>> Live from Barcelona Spain it's theCUBE covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Live from Barcelona Spain it's theCUBE covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Hola Barcelona I'm Stu Miniman and my guest host for this week is the one and only Corey Quinn, and you're watching theCUBE the leader in live tech coverage, actually the fourth year we've been doing the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. This is KubeCon CloudNativeCon Barcelona 2019. We've got two days of wall to wall live coverage. Last year we were in Copenhagen it was outside a little bit windy and we had this lovely silk above us. This time we are inside at the Fira. We've got some lovely Cube branding. The store with all the t-shirts and the little plushies of Fippy and all the animals are right down the row for us, and there is 7,700 people here. So I have been, I did the Austin show in 2017 did the Seattle show last year 2018. We had done the Portland show in 2016, so it's my third time doing one of these, but Corey it is your first time at one of these shows. Wait this isn't an AWF show, so what are you doing here? >> I'm still trying to figure that out myself when people invite me to go somewhere "Do you know anything about insert topic here?" absolutely, smile and bluff your way through. Eventually someone might call you on it, but that's tomorrow's problem not quite today's. >> Yeah I have this general rule of thumb the less I know about something the more I overdress to overcompensate it. Oh so here's the guy in the three piece suit. >> My primary skill is wearing a suit everything else is just edging details. >> Alright, so let's set the stage for our audience here Corey. As I've said we've got the Foundation, we've got a lot of the big members, we've got some of the project people, but I'm really excited we actually have some excellent users here, because it is five years now since Kubernetes came onto the scene of course built off of Borg from Google, and as Dan Conn said in the opening key note, he actually gave a nice historical lesson. The term he used is simultaneous invention and basically those things that, you know, there are times where we argue, who created the light bulb first, or who did this and this? Because there were multiple times out there and he said look there were more than a dozen projects out there. >> Many of them open source or a little bit open as to these things like container orchestration, but it is Kubernetes that is the defacto standard today, and it's why so many people show up for this show, >> and there's such a large ecosystem around it. So you live in the Cloud world you know what's your general view on CloudNative and Kubernetes and this whole kind of space? >> Well going back to something you said a minute or two ago. I think there's something very strong to be said about this being defined by it's users. I've never yet seen a successful paradigm takeoff in the world of technology that was vendor defined. It's at some point you wind up with these companies doing the digital equivalent of here we've crafted you this amazingly precise wrench, and you hand it to a user and the first thing they say is wow it's kind of a crappy hammer, but it's at least good for a first attempt. Tools are going to be used as users want to use them and they define what the patterns look like. >> Yeah so I'll give you the counter point there because we understand if we ask users what they wanted they wanted better buggy whips so we can go faster. To compare and contrast we had done a few years ago was this openstack was user driven and it came out of NASA, and if it was good enough for the rocket scientist, it should be something we that can learn on, and Rackspace had done good and gave it to the open source community, and stepped back and let people use it. First of all openstack it's not dead it's being used in the Telco world it's being used outside of North America quite a bit, but we saw the kind of boom and bust of that. >> We are a long way passed the heyday. >> The vendor ecosystem of openstack was oh it's an alternative to AWS, and maybe some way to get off the VMY licensing, and I've actually said it's funny if you listen to what happens in this ecosystem. Well, giving people the flexibility not to be totally locked in to AWS, and oh it's built on Linux and therefore I might not want to have licensing from certain vendors. Still echos from previously but it is very different. >> Very much so, and I will say the world has changed. >> I was very involved in Eucalyptus which was a bit of a different take on the idea, or the promise of what openstack was going to be What if you had Cloud API's in your own data center in 2012 that seemed like a viable concern. The world we live in today of public cloud first for a lot of shops was by no means assured. >> Yeah, Martin Meikos, Cube alum by the way, fantastic leader still heavily involved in open source. >> Very much so >> One of those things I think he was a little bit ahead of his time on these. So Corey, one of the reasons, why are you here? You are here because I pulled you here, and we do pay you to be here as a host. You're not here for goodwill and that. Your customers are all users and tend to be decent sized users and they say Corey helps people with their Amazon bills no that's the AWS bills not the I have a pile of boxes of smiley faces on there, oh my God what did I do around Christmas time. >> Exactly >> So the discussion at the show is this whole hybrid and multi cloud world when I talk to users they don't use those words. Cloud strategy, sure, my pile of applications, and how I'm updating some of them, and keeping some of them running, and working with that application portfolio and my data. All hugely important but what do you hear from users, and where does the things like cloud and multi cloud fit into their world? >> There are two basic archetypes of user that I tend to deal with. Because I deal with, as you mentioned, with predominately large customers >> you have the born in the cloud types who have more or less a single application. Picture a startup that hits meteoric growth and now is approaching or is in the IPO stage. They have a single application. They're generally all in on one provider, and the idea of going multi cloud is for auxiliary things. If we take a step back, for example, they're saying things like oh PagerDuty is a service that's not run by one of our major public cloud providers. There are a bunch of SaaS applications like that that factor in, but their infrastructure is >> predominately going to be based in one environment. The other large type of customer you'll tend to see is one of those multinational very divisional organizations where they have a long legacy of being very data center first because historically that was kind of the only option. And you'll start to see a bunch of different popup cloud providers inside those environments, but usually they stop at the line of business boundary or very occasionally on a per workload basis. I'm not seeing people say, >> well we're going to build this one application workload, and we want to be able to put that on Oracle cloud, and Azure and GCP and AWS, and this thing that my cousin runs out of the Ozarks. No one wants to do that in the traditional sense because as soon as you go down that path you are constrained to whatever the lowest common denominator across all those things are, and my cousins data center in the Ozarks doesn't have a lot of frills. So you wind up trying to be able to deploy anywhere, but by doing that you are giving up any higher level offering. You are slowing yourself down. >> Yeah, the thing we've always been worried about is back in the day when you talk about multi vendor do we go by the standard, and then go to least common denominator and what has worked it's way through the environment? That's what the customers want. I want today if I'm the user, agility is really one of the things that seem to be top of mind. What IT needs to do is respond to the speed of what the business needs and a CloudNative environment that I look at is it has to be that lever to be able to help me deliver on the next thing, or change the thing, or update my thing to get that working. It was, so disclaimer Red Hat is our headline sponsor here we thank them for our presence, but actually it's a great conversation with open shift customers, and they didn't talk about open shift to open shift to open shift. They talk about their digital transformation. They talk about their data. They talk about the cool new things that they are able to do, and it was that platform happened to be built on Kubernetes. That was the lever to help them do this at the Google show where you were at. That was the same conversation we had whether it is in GCP or whether it was in my own data center. >> You know yes we can do it with containers and everything like that. It was that lever to be able to help me modernize and run new apps and do it faster than I would've done it in the past. So it's that kind of progression that is interesting for me to hear, and just there is not, there is this tendency now to be like oh look everybody is working together and it's wonderful open source ecosystem. It's like well look the world today is definitely coopetition. Yes you need to be up on stage and if a customer says, I need to work with vendors A, B, C, and D. A, B, C, and D, you better work with that or they will go and find an alternative, because there are alternatives out there. >> (Corey) Absolutely, and when a company embarks on a digital transformation and starts moving into public cloud, there are two reasons they are doing that. The first is for cost savings in which case (laughs), let's talk, and the other is for capability storing, and you're not going to realize cost savings for a lot longer than you think you will. In any case you are not going realize capability story if all you view public cloud is being, is another place to run your VAMS or now your containers. >> Yeah, so thank you, Corey your title in your day job You're a Cloud economist. >> I am, two words that no one can define. So no one calls me on it. >> Kubernetes it's magical and free right >> That's what everyone tells me. It feels like right now we are sort of peak heighth as far as Kubernetes goes, and increasingly, whenever you see a technology that has gotten this level of adoption. We saw it with openstack, we've seen it with cloud, we've seen it with a bunch of things. We are starting to see it with Serverless as well. Where, what problem are you trying to solve? I'm not going to listen to the answer, today that answer is Kubernetes, and it seems like everyone's first project is their own resume. Great, there has to be a value proposition, there has to be a story for it, >> and I'm not suggesting that there isn't, but I think that it is being used as sort of an upscale snake oil in some cases or serpen grease as we like to call it in some context. >> Yeah, and that's one of our jobs here is to help extract the sigma from the noise. We've got some good customers. We're going into the environment. One of the things I try to do in the open keynote is find that theme. Couple of years, for a couple of shows >> it's been service mesh is the new hotness. We're talking about Istio, we're talking about Helm, We're talking about all these all these environments that say okay how do I pull together all the pieces of the application, >> and manage that together? Because there's just, you know, moving up the stack, and getting closer to that application. We'll talk about Serverless in one of the other segments later this week I'm sure because you know there's the, okay here Knative can help bridge that gap, but is that what I need? We talk a lot about Kubernetes is how much does the public cloud versus in my data center, and some of the guys they talk to, Serverless is in the public cloud. We'll call it functions of the service if you put it in your own data center, because while yes there are servers everywhere. If you actually manage those racks and everything like that it probably doesn't make sense to call it Serverless. We try not to get into too many semantics arguments here on theCUBE. >> You can generally tend to run arbitrary code anywhere the premise of Serverless to my mind. >> Is more about the event model, and you don't get that on VRAM in the same way that you do in a large public cloud provider, and whether that is the right thing or not, I'm not prepared to say, but it's important for that to be understood as you are going down that path. >> So Corey, any themes that jumped out for you, or things that you want to poke at, at the show, for me, Kubernetes has really kind of crossed that Chasm, and we do have large crowds. You can see the throngs of people behind us, and users that have great stories to tell, and CNCF itself, you know has a lot of projects out there, we're trying to make some sense of all those pieces. There's six now that have graduated, and FluentD is the most recent, but a lot of interesting things from the sandbox, through that kind of incubating phase there, and we're going to dig into some of the pieces there. Some of them build on top of Kubernetes, some of them are just part of this whole Cloud Native Ecosystem, and therefore related but don't necessarily need it, and can play in all these various worlds. >> What about you? >> For me I want to dig a little bit more into the idea of multi cloud. I have been making a bit of a stink for the past year. With the talk called the myth of multi cloud. Where it's not something I generally advise as a best practice, and I'm holding that fairly well, but what I want to do is I want to have conversations with people who are pursuing multi cloud strategies and figure out first, are they in fact pursuing the same thing, so we're defining out terms and talking on the same page, and secondly I want to get a little more context, and insight into why they are doing that, and what that looks like for them. Is it they want to be able to run different workloads in different places? Great that's fair, the same workload run everywhere, on the lowest common denominator. Well lets scratch below the surface a bit, and find out why that is. >> Yeah, and Corey you're spot on, and no surprise because you talk to users on this. From our research side on our team, we really say multi cloud or hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud means you've got your own data centers, as opposed to multi cloud could be any of them. There's a little bit of a Venn Diagram you could do between that. >> But I am prepared to be wrong as well. I'm a company of two people. I don't have a research department, that's called the spare time I get >> when I can't sleep at night. So I don't have data, I have anecadata. I can talk about individual use cases, but then I'm telling individual company stories that I'm generally not authorized to tell. So it's more a question now of starting to speak to a broader base. >> So just to finish on the thought from out team is everything from I have all of these pieces, and they're really not connected, and I'm just trying to get my arms around through some of the solutions. Like in the AWS world we're looking at the VMware on AWS, and the outpost type of solution. That pullout or what Azure does with Azure stack, and the like, or even company like IBM and Oracle, where they have a stack that can be both >> in the public cloud and the private cloud. Those kind of fully integrated pieces versus the right now I'm just putting applications in certain areas, and then how do I manage data protection, how do I manage security across all these environments. It is a heterogeneous mess that we had, and I spent a lot of my career trying to help us break down those silos, get away from the cylinders of excellence as we called them, and we worked more traditionalist. So how much are we fighting that? I will just tell you that most of the people we're going to have on theCUBE, probably aren't going to want to get into that. They'll be happy to talk about their piece, and how they work with this broad wonderful ecosystem, but we can drill into where Kubernetes fits. We've got the five year anniversary of Kubernetes. We'll be talking to some of the people that helped create this technology, and lots of the various pieces. So with that, Corey, want to give you the final take here, before we talk about the stickers, and some of the rest. >> Oh absolutely, I think it's a fascinating show. I think that they're the right people who are attending. To give valuable perspective that, quite frankly, you're not going to get almost anywhere else. It's just a fascinating blend of people from large companies, small companies, giant vendors, and of course the middleware types, who are trying to effectively stand between in many cases, customers and the raw vendors, for a variety of very good reasons. Partner strategies are important. I'm very curious to see what that becomes, and how that tends to unfold in the next two days. >> Okay, so theCUBE by the way, we're not only a broadcast, but we are part of the community. We understand this network, and that is why Corey and I, you know, we come with stickers. So we've got these lovely sticker and partnership with Women Who Go, that made this logo for us for the Seattle show, and I have a few left, so if you come on by. Corey has his platypus, last week in AWS. So come on by where we are, you get some stickers, and of course, hit us up on Twitter if you have any questions. We're always looking for the community, and the network to help us with the data, and help us pull everything apart. So for Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman, two days of live wall to wall coverage >> will continue very soon, and thank you as always for watching theCUBE. (Fading Electronic Music)

(motivating electronic music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the co-host and co-founder of Silicon Angle Media. We're here for a CUBE Conversation in our studios in Palo Alto, California. Here with two great guests inside the industry, to help illuminate the cloud computing conversation, really around what's coming up with Amazon re:Invent. But more importantly, the major advances happening in the digital transformation around IT and around developers and around cloud, and how that's impacting business. Our guests are Chris Comings, who's with the Chasm Group, consult and they help people, and former industry executive at NetApp, and (mumbles) the storage company. Peter Smails, the CMO of Datos.io data, and then he's the CMO there. Now, new progressive solutions. So guys, great solution. And Peter, I know you got news. We're gonna do another segment on your big news coming out, so we're gonna hold that off. >> Cool. >> The game has changed, right? >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> And we talked, with Chris and I had a one on one about this. But the industry conversation, there's people that are in the know, and people who are trying to figure out what's happening and how it impacts their business. CIO, CEOs, CDOs, chief data officers, chief security officers. There's a lot of things on the plate of businesses. >> Right. >> Big time. >> Right. >> So let's unpack this, and let's illuminate what it means. So cloud computing, Peter, what's your take on this, because Datos just takes a unique approach? I love your solution. A lot of people are liking this solution, but it's nuanced, because it's cloud-- >> Yeah. >> That's driving you. >> Yeah. >> What's the big driver? >> So the big driver, you said at the top of the discussion, the big driver is digital transformation. Digital transformation. Organizations are trying to be more data-driven. Okay, this is completely throwing, throwing traditional IT amok, because we're not living in the traditional world anymore of all my data sits within a single data center, I run my traditional monolithic applications. That's changed. The world is no longer running in a traditional four wall data center, and the world's moved away from the traditional view of scale-up architectures to elastic compute, shared nothing, elastic storage environment. So what's happening is, you've got the challenge of trying to essentially support traditional transformation initiatives, and it's just throwing all the underlying infrastructure foundations that an entire generation of IT professionals has known (laughs) into disarray. So everything's a little bit caddywhompus right now. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative), Chris? >> Well, and like you said, those people all have gone from being implementers to, they're moving to being developers. >> Right. >> And it completely changes their, it has to be a big change in their mindset. And it changes the management folks, the CIOs, the CDOs, the people that you interact with on a daily basis, right? >> Absolutely. >> Because these people are all trying to kind of come up to the next generation and get there. >> So you talked about, we got re:Invent coming up in a couple of weeks and, I think reinvent's a perfect term for this entire conversation, because everybody is reinventing themselves. The customer's reinventing themselves, the IT organizations are reinventing themselves, the individual roles within organizations are changing, and the whole evolution of dev ops versus traditional roles, so it is really-- >> And the vendors are all trying to reinvent themselves, too. >> Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. >> Well there's a lot of noise, so the customer's being bombarded with pitches. And if I here one more digital transformation pitch, without substance, I still don't understand. So in the spirit of trying to understand, first of all, I believe in digital transformation, but you can't just say the word, you gotta to prove it. But there's hard to prove a new approach or they've never seen it before. It's kind of like Steve Jobs would say, "If you want a Blackberry, that's a phone, "but the iPhone's not what you've seen before." But everyone loved it, changed the industry. That dynamic's happening in the cloud where for instance, your solution, some might not have seen before, but it's highly relevant to the user behavior expectations of the new environment. Okay, so this is the issue. What is the new environment specifically around digital transformation? Because I have an investment in storage. If I'm a customer, I bought a zillion drives from NetApp and EMC. I got data domain backup and, I got a perimeter, I have all this stuff, and now I've got this cloud thing bursting, and I got some analytics running there, and then I got the hot shot young developers banging out apps, and they want to put it in the cloud and... and security, I mean, what's going on? >> You wanna take that one first? And then I'll jump in. >> Can't I just buy more storage? >> Yeah. (Men laugh) Hey, just, no John, you don't just buy more storage, you upgrade from spinning to flash. I mean, that's really, >> There you go. >> That's really, really cutting edge right there. No I think what a lot of you see what they're doing is basically saying listen, for all this secondary, tertiary, quaternary, I mean, I didn't even know what that word was. But your second, your third, your fourth cuts of that data, move that all to the cloud, get that out of my environment. I'm not gonna be submersed in dealing with all of that anymore. Then maybe I can clear out some of my headaches, so I can actually focus on that primary cut, and what do I do about that primary cut? And that's where these completely new approaches come into play, and I, Peter I don't know if you call that hybrid, or multi-aire or what? But it is basically just trying to get some of that noise out of their system, so they can focus on the thing that's most valuable. >> So the way I would make that tangible John, is sort of, to us it all rolls down to the notion of the modern IT stack, okay? So essentially, the way you respond to digital transformation which, is all about being more agile, and some of the buzzwords you hear, but they're trying to be more, customers are trying to be, vendors are trying to be, or excuse me, customers or organizations are trying to be more customer-centric. They're trying to be more business driven, more data driven, okay great. If that's their initiative-- >> That's a mission. That's a mission. >> That's a mission. >> Yep. >> What that means for IT specifically is a fundamental rearchitecture of the underlying stack, okay, along a couple vectors, which is, organizations are building these new applications. They're fundamentally rearchitecting applications. What used to be a monolithic-oriented, traditional, relational, on-prem database is now running in a microservices, highly distributed configuration. That's vector number one, implication. Implication number two is we're absolutely in the mainstream of hybrid cloud, okay? You may be running all your apps on-prem, but you're still connected in some way to the cloud, for archiving, for BI, for TASDAV, whatever the case may be. And number three is the world just moved completely to an elastic, compute, shared nothing world. So we call that the modern IT stack. So the modern IT stack, modern infrastructure today-- >> Share nothing, you said? >> Shared nothing, the cloud is-- >> Oh, shared nothing. >> Yeah, shared nothing, shared nothing storage, shared nothing compute, that's that's, those are the foundations of a cloud based architecture. >> Is that called serverless? >> You could call it serverless as well. >> Okay. >> But, if you look at the modern IT stack, so to your point, the modern IT stack, modern infrastructure today is EC2. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> Modern storage is S3. It could be object prem, object storage sitting on-prem. You know, modern applications are IOT. Modern, or our customer 360, IOT. Modern databases are dynamo DB. It's MongoDB, it's the number two-- >> Right. >> database in the cloud. So to answer your question very specifically, to make it tangible, that's to us the fundamental indication is, that new modern IT stack, throws storage into disarray, it throws data management into disarray-- >> It's an operational disruption. >> It's an operational disruption. >> All right, so let's backup for a second, because I think you nailed the thread I was trying to connect on. So let's take MongoDB, your reference to that being, where'd that come from? We all know why, the LAMP stack, it was one of the drivers. But developers drove that. >> That's right. >> So it wasn't the IT department recommending Mango. >> Right (laughs). >> so the developers were driving that because of ease of use. Now there's some scalability with Mango, we all know about, but what that means is, no one gives a crap if it can scale, because you already hit your product market fit. Then you could rearchitect, so you're seeing this use case of developers driving some of the behavior. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> Hence containers, docker containers, and the role of Kubernetes. >> Kubernetes, yep. >> So if that's the case, how does an enterprise customer deal with that vector? Because now the developers are dictating the stacks. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> Well, I-- >> Is it a free-for-all right now? I mean, this is... >> I think both of those guys are, think of it as they used to be warring factions, dev and ops, and the fact that we say the word dev ops right now is kind of a, it's kind of an oxymoron, right? Because they don't actually know each other and actually don't naturally talk to one another, and they go, "That's the other guy who's holding me back." >> Yeah, it's the old-- >> They look at, yeah, yeah. >> Goes over the fence. >> And so now, you've got folks that are really trying to, trying to bring it together a little bit more on that front and I think that, we're starting to see some technologies where people can say, "Not only can I use that "to accelerate my developments," so meets the dev criteria, but also the ops people say, "You know what, that stuff's not so bad. "I could actually work with that." >> Right, and then there's IT going, "Uh-oh," because they're basically sitting there on the catcher's side, so to your point it's, the dev ops, it is very much of an application-led environment. The tip of the spear for the new IT stack is absolutely application-led. And IT is challenged with essentially aligning to that, collaborating with that, and keeping up with that pace of change. >> And John, on this point, I think this is where, back to re:Invent, and really the role of AWS. This all started because of that. When a developer can just say, "I don't even know who those IT people are over there, "But I can spin up my S3 instance, "and I can start working against it." They start moving down the path, they show it to somebody, someone says, "Wow, that's great stuff, I want that." >> John: Yeah, right. >> Guess what? We need to make sure that that's enterprise class and scalable and then that's where that whole thing starts, and then it becomes that pull-ya-apart, "Oh God, what did these developer people do? "I'm gonna inherit this? "What the heck am I gonna do with it?" Now it's, we've gotta move that to be more symbiotic up front. >> I remember talking to both Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy years ago, I think maybe five years ago, and I asked the question, "What enables developers?" What is enabling point? Does infrastructure dictate developer behavior? Or do developers dictate infrastructure behavior? This was years ago, when the dev ops was an early-on movement. Clearly the vote is there. Developers are driving infrastructure. Hence the dev ops infrastructure, >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> as code model, that's proven. Jassy was interesting because he looked at it that way and said, "Yeah, we saw the same thing," and they've never wavered, Amazon's stayed on the course, and they've just been running like a machine, like a, just pounding it out. I asked Pat Gelsinger, he once positioned the AWS as the developer cloud. Kinda in, I wouldn't say depositioning them, but he was basically pointing out, they have a developer cloud. Now Amazon's the enterprise cloud. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> Because they've developers are now a big driver of that, and the scale with data is actually turning out to be a better security environment. >> Right. >> For cyber. >> Right, it might just-- >> So it's cloud's winning. >> Cloud is winning and just sort of just take that one step further. It's always ultimately, the winner's going to, it's Darwinism, it's like the winner's gonna be the one with the richest ecosystem. And AWS is becoming that enterprise eco. And you could argue, I mean, GCP's fighting to be in there, Oracle's not going to go quietly into that dark night. You've got multiple public cloud vendors. >> That's right. >> Yeah. >> But the reality is that he who has the biggest, he or she who has the biggest ecosystem is gonna win, and that's right now is AWS driving that bus. >> All right, so I need to see those glasses for a second, and then want to go into another line of question here. (men laugh) >> You may use those. >> Oh who's, oh you put them on, all right good, as long as he's wearing them. >> He that wear-- >> You know, on that front too, on that front too, I would think we started back where VM was the big new thing, and here we go with VM's, and then all of a sudden we're coming up and we're saying, "Yeah, now there's containers." And so now we're gonna see this move to, we want to micro-package these services, and be able to aggregate them. Well you know the average IT shop that I would be talking to out there is just still trying to figure out, how do they put together their on-prem and their AWS instance? So this notion of hybrid is where most of these large enterprises are. We see a lot of terminology out there and a lot of vendors talking about multi-cloud. But multi-cloud is really just taking an option on the future and saying, "I'm not locked into you, AWS, "even though I am locked into you 100% right now. "I don't want to be forever in the future." >> It's a value statement that they're gesturing. >> That's right. >> Good segue. >> Chris: But it's not a practical implementation piece. >> I got my nerd glasses on so-- >> Peter: Strap in for something, here we go. I got my nerd glasses, so next question, we'll go a little nerdy, because this is important one. I put out at my crowd chat for Amazon, so to crowdchat.net/awsreinvent it's open, I have a lot of questions on there. Feel free to weigh in, it's an influencer-only chat, so no consumers, so I asked the question, and this is to the value statement, because multi-cloud is basically telegraphing lock-in. We don't want lock-in. >> Right. >> But we want love choice. If you have good choice and good value, we'll go there so it's a value equation. So the question I said is, where do you, this is a question I put on crowd-chat, I'll ask you guys. Where do you see the value that cloud creates for customers in the next 24 months? #cloud So the first response was from Subbu Allamaraju, who's the CIO at Expedia. He writes, "Agility from the service "ecosystem and rapid second-order architecture "architectural changes thereby clearing technical debt." And the second one from Grant Chase, "Born on the cloud apps already here. "Next wave migrating of existing apps." And then Maddoux Tsukahara said, "Legacy SASS applications will be disrupted "by cloud microservices, serverless, "and AI and machine learning." So we start to see the pattern. Your thoughts? Value creation, in the cloud, is gonna be what? >> So I think they're hitting on the right trends. I would go back to the first one which is "How do I get this on-prem stuff "that's driving me crazy, consuming all of my resources "in terms of maintenance and upgrades? "And then optimizing my environment for that." Which ones of those are core? And which ones of those are really kind of ancillary? I've gotta have them, but I really don't want them. If I didn't have to use them, I'd get rid of them. Take all, just do that homework. Separate the two cleanly. Move ancillary to the cloud, and move on. >> Peter: Yeah, yeah. >> So service ecosystem he nailed, I love, by the way, I agree with you, that was my favorite answer. And rapid second-order architecture changes. This speaks to what datos.io is doing. Because you guys, what you're in, the tornado that you're in, kind of just a play on the Chasm group here. You guys have a solution that has got visibility into some of the real dynamics of the environmental environment. >> Check. >> People, tech, stack, et cetera. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So what are some of the things that you're seeing that point to these second or level architectural changes? >> Well you mentioned, a couple different things, which is, you mentioned the notion of technical debt, which is indirectly what you were just talking about, the ability to get rid of my technical debt. It's an easy way, it eliminates my barrier to answering to creating net new applications. So without having to sort of, I avoid the innovator's dilemma if you will, because I can build these net new applications, which are the things I have to to drive my digital transformation, et cetera. I can do that in a very cost-effective and agile way. Meanwhile, sort of ignoring the old world. Then what I'll do is I'll go back, and I'll worry about the old stuff, and I'll start migrating some of that old stuff to the cloud. So in the context of, yeah, so what we see from a Datos IO perspective, in the context of data management, is that one, applications drive the stack, like you said earlier, it's absolutely, the application's at the tip of the spear, driving the stack. Organizations are building net new applications that are cloud native, okay? And they're built on the new modern IT stack, and at the same time, they're also taking their legacy application, so I like that second answer as well which is, modern cloud applications are here. The interesting thing is, you say modern cloud apps, modern cloud apps don't have to run in the cloud. >> That's right. >> We've got customers that are running their next gen app-- >> It's an operating model. >> It's an operating model. We've got customers running 100% on-prem. Their econ number stuff runs on-prem, then you have people that run in the cloud. So it's a mindset, it's an operating model. So you've got folks absolutely deploying these cloud-native apps. >> Well, it's an architectural model too, it's how they are deploying and servicing apps. >> And ultimately, it comes down to the architectural model. That's what shifted, and that world is very infrastructure. The other thing I would add to the cloud thing is if you do it right, the cloud actually can give you architectural independence and cloud independence, but you can't be focused on the infrastructure level. You've gotta focus at the application level, because then you can be agnostic, until they're online. >> So Peter you, you guys are disrupting a very large space, backup and recovery in the cloud which you guys are doing. >> Check. >> And the application database layer is a very progressive solution. So I love your approach, but you're talking about disrupting the data domains of the world. We're talking about big whales. >> Yeah. >> Big incumbents that are built around four walls in the data center. >> Check. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative), yep. >> What are you seeing? What's the makeup? What's the personnel of the customers look like? If dev ops is happening, which we agree it is, and the the evidence is there clearly, they're not 50 year old backup and recovery guys. They're young guns, they're probably not thinking about waking up every day with their coffee, say, "Hmm, what am I gonna do with backup today?" >> Yeah. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> They're waking up saying, "Hey, I'm gonna drive some more machine learning "and AI in my apps." >> Yep. >> "And I'm gonna provide workflow movement to--" >> And you said breakfast was some, you said that. >> Adopt this microservice. >> I had the craziest dream last night. It was microservices, what? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, so I can answer that two ways. There's the technology side of it. Fun little tidbit, average age of the traditional backup and recovery software architecture, about 20 years. >> Hmm. >> Architected well before the mainstream advent of the cloud or certainly modern applications. >> Hold on, the person's 20 years old? Or it's 20 years of architecture? >> No, the architecture of the software. >> Okay. >> The solutions, or come up, the point is they've been around for awhile. >> It's old. It's old. >> It's old, fair enough. >> Yeah, and 20 years-- >> So on the technology side, that's a dilemma. On the persona side, you're absolutely right as well. These are, it's the application folks that are driving the conversation, that our applications dictate the IT stack. They're building these new architectures, which have all these implications on the infrastructure. >> All right, so I'm gonna play devil's advocate, just because I want to connect the dots. And again, illuminate what I think the problem is that you have. One is, okay I'm a CIO. Hey, he's my storage guy. Who the hell are you, young gun? Complaining about your backup and recovery. He recommends all flash arrays in the data center provisioned in a VSAN environment, whatever that's going on. Who are you? You're just nothing to me. You don't make that decision. >> I'm the guy that can give you all the visibility to your data to make you smarter and more agile as a company. I can save you money. I can make this company more market-- >> So what do I need to do differently? If I'm the CIO, I don't want to make these, or these architectural calls based upon old dogma or old reporting lines. This is an example. I go to him, he's my storage guy. Who are you? I already built you the dev ops environment. He runs storage and so, you're impacted as a developer. So how do you guys talk to that guy? What does the CXO have to do differently to adapt to the new environment? >> I'll take that and then you can-- >> Please. >> You know, jump in. So I think what you see is, you see the proliferation of new personas. Like you see chief transformation officers, you see chief digital officers. You see system architects and DBAs getting a more prominent role in the conversation. So the successful CIOs and technology officers are the ones that are essentially gonna get the cowboys and the Indians to collaborate more closely, because they have to, because the folks that were over in the corner that used to get laughed at, building these, oh mangos and these new applications and such, they're the ones holding the keys to the future. So the successful technologists are gonna be the ones that marry those personas from the application side of the house with the traditional storage, infrastructure folks as well. You successfully do that, then you can be more, then you can move more quickly forward. >> Yeah, that's right. >> What do you think? >> Well I think some of it's gonna come back down to economics, too. And I agree with that move which is, I talked to over a hundred CIOs and their staff in the last year. I had one conversation where the person said, "You know what? "The chief complaint about me as CIO "is I'm not spending enough money." And I thought to myself, "Sounds like a company that I should put some bucks into, "because they must be doing really, really well." Everybody else is looking at it saying, "You know what? "I'm under pressure to adopt the cloud, "because there's a belief out there "that the cloud is gonna be so much less expensive "than what they've done in the past." And then I think they find that it's not, that it's not just the one size fits all answer to that. >> Right. >> And so as a consequence, you're gonna have people say, Listen, this money printing operation, or this funnel out the door to, whether it's EMC or NetApp 4, or whatever it may be, whatever storage vendor for backup architecture, they've got to stop that funnel. Because they've got to take what they were spending there and move it to the things that are going to make money for them, not just gonna hold on to it, and de-risk their enterprise. >> I'm here with two industry leaders, Chris Comings and Peter Smails, talking about the impact of infrastructure technologies, and app development in the cloud for businesses. It's a great conversation, and our final point, I wanna just get to, I know we're running on some time here but we wanna go a little further. I think this is awesome. That's for taking the time to share it out. >> It's great. >> One of my other questions I put on my crowd chat was, a true or false and comment question. Here's the statement: Serverless computing will become mainstream, will come to mainstream private cloud, true or false, comment. Subbu said, "False, adoption and success "of serverless patterns depend almost entirely "on the strength of the ecosystem "that the data center lacks." Interesting comment. I was kinda leaning, I go, "I was leaning towards true." But I don't have enough insight on this, because I'm waffling between true or false. I love serverless, I love the idea of, notion of resources that are just programmable. But what is the state of serverless? I mean, is he right? Is that that there's not enough ecosystem in the data center areas or... >> You wanna go first? >> Well, I'd just say that I would, I would just call out two things on that front. One is, I think you need a lot more germination of microservices that are out there in order to be able to put that all together. That's one aspect. We're seeing that growth come rapidly. The other thing is, now your security is beholden to the lowest common denominator. The security of that individual microservice. So I think you're gonna have some fits and starts here as we move down that path because, boy oh boy, the last thing I wanna do is get all modern but at the same time, put myself at a greater amount of risk. >> I thought the comment at the end was, I think it's true. I thought it was interesting what he said at the end. He said, "The ecosystem that the data center lacks." I would contend that potentially, the ecosystem that the cloud has would support that. >> Yeah. >> Because the cloud, by definition is, it's a shared-nothing world. >> Right. >> You know? >> So, he also comments, someone said, Lambda, "My Expedia is that Lambda's growth "is almost entirely due to the power "of the ecosystem of services, "which is one of the key points," and he points to his blog post. Stu Miniman, our Wikibon analyst weighed in, because Stu's on this big time. "Service will definitely be used for edge applications. "Currently don't see use case for general data center usage." >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> So edge of the network. Again, good point? This edge of the network thing helps you, because most people are using cloud for edge. >> Peter: Right. >> So this IOT, which is, an iterative things, is an edge of the network. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Whether it's devices, sensors, industrial equipment, or people's devices on their bodies. >> Yeah. >> It's a huge data source. >> Absolutely. >> Cloud's rolling that up. Or a cloud-like infrastructure. >> Well but it's not necessarily rolling it up. It's just connecting all the dots as to where you can put storage and you can put compute where the data is. Or you can move the data to where the storage and the compute is. So it's not, I mean, yes there's core and edge, that's absolutely true, but the notion of rollup isn't necessarily true. It's not necessarily the cloud enables me to do all this colossal aggregation. It's I basically distribute my compute, I distribute my storage. >> Well, when I say rollup, I'm assuming there's some sort of architectural thing. >> Okay, fair. >> But this fits into your wheelhouse, I think. But I just connecting the dots. That's why it's a question for you is, it would make sense for a solution like DATOS to be there because, That's a application so you-- >> Absolutely. >> You back up IOT? >> Oh absolutely. We backup IOT, but we basically backup any modern cloud application. And by definition, what does that mean? >> So IOT's and app for you. >> IOT, absolutely IOT's-- >> Not necessarily a-- >> So the technically where we plug in is, we plugin at the database level. And the databases basically, are the underlying infrastructure that support the applications. So in the case of IOT, those are typically very highly distributed across GIOS, absolutely we protect them. >> So we were just talking earlier about the words flexibility, manageability, agility. That's kind of vanilla words that everyone uses these days. But in essence, you're actually really doing it. Right, so. >> Thanks for that setup. Yes, we actually do all those buzz words. >> So Chris recommends, I recommend that you call it, hyper flexibility. >> Yeah. >> Or microflexibility. >> Or ultra. >> Or ultra flexibility. >> Or go mega. Just go mega right now. Or uber and steal a little of that, although that's kind of out of favor right now. >> Not, uber is-- >> Uber we wanna let that one kind of fly by. >> But remember we also talked before, we thought we were spot on with our product being branded RecoverX. We thought we were really in the spot with the whole, you know. >> Your name is awesome. RecoverX is a great brand. >> So we're gonna stick with that for now before we-- >> Good branding, RecoverX, Data IOS. Chris, thanks for coming on. Final comment, any words on the storage industry as it evolved? You mentioned earlier, just call it flash. Certainly, all flash arrays are doing well. Pure Storage went public. Flash is a standard. >> Yeah. >> It has benefits. Where does the flash storage go with all this cloud value coming over the top? >> Well I think, you know, there's gonna be a couple. I have one comment on that which is, we see what flash is doing at the array level, and now we're gonna see what NVME does at the cash layer, for allowing this access to information. You think about, I want to run a singular query, but some of that data is here, there, everywhere, but I've gotta have a level of performance that allows me to actually run it, and get an answer from it. And so that's where that comes into play. I think we're gonna see a whole host of folks flooding into that space, to try and improve performance, but not only improve performance, but enable that whole distribution model. >> Yeah, and I would just pick up on more persona-centric thing which is, the message to the traditional IT shops is it is all about collaboration. The folks over in the corner, the application folks, it is absolutely all about getting more closely aligned, because cloud is here. >> Yeah. >> Multicloud, hybrid cloud, call it whatever you want, is here. The traditional IT stack is absolutely being disrupted, and it's all about embracing this application-centric, data-driven view of the world. That's the future, traditional IT's got to align with that, and collaborate and drive that whole thing forward. >> That's a great, I agree 100% what you guys just said, great comment. I would just say Wikibon calls it unigrid, which is, I'll rename it hypergrid, meaning it's just one system, to your point. Private, public, it's all cloud-like. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, it doesn't matter where it goes. Okay guys, thanks for the thought leadership. Peter Smails and Chris Cummings here, breaking down the industry landscape on storage infrastructure, application developers, in context the cloud. This is theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (motivating electronic music)

(techy music playing) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to theCUBE Studios here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, the cofounder of SiliconANGLE Media Inc., also cohost of theCUBE. We're here for a CUBE Conversation on Thought Leader Thursday and I'm here with Chris Cummings, who's a senior manager, advisor, big-time industry legend, but he's also the Chasm Group, right now, doer, Crossing the Chasm, famous books and it's all about the future. Formerly an exec at Netapp, been in the storage and infrastructure cloud tech business, also friends of Stanford. Season tickets together to go to the tailgates, but big Cal game coming up of course, but more importantly a big-time influence in the industry and we're going to do some drill down on what's going on with cloud computing, all the buzzword bingo going on in the industry. Also, AWS, Amazon Web Services re:Invent is coming up, do a little preview there, but really kind of share our views on what's happening in the industry, because there's a lot of noise out there. We're going to try to get the signal from the noise, thanks for watching. Chris, thanks for coming in. >> Thank you so much for having me, glad to be here. >> Great to see you, so you know, you have seen a lot of waves of innovation and right now you're working with a lot of companies trying to figure out the future. >> That's right. >> And you're seeing a lot of significant industry shifts. We talk about it on theCUBE all the time. Blockchain from decentralization all the way up to massive consolidation with hyper-convergence in the enterprise. >> Mm-hmm. >> So a lot of action, and because of the day the people out in the marketplace, whether it's a developer or a CXO, CIO, CDO, whatever enterprise leader's doing the transformations. >> Chris Collins: We got all of them. >> They're trying to essentially not go out of business. A lot of great things are happening, but at the same time a lot of pressure on the business is happening. So, let's discuss that, I mean, you are doing this for work at the Chasm Group. Talk about your role, you were formerly at Netapp, so I know you know the storage business. >> Right. >> So we're going to have a great conversation about storage and impact infrastructure, but at the Chasm Group how are you guys framing the conversation? >> Yeah, Chasm Group is really all about helping these companies process their thinking, think about if they're going to get to be a platform out in the industry. You can't just go and become a platform in the industry, you got to go knock down problem, problem, problem, solution, solution, solution. So we help them prioritize that and think about best practices for achieving that. >> You know, Dave Alante, my co-CEO, copartner, co-founder at SiliconANGLE Media and I always talk about this all the time, and the expression we use is if you don't know what check mate looks like you shouldn't be playing chess, and a lot of the IT folks and CIOs are in that mode now where the game has changed so much that sometimes they don't even know what they're playing. You know, they've been leaning on this Magic Quadrant from Gartner and all these other analyst firms and it's been kind of a slow game, a batch kind of game, now it's real time. Whatever metaphor you want to use, the game has changed so the chessboard has changed. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> So I got to get your take on this because you've been involved in strategy, been on product, you worked at growth companies, big companies, start-ups, and now looking at the bigger picture, what is the game? I mean, right now if you could lay out the chessboard, what are people looking at, what is the game? >> So, we deal a lot with customer conversations and that's where it all kind of begins, and I think what we found is this era of pushing product and just throwing stuff out there. It worked for a while but those days are over. These folks are so overwhelmed. The titles you mentioned, CIO, CDO, all the dev ops people, they're so overwhelmed with what's going on out there. What they want is people to come in and tell them about what's happening out there, what are their peers doing and what problems are they trying to solve in order and drive it that way. >> And there's a lot of disruption on the product side. >> Yes. >> So tech's changing, obviously the business models are changing, that's a different issue. Let's consider the tech things, you have-- >> Mm-hmm. >> A tech perspective, let's get into the tech conversation. You got cloud, you got private cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, micro-machine learning, hyper-machine learning, hyper-cloud, all these buzzwords are out there. It's buzzwords bingo. >> Chris: Right. >> But also the reality is you got Amazon Web Services absolutely crushing it, no doubt about it. I mean, I've been looking at Oracle, I've been looking at Google, I've been looking at SAP, looking at IBM, looking at Alibaba, looking at Microsoft, the game is really kind of a cloak and dagger situation going on here. >> That's right. >> A lot of things shifting on the provider side, but no doubt scale is the big issue. >> Chris: That's right. >> So how does a customer squint through all this? >> The conversations that I've had, especially with the larger enterprises, is they know that they've got to be able to adopt and utilize the public cloud capabilities, but they also want to retain that degree of control, so they want to maintain, whether it's their apps, their dev ops, some pieces of their infrastructure on prem, and as you talked about that transition it used to be okay, well we thought about cloud was equal to private cloud, then it became public cloud. Hybrid cloud, people are hanging on to hybrid cloud, sometimes for the right reasons and sometimes for the wrong reasons. Right reasons are because it's critical for their business. You look at somebody, for instance, in media and entertainment. They can't just push everything out there. They've got to retain control and really have their hands around that content because they've got to be able to distribute it, right? But then you look at some others that are hanging on for the wrong reasons, and the wrong reasons are they want to have their control and they want to have their salary and they want to have their staff, so boy, hybrid sounds like a mix that works. >> So I'm going to be having a one-on-one with Andy Jassy next week, exclusive. I do that every year as part of theCUBE. He's a great guy, good friend, become a good friend, because we've been a fan of him when no one loved Amazon. We saw the early, obviously at SiliconANGLE, now he's the king of the industry, but he's a great manager, great executive, and has done a great job on his ethos of Bezos and Amazon. Ship stuff faster, lower prices, the flywheel that Amazon uses. Everything's kind of on that-- And they own Twitch, which we stream, too, and we love. But if you could ask Andy any questions what questions would you ask him if you get to have that one-on-one? >> Yeah, well, it stems from conversations I've had with customers, which was probably once a week I would be talking to a CIO or somebody on that person's staff, and they'd slide the piece of paper across and say this is my bill. I had no idea that this was what AWS was going to drive me from a billing perspective, and I think we've seen... You know, we've had all kinds of commentary out there about ingress fees, egress fees, all of that sort of stuff. I think the question for Andy, when you look at the amount of revenue and operating margin that they are generating in that business, how are they going to start diversifying that pricing strategy so that they can keep those customers on without having them rethink their strategy in the future. >> So are you saying that when they slide that piece of paper over that the fees are higher than expected or not... Or low and happy, they're happy with the prices. >> Oh, they're-- I think they're-- I think it's the first time they've ever thought that it could be as expensive as on-premise infrastructure because they just didn't understand when they went into this how much it was going to cost to access that data over time, and when you're talking about data that is high volume and high frequency data, they are accessing it quite a bit, as opposed to just stale, cold, dead stuff that they want to put off somewhere else and not have to maintain. >> Yeah, and one of the things we're seeing that we pointed at the Wikibon team is a lot of these pricings are... The clients don't know that they're being billed for something that they may not be using, so AI or machine learning could come in potentially. So this is kind of what you're getting at. >> Exactly. >> The operational things that Amazon's doing to keep prices low for the customer, not get bill shock. >> Chris: That's right. >> Okay, so that's cool. What else would you ask him about culture or is there anything you would ask him about his plans... What else would you ask him? >> I think another big thing would be just more plans on what's going to be done around data analytics and big data. We can call it whatever we want, but they've been so good at the semi-structured or unstructured content, you know, when we think about AWS and where AWS was going with S3, but now there's a whole new phenomenon going on around this and companies are as every bit as scared about that transition as they were about the prior cloud transition, so what really are their plans there when they think about that, and for instance, things like how does GPU processing come into play versus CPU processing. There's going to be a really interesting discussion I think you're going to have with him on that front. >> Awesome, let's talk about IT. IT and information technology departments formerly known as DP, data processing, information-- All that stuff's changed, but there were still guys that were buying hardware, buying Netapp tries that you used to work for, buying EMC, doing data domain, doing a lot of stuff. These guys are essentially looking at potentially a role where-- I mean, for instance, we use Amazon. We're a big customer, happy customer. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> We don't have those guys. >> Chris: Right. >> So if I'm an IT guy I might be thinking shit, I could be out of a job, Amazon's doing my job, so I'm not saying that's the case but that's certainly a fear. >> Chris: Absolutely. >> But the business models have to shift from old IT to new IT. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> What does that game look like? What is this new IT game? Is it more, not a department view, is it more of a holistic view, and what's the sentiment around the buyers and your customers that you talk to around how do they message to the IT guys, like, look, there's higher valued jobs you could go to. >> Right. >> You mention analytics... >> That's right. >> What's the conversation? Certainly some guys won't make the transition and might not make it, but what's the narrative? >> Well, I think that's where it just starts with what segment are you talking about, so if you look at it and say just break it down between the large enterprise, the uber enterprise that we've seen for so long, mid-size and smaller, the mid-size and smaller are gone, okay. Outside of just specific industries where they really need that control, media and entertainment might be an example. That mid-size business is gone for those vendors, right? So those vendors are now having to grab on and say I'm part of that cloud phenomenon, my hyper-cloud of the future. I'm part of that phenomenon, and that becomes really the game that they have to play, but when you look at those IT shops I think they really need to figure out where are they adding value and where are they just enabling value that's being driven by cloud providers, and really that's all they are is a facilitator, and they've got to shift their energy towards where am I adding value, and that becomes more that-- >> That's differentiation, that's where differentiation is, so non-differentiated labor is the term that Wikibon analysts use. >> Oh, okay. >> That's going down, the differentiated labor is either revenue generating or something operationally more efficient, right? >> That's right, and it's all going to be revenue generating now. I mean, I used to be out there talking about things like archiving, and archiving's a great idea. It's something where I'm going to save money, okay, but I got this many projects on my list if I'm a CIO of where I can save money. I'm being under pressure about how am I going to go generate money, and that's where I think people are really shifting their eyeballs and their attention, is more towards that. >> And you got IOT coming down the pike. I mean, we're hearing is from what I hear from CIOs when we have a few in-depth conversations is look, I got to get my development team ramped up and being more cloud native, more microservice and I got to get more app development going that drives revenue for my business, more efficiency. >> Chris: Right. >> I have a digital transformation across the company in terms of hiring culture and talent. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> And then I got pressure to do IOT. >> Chris: Right. >> And I got security, so of those five things, IOT tends to fall out, security takes preference because of the security challenges, and then that's already putting their plate full right there. >> That's right, that's real time and those people are-- >> Those are core issues. >> Putting too much pressure on that right now and then you're thinking about IT and in the meantime, by the way, most of these places don't have the dev ops shop that's operating on a flywheel, right? So you're not... What's it, Goldman Sachs has 5,000 developers, right? That's bigger than most tech companies, so as a consequence you start thinking about well, not everybody looks like that. What the heck are they going to do in the future. They're going to have to be thinking about new ways of accessing that type of capability. >> This is where the cloud really shines in my mind. I think in the cloud, too, it's starting to fragment the conversations. People will try to pigeonhole Amazon. I see Microsoft-- I've been very critical of Microsoft in their cloud because-- First of all, I love the move that they're making. I think it's a smart move business-wise, but they bundle in 365 Office, that's not really cloud, it's just SAS, so then you start getting into the splitting of the hairs of well, SAS is not included in cloud. But come on, SAS is cloud. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> Well, maybe Amazon should include their ecosystem that would be a trillion dollar revenue number, so all companies don't look the same. >> That's right. >> And so from an enterprise that's a challenge. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> Do I got to hire developers for Asger, do I got to hire developers for Amazon, do I got to hire developers for Google. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> There's no stack consistency across private enterprises to cloud. >> Chris: So I have-- >> Because I'm a storage guy, I've got Netapp drives and now I've got an Amazon thing. I like Amazon, but now I got to go Asger, what the hell do I do? >> I got EMCs here and I got Nimbles there and HP and I've still got tape from IBM from five decades ago, so, John, I got a great term for you that's going to be a key one, I think, in the ability. It's called histocompatibility, and this is really about... >> Oh, here we go. Let's get nerdy with the tape glasses on. >> It's really about the ability to be able to inter-operate with all this system and some of these systems are live systems, they're current systems. Some of it's garbage that should've been thrown out a long time ago and actually recycled. So I think histocompatibility is going to be a really, really big deal. >> Well, keep the glasses on. Let's get down in the weeds here. >> Okay. >> I like the-- With the pocket protector, if you had the pocket protector we'd be in good shape. >> Yep. >> So, vendors got to compete with these buzzwords, become buzzword bingo, but there are trends that you're seeing. You've done some analysis of how the positionings and you're also a positioning guru as well. There's ways to do it and that's a challenge is for suppliers, vendors who want to serve customers. They got to rise above the noise. >> Chris: That's right. >> That's a huge problem. What are you seeing in terms of buzzword bingo-- >> Oh, my goodness. >> Because like I said, I used to work for HP in the old days and they used to have an expression, you know, don't call it what it is because that's boring and make it exciting, so the analogy they used was sushi is basically cold, dead fish. (laughing) So, sushi is a name for cold, dead fish. >> Chris: Yeah. >> So you don't call your product cold, dead fish, you call it sushi. >> Chris: Right. >> That was the analogy, so in our world-- >> Chris: That was HP-UX. >> That was HP-UX, you know, HP was very engineering. >> Yes. >> That's not-- Sushi doesn't mean anything. It's cold, dead fish, that's what it is. >> Right. >> That's what it does. >> That's right. >> So a lot of vendors can error in that they're accurate and their engineers, they call it what it is, but there's more sex appeal with some better naming. >> Totally. >> What are you seeing in terms of the fashion, if you will, in terms of the naming conventions. Which ones are standing out, what's the analysis. >> Well, I think the analysis is this, you start with your adjectives with STEM words, John, and what I mean by that is things like histocompatibility. It could start with things like agility, flexibility, manageability, simplicity, all those sorts of things, and they've got to line those terms up and go out there, but I think the thing that right now-- >> But those are boring, I saw a press release saying we're more agile, we're the most effective software platform with agility and dev ops, like what the hell does that mean? >> Yeah, I think you also have to combine it with a heavy degree of hyperbole, right? So hyperbole, an off-the-cuff statement that is so extreme that you'd never really want to be tested on it, so an easy way to do that is to add hyper in front of all that. So it's hyper-manageability, right, and so I think we're going to see a whole new class of words. There are 361 great adjectives with STEMs, but-- >> Go through the list. >> Honestly. >> Go through the list that you have. >> I mean, there's so many, John, it's... >> So hyper is an easy one, right? >> Hyper is easy, I think that's a very simple one. I think now we also see that micro is so big, right, because we're talking about microservices and that's really the big buzzword in the industry right now. So everything's going to be about micro-segmenting your apps and then allowing those apps to be manifest and consumed by an uber app, and ultimately that uber app is an ultra app, so I think ultra is going to be another term that we see heading into the spectrum as well. >> And so histocompatibility is a word you mentioned, just here in my notes. >> Yep. >> You mentioned, so histo means historical. >> Exactly. >> So it means legacy. >> Chris: That's right. >> So basically backwards compatible would be the boring kind of word. >> Chris: That's right. >> And histocompatibility means we got you covered from legacy to cloud, right. >> Uh-huh. >> Or whatever. >> You bet. >> Micro-segmentility really talks to the granularity of data-driven things, right? >> That's right, another one would be macro API ability, it's kind of a mouthful, but everyone needs an API. I think we've seen that and because they're consuming so many different pieces and trying to assemble those they've got to have something that sits above. So macro API ability, I think, is another big one, and then lastly is this notion of mobility, right. We talk about-- As you said earlier, we talked about clouds and going from-- It's not just good enough to talk about hybrid cloud now, it's about multi-cloud. Well, multi-cloud means we're thinking about how we can place these apps and the data in all kinds of different spaces, but I've got to be able to have those be mobile, so hyper-mobility becomes a key for these applications as well. >> So hyper-scale we've seen, we've seen hyper-convergence. Hyper is the most popular-- >> Chris: Absolutely. >> Adjective with STEM, right? >> Chris: It's big. >> STEM words, okay, micro makes sense because, you know, micro-targeting, micro-segmentation, microservices, it speaks to the level of detail. >> Chris: Right. >> I love that one. >> Chris: Right. >> Which ones aren't working in your mind? We see anything that's so dead on arrival... >> Sure, I think there's a few that aren't working anymore. You got your agility, you got your flexibility, you got your manageability, and you got your simplicity. Okay, I could take all four of those and toss those over there in the trash because every vendor will say that they have those capabilities for you, so how does that help you distinguish yourself from anyone else. >> So that's old hat. >> It's just gone. >> Yeah, never fight fashion, as Jeremy Burton at EMC, now at Dell Technologies, said on theCUBE. I love that, so these are popular words. This is a way to stand out and be relevant. >> That's right. >> This is the challenge for vendors. Be cool and relevant but not be offensive. >> Yeah. >> All right, so what's your take on the current landscape for things like how do companies market themselves. Let's say they get the hyper in all the naming and the STEM words down. They have something compelling. >> Chris: Right. >> Something that's differentiated, something unique, how do companies stand out above the crowd, because the current way is advertising's not working. We're seeing fake news, you're seeing the analyst firms kind of becoming more old, slower, not relevant. I mean, does the Magic Quadrant really solve that problem or are they just putting that out there? If I'm a marketer, I'm a B2B marketer. >> Yeah. >> Obviously besides working with theCUBE and our team, so obviously great benefits. Plug there, but seriously, what do you advise? >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing is, you know, you think about marketing as not only reaching your target market, but also enabling your sales force and your channel partners, and frankly, the best thing that I've found in doing that, John, is starting every single piece that we would come up with with a number. How much value are we generating, whether it's zero clicks to get this thing installed. It's 90% efficiency, and then prove it. Don't just throw it out there and say isn't that good enough, but numbers matter because they're meaningful and they stimulate the conversation, and that's ultimately what all of this is. It's a conversation about is this going to be relevant for you, so that's the thing that I start with. >> So you're say being in the conversation matters. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> Absolutely. >> What's the thought leadership view, what's your vision on how a company should be looking at thought leadership. Obviously you're seeing more of a real-time-- I call it the old world was batch marketing. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> E-mail marketing, do the normal things, get the white papers, do those things. You know, go to events, have a booth, and then the new way is real-time. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> Things are happening very fast-- >> That's right. >> In the market, people are connected now. It's a global, basically, message group. >> That's right. >> Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and all this stuff. >> It's really an unfulfilled need that you guys are really looking to fill, which is to provide that sort of real-time piece of it, but I think vendors trip over themselves and they think about I need a 50 page vision. They don't need a 50 page vision. What they need is here are a couple of dimensions on which this industry is going to change, and then commit to them. I think the biggest problem that many vendors have is they won't commit, they hedge, as opposed to they go all in behind those and one thing we talk about at Chasm Institute is if you're going to fail, fail fast, and that really means that you commit full time behind what you're pushing. >> Yeah, and of course what the Chasm, what it's based upon, you got to get to mainstream, get to early pioneers, cross the chasm. The other paradigm that I always loved from Jeffrey Moore was inside the tornado. Get inside the tornado because if you don't get in you're going to be spun out, so you've got to kind of get in the game, if you will. >> Chris: That's right. >> Don't overthink it, and this is where the iteration mindset comes in, "agile" start-up or "agile" venture. Okay, cool, so let's take a step back and reset to end the segment here. >> Mm-hmm. >> Re:Invent's coming up, obviously that's the big show of the year. VMworld, someone was commenting on Facebook VMworld 2008 was the big moment where they're comparing Amazon now to VMworld in 2008. >> Chris: Right. >> But you know, Pat Gelsinger essentially cut a great deal with Andy Jassy on Vmware. >> Chris: Right. >> And everything's clean, everything's growing, they're kicking ass. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> They got a private cloud and they got the hybrid cloud with Amazon. >> Yeah, it's that VMcloud on Amazon, that really seems to be the thing that's really driving their move into the future, and I think we're going to see from both of those folks, you are going to see so much on containers. Containerization, ultra-containers, hyper-containers, whatever it may be. If you're not speaking container language, then you are yesterday's news, right? >> And Kubernetes' certainly the orchestration piece right underneath it to kind of manage it. Okay, final point, what's in store for the legacy, because you're seeing a few major trends that we're pointing out and we're watching very closely, which really I put into two buckets. I know Wikibon's a more disciplined approach, I'm more simple about that. The decentralization trend we're seeing with Blockchain, which is kind of crazy and bubbly but very infrastructure relevant, this decentralized, disrupting, non-decentralized incumbence, so that's one trend and the other one is what cloud's doing to legacy IT vendors, Oracle, you know, these traditional manufacturers like that HP and Dell and all these guys, and Netapp which is transforming. So you've got disruption on both sides, cloud and like a decentralized model, apps, what's the position, view, from your standpoint, for these legacy guys? >> It's going to be quite an interesting one. I think they have to ride the wave, and I'll steal this from Peter Levine, from Andreessen, right? He talks about the end of cloud computing, and really what that is is just basically saying everything is going to be moving to the edge and there's going to be so much more compute at the edge with IOT and you can think about autonomous vehicles as the ultimate example of that, where you're talking about more powerful computers, certainly, than this that are sitting in cars all over the place, so that's going to be a big change, and those vendors that have been selling into the core data center for so long are going to have to figure out their way of being relevant in that universe and move towards that. And like we were talking about before, commit to that. >> Yeah. >> Right, don't just hedge, but commit to it and move. >> What's interesting is that I was talking with some executives at Alibaba when I was in China for part of the Alibaba Cloud Conference and Amazon had multiple conversations with Andy Jassy and his team over the years. It's interesting, a lot of people don't understand the nuances of kind of what's going on in cloud, and what I'm seeing is it's essentially, to your point, it's a compute game. >> Chris: Yeah. >> Right, so if you look at Intel for instance, Alibaba told me on my interview, they don't view Intel as a chip company anymore, they're a compute company, right, and CJ Bruno, one of the executives there, reaffirmed that. So Intel's looking at the big picture saying the cloud's a computer. Intel Inside is a series of compute, and you mentioned that the edge, Jassy is building a set of services with his team around core compute, which has storage, so this is essentially hyper-converged cloud. >> That's right. >> This is a pretty big thing. What's the one thing that people might not understand about this. If you could kind of illuminate this trend. I mean, the old Intel now turned into the new Intel, which is a monster franchise continuing to grow. >> Mm-hmm. >> Amazon, people see the numbers, they go oh, my god, they're a leader, but they have so much more headroom. >> Chris: Right, right. >> And they've got everyone else playing catch up. >> Yeah. >> What's the real phenomenon going on here? >> I think you're going to see more of this aggregation phenomenon where one vendor can't solve this entire problem. I mean, look at most recently, in the last two weeks, Intel and AMD getting together. Who would've thought that would happen? But they're just basically admitting we got a real big piece of the equation, Intel, and then AMD can fulfill this niche because they're getting killed by NVIDIA, but you're going to see just more of these industry conglomerations getting together to try and solve the problem. >> Just to end the segment, this is a great point. NVIDIA had a niche segment, graphics, now competing head to head with Intel. >> Chris: That's right. >> So essentially what's happening is the landscape is completely changing. Once competitors no longer-- New entrants, new competitors coming in. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> So this is a massive shift. >> Chris: It is. >> Okay, Chris Cummings here inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier of CUBE Conversation. There's a massive shift happening, the game has changed and it's incumbent upon start-ups, venture capital, you know, Blockchain, ICOs or whatever's going on. Look at the new chessboard, look at the game and figure it out. Of course, we'll be broadcasting live at AWS re:Invent in a couple weeks. Stay tuned, more coverage, thanks for watching. (techy music playing)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, DC it's theCUBE. Covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back here on theCUBE continuing our coverage of .conf2017 sponsored by Get Together in your nations capitol, we are live here at the Walter Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. Along with Dave Vellante I'm John Walls Joined now by a couple CUBE alums, actually, you guys were here about a year ago. Yeah, Robert Herjavec, with the Herjavec Group of course you all know him from Shark Tank fame answer Atif Ghauri who is the VP of Customer Service Success at the Herjavec Group. I love that title, Atif we're going to get into that in just a little bit. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> Good to see you all. >> We're more like CUBE groupies We're more like CUBE groupies. >> Alums. >> Alums, okay, yeah. >> If we had a promo reel. >> Yeah, we love it here. We get free mugs with the beautiful Splunk. >> That doesn't happen all the time does it. >> Where did you get those? >> They're everywhere. >> Dave, I'll share. >> So again for folks who don't, what brings you here what, what's the focus here for the Herjavec Group in in terms of what you're seeing in the Splunk community and I assume it's very security driven. >> Yeah, well we've been part of the Splunk community for many years going on gosh, eight, nine years. We're Splunkers and we use Splunk as our core technology to provide our managed service and we manage a lot of customer environments with Splunk and we've been really forefront of Splunk as a SIM technology for a long time. >> Atif, excuse me, David, just the title, VP of Customer Service Success, what's under that umbrella? >> Yeah, it's actually pretty simple and straightforward given especially that Splunk's aligned the same way. Christmas success is King, right. If our customers aren't successful then how are we successful? So what we're trying to do there is putting the customer first and help in growing accounts and growing our services starting with our customers that we have today. >> It was actually Doug Maris, I have to give him full credit him and I were on a flight, and I said to him what's really critical to you growing revenue, efficiency, innovation and he said, number one for us is customer success. So we're very happy to steal other people's ideas if they're better. >> So security's changing so fast. You mentioned SIM, Splunk's narrative is that things are shifting from a traditional SIM world to one of an analytic driven remediation world. I wonder if you could talk about what you're seeing in the customer base, are people actually shifting their spending and how fast and where do you see it all going? >> Yeah, so the days of chasing IOC's is a dead end. Because that's just a nonstop effort. What's really happening now is technique detection. Defining, looking at how hackers are doing their trade craft and then parroting that. So Splunk has ideas and other vendors have ideas on how to go about trying to detect pattern recognition of attacker trade craft. And so what definitely was driving what's next when it comes to security automation, security detection, for our customers today. >> You know, we always tell people and it's just dead on but the challenge is people want to buy the, sexy, exciting thing and why I always try to say to customers is you're a dad and you have three kids, and you have a minivan. You don't really want to own a minivan, you want a really nice Ferrari or Corvette but at the end of the day, you have three kids and you got to get to the store. And in the security world it's a little bit like that. People talk about artificial intelligence and better threat metrics and analytics but the core, foundational basis still is logs. You have to manage your log infrastructure. And the beauty of Splunk is, it does it better than anyone and gives you an upstream in fact to be able to do the analytics and all those other things. But you still got to do the foundation. You still got to get three kids into the minivan and bring back groceries. >> So there's been a lot of focus, obviously security's become a Board level topic. You hear that all the time, you used to not hear it all the time, used to be IT problem. >> Absolutely, the only way I could get a meeting with the CEO or CIO was because I was on Shark Tank. But as a security guy, I would never meet any executives. Oh yeah I spend 80% of my time meeting with CEO, not just CIO's, but CEO's and Boards and that kind of stuff, absolutely. >> How should the CIO be communicating the Board about security, how often, what should be the narrative you know, transparency, I wonder if you could give us your thoughts. >> It's a great question. There's a new financial regulation that's coming out where CISO's and CIO's actually have to sign off on financial statements related to cyber security. And there's a clause in there that says if they knowingly are negligent, it carries criminal charges. So the regulations coming into cyber security are very similar to what we're seeing and Sarbanes Oxley like if a CEO signs an audit statement that he suspects might have some level of negligence to it I'm not talking about outright criminal fraud but just some level of negligence, it carries a criminal offense. If you look at the latest Equifax breach, a lot of the media around it was that there should be criminal charges around it. And so as soon as as you use words like criminal, compliance, audit, CEO's, executives really care. So the message from the CIO has to be we're doing everything in our power, based on industry standards, to be as secure as we can number one. And number two we have the systems in place that if we are breached, we can detect it as quickly as possible. >> So I was watching CNBC the other day and what you don't want to see as a Board member, every Board members picture from Equifax up there, with the term breach. >> Is that true? >> Yeah, yeah. >> See, but, isn't that different. Like you never, like if we think back on all the big breaches, Target and Sony they were all seminal in their own way. Target was seminal because the CEO got fired. And that was the first time it happened. I think we're going to remember Equifax, I didn't know that about the Board. >> For 50 seconds it was up there. I the sound off. >> You don't want to be a Board member. >> I mean, I hate to say it, but it's got to be great for your business, first of all it's another reason not to be a public company is one more hurdle. But if you are they need help. >> They absolutely need help. And on point I don't want to lose is that what we're seeing with CISO's, Chief Information Security Officers, Is that that role's transcending, that role is actually reporting directly to in to CEO's now. Directly into CFO's now, away from the CIO, because there's some organizational dynamics that keep the CISO from telling, what's really going on. >> Fox in henhouse. >> Exactly. >> You want to separate those roles. You're you're seeing that more often. What percent of the CISO's and CIO's are separate in your experience? >> Organizations that have a mature security program. That have evolved to where it's really a risk-based decision, and then the security function becomes more like risk management, right. Just what you they've been doing for decades. But now you have a choice security person leading that charge. >> So what we really always saying theCUBE, it's not a matter of if, it's when you're going to get infiltrated. Do you feel as though that the Boards and CIO's are transparent about that? Do Boards understand that that it's really the remediation and the response that's most important now, or there's still some education that has to go on there? >> You know, Robert speaks to Boards are the time he can comment on that, but they really want to know two things, how bad is it and how much money do you need. And those are the key questions that's driving from a Board perspective what's going to happen next. >> What's worse that Equifax got breached or that Equifax was breached for months and didn't know about it. I mean, as a Board member the latter is much worse. There's an acceptance like I have a beautiful house and I have big windows a lots of alarms and a dog, not a big dog, but still, I have a dog. >> A yipper. >> Yeah, I have a yipper. It's worse to me if somebody broke into my house, was there for a while and my wife came home at night and the person was still there. That to me is fundamentally worse than getting an alarm and saying, somebody broke the window, went in, stole a picture frame. You're going to get breached, it's how quickly you respond and what the assets are. >> And is it all shapes and sizes, too I mean, we talk about big companies here you've mentioned three but is it the mid-level guys and do smaller companies have the same concerns or same threats and risks right now? >> See these are the you heard about. What about all the breaches you don't know. >> That's the point, how big of a problem are we talking about? >> It's a wide scaling problem right and to the previous question, the value now in 2017, is what is the quality of your intelligence? Like what actions can I take, with the software that you're giving me, or with the service that you're giving me because you could detect all day but what are you going to do about it? And you're going to be held accountable for that. >> I'm watching the service now screen over here and I've seen them flash the stat 191 days to detect an infiltration. >> That sounds optimistic to me. I think most people would be happy with that if they could guarantee that. >> I would think the number's 250 to 300 so that now maybe they're claiming they can squeeze that down but, are you seeing any compression in that number? I mean it's early days I know. >> I think that the industry continues to be extremely complicated. There's a lot of vendors, there's a lot of products. The average Fortune 500 company has 72 security products. There's a stat that RSA this year that there's 1500 new security start ups every year. Every single year. How are they going to survive? And which ones do you have to buy because they're critical and provide valuable insights. And which ones are going to be around for a year or two and you're never going to hear about again. So it's a extremely challenging complex environment. >> From the bad guys are so much more sophisticated going from hacktivists to whatever State sponsored or criminal. >> That's the bottom line, I mean the bad guys are better, the bad guys are winning. The white hats fought their way out to the black hats, right. The white hats are trying, trying hard, we're trying to get organized, we're trying to win battles but the war is clearly won by the by the black hats. And that's something that as an industry we're getting better at working towards. >> Robert, as an investor what's your sentiment around valuations right now and do you feel as though. >> Not high enough. >> Oh boy. >> Managed security companies should be trading way higher value. >> Do you feel like they're somewhat insulated? >> Its a really good question, we're in that space you know we're we're about a $200 million private company. We're the largest privately held, managed security company in the world actually. And so I always think every time we're worth more I think wow, we couldn't be worth more, the market can't get bigger. Because your values always based for potential size. Nobody values you for what you're worth today. Because an investor doesn't buy history an investor doesn't buy present state, an investor buys future state. So if the valuations are increasing, it's a direct correlation because the macro factors are getting bigger. And so the answer to your question is values are going to go up because the market is just going to be fundamentally bigger. Is everybody going to survive? No, but I think you're going to see valuations continue to increase. >> Well in digital business everybody talks about digital business. We look at digital business as how well you leverage data. We think the value of data is going through the roof but I'm not sure customers understand the intrinsic value of the data or have a method to actually value their data. If they did, we feel like they would find it's way more valuable and they need to protect it better. What are you seeing in that regard with customers? >> There's an explosion of data in that with IoT, internet of things, and the amount of additional data that's come now. But, to your point, how do you sequence and label data? That's been a multi-decade old question more organizations struggle with. Many have gone to say that, it's all important so let's protect it all, right. And verses having layers of approach. So, it's a challenging problem, I don't think across all our customer base. That's something that each wrestling with to try to solve individually for their companies. >> Well, I think you also have the reality though of money. So, it's easy to say all the data is important, Structured unstructured, but you look at a lot of the software and tools that you need around this floor are sold to you on a per user or per ingestion model. So, even though all your data is critical. You can't protect all your data. It's like your house, you can't protect every single component of it, you try, and every year gets better maybe get a better alarm maybe I'll get rid the yappy dog and get a Doberman you know you're constantly upgrading. But you can't protect everything, because reality is you still live in an unstructured, unsafe world. >> So is that the complexity then, because the a simple question is why does it take so long to find out if there's something wrong with your house? >> I think it's highly complex because we're dealing with people who are manipulating what we know to their benefit in ways we've never done it. The Wannacry breach was done in a way that had not been done before. If it had done before we could have created some analytics around it, we could created some, you know, metrics around it but these are attacks that are happening in a way we've never seen before and so it's this element of risk and data and then you always have human nature. Gary Moore was that the Council this morning. The writer of Crossing the Chasm, legendary book, and he said something very interesting which was Why do people always get on a flight and say, good luck with the flight, hope you fly safe. But they don't think twice about hopping in their car and driving to the grocery store. Whereas statistically, your odds of dying in that car are fundamentally greater, and it's human nature, it's how we perceive risk. So it's the same with security and data in cyber security. >> As security experts I'm curious and we're here in DC, how much time you think about and what your thoughts might be in the geopolitical implications of security, cyber war, you know it's Stuxnet, fast forward, whatever, ten years. What are you thoughts as security practitioners in that regard? >> The longest and most heated battles in the next World War, will not be on Earth, they'll be in cyberspace. It's accepted as a given. That's the way this Country is moving. That's the way our financial systems are tied together and that's the way we're moving forward. >> It's interesting we had Robert Gates on last year and he was saying you know we have to be really careful because while we have the United States has the best security technologies, we also have the most to lose with our infrastructure and it's a whole new you know gamification or game theory balance we have to play. >> I would agree with him that we have some of the best security technology in the world but I would say that our barometer and our limiter is the freedom of our society. By nature what we love about our country and Canada is that we love freedom. And we love giving people access to information and data and free speech. By nature we have countries that may not have as good a security, but have the ability to limit access to outsiders, and I'm not saying that's good by any means but it does make security a little bit easier from that perspective. Whereas in our system, we're never going to go to that, we shouldn't go to that. So now we have to have better security just to stay even. >> To Dave's point talking about the geopolitical pressures, the regulatory environment being what it is, you know legislators, if they smell blood right, it in terms of compliance and what have you, what are you seeing in terms of that shift focus from the Hill. >> Great question. I did a speech to about two thousand CIO's, CISO's not long ago and I said, how many people in this room buy security to be more secure and how many people buy because you have to be compliant. 50/50, even the security ones admitted that how they got budget was leveraging the compliance guys. It was easier to walk into CEO's office and say look, we have to buy this to meet some kind of a political, compliance, Board issue. Than it was to say this will make us better. Better is a hard sell. So that, has to go to the head to pull the trigger to do some of that. >> You know, I think in this geopolitical environment it's look at the elections, look at all the rhetoric. It's just there is going to be more of that stuff. >> A lot's changed in crypto and its potential applications in security. More money poured into ICO's in the first half than venture backed crypto opportunities. >> There are practical applications of blockchain technology all across the board, right, but as you mentioned is fundamentally built on pathology. On core gut security work and making a community of people decide whether something's authentic or not. It's a game changer, as far what what we could do from a platform standpoint to secure our financial systems and short answer it's volatile. As you saw with the fluctuation of Bitcoin and then the currency of Bitcoin, how it's gone up and down. It's quite volatile right now because there's a lot of risk So I say what's the next Bitcoin in six months or eighteen months and what's going to happen to the old Bitcoin and then all the money that into there, where is that going to go? So that's a discuss the pivot point I think for the financial services industry and more and more their larger institutions are just trying to get involved with that whole network of blockchain. >> Crypto currencies really interesting. In some ways it's the fuel that's funding the cyber security ransomeware. I mean it's one of the easiest ways to send money and be completely anonymous. If you didn't have crypto currency, how would you pay for ransomware? You give them your checking account? You deposit into their checking account? So, I think that you're seeing a big surge of it but if you look at the history of money or even checks, checks were developed by company called Deluxe here in the United States 104 years ago. They're a customer of ours, that's why I know this, but the basis of it is that somebody, a real institution with bricks and mortar and people in suits is backing that check, or that currency. Who's backing crypto currency today? So you have, by nature, you have this element of volatility and I don't know if it's going to make it or it's not going to make it. But inevitably has to cross from a purely electronic crypto form to some element of a note or a tender that I can take from that world and get backing on it. >> That's kind of what Warren Buffet has said about it. I mean I would respond that it's the community, whatever that means, that's backing it. I mean, what backs the greenback, it's the US Government and the US military. It's an interesting. >> Right like, at the end of the day I would still rather take a US dollar than even a Canadian dollar or a UK dollar. >> Gentlemen thanks for being with us. >> Great to see you. >> Thank you for the coffee mug. >> This is incredible. >> There's actually stuff in it too so be careful. >> I drank it is that okay? >> Can I go to the hospital. >> Atif, thanks for the time and Robert good luck with that new dog. (all laughing) >> Don't tell my wife I got rid of her dog. >> In time. >> In time. All things a time, theCUBE continues live here Washington DC at .conf2017 right after this.

>> Narrator: From the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here at the east coast studio for Silicon Angle Media. Happy to welcome back to the program, a many time guest, Chris Selland, who is now the Vice President of strategic growth with Unifi Software. Great to see you Chris. >> Thanks so much Stu, great to see you too. >> Alright, so Chris, we'd had you in your previous role many times. >> Chris: Yes >> I think not only is the first time we've had you on since you made the switch, but also first time we've had somebody from Unifi Software on. So, why don't you give us a little bit of background of Unifi and what brought you to this opportunity. >> Sure, absolutely happy to sort of open up the relationship with Unifi Software. I'm sure it's going to be a long and good one. But I joined the company about six months ago at this point. So I joined earlier this year. I actually had worked with Unifi for a bit as partners. Where when I was previously at the Vertica business inside of HP/HP, as you know for a number of years prior to that, where we did all the work together. I also knew the founders of Unifi, who were actually at Greenplum, which was a direct Vertica competitor. Greenplum is acquired by EMC. Vertica was acquired by HP. We were sort of friendly respected competitors. And so I have known the founders for a long time. But it was partly the people, but it was really the sort of the idea, the product. I was actually reading the report that Peter Burris or the piece that Peter Burris just did on I guess wikibon.com about distributed data. And it played so into our value proposition. We just see it's where things are going. I think it's where things are going right now. And I think the market's bearing that out. >> The piece you reference, it was actually, it's a Wikibon research meeting, we run those weekly. Internally, we're actually going to be doing them soon we will be broadcasting video. Cause, of course, we do a lot of video. But we pull the whole team together, and it was one, George Gilbert actually led this for us, talking about what architectures do I need to build, when I start doing distributed data. With my background really more in kind of the cloud and infrastructure world. We see it's a hybrid, and many times a multi-cloud world. And, therefore, one of the things we look at that's critical is wait, if I've got things in multiple places. I've got my SAS over here, I've got multiple public clouds I'm using, and I've got my data center. How do I get my arms around all the pieces? And of course data is critical to that. >> Right, exactly, and the fact that more and more people need data to do their jobs these days. Working with data is no longer just the area where data scientists, I mean organizations are certainly investing in data scientists, but there's a shortage, but at the same time, marketing people, finance people, operations people, supply chain folks. They need data to do their jobs. And as you said where it is, it's distributed, it's in legacy systems, it's in the data center, it's in warehouses, it's in SAS applications, it's in the cloud, it's on premise, It's all over the place, so, yep. >> Chris, I've talked to so many companies that are, everybody seems to be nibbling at a piece of this. We go to the Amazon show and there's this just ginormous ecosystem that everybody's picking at. Can you drill in a little bit for what problems do you solve there. I have talked to people. Everything from just trying to get the licensing in place, trying to empower the business unit to do things, trying to do government compliance of course. So where's Unifi's point in this. >> Well, having come out of essentially the data warehousing market. And now of course this has been going on, of course with all the investments in HDFS, Hadoop infrastructure, and open source infrastructure. There's been this fundamental thinking that, well the answer's if I get all of the data in one place then I can analyze it. Well that just doesn't work. >> Right. >> Because it's just not feasible. So I think really and its really when you step back it's one of these like ah-ha that makes total sense, right. What we do is we basically catalog the data in place. So you can use your legacy data that's on the main frame. Let's say I'm a marketing person. I'm trying to do an analysis of selling trends, marketing trends, marketing effectiveness. And I want to use some order data that's on the main frame, I want some click stream data that's sitting in HDFS, I want some customer data in the CRM system, or maybe it's in Sales Force, or Mercado. I need some data out of Workday. I want to use some external data. I want to use, say, weather data to look at seasonal analysis. I want to do neighborhooding. So, how do I do that? You know I may be sitting there with Qlik or Tableau or Looker or one of these modern B.I. products or visualization products, but at the same time where's the data. So our value proposition it starts with we catalog the data and we show where the data is. Okay, you've got these data sources, this is what they are, we describe them. And then there's a whole collaboration element to the platform that lets people as they're using the data say, well yes that's order data, but that's old data. So it's good if you use it up to 2007, but the more current data's over here. Do things like that. And then we also then help the person use it. And again I almost said IT, but it's not real data scientists, it's not just them. It's really about democratizing the use. Because business people don't know how to do inner and outer joins and things like that or what a schema is. They just know, I'm trying do a better job of analyzing sales trends. I got all these different data sources, but then once I found them, once I've decided what I want to use, how do I use them? So we answer that question too. >> Yea, Chris reminds me a lot of some the early value propositions we heard when kind of Hadoop and the whole big data wave came. It was how do I get as a smaller company, or even if I'm a bigger company, do it faster, do it for less money than the things it use to be. Okay, its going to be millions of dollars and it's going to take me 18 months to roll out. Is it right to say this is kind of an extension of that big data wave or what's different and what's the same? >> Absolutely, we use a lot of that stuff. I mean we basically use, and we've got flexibility in what we can use, but for most of our customers we use HDFS to store the data. We use Hive as the most typical data form, you have flexibility around there. We use MapReduce, or Spark to do transformation of the data. So we use all of those open source components, and as the product is being used, as the platform is being used and as multiple users, cause it's designed to be an enterprise platform, are using it, the data does eventually migrate into the data lake, but we don't require you to sort of get it there as a prerequisite. As I said, this is one of the things that we really talk about a lot. We catalog the data where it is, in place, so you don't have to move it to use it, you don't have to move it to see it. But at the same time if you want to move it you can. The fundamental idea I got to move it all first, I got to put it all in one place first, it never works. We've come into so many projects where organizations have tried to do that and they just can't, it's too complex these days. >> Alright, Chris, what are some of the organizational dynamics you're seeing from your customers. You mention data scientist, the business users. Who is identifying, whose driving this issues, whose got the budget to try to fix some of these challenges. >> Well, it tends to be our best implementations are driven really, almost all of them these days, are driven by used cases. So they're driven by business needs. Some of the big ones. I've sort of talked about customers already, but like customer 360 views. For instance, there's a very large credit union client of ours, that they have all of their data, that is organized by accounts, but they can't really look at Stu Miniman as my customer. How do I look at Stu's value to us as a customer? I can look at his mortgage account, I can look at his savings account, I can look at his checking account, I can look at his debit card, but I can't just see Stu. I want to like organize my data, that way. That type of customer 360 or marketing analysis I talked about is a great use case. Another one that we've been seeing a lot of is compliance. Where just having a better handle on what data is where it is. This is where some of the governance aspects of what we do also comes into play. Even though we're very much about solving business problems. There's a very strong data governance. Because when you are doing things like data compliance. We're working, for instance, with MoneyGram, is a customer of ours. Who this day and age in particular, when there's money flows across the borders, there's often times regulators want to know, wait that money that went from here to there, tell me where it came from, tell me where it went, tell me the lineage. And they need to be able to respond to those inquiries very very quickly. Now the reality is that data sits in all sorts of different places, both inside and outside of the organization. Being able to organize that and give the ability to respond more quickly and effectively is a big competitive advantage. Both helps with avoiding regulatory fines, but also helps with customers responsiveness. And then you've got things GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, I believe it is, which is being driven by the EU. Where its sort of like the next Y2K. Anybody in data, if they are not paying attention to it, they need to be pretty quick. At least if they're a big enough company they're doing business in Europe. Because if you are doing business with European companies or European customers, this is going to be a requirement as of May next year. There's a whole 'nother set of how data's kept, how data's stored, what customers can control over data. Things like 'Right to Be Forgotten'. This need to comply with regulatory... As data's gotten more important, as you might imagine, the regulators have gotten more interested in what organizations are doing with data. Having a framework with that, organizes and helps you be more compliant with those regulations is absolutely critical. >> Yeah, my understanding of GDPR, if you don't comply, there's hefty fines. >> Chris: Major Fines. >> Major Fines. That are going to hit you. Does Unifi solve that? Is there other re-architecture, redesign that customers need to do to be able to be compliant? [speaking at The same Time] >> No, no that's the whole idea again where being able to leave the data where it is, but know what it is and know where it is and if and when I need to use it and where it came from and where it's going and where it went. All of those things, so we provide the platform that enables the customers to use it or the partners to build the solutions for their customers. >> Curious, customers, their adoption of public cloud, how does that play into what you are doing? They deploy more SAS environments. We were having a conversation off camera today talking about the consolidation that's happening in the software world. What does those dynamics mean for your customers? >> Well public cloud is obviously booming and growing and any organization has some public cloud infrastructure at this point, just about any organization. There's some very heavily regulated areas. Actually health care's probably a good example. Where there's very little public cloud. But even there we're working with... we're part of the Microsoft Accelerator Program. Work very closely with the Azure team, for instance. And they're working in some health care environments, where you have to be things like HIPAA compliant, so there is a lot of caution around that. But none the less, the move to public cloud is certainly happening. I think I was just reading some stats the other day. I can't remember if they're Wikibon or other stats. It's still only about 5% of IT spending. And the reality is organizations of any size have plenty of on-prem data. And of course with all the use of SAS solutions, with Salesforce, Workday, Mercado, all of these different SAS applications, it's also in somebody else's data center, much of our data as well. So it's absolutely a hybrid environment. That's why the report that you guys put out on distributed data, really it spoke so much to what out value proposition is. And that's why you know I'm really glad to be here to talk to you about it. >> Great, Chris tell us a little bit, the company itself, how many employees you have, what metrics can you share about the number of customers, revenue, things like that. >> Sure, no, we've got about, I believe about 65 people at the company right now. I joined like I said earlier this year, late February, early March. At that point we we were like 40 people, so we've been growing very quickly. I can't get in too specifically to like our revenue, but basically we're well in the triple digit growth phase. We're still a small company, but we're growing quickly. Our number of customers it's up in the triple digits as well. So expanding very rapidly. And again we're a platform company, so we serve a variety of industries. Some of the big ones are health care, financial services. But even more in the industries it tends to be driven by these used cases I talked about as well. And we're building out our partnerships also, so that's a big part of what I do also. >> Can you share anything about funding where you are? >> Oh yeah, funding, you asked about that, sorry. Yes, we raised our B round of funding, which closed in March of this year. So we [mumbles], a company called Pelion Venture Partners, who you may know, Canaan Partners, and then most recently Scale Venture Partners are investors. So the companies raised a little over $32 million dollars so far. >> Partnerships, you mentioned Microsoft already. Any other key partnerships you want to call out? >> We're doing a lot of work. We have a very broad partner network, which we're building up, but some of the ones that we are sort of leaning in the most with, Microsoft is certainly one. We're doing a lot of work guys at Cloudera as well. We also work with Hortonworks, we also work with MapR. We're really working almost across the board in the BI space. We have spent a lot of time with the folks at Looker. Who was also a partner I was working with very closely during my Vertica days. We're working with Qlik, we're working with Tableau. We're really working with actually just about everybody in sort of BI and visualization. I don't think people like the term BI anymore. The desktop visualization space. And then on public cloud, also Google, Amazon, so really all the kind of major players. I would say that they're the ones that we worked with the most closely to date. As I mentioned earlier we're part of the Microsoft Accelerator Program, so we're certainly very involved in the Microsoft ecosystem. I actually just wrote a blog post, which I don't believe has been published yet, about some of the, what we call the full stack solutions we have been rolling out with Microsoft for a few customers. Where we're sitting on Azure, we're using HDInsight, which is essentially Microsoft's Hadoop cloud Hadoop distribution, visualized empower BI. So we've really got to lot of deep integration with Microsoft, but we've got a broad network as well. And then I should also mention service providers. We're building out our service provider partnerships also. >> Yeah, Chris I'm surprised we haven't talked about kind of AI yet at all, machine learning. It feels like everybody that was doing big data, now has kind pivoted in maybe a little bit early in the buzz word phase. What's your take on that? You've been apart of this for a while. Is big data just old now and we have a new thing, or how do you put those together? >> Well I think what we do maps very well until, at least my personal view of what's going on with AI/ML, is that it's really part of the fabric of what our product does. I talked before about once you sort of found the data you want to use, how do I use it? Well there's a lot of ML built into that. Where essentially, I see these different datasets, I want to use them... We do what's called one click functions. Which basically... What happens is these one click functions get smarter as more and more people use the product and use the data. So that if I've got some table over here and then I've got some SAS data source over there and one user of the product... or we might see field names that we, we grab the metadata, even though we don't require moving the data, we grab the metadata, we look at the metadata and then we'll sort of tell the user, we suggest that you join this data source with that data source and see what it looks like. And if they say: ah that worked, then we say oh okay that's part of sort of the whole ML infrastructure. Then we are more likely to advise the next few folks with the one click function that, hey if you trying to do a analysis of sales trends, well you might want to use this source and that source and you might want to join them together this way. So it's a combination of sort of AI and ML built into the fabric of what we do, and then also the community aspect of more and more people using it. But that's, going back to your original question, That's what I think that... There was quote, I'll misquote it, so I'm not going to directly say it, but it was just.. I think it might have John Ferrier, who was recently was talking about ML and just sort of saying you know eventually we're not going to talk about ML anymore than we talk about phone business or something. It's just going to become sort of integrated into the fabric of how organizations do business and how organizations do things. So we very much got it built in. You could certainly call us an AI/ML company if you want, its actually definitely part of our slide deck. But at the same time its something that will just sort of become a part of doing business over time. But it really, it depends on large data sets. As we all know, this is why it's so cheap to get Amazon Echoes and such these days. Because it's really beneficial, because the more data... There's value in that data, there was just another piece, I actually shared it on Linkedin today as a matter of fact, about, talking about Amazon and Whole Foods and saying: why are they getting such a valuation premium? They're getting such a valuation premium, because they're smart about using data, but one of the reasons they're smart about using the data is cause they have the data. So the more data you collect, the more data you use, the smarter the systems get, the more useful the solutions become. >> Absolutely, last year when Amazon reinvented, John Ferrier interviewed Andy Jassy and I had posited that the customer flywheel, is going to be replaced by that data flywheel. And enhanced to make things spin even further. >> That's exactly right and once you get that flywheel going it becomes a bigger and bigger competitive advantage, by the way that's also why the regulators are getting interested these days too, right? There's sort of, that flywheel going back the other way, but from our perspective... I mean first of all it just makes economic sense, right? These things could conceivably get out of control, that's at least what the regulators think, if you're not careful at least there's some oversight and I would say that, yes probably some oversight is a good idea, so you've got kind of flywheels pushing in both directions. But one way or another organizations need to get much smarter and much more precise and prescriptive about how they use data. And that's really what we're trying to help with. >> Okay, Chris want to give you the final word, Unify Software, you're working on kind of the strategic road pieces. What should we look for from you in your segment through the rest of 2017? >> Well, I think, I've always been a big believer, I've probably cited 'Crossing the Chasm' like so many times on theCUBE, during my prior HP 10 year and such but you know, I'm a big believer and we should be talking about customers, we should be talking about used cases. It's not about alphabet soup technology or data lakes, it's about the solutions and it's about how organizations are moving themselves forward with data. Going back to that Amazon example, so I think from us, yes we just released 2.O, we've got a very active blog, come by unifisoftware.com, visit it. But it's also going to be around what our customers are doing and that's really what we're going to try to promote. I mean if you remember this was also something, that for all the years I've worked with you guys I've been very much... You always have to make sure that the customer has agreed to be cited, it's nice when you can name them and reference them and we're working on our customer references, because that's what I think is the most powerful in this day and age, because again, going back to my, what I said before about, this is going throughout organizations now. People don't necessarily care about the technology infrastructure, but they care about what's being done with it. And so, being able to tell those customer stories, I think that's what you're going to probably see and hear the most from us. But we'll talk about our product as much as you let us as well. >> Great thing, it reminds me of when Wikibon was founded it was really about IT practice, users being able to share with their peers. Now when the software economy today, when they're doing things in software often that can be leveraged by their peers and that flywheel that they're doing, just like when Salesforce first rolled out, they make one change and then everybody else has that option. We're starting to see that more and more as we deploy as SAS and as cloud, it's not the shrink wrap software anymore. >> I think to that point, you know, I was at a conference earlier this year and it was an IT conference, but I was really sort of floored, because when you ask what we're talking about, what the enlightened IT folks and there is more and more enlightened IT folks we're talking about these days, it's the same thing. Right, it's how our business is succeeding, by being better at leveraging data. And I think the opportunities for people in IT... But they really have to think outside of the box, it's not about Hadoop and Sqoop and Sequel and Java anymore it's really about business solutions, but if you can start to think that way, I think there's tremendous opportunities and we're just scratching the surface. >> Absolutely, we found that really some of the proof points of what digital transformation really is for the companies. Alright Chris Selland, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks so much for joining us and thank you for watching theCUBE. >> Chris: Thanks too. (techno music)

>> Man: Let me check. >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering InterConnect 20 17. Brought to you by IBM. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Day two, we are here live in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect. This is Silicon Angle's The Cube coverage of IBM's cloud event. The CEO, Ginni Rometty, was just on stage. We're kickin' off wall to wall coverage for three days. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Dave Vellante, here for all three days. >> And, our next guest is Andy Lin, who's the VP of (mumbles) Mark Three Systems. A, 20 plus year IBM platinum partner. Doin' some real cutting edge work with cognitive as Ginny Rometty said cognitive to the core, is IBM's core strategy. Data first, enterprise strong is kind of the buzz words. Andy, welcome to The Cube. Appreciate you comin' on. >> Thanks for havin' me. >> So, obviously, enterprise strong, you know, it's, it's a kind of whole nother, you know, conversation that we can go deep on, but data first and cognitive to the core is really kind of the things that you guys are really getting into. All kinds of data types. Automating it and making it almost frictionless to move insights out. So, take a minute to explain what Mark Three's doing and what your role is with the company. >> Sure. Absolutely. So, I'm Vice President of strategy in Mark Three, so I work sort of across all our initiatives, especially areas that are emerging. Just a little bit about Mark Three, just historically for background purposes. So, we're a 22 year IBM platinum partner, as you pointed out. We actually started in the mid 90's, actually doing IT infrastructure around the IBM stack at that time. So, we sort of been with IBM over the last 20 years since the beginning. We've sort of grown up throughout the stack as IBM's evolved over the last two decades. About two and a half years ago, we started a digital development unit, called BlueChasm. And what BlueChasm does, is it basically builds open digital and cognitive platforms on the IBM cloud that are around a lot of services you pointed out. And, we basically designed it based on use cases that the ecosystem and our clients talk about. And, to give you a couple examples, one of the, one of the big ones that we're seeing a lot of interest around is called video recon. Video recon is a video analytics platform that's API enabled and open at it's core. So, regardless of where the video comes from, if it's a content management system, if it's a camera, we're able to basically take in that video, basically watch and listen to the video using Watson and some elements of our own intellectual property. And, then basically return insights based on what it sees and hears along with time stamps, back to the user to actually take action. >> Yeah. I love the name BlueChasm. It brings up, you know, Jeffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm. Blue, IBM, big blue, so you know, it's a nice clever play. The BlueChasm opportunity. So, in your mind, for people watching, squint through some of the trends and extract out where you see these opportunities. Because if you're talkin' about new opportunities are emerging because of cloud horsepower and compute and storage and all the greatness of cloud, and you got real time analytics kind of really hittin' the main stream. That's going to, that's highlighted by internet of things is you can't go anywhere these days without hearing about autonomous vehicles, industrial (mumbles) things, AI, Mark Benioff was sayin', you know, we've seen the movies like Terminator and we've all dreamed about AI, so we can kind of get excited about the prospects. But, the chasm you're talkin' about, this is where these things that were ungettable before, unreachable new things, what are some of those things that you guys are doin' in that chasm? >> Yeah, so I think some of the things that we're doing are basically enabling, like I'll use video recon as an example, right, we're enabling a class to be able to get new insights using basically computer vision, but in an open and accessible way, that they've never had been able to do before. Vision itself, I don't think is new or revolutionary. You know, a lot of folks are doing it, self driving cars, etcetera. >> John: Yeah. >> But, I think what is new is being able to make it open and easily accessible to the normal enterprise, the normal service provider. Up to now, it's been, you know you've had, really had to have your own team of, you know, really, really deep AI develops or PHD's to be able to produce it for your own platform. What we're trying to do is basically demarketize that. >> John: Yeah. >> So, to give you an example, some use cases that we're, we're sort of working on today, the ability to do things like read meters and gages, as an example, with a camera. That way you can avoid a situation where somebody has to walk around all the time, you know, look at different things that could be dangerous. That there could be issues actually looking at what you see from a metering perspective. Or to be able to, for instance, for in the media entertainment industry or the video production industry, be able to do things like identify shot types, be able to more quickly allow our enterprise users in that particular space to be able to create video content quickly. And, the underlying theme with all this, I think it's really about speed to market. And, how quickly can you iterate and please whatever your customers in that particular space that you're in. >> So with the video recon, so your, your videos are searchable, essentially. >> (Andy) Correct. >> So, so what do you do? Use Watson, natural language processing to sort of translate them? Now (mumbles), of course, you know, NLP is maybe I don't know 75, 80 percent accurate, how do you close that gap? >> Yeah, so video recon does both visual and audio. So, the audio portion you are correct. There is some degree of trade off in accuracy relative to what I think the average human can do today. Assuming the human is focused and able to really tag these videos accurately. So, we are able to train it based on things like proper words and things that are enterprise focused. Because I know there, there are a lot of different ways that I think you can maybe attack this today from a video analytics perspective, where we're focused primarily just on the enterprise, solving business problems with, with video analytics. So, you know, taking advantage of if Watson improves, cause we do use (mumbles) tech at it's core from, on the audio perspective. Applying some of our own techniques to basically improve the accuracy of certain words that matter most to the enterprise. One of the things we've noticed is it's an entirely collaborative relationship with our, with our, with our enterprise clients but really partners. Because what works well for one, may not work well for another. One thing about cognitive is it really depends on the end user as to if this is a good idea or not. Or if this will work for their use case, just based on error, as you pointed out. >> So, to your point, you're identifying enterprise use cases and then tuning the system. Building solutions, essentially, for those use cases. >> Andy: Absolutely. >> Now, you said 22 year IBM platinum partner, so you obviously started well before this so-called digital transformation. >> Andy: Yes. >> You see digital transformation as, you know, revolutionary, or is it more of an evolution of your business? >> I'd definitely say it's an evolution. I think, you know, a lot of the industry buzz words out there are all around, you know, transformation or transition, but for us it's been completely additive. You know, at the end of the day we're just doing what our clients want, you know. And, we're still continuing the core part of our business around modernizing and optimizing IT infrastructure, tech sacks in the data center, also infrastructure service in the cloud. Also, up through the middle where it's still really as strong as ever. I mean, in fact that business has actually been very much reinforced by some of these capabilities that we brought in on the digital development side. Because, at the end of the day, you know, clients may have a digital unit and they may have, you know, IT, but they're really viewed sort of all in the same. A lot of people try to put 'em in two different buckets bimodal or whatever you want to use. But, you know, inevitably, you know, clients just see a business problem they want to address. >> Yep. >> And, they're saying how can I address it the fastest and the most effectively as relative to what their stakeholders want. And, we just realized early on that we had to have that development capability, be able to build platforms, but also guide out clients. If they don't want one of our platforms, if they don't want video recon or cognitive call center platform, that's perfectly fine. We're more than happy to guide them on how to build something similar for their developers with our developers relative to their tech stack, you know, hopefully on the IBM cloud. >> Andy, one of the things you were pointing out that I think is worth highlighting is the digital transformation buzz word, which has been around for a few years now, really is in main stream right now. >> Andy: Yes. >> People are really working hard to figure this out. We're seeing the disruption on the business model side. You mentioned speed and time to market, that's agility. That's not just a technical development term anymore. It's actually business model. It's business related. >> Andy: Yes. >> But there's two axes of things going on. There's the under the hood, heavy lifting stuff that goes on around getting stuff digitally to work. That's IT, security, and you know, Ginni Rometty talks about a lot of that on stage. That's being enterprise grade or enterprise strong. The other one is this digitization of the real world, right? So, that's creative. That requires insights. That requires kind of a different, it's actually probably maybe more fun for some people, but I mean it depends on who your profile is, but you have kind of two spectrums. Cool and relevant and exciting and intoxicating, creative, user experience driven. You mentioned reading meters. >> Andy: Yeah. >> That's the analog world. >> Andy: Yes. >> That's actually space. That's the world. That's like, you got the sky you got the meter. >> Andy: Yeah. >> You got physical impressions. This is the digitization of our world. What's your perspective? How do you talk to customers when they say, "Hey I want to digitize my business." >> Andy: Mm hmm. >> How does it go? What do you say? I mean, do you break it down into those axes? Do you go, did they see it that way? Can you share some color on this digital transformation of digitizing business? >> Yeah, so I mean it really depends on, I think, it normally it has to do with interacting with some other stakeholders in a certain way, you know. I think from our perspective it really is about, you know, how they want to interface. And, most of the time you pointed out speed. Speed I think is the number one reason why people are doing the digital transformation. It's not really about cost or these other factors. It's how quickly can I adjust my business model so I can win in the market place? And, you know, I think I pointed this earlier, but like, you know IOT is huge now. It covers what I call three out of the five senses in my mind. It covers basically touch, smell and taste in many ways. And, for us, I think we're basically trying to help them even get beyond IOT with video. Video really covers, you know, sight and hearing as well. It covers all the five senses. And, then you take that and figure out how do I digitize that experience and be able to allow you to interact with your stakeholders. Whether it be your customers, your suppliers or your partners out in the market place. And, then based on that we'll take these building blocks on how we, you know, extend the experience, and work with them on their specific use case. >> So, you got to ingest the data, which is the, you know, the images or data coming in. >> Correct. >> Then you got to prep it available for insights. >> Correct. >> And, produce them in, like really fast. >> Andy: Yep. >> That's hard. >> Andy: It is, yeah. >> It's not trivial. >> No it is not, it's not a trivial problem. Yeah, absolutely. And, I think, you know, there's a lot of opportunity here in the space over the next I think two to two to five years. But you're absolutely right. >> John: Yeah. >> I mean it is, it is a challenging. >> And, I want to get your thoughts too, and if you can share your reaction to some of the trends around machine learning, for instance. It's really kind of fueling this democratization. >> Andy: Yeah. >> You mention in the old days it was really hard, there was kind of a black art to, to machine learning or unique special, specialties. And, even data science that's at one level was really, really hard. Now you have common people doing things with visualization. What's the same with machine learning? I mean, you got more data sets coming in. Do you see that trend relevant to what you guys are working on in BlueChasm? >> Absolutely. I think at the core of it, and this wasn't our plan initially three years ago, we didn't realize that this was happen, but every single one of the platforms or prototypes or apps we've built, they all incorporate some degree of machine learning, deep learning within it's core. And, this is primarily just driven by I think what, to give a client a unique platform or a unique service on the market. Because, much of the base digitization, I mean Ginny likes to talk a lot about, you know, the key to being, differentiating yourself from digital world is being cognitive. And, we've seen this really play out in practice. And, I think what's changed, as you pointed out is, that it's easily accessible now to sort of the common man, as I put it. In years past, you really had to have people that are highly specialized. You build your own product. But now through open source- >> There's building blocks out there. >> Absolutely. >> You can just take an open source library and say hey, and then tweak the machine learning. >> Absolutely. And, the ramp up time has come down, you know, dramatically, even for our developers. Just watching them work. I mean, the prototype to video recon was built over the course of a weekend by one of our developers. He just came in one Monday and said, you know, is this, is this interesting? >> He's fired. >> Exactly. And, we were like, yes I think this is interesting. >> Well this is the whole inspiration thing that I talk about, the creativity. This is the two axes, right? >> You try to do that in the old days, I got to get a server provision. >> Andy: Yeah. >> I'm done. >> Andy: Right. >> You know, I'm going to go have a a beer. Whatever. I mean, there's almost an abandonment going on. We talked to Indiegogo yesterday about how they're funding companies. >> Andy: Yeah. >> You have this new creative action. >> Andy: Mm hmm. >> So you guys are seeing that. Any other examples you can share in terms of color around this kind of innovation? >> Yeah, so we, at BlueChasm we try to let our developers sort of have free reign over what they like to create. So video recon was spawned literally by a, on a side project, you know as with a lot of companies. It was, you know, a platform that sort of evolved into a commercial product, almost by accident, right? And, we've had others that have been anchored by like what clients had done, but like around the cognitive call center, which basically takes phone calls that are recorded and then basically transcribes and makes them easily searchable for audit reasons, training reasons, etcetera. Same kind of idea. We built things around like cognitive drones. A lot of folks are trying to do things with drones. Drones themselves aren't really not novel anymore, but being able to utilize them to collect data in unique ways, I think that industry is definitely evolving. We've built other things like, what I call the minority report board, after the scene in the movie where the board sort of looks at you and then based on what it sees of you, of different data points, it shows you an ad or shows you a piece of visual content to allow you to interact. >> John: Yeah. >> I mean, these are, these are examples. You know, we have others. But, you know we've just seen like in this organization if we allow creativity to sort of reign, you know, have free reign. We're able to sort of bring it back in along with some of the strengths of core Mark Three about being (mumbles). >> I mean the cognitive is really interesting. It's a programmatic approach to life. And, if you think about it, it's like if you have this collective intelligence with the data, you could offer an augmented reality experience- >> Andy: Yes. >> To anybody now, based upon what you're doin'. >> Absolutely. So I mean, I think that the toughest part I think right now is figuring out which of the opportunities to pursue. Because, there are so many out there and everyone has some interest in some degree, you know. You have to figure out how to prioritize about, you know, which, which of the ones you want to address first. >> John: Yeah. >> And, in what order. Because, what we've noticed is that a lot of these are building blocks that lead to other greater and greater platform concepts, and part of the challenge is figuring out what order you want to actually build these into. And, through you know, microservices through retainerization all these, you know, awesome evolutions as far as like with cloud and infrastructure technology, you're really able to piece together these pieces to build amazing (mumbles) quickly. >> The cloud native stuff is booming right now. >> Yeah. >> It's really fun to watch. Microservices, (mumbles), this orchestration, composability is just kickin' ass. >> Absolutely. >> And, all your clients are basically becoming software companies. They're takin' your services and building out their own sas capabilities. >> Andy: Right. >> Right? >> Without a doubt. I mean, you know the cloud (mumbles), container revolution's been significant for us. I mean we, we added the audio component to video recon based on some of the work we've been doing on the call center side. It was almost by accident. And, we were able to really put them together in a day because we were able to basically easily compose the overall platform at that time, or the prototype of the platform at that time just by linking together those services. So, we see this as a pattern moving forward. >> Andy, thanks for coming on The Cube. Really appreciate it. In the quick 30 seconds, what are you doin' here at the show? What are you guys talkin' about? What's some of the activity? Coolest thing you're seeing? Share some insight, what's going on here in Las Vegas. Share some perspective. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, we have a booth here in Vegas. We're demoing some of the platforms we talked about: video recon, cognitive call center. We're at booth six 87, which is toward the center back of the expo center. We have four break outs that we'll be doing as well. Talking about some of these concepts, as well as some of our projects that involve, you know, modernization of the data center as well. So, the true what I call IBM full stack. >> And, for the folks that aren't here watching, is there, the website address? Where can they go to get more information? >> Yeah, absolutely. You can go to Mark Three sys. M A R K triple I S Y S dot com, which is our website. If you want to learn a little bit more about video recon you can go to video recon dot I O. We have a very simple demo page, but you know, if you're interested in learning more or you want to explore if we can accommodate your specific use case, please feel free to reach out to me. Also, Mark Three systems, M A R K triple I systems at Twitter as well, and I can get back to you. >> Well, you know we're going to follow up with you. Going to get all of our Cube videos into the cognitive era. You'll be seeing us, pinging you online for that. >> Yeah. >> Love the video recon, just great. BlueChasm, great, great initiative. Congratulations on that. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for comin' on. Its The Cube live here in Las Vegas. Day two of coverage, wall to wall. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us. More great interviews after this short break.