies. So we can snapshot the customers usage in their infrastructure environment, as often as we need to. So on Black Friday, you can guarantee we snapshot every retail customer in our portfolio at least every 30 minutes. And if there's a financial services crisis, as various presidents pick a fight with a global trade war. Share prices bounce up and down >> Not naming names. >> And dollars go in different directions and the RMB goes you need to meter the usage very rapidly, very accurately, and very often. And that's what our metering technology does. Now the service part of this, is not only do we kind of make sure that's all running 24 by seven, part of our service is to do the capacity management for the customers. So we take that responsibility off them. And if we think that the portal is telling us and the intelligence built into the portal, and into the experienced service managers saying, "You need an upgrade, we need to upgrade this piece." Then we can produce a change control note, one or two days, sign it, and then we can get some more infrastructure capacity rolled in of the chosen architecture for that customer. >> Just describing what you were saying about the retailers on Black Friday, and then watching the currency fluctuate based on whatever our world leaders are tweeting about. How has this in your mind changed the way the business world works today? Just the fact that we can see all this information this real time data. >> Its changed the speed and I think it it's the change of speed at which companies like ourselves have got to operate. And I think it's changed the speed at which the IT teams inside the end customers got to operate. And they get, I think they probably got the harder job than we have. An IT manager in an organization these days, not only has to watch those macro factors, the dollar going up and down, Britain finally sorts out its position on Brexit, we won't go into that one. And the IT team have got to look at that and see the impact on the business. But they also got to cope with the very rapidly changing environment. And a whole user base, I mean I don't know if any of you I presume you had to download the app on your smart phones. You press it, and if it doesn't download in three seconds, you're going, "Is something wrong here?" and that level of expectation in terms of the delivery of new application requests, is inherent in the user base now. Particularly the younger people are coming through in the wave of early stage employees and our customers. They expect instant gratification almost. They want a new app. They're a bit vague about how they want it to run, but they want it today. Now. And they want to pay a low volume price per click basis. So that's kind of, we're partly reacting to many of those trends. Part of our solution is in fact we provide, if we think the initial sizes, lets just say we need 500 Vms. Or we need 400 Nutanix and GreenLake licenses. We always provide a buffer. And in the early stage, lets say its 20 percent buffer. And that gives the customer some overflow room. So not only when we provision above their utilization but without a buffer to de-risk it for them. At our risk. And that's to make sure the service is seamless. And that's something that IT departments are not used to. But it matches the expectation of the internalized, I call them the IT consumers really, in business. Or customers of a bank. You know you dial your bank up on your app and you want to know what your balance is. And if you want to move money from that account to that account, you want it to go straight away. But I had a chasting experience on Sunday. My bank, they've got the app is online on Sunday. But they don't move money on the weekends. Am I'm like what? (chuckles) That was a bit stunning. And so my expectation is fueled by this kind of instant society that we live in. Yeah. >> So its order able now? >> Craig: Yes. Its order able now, we finished it >> Available? >> Available within 30 days. I mean, we think we'll have it available by the end of the month for delivery. >> Great and from a customer standpoint, will the customer be asking for Nutanix GreenLake? How does it, how do you give them the decision tree or is it a customer saying, " I wanted Nutanix." >> We have some people that are far more technically oriented than I am, technically literate than I am. We have some pre sales specialists inside the Nutanix team and inside the HP team. And we have some sizing tools as well to help us. So if the customer comes to us and says they want a particular workload, because we've expanded the choice, if they are talking to HP we'll look at what's the right solution. And if its Nutanix, then we use the Nutanix pre sales teams to help us. And that seems to be a very popular message in the marketplace. And is resonating very well. So we're helping the customer make a choice and obviously in a indirect motion, the partners will be helping the customer make that choice. And then coming us to, they'll specify the technology solution and they'll come to us with a specification. We'll turn that into a detailed specification. And a detailed cost and contract. >> So just GreenLake has been around for nine years now is this the first HCI based offering in the GreenLake portfolio? >> We've been working on the, we've had GreenLake on SimplyVity, which is the HP owned HCI solution. Two and a half, maybe three years now. And very successfully, its working very well in a few large cases. But it works different it works at a different level with different scaling parameters. So this is actually, the Nutanix partnership, and the reason why the two CEO's were excited, was this gives the customer another choice. And it gives them another choice other than the default virtualization engine, which everybody uses. And it also brings in the Nutanix expertise in end user computing, they call it VDI as I would call it. But that expertise and in the database world, it brings their expertise in that space is very valuable to us. So it augments our portfolio, and it brings two solutions to them. Not just the GreenLake solution, pay per use solution. But it also bring the proven HP server technology into their appliance portfolio. >> And the alignment on the optionality ] is really what is also driving this. >> Yes. And it is, we're both genuinely believe in customer choice in options. If the customer only got one choice, A: you've only given what the customer one choice and you might win or might lose, but you're going to have a resentful customer. If the customer says they want to go with HP and we only give them one choice, or can only give them one choice. Doesn't make for a long term relationship. And certainly I think both companies, HP clearly we believe having you know, lifetime we value a customer for its lifetime relationship with us. So its very important that we offer the customer choice, then narrow down to the right solution, refine that solution and draw it up into a contract. >> Excellent, so it's the right choice. Craig Routledge you are now a Cube alum. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage from .Next.

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage. Day two of Cisco Live from San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin. Dave Vellante is my esteemed cohost. And we're pleased to welcome one of Cisco and Cohesity's customers from Quantium, Craig Tayler, Executive Manager at Business Technology and Platforms. Craig, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> Great seeing you. >> So, we love talking with customers. We love talking about data. Tell our audience a little bit about Quantium. I know you guys have expertise in two core domains, data science, AI, two really sexy topics that we talk about on theCUBE at every event. But give our audience a little bit of the flavor of who you guys are. >> Yeah, so Quantium's been around for 16 years, founded and headquartered in Sydney, Australia. And really, they are like you mentioned, the two main aspects of our business. So when you think of data science more as human intelligence, and then the AI side is how we can augment that with computers as much as possible. So, on the human intelligence side, we're looking at things like data curation, how can we work with a company to understand their data, perhaps monetize their data. And then on the AI side, we're more looking at things like, how do we do predictive modeling or predictive analytics, and how can we get that in front of maybe say a supply chain solution, or working with grocery stores around actually predicting how much fresh food they need. So we think of these things like, wouldn't it be great if we had a better idea of how much we needed? Less waste, less cost, everything else. So that's really how we kind of split the two sides of the company. >> You guys provide this as a service, is that right? >> Yeah, that's correct. So, with those two arms we focus on, whether it be a consulting engagement with a company, where that's a one-off, or an ongoing thing, and we have a range of products that we sell as well, with the idea that any of these companies, whether it be a bank or a retailer, can plug these tools into their existing solutions to give them some real data, some real impact, as opposed to the thoughts, or the feels, or the gut instincts, that we've been working on for so long, all right. >> So paint a picture of your environment. I mean, what does it look like? Cloud, not cloud, apps. >> Yeah. It's certainly a variety. So, if we think, on-premise is really where we do a lot of our work. And this is around, a lot of companies still feel a little bit sensitive around where their data is going, and they like that security of knowing physically where it's located. So on-premise stack we have a bit over 300 servers running a Hadoop cluster, that's where we do the majority of our AI work. And then what we augment that with is, and what we use the cloud a lot for, as we're doing work globally, we're doing a lot of work in North America, it's not feasible to bring all that data back to Sydney, process it, and send it all back, so then really, what we use the cloud for is to take our technology, take our analytics, to the data. So if we're working with a customer, West Coast, East Coast, and they're in Azure we'll deploy in Azure. If they're in GCP, we can deploy in GCP. And that's really how we use cloud is to offer our service, as much as we can, around the world. >> So you said, you got 300 servers, did I hear you right, in a Hadoop cluster, right? >> Yeah, correct. >> What's your distribution? >> We use MapR at the moment. I know there's certainly been a bit of news about them. >> I was going to ask you, well, all three of them. (Craig laughs) Well I guess Hortonworks now folded in, but-- >> Yeah, correct. Cloud has certainly shaken up that marketplace quite a bit. >> Dave: I'm sure, yeah. >> It's been something that we've been keeping a close eye on for quite a while. What's the future there? Is it another distribution? Will someone pick up MapR? Will they get through it? So it is interesting, it's certainly a challenge, but when you're playing in a more emerging space, these are some of the risks you take, but we've always felt that they're worth it. We've had many great years of that and we don't really see any reason that we're not going to get more great years out of that Hadoop environment. >> Yeah, I mean, the IP's going to survive, and it sounds like you guys were early on into it, you got a lot of value out of it. If you had to do it again, you'd probably do the same thing. >> Yeah, that's certainly true. I think, what we've built, there are cloud options on the hyperscale providers that you can use, but look, out of the box, they're not really capable of what we were trying to do. So if we had our time again, we probably would still build the same solution. We'd build it a little bit quicker, obviously, because it's a little bit more in the marketplace, it's not such an emerging technology, but I think we would do the same thing again. >> Dave: Right, and MapR was always ahead of the game with their approach. >> Correct. >> So, obvious question is, how do you protect that data? You're a Cohesity customer, but talk about the data protection aspect of that. >> Yeah, so this is where Cohesity really had a lot of synergies with us, was centralizing a whole raft of datasets into one location. And that's what we do with Hadoop. We take a lot of different datasets and we put it all there. We aggregate it there. So on the secondary data side we had the same problem. Silo datasets all over the environment. Things like, the protection aspect, the compliance aspect, it's not impossible, but it's very hard to manage. So what we really wanted to do was, what do we do with the data when we're not using it anymore? So we might still want to use it in the future, we have to hold onto it. And we needed a better solution for how we manage that. So, having Cohesity, which, to us, being a hyper-converged solution, it's very similar to how Hadoop works. It's a lot of data, a lot of compute, and that's how you deploy it. So we found that actually having all of that, the secondary kind of data that we still needed to keep, combined into one location, for us, it matched on a technology level. And then being able to have all that data in one space, you can do some analytics on it. How often are we using it? What is the data? How many copies of it do we have? So there are a lot of synergies from the data science aspect, and also the technology aspect, which has worked really well for us. >> So what was profound about Hadoop was the idea of bringing five megabytes of code to a petabyte of data, leaving the data where it is, highly distributed environment, obviously challenge protecting that. Help us understand. You're saying that Cohesity architecture is well-suited for that type of environment? >> Yeah, it certainly is. I mean, it augments it quite well, is how I'd say. So at the moment we keep the environments quite separate, but the way we manage them is very similar. So there's great audit login, great security controls that you can place on both environments. So the way that we structure Hadoop with role-based access, who can perform what action, the same thing applies in Cohesity. So now we sort of see that the way that we manage primary is the same way that we can manage secondary. So, it's easier for the staff, when we come to things like compliance or legislation, or, we value data, it's our lifeblood, so we have to be very careful with it. So if we want to do any audit reports or anything like this, we can do 'em the same way. Who has access, what they've done. >> So, Hadoop's been around a lot longer than Cohesity. So, what were you doing before Cohesity, and what were some of those challenges? >> Yeah, what we were doing was a lot. And that was really the only option we had. So we had four or five different solutions that had kind of organically grown over time, whether that was some secondary storage, multiple different backup products, throw a couple of NASes in there, just for good measure. >> Just in case. >> Yeah, just in case. And then really, what we were doing, and how we managed that, is we had close to one FTE dedicated to that environment. It's not great for that person, it's not really the funnest of jobs. And then obviously, the management of it becomes quite difficult. And so that was how we did it. We got by. But it certainly could have been a lot better. >> So that was one FTE dedicated to the backup? >> Just dedicated to the backup. >> Dedicated to data protection? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Okay. So then you bring in Cohesity, you do the business case, say oh wow, and part of that was we can free up this person to do other things, I presume, right? >> Yeah, yeah, definitely. That was actually certainly one of the key business cases. So, IT is a cost center. We certainly, we work for the business, we support the business, there's no doubt about that. But we are, at the end of the day, a cost center. So getting extra headcount or getting equipment, there has to be a really good business case behind this. And so we found that, so we freed up about 80% of time that we're spending on this, and so actually the two biggest things that we've seen as a benefit of that, staff engagement is actually a lot higher, right, because we don't have someone just dedicated to turning the screws on this old solution all the time. So they get to spend more time on newer tech, which is great, and obviously, if their time's freed-up, value-added activities. What can they be focusing on. >> So how's it work? Is it a self-service platform now? Or somebody, this individual, sets the overall policy, and then people apply it as they see fit, the application guys? >> Yeah, so we have a range. So our infrastructure team holds the overall management of it, and we have that one person who kind of, say rules it, so to speak, but the way we've done with this role-based access, we can give the service desk permission to search backups, so if someone needs a restore, or maybe legal and the compliance team want to know who was accessing what, we can give a lot more self-service to these teams. So the service desk, if they're dealing with an end-user that wants a restore, within 30 seconds, we can tell them, okay, here is the backup we have. Here are the dates that we have it. Which one do you want? Previously, that's a week-and-a-half turnaround. Escalate a ticket, spend three days doing restores and searching through it-- >> Dave: Working weekends. >> Right. Working weekends, and if you even do have the data. Typically what happens, by the time you've restored it, the customer has said, "Look, well I don't need it anymore." It's too late. >> So let's talk about some of the customer benefits. You've only deployed this about six months ago. >> Yeah, correct. >> You talked about a number of the benefits from a time perspective, allowing valuable FTEs to not only be reallocated for other projects, but also from a job satisfaction perspective-- >> Yeah definitely. >> Which is all the way up to the top end of the business. But in terms of helping customers extract more value from their data, monetizing their data, that example that you just gave of where it took too long to recover data before and the customer, the time has passed, what are some of the impacts that your customers are achieving so far? >> Yeah, so I think the biggest area of this that I think we actually look at the most, is that, like I mentioned earlier, we will do, say a piece of work with a customer, and then we'll keep that data. We might need it in the future, but there's not an ongoing engagement. What are we going to do with that? And so we tend to sort of put it aside. If a customer wants any further work done, or perhaps they want to come back with clarification, or anything like this, it then takes us quite a bit of time to find that data, get it back into production, get it back to the state that we were previously using it in. So, one of the biggest things that we've seen is actually now having all of that data always available on Cohesity, and being a hyper-converged platform, it has a lot of compute on it as well, so we can actually run some simple analytics on that data. So if a customer comes back and wants to query just a couple of small items, or perhaps we want to recheck a couple of things, super easy now for us to do that. And so we talk about time to market, or anything like this, is really big for us, and customer responsiveness. So if a customer is asking us a question and the answer is a five-minute answer, they don't want it in four days. So if we can turn that answer around a lot quicker, then obviously everyone's happier. >> And you've already been able to start achieving that? >> Yeah, we have been able to start achieving that already. Whether that be from a customer perspective, and certainly from a compliance perspective, if we have a customer that actually wants to know, where is our data, who has accessed it, everything else, we can turn that around straightaway. So obviously, when we talk about customer satisfaction, or that relationship, they feel a lot more comfortable that we're doing the right thing with their data, and that is obviously hugely invaluable for us as a business. >> And just another infrastructure question. These 300 servers, it's mostly UCS, is that right? Or a lot of UCS? >> Yeah, so we use Cisco for pretty much everything. We certainly are heavy, heavy users of UCS, and so, when we are looking at, I mean, implementing anything to the environment, you don't want it to be a lengthy process, because your return on investment is going to be hit. If you're spending three months installing something, you've already paid, you're getting no benefit out if it, it's now three months old before it's even implemented. So having this kit on Cisco UCS has been great for us, and we were having issues with our previous backup solution and we actually managed to implement the Cohesity solution on UCS and start using it before repairing our existing solution. So it's phenomenal how quickly, through UCS, we were able to bring it in. >> Dave: What kind of issues were you having? Just integration issues, or? >> Yeah, so with our previous backup solution, being a fragmented solution that we had stitched together, we had something as simple as a RAID controller failure caused a whole bunch of data corruption across multiple areas, and so, how the NAS saw the data corruption was different to how the SANDS saw it, and trying to re-index everything, we were struggling to understand what was going on. And whilst we were working through that, we actually had some other members of the team implement Cohesity and get it into the environment quicker than we could repair our existing solution. That's the power of Cisco UCS, really. >> Looking at this massive transformation that Cisco has been undergoing for a while, from a traditional network appliance vendor to now hardware, software, what are your thoughts on how that transformation, which is, in part, you could say, accelerated by DevNet, how is it going to enable businesses like yours to be able to start getting value even faster from the technology? >> Yeah, that's a very good question, and that's something, I think, a few of us in the industry, if we go back two, three, four, five years, was Cisco going to reinvent itself? What was that place? With hyperscale cloud, all these kind of things. I think quite a few people had some questions around what was going to happen in that space. They weren't always the quickest to market. They had great products, but there was a bit of speed issues there. And what we've seen as they've reinvented themselves is, Cisco has this great name for really being ahead of the curve, or leading industry, and this is, I think, what they were built on, really. And so it's been great from our perspective to see them, say, almost getting back to their roots a little bit, in this regard, and so for us, we are a technology business, we are fast-moving, our customers want things to be fast-moving, and so being able to rely on a technology partner like Cisco, and knowing that they're looking for the latest and greatest even quicker than ourselves, I think that's probably where we start to see the biggest impact. In the past, we might have a challenge that we need to solve, you talk to some vendors, and you might hear something like, oh, we're working on that. Maybe in 12 to 18 months we'll have it in the marketplace. Well we need it now. We don't need it in 18 months, it's a today problem. And that's not what we're seeing anymore with Cisco. Typically, any conversation we have with our account reps around here are some of the challenges, here are what our customers want to do, more frequently than not, our Cisco account reps will say, I think we have a solution for that. And that really, being able to partner with players like that in the industry, that makes some of the biggest differences for us as a company, because we need to partner with all these people to do what we do. >> Exactly. So, with all the momentum that you guys have achieved in just six short months, what's next? >> Yeah, Quantium is certainly a fast-moving company, like I mentioned, and what we wanted, we always like to run close to the leading edge, we're similar with Hadoop, we like to be early adopters. We like technology to grow with us. And this is what we saw in Cohesity. So, they haven't been around for long, and they're already doing everything we need. So we think, well this is a great mix. If we've got someone who's already solving everything that we need, this question of what next is great. And so as we move more towards your hyperscale cloud, being able to run Cohesity across all those environments to manage all of that data across all of it, that's certainly a big one that we're investigating. Like I mentioned, we keep pretty much all of our data, and so actually being able to use cloud as an archive solution, it sounds great, but then it's another silo to manage, it's another solution that you need to implement, but Cohesity will manage all that for us. So, the what next, I think, is we'll see the scale out of the solution as our data requirement grows, we will see it expand into the cloud environments that we're going to start building, so we really see it growing with us from that aspect. And then we see a great idea of being able to repurpose a lot of our on-premise hardware by archiving out to the cloud as well. >> What about SaaS? Do you see a need to use a Cohesity to protect your SaaS data, or are you kind of not there yet? >> Yeah, I think it certainly has a play there, it's still something that I think we're exploring a little bit more to make sure that it's a right fit. But certainly, there is an opportunity there to be explored, yeah. >> Always opportunities. Well Craig, we appreciate you stopping by theCUBE-- >> Thank you for having me. >> And sharing how Quantium is leveraging your partnerships with Cisco, with Cohesity, to drive those core business drivers of data science and AI. >> Thank you. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Cisco Live, in San Diego. (light music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody this is Dave lotta a and this is the cube the leader in live tech coverage this cube conversation I'm really excited Craig Hibbert is here he's a vice president of infinite at and he focuses on strategic accounts he's been in the storage business for a long time he's got great perspectives correct good to see you again thanks for coming on good to say that good to be back so there's a there's a saying don't fight fashion well you guys fight fashion all the time you got these patents you got this thing called neuro cache you're your founder and chairman mo che has always been - cutting against the grain and doing things his own way but I'd love for you to talk about some of those things the patents that you have some architecture the neuro cache fill us in on all that sure so when we go in we talk to customers and we say we have a hundred and thirty-eight patents a lot of them say well that's great but you know how does that relate to me a lot of these are and or gates and certain things that they don't know how it fits into the day to day life so I think this is a good opportunity to talk about several of those that do and so obviously the neural cache is something that is is dynamic instead of having a key in a hash which all the other vendors have just our position in that table allows us to determine all the values and things we need from it but it also monitors this is an astounding statement but from the moment that array is powered on every i/o that flows through it we track data for the life of the reins for some of these customers it's five and six years so you know those blocks of data are they random are they sequential are they hot are they cold when was the last time was accessed and this is key information because we bring intelligence to the lower level block layer where everybody else has just done they just ship things things come into acutely moving they have no idea what they are we do and the value around that is that we can then predict when workloads are aging out today you have manual people writing things in in things like easy tier or faster or competing products or two stories right and all these things that that manage all these problems are the human intervention we do it dynamically and that feeds information back into the Ray and helps to determine which virtual ray group it should reside on and where on the discipline Dalls based upon the age of the the application how it's trending the these are very powerful things in a day where we need eminent information send in to a consumer in a store I'd it's all all this dynamic processing and the ability to bring that in so that's that's one of the things we do another one is that the catalyst for our fast rebuilds we can rebuild two failed full 12 terabyte drives in under 80 minutes if those drives are half full then it's nine minutes and this is by understanding where all the data is and sharing the rebuild process from the drives that's another one of our patterns perhaps one of the most challenging that we have is that storage vendors tend to do error correction at the fibre channel layer once that data enters into the storage array there is no mechanism to check the integrity of that data and a couple of vendors have an option to do this but they can only do it for the first right and they also recommend you to turn that feature off because it slows down the box so we're infinite out is unique and I think this is for me one of the the most important paths that we have is that every time we ride a 64k slice in the system we assign some metadata to that and obviously it has a CRC check sum but more importantly it has the locality of reference so if we subsequently go back and do a reread and the CRC matches but the location has changed we know that corruption has happened sometimes a bit flipped on right all of these things that constitute sound data corruption that's not just the impressive part what we do at that point is we dynamically deduce that the data has been corrupt and using the parity in the quorum where it were a raid 6 like a dual parity configuration we rebuild that data on the fly without the application or the end-user knowing that there was a problem and that way served back the data that was actually written we guarantee that were the only array that does that today there's massive for our customers I mean the time to rebuild you said 12 terabyte drive I mean I yeah I would have thought I mean they always joke how long do you think it takes to rebuild a 30 terabyte drive because eventually you know sure you know it's like a month with us it's the same so if you look at our three terabyte drives it was 18 minutes the four terabyte drives 18 minutes the 618 minutes 812 will be good all the way up to 20 terabyte drives figuration we have no what I came back to a conversation we've had many many times we've shown you guys we were early on in the flash storage trend and we saw the prices coming down we done like high-speed spinning disks were there days were numbered and sure correct in that prediction but then you know disk drives have kept that distance yeah you guys have a skewed going all flash because the economics but help us understand this because you've got this mechanical device and you yet you guys are able to claim performance that's equal to or oftentimes much much better than a lot of your all flash competitors and I want to understand that a little bit it suggests to me that there's so much other overhead going on and other ball necks in the system that you guys are dealing with both architectural II and through your intelligence software can you talk about that absolutely absolutely the software is the key right we are a software company and we have some phenomenal guys that do the software piece so as far as the performance goes the the backend spinning discs are really obfuscated by two layers of virtualization and we ensure that because we have massive amounts of DRAM that all of that data flows into DRAM it will sit in DRAM for an astonishing five minutes I say astonishing because most of our vendors try to evict cache straight away so they've got room for the next one and that does not facilitate a mechanism by which you can inspect those dumb pieces of data and if you get enough dumb data you can start to make him intelligent right you can go get discarded data from cell phone towers and find out we know where people go to work and what time they worker because of that what demographic at the end and you know now you're predicting the election based upon discarding itself on talladega so so if you can take dumb data and put patterns around it and make it sequential which we do we write out a log structured right so we're really really fast at the front-end and some customers say well how do you manage that on the backend here's something that our designers and architects did very very well the the speed of the of ddr3 is about 15k per second which is what Cindy REM right now we have 480 spindles on the backend if you say each one of them can do a hundred 100 mics per second which they can do more than that 200 that gives us a forty eight gigabit gigabyte sorry per second backplane D stage ability which is three times faster than the DRAM so when you look at it the box has been designed all the way so there is no bottleneck through flowing through the DRAM anything that still been access that comes out of that five minute window once it's D stays to all the spindles incidentally analog structured right so right now it over 480 spindles all the time and then you've got the random still on the SSD which will help to keep that response time around about 2 milliseconds and just one last point on there I have a customer that has 1.2 petabytes written on a 1.3 a petabyte box and is still achieving a 2 millisecond response time and that's unheard of because most block arrays as you fill them up to 60 70 % that the performance starts going in the tank so I go down memory lane here so the most successful you know storage array in the history of the industry my opinion probably fact it was symmetric sand mosha a designed that he eschewed raid5 everybody was on the crazy about raid 5 is dead no no just mirror it yeah and that's gonna give us the performance that we need and he would write they would write 2d ran and then then of course you'd think that the D stage bandwidth was the bottleneck because they had such a back high a large number of back-end spindles the bandwidth coming out of that DRAM was enormous you just described something actually quite similar so that I was going to ask you is it the D stage bandwidth the bottleneck and you're saying no because your D stage being what there's actually three tighter than the D rate up it is so with the symmetric some typical platforms you would have a certain amount of disk in a disk group and you would assign a phase and Fiber Channel ports to that and there'd be certain segments in cash that would dedicated those discs we have done away with that we have so many well with two layers of the virtualization at the front as we talked about but because nothing is a bottleneck and because we've optimized each component the DRAM and I talked about the SSDs we don't write heavily over those we write in a sequential pattern to the SSD so that the wear rate is elongated and so because of that and we have all the virtualized raid groups configured in cache so what happens is as we get to that five-minute window we're about 2 D state all of the raid groups the al telling the cash how to lay out the virtual raid structure based on how busy or the raid groups are at the time so if you were to pause it and ask us where it's going we can tell you it's the Machine line it's the artificial intelligence of saying this raid group just took a D stage you know or there's a lot of data in the cache that's heading for these but based upon the the prediction of the heart the cold that I talked about a few months ago and so it will make a determination to use a different virtual rater and that's all done in memory as opposed to to rely on the disk so we're not we don't have the concept of spare disk we have the concept of spare capacity it's all shared and because it's all shared it's this very powerful pool that just doesn't get bogged down and continues to operate all the way up to the full capacity so I'm struggling with this there is no bottleneck because there's always a problem that can assure them so where is the bottleneck the ball net for us is when the erase fault so if you overwrite the maximum bandwidth and that historically you know in in 2016-2017 was a roughly 12 cube per second we got that in the fall 2018 to roundabout 15 and we're about to make the announcement that we've made tectonic increases in that where will now have right bandwidth approach in 16 gig per second and also read bandwidth about 25 K per second that 16 is going to move up to 20 remember what I said we release a number and we gradually grow into it and and and maximize and tweak that software when you think that most or flash arrays can do maybe one and a half gig per second sustained writes that gives us a massive leg up over our competition instead of buying an all flash array for this and another mid-tier array for this and coal social this you can just buy one platform that services at all all the protocols and they're all access the same way so you write an API one way mark should almost as big fan of this about writing code obviously was spinnaker and some of those other things that he's been involved in and we do the same thing so our API is the same for the block as it is for the NAS as it is for the ice cozy so it's it's very consistent you write it once and you can adapt multiple products well I think you bring about customers for short bit everybody talks about digital transformation and it's this big buzzword but when you talk to customers they're all going through some kind of digital transformation oh they want to get digital right let's put it that way yeah I don't want to get disrupted they see Amazon buying grocers and while getting into the financial services and content and it's all about the data so there's a real disruption scenario going on for every business and and the innovation engine seems to be data okay but data just sitting there and a data swamp is no good so you got to apply machine intelligence for that to that data and you got to have scale mm-hmm do you guys make a big deal about about petabyte scale yeah what are your customers telling you about the importance of that and how does it fit into that innovation sandwich that I just laid out sure no it's great question so we have some very because we're so have 70 petabytes of production over those 70 yep we have a couple of those both financial institutions very very good at what they do we worked with them previously with a with another product that really kind of introduced another one of most Shea's products that was XIV that introduced the concepts of self-healing and no tuning and things like we don't even talked about that there's no tuning knobs on the infinite I probably should mention that but our customers said have said to us we couldn't scale you know we had a couple hundred terabyte boxes before there were okay you know you've brought you've raised the game by bringing in a much higher level of availability and much higher capacity we can take one of our but I'm in this process right now the customer we can take one of our boxes and collapse three vmax 20 of VMAX 40s on it we have numerous occassions gone into establishments that have 11 12 23 inch cabinets two and a half thousand spindles of the old DMC VMO station we've replaced it with one 19-inch rack of arts right that's a phenomenal state when you think about it and that was paid for you think some of these v-max 47 it's 192 ports on them Fiber Channel ports we have 24 so the fibre channel port reduction the power heating and cooling over an entire row down to one eight kilowatt consumption by the way our power is the same whether it's three four terabytes six eight twelve they all use the same power plan so as we increase the geometry capacity of the drives we decrease the cost per usable well we're actually far more efficient than all fly sharing with the most environmentally friendly hybrids been in this planet on the array so asking about cloud so miss gray on the planet that would be yeah so when cloud first sort of came out of the division Financial Services guys are like no clouds that's a bad word they're definitely you know leaning into that adopting it more but still there's a lot of workloads that they're gonna leave on Prem they want to that cloud experience to the data what are you hearing from the financial services customers in particular and I and I've single them out because they're they're very advanced they're very demanding they are they a lot of dough and so what do you see in terms of them building cloud hybrid cloud and and what it means for for them and specifically the storage industry yeah so I'm actually surprised that they've adopted it as much as they have to be honest with you and I think the the economics are driving that but having said that whenever they want to get the data back or they want to bring it back home prime for various reasons that's when they're running into problems right it's it's like how do I get my own data back well you've got to open up the checkbook and write big checks so I think infini debt has a nice strategy there where we have the same capabilities that you have on prime you having the cloud don't forget nobody else has that one of the encumbrances to people move into the cloud has been that it lacks the enterprise functionality that people are used to in the data center but because our cost point is so affordable we become not only very attractive or four on Prem but for cloud solutions as well of course we have our own new tricks cloud offering which allows people to use as dr or replications and so however you want to do it where you can use the same api's and code that your own dis and extrapolate that out to the cloud I was there which is which is very helpful and so we have the ability if you take a snapshot on Amazon it may take four hours and it's been copied over to an s3 device that's the only way they can make it affordable to do it and then if you need that data back it's it's not it's not imminent you've got to rehydrate from s3 and then copy it back over your snapshot with infinite data its instantaneous we do not stop i/o when we do snapshots and another one the patterns we use the time synchronous mechanism every every AO the rise has a timestamp and we when we take a snapshot we just do a point in time and in a timestamp that's greater than that instantiation point is for the volume and previous is for the snapshot we can do that in the cloud we can instantly recover hundreds of terabytes worth of databases and make them instantly available so our story again with the innovation our innovation wasn't just for for on pram it was to be facilitated anyway you are and that same price point carries forward from here into the cloud when Amazon and Microsoft wake up and realized that we have this phenomenal story here I think they'll be buying from us in leaps and bounds it's it's the only way to make the cloud affordable for storage vendors so these are the things you talk about you know bringing bringing data back and bringing workloads back and and there are tool chains that are now on Prem the kubernetes is a great example that our cloud like and so when you bring data back you want to have that cloud experience so automated operations plays into that you know automation used to be something that people are afraid of and they want to do do manual tearing member they wanted their own knobs to turn those days are gone because people want to drive digital transformations they don't want to spend time doing all this heavy lifting I'm talk about that a little bit and where you guys fit yeah I mean you know I say to my customers to not to knock our competition but you can't have a service processor as the inter communication point between what the customer wants and it deciding where it's going to talk to the Iranian configure it's going to be instantaneous and so we all we have we don't have any Java we don't have any flash we don't have any hosts we don't have massive servers around the data center collecting information we just have an html5 interface and so our time to deployment is very very quick when we land on the customer's dark the box goes in we hook up the power we put the drives in we're Haiti's the word V talk because it brings back memories for a lot of course I am now we're going back in time right knowing that main here and so we're very dynamic both in how we forward face the customers but also on the backend for ourselves we eat our own dog food in the sense that we are we have an automation team we've automated our migration from non infinite out platforms towards that uses some level of artificial intelligence we've also built a lot of parameters around things like going with ServiceNow and custom sites because well you can do with our API what other people take you know page and page of code I'll give you an example one of our customers said I need OC i the the let-up management product we called met up and they said hey listen you know it usually takes six months to get an appointment and that it takes at least six months to do the comb we said no no we're not like any other storage render we don't have all these silly raid groups and spare disk capacity you know this weave three commands we can show in the API and we showed them the light Wow can you send us an array we said no we can do something better we were designed SDS right when when infinite out was coded there was no hardware and the reason we did that is because software developers will always code to the level of resilience of the hardware so if you take away that Hardware the software developers have to code to make something to withstand any type of hardware that comes in and at the end of the coding process that's when we started bringing in the hardware pieces so we were written STS we can send vendors and customers a an OVA a virtual appliance of our box they were able to the in a week they told the custom we have to go through full QA no reason why it wouldn't work and they did it for us and got it was a massive customer of theirs and ours that's a powerful story the time to deployment for your homegrown apps as well as things like ServiceNow an MCI incredible infinite out three API calls we were done so you guys had a little share our partnership with met up in the field we did yeah I mean was great they had a massive license with this particular customer they wanted our storage on the platform and we worked very very quickly with them they were very accommodating and we'd love to get our storage qualified behind their behind their heads right now for another customer as well so yeah there's definitely some sooner people realize what we have a Splunk massive for us what we're able to do was plunk in one box where people the competitors can't do in a row so it so it's very compelling what we actually bring in how we do it and that API level is incredibly powerful and we're utilizing that ourselves I would like to see some integration with canonical Marshall what these guys have done a great job with SDS plays we'd like to bring that here do spinnaker do collect if I could do some of those things as well that we're working on the automation we just added another employee another FTE to the automation team and infinite out so we do these and we engage with customers and we help you get out of that trench that is antiquity and move forward into the you know into the vision of how you do one thing well and it permeates the cloud on primary and hybrid all those guys well that API philosophy that you have in the infrastructure is code model that you just described allows you to build out your ecosystem in a really fast way so Greg thanks so much for coming on thank you and doing that double click with this really I'd love to have you back great thanks a lot Dave all right thank you welcome thank you for watching you're watching the cube and this is Dave Volante we'll see you next time

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at IBM Think 2019 in San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we're welcoming a couple of guys to theCUBE for the first time. We've got Craig Reese, Cisco global alliance executive at IBM, and Jeff Gatz, IBM partner alliance executive at Cisco. >> Correct. >> Alright, guys, so this is not the first time that you've met. You guys have been working together for a very long time. Craig, let's start with you. As we look at this world that we're in today. The average company has, what? Five different private clouds, public clouds. We're in this reality of hybrid multi-cloud. I read a stat the other day, Stu, that you shared with me, that 80% of organizations in 2018 migrated data or apps from public cloud. So there's this inherent challenging kind of complex situation that we live in. >> That is true. >> What is the hard truth that organizations have to go through or face about transacting business in a multi-cloud environment? >> Yeah, well, it's as you described, it is a multi-cloud, so by definition is complex. Two, the kind of the easy things have been moved, right? So maybe only 20% of the workloads, the easy stuff is moved, now the hard stuff has to start, and how do you do that? How do you understand what those workloads are? How do you understand which cloud's the right cloud? If any cloud. Maybe it needs to stay on-premise, right? So as you're looking at private cloud, public cloud, on-prem, how do you get there? Who can help you get there? And that we believe we come in, both from a services provider as well as a key technology partner, right? I mean, the technology alone isn't enough, right? You have to be able to figure out how to have it work within the organization and have the technology work as well for you. It's a balancing act but we think that's where our strong suit is from and IBM Services standpoint. >> And I'd say that complexity, it almost leads to paralysis for a lot of businesses. They've done what they can do, that 80% becomes really difficult, and so they end up in a cycle of what's the right technology? What's the right solution? How do I move forward? And that's where Cisco looks at IBM Services and says, okay, this is a partnership that allow our customers to more easily transition into that next phase of digitization. >> We were actually at Cisco Live in Barcelona two weeks ago and we heard a lot about multi-cloud and how those solutions fit together. Explain to our audience a little bit, what is the IBM plus Cisco? How does that go together? Both companies have a long history in the data center. IBM's got lots of applications, CISCO, of course, strong on the network. So explain where there's some of those deep intersection points and some of the services that come together. >> So if you start from a services or you start from the IBM-Cisco relationship standpoint, we're not new kids on the block. We go back decades, two decades, together in terms of IBM as a partner deploying Cisco technologies, incorporating Cisco technologies, and our customers. So we have a strong base of skills, we have a long history, but I think in this cloud world, we also have a shared perspective that it is a multi-cloud world. It's not, well, you're going to do this and we're going to do this. We do have a shared perspective of what our customers need and we believe that together we bring a unique proposition to them in the marketplace, far different than maybe I would say different than other Cisco partner, but also even just from a services integrator, or an IT services integrator, which is really what we are. >> So just to parlay on that 'cause one of the things we really worked with with customers is there's a lot of different ways customers want to consume technology now. And so there's standard systems integrator perspective, but really what we're seeing now is customer's are a lot more interested in, how do I offload IT and just go about the business of running what I'm good at? I want somebody else to do the thing that they're good at so I can do what I'm good at. And so when you look as a managed service provider, what does that really mean? So is it just as a service consumption model? Is that something more along the lines of, take it over for me and manage everything together? And where we see really unique value, where IBM's really investing, that we're really excited about, is in the automation and orchestration across the globe for their customer. So not just, how do I provide hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud, but offer that in a way that is consumptive, and then automated and orchestrated for them so that it really is just a turnkey easy button, if you will. >> Customers have gotten spoiled, right? It's easy, swipe a card and all of a sudden you're spun up. Well, now they're looking for that at a broader range across the enterprise, and what Jeff just said, that's one of where we think we can bring value to them in helping them get to that consumption model that they want, they've gotten used to, while they're still trying to do the hard stuff with the technology. >> So, Craig, what's a double click into that value perspective? Where does IBM and your services really shine here, and help customers actually leverage what you're bringing to unlock the value of their data? >> So first off would be global, right? I mean, let's face it, we are a large company, global presence, both in terms of our skill base, in terms of the management capabilities that Jeff talked about that we have. So we bring that global footprint, that global presence, to be able to deploy, design, build, run, manage, kind of take them through their whole life cycle. And in our offerings, it's kind of the where we're going. We're going from being a custom one-off, custom two-off. It's really looking at standardizing 80, 90% of this to drive the automation benefits, to drive the consistency and the delivery model, to deliver the SLAs that they want out of this, all backed up by the business model that how they want to consume it. So it's a definite change in going down that path. >> Jeff, you mentioned earlier that customer's can just have paralysis based on there's so many choices out there. And here Craig talking about we need to get standardization. That's one of the challenges today is there's so many options. It's nice if I just can consume something as a service, but, oh, my business is a little bit different and I have special requirements. Something I heard a lot at the Cisco show and I'm hearing in here is you need to meet them where they are. And at the Cisco show, it was the bridge to possible. It's like, where are you today and how do you get there? Help give us a little bit of insight as to, because today IT is, in my words, I'll say it's a heterogeneous mess. (chuckles) Everybody, it's like I built it based on what I need and inside I built temples of excellence or silos. So how do I get from that world before that was highly fragmented and very different to allowing it to be able to be scalable, and grow, and change faster? >> So virtualization becomes that double-edged sword, right? It gives us that flexibility, but it also causes that fragmentation across 'cause I have so much more flexibility now. So I think the generic 80/20 rule applies. Every customer, your mileage may vary, right? But you can get to a base standard of what is the right platform with which to provide the flexibility that individual customers need, and that's where the experience of IBM Services, they've worked with every Fortune 1000 customer you can possibly imagine. So they've seen all the permutations that are out there, especially as it relates to deploying Cisco technology. So they understand what base they need going forward, and then what part are they going to have to tweak for those customer's to really adopt and execute on their IT strategy? >> So when you're in customer conversations, and this is a question for both of you, so, Craig, we'll start with you. When we look at the data problem, it goes all the way up to the C level, right? To the boardroom because there's a tremendous amount of value that needs to be unlocked there. When you're having these conversations, especially the capabilities, combined power that Cisco and IBM bring together, where are these conversations with customers? Are you starting at that C-suite or are you talking with the guys and the gals with the feet on the street that are living in this chaotic heterogeneity? I think, that Stu called it. (Craig laughing) Where do those conversations begin, Craig? >> I think it is at the C-suite for a large portion of it, at least the direction maybe comes from the C-suite. We need to do something different than how we did. Who could we talk to? Who can we bring in to have that conversation? Kind of may move down to the teams that are closer to the ground. And you start hearing themes that become kind of common. How do I deal with security? How do I deal with data privacy? Where I have those concerns. How do I determine what applications and workloads I should move where, and what's the most cost-effective place for those to run? So I think we can bring that expertise, we can bring that guidance, that consultative approach to those discussions with the customer. Not only us but with the Cisco team as well to really start getting to the point where we believe the offerings we have to move you to a hybrid cloud, migration path, or this type of offering, it does hit that 80%, and then we can hone in on, but what is that 20% that's unique for your business that we have to figure out maybe uniquely from a technology standpoint, from services we offer, from the SLA, whatever it would be, to really get them there. But I think it starts more at the top but works its way down. My view, anyway. >> I completely agree. The conversation starts at the C-suite, but that tends to be relatively generic, right? In terms of this is our strategy, and then it gets passed down, and you get into that 20% which is the heavy lifting as soon as you get down to the next layer. But it does start from the top down, and it has to these days. >> And I distinctly remember one customer we had where we did sit in a room. It started from the top and we had lots of smart people in the room, and we had three possibilities sketched out on the whiteboard. Which one do we think really solves the problem here? Because there are multiple paths to go to get there, and we had to pick the path we think makes the most sense, and then convince the customer this is the right way to go and get them bought in. >> One of the things that if you look at this, the transformation that people are going through, in many ways that moved to from a capex model to an opex model is one of the things, the promise of the cloud. But you talk about struggles in the C-suite. The CFO used to say, here's your budget for the year, and I can understand that, and, wait, this is going to be uncertain and I'm not sure what that bill's going to be next month or a quarter from now, or how do I do my planning? Give us a little bit of insight into that transformation. >> I tell you, it's uncertain as a service provider too. (laughing) There's two sides to that. They just say, well, I want an SLA and I want a service, and I want it to go infinitely up and infinitely down. You have to sort of meet, de-risk each side, where you pick your battles, and get to a point where the customer believes the service is valuable from a business standpoint, from a productivity standpoint, from hitting the objectives that they set down from the C-suite, and you hopefully have a good partnering relationship, triangular, customer, partner, service provider, where you're having that ongoing dialogue, you're delivering on the value, you're helping to expand that, and those risk issues go away over time. But the proof is always in the first six, 12 months of delivery. >> I'll borrow your phrase of meeting customers where they're at, right? This idea of consumption. I think a lot of customers are interested in it, but there's a cost to that financial flexibility. And so maybe it starts at a zero to a hundred flexibility, and it comes quickly down based on what you determine jointly between the three of us is really the right solution. That's really where it's at in this as a service model. It makes a lot more sense, it's easier to do, and it's purely software, but as soon as you're on-premise, that becomes a slightly more challenging conversation and that's what this partnership does day in and day out. So as we wrap this up, one thing I kind of want to do is click in to the customer experience a little bit more. You were talking, Craig, about a lot of companies have moved the easy stuff, right? They've pushed that easy button. They have a hybrid multi-cloud, a strategy that's effective for 20% of their business. For the other 80%, are you saying where, I mean, in any company, in any industry, Stu, we know this, as we talk to companies all over the globe, data is the life blood of any organization that has transformative power. But, I'm curious, in that journey to get a company from 20%, to 30%, to 40%, where they're actually starting to have to tackle those more complex workloads, are you seeing any industries in particular that are, I don't want to say early adopters, but are understanding the value that IBM Services and Cisco are bringing together in order to facilitate the speed at which they have to transform? >> So I would say our customer base is cross industry. What I would say is the industry that seems to have the most questions, the most concerns, the most reservations is the financial services industry. And there they have to be very specific around what's my data privacy issue, where am I at with security? I got to tell you, Cisco has some very strong customers in that space that really help in that partnership, particularly around the financial services industry. They're the toughest ones, I think, at this point, from my standpoint. >> Yeah, I mean financial services, obviously where you and I engage a lot, but I would say the thing that's most exciting to me is that it's not just financial services. We're seeing it across the board. I wouldn't say there's an industry outside of, industries or companies that are born in the cloud model, but the more, legacy's the wrong word, but traditional business models, they're all shifting, because they have to to remain relevant. >> Exactly, they have to. Well, that just means plenty of opportunities-- >> Absolutely. >> For IBM Services and Cisco. Gentlemen, thank you so much for chatting with Stu and me on the program today. We appreciate it and congratulations, you're now CUBE alumni, so you each get a reward. It's like a gold start but it's a blue CUBE sticker. >> Awesome, and I would like to thank Cisco for being a Platinum Partner here at IBM Think this week. We appreciate them being a partner here in the partner showcase. >> Yeah, and then for the folks that are here the show, please come by, get your free pair of socks, and you can get signed up to win special prizes. >> Special prizes and socks. Wow, you guys, that's-- >> What more could you want? >> I'm speechless. Thanks so much Craig and Jeff, appreciate your time. For Stu Miniman, and I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from day one coverage of IBM Think 2019. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat electronic music)