(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to "theCUBE" conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE," got a great security conversation, Ed Casper who's the founder and CEO of Cloud Storage Security, the great Cloud background, Cloud security, Cloud storage. Welcome to the "theCUBE Conversation," Ed. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> I got Lafomo on that background. You got the nice look there. Let's get into the storage blind spot conversation around Cloud Security. Obviously, reinforced has came up a ton, you heard a lot about encryption, automated reasoning but still ransomware was still hot. All these things are continuing to be issues on security but they're all brought on data and storage, right? So this is a big part of it. Tell us a little bit about how you guys came about the origination story. What is the company all about? >> Sure, so, we're a pandemic story. We started in February right before the pandemic really hit and we've survived and thrived because it is such a critical thing. If you look at the growth that's happening in storage right now, we saw this at reinforced. We saw even a recent AWS Storage Day. Their S3, in particular, houses over 200 trillion objects. If you look just 10 years ago, in 2012, Amazon touted how they were housing one trillion objects, so in a 10 year period, it's grown to 200 trillion and really most of that has happened in the last three or four years, so the pandemic and the shift in the ability and the technologies to process data better has really driven the need and driven the Cloud growth. >> I want to get into some of the issues around storage. Obviously, the trend on S3, look at what they've done. I mean, I saw my land at storage today. We've interviewed her. She's amazing. Just the EC2 and S3 the core pistons of AWS, obviously, the silicons getting better, the IaaS layers just getting so much more innovation. You got more performance abstraction layers at the past is emerging Cloud operations on premise now with hybrid is becoming a steady state and if you look at all the action, it's all this hyper-converged kind of conversations but it's not hyper-converged in a box, it's Cloud Storage, so there's a lot of activity around storage in the Cloud. Why is that? >> Well, because it's that companies are defined by their data and, if a company's data is growing, the company itself is growing. If it's not growing, they are stagnant and in trouble, and so, what's been happening now and you see it with the move to Cloud especially over the on-prem storage sources is people are starting to put more data to work and they're figuring out how to get the value out of it. Recent analysts made a statement that if the Fortune 1000 could just share and expose 10% more of their data, they'd have net revenue increases of 65 million. So it's just the ability to put that data to work and it's so much more capable in the Cloud than it has been on-prem to this point. >> It's interesting data portability is being discussed, data access, who gets access, do you move compute to the data? Do you move data around? And all these conversations are kind of around access and security. It's one of the big vulnerabilities around data whether it's an S3 bucket that's an manual configuration error, or if it's a tool that needs credentials. I mean, how do you manage all this stuff? This is really where a rethink kind of comes around so, can you share how you guys are surviving and thriving in that kind of crazy world that we're in? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, data has been the critical piece and moving to the Cloud has really been this notion of how do I protect my access into the Cloud? How do I protect who's got it? How do I think about the networking aspects? My east west traffic after I've blocked them from coming in but no one's thinking about the data itself and ultimately, you want to make that data very safe for the consumers of the data. They have an expectation and almost a demand that the data that they consume is safe and so, companies are starting to have to think about that. They haven't thought about it. It has been a blind spot, you mentioned that before. In regards to, I am protecting my management plane, we use posture management tools. We use automated services. If you're not automating, then you're struggling in the Cloud. But when it comes to the data, everyone thinks, "Oh, I've blocked access. I've used firewalls. I've used policies on the data," but they don't think about the data itself. It is that packet that you talked about that moves around to all the different consumers and the workflows and if you're not ensuring that that data is safe, then, you're in big trouble and we've seen it over and over again. >> I mean, it's definitely a hot category and it's changing a lot, so I love this conversation because it's a primary one, primary and secondary cover data cotton storage. It's kind of good joke there, but all kidding aside, it's a hard, you got data lineage tracing is a big issue right now. We're seeing companies come out there and kind of superability tangent there. The focus on this is huge. I'm curious, what was the origination story? What got you into the business? Was it like, were you having a problem with this? Did you see an opportunity? What was the focus when the company was founded? >> It's definitely to solve the problems that customers are facing. What's been very interesting is that they're out there needing this. They're needing to ensure their data is safe. As the whole story goes, they're putting it to work more, we're seeing this. I thought it was a really interesting series, one of your last series about data as code and you saw all the different technologies that are processing and managing that data and companies are leveraging today but still, once that data is ready and it's consumed by someone, it's causing real havoc if it's not either protected from being exposed or safe to use and consume and so that's been the biggest thing. So we saw a niche. We started with this notion of Cloud Storage being object storage, and there was nothing there protecting that. Amazon has the notion of access and that is how they protect the data today but not the packets themselves, not the underlying data and so, we created the solution to say, "Okay, we're going to ensure that that data is clean. We're also going to ensure that you have awareness of what that data is, the types of files you have out in the Cloud, wherever they may be, especially as they drift outside of the normal platforms that you're used to seeing that data in. >> It's interesting that people were storing data lakes. Oh yeah, just store a womp we might need and then became a data swamp. That's kind of like go back 67 years ago. That was the conversation. Now, the conversation is I need data. It's got to be clean. It's got to feed the machine learning. This is going to be a critical aspect of the business model for the developers who are building the apps, hence, the data has code reference which we've focused on but then you say, "Okay, great. Does this increase our surface area for potential hackers?" So there's all kinds of things that kind of open up, we start doing cool, innovative, things like that so, what are some of the areas that you see that your tech solves around some of the blind spots or with object store, the things that people are overlooking? What are some of the core things that you guys are seeing that you're solving? >> So, it's a couple of things, right now, the still the biggest thing you see in the news is configuration issues where people are losing their data or accidentally opening up to rights. That's the worst case scenario. Reads are a bad thing too but if you open up rights and we saw this with a major API vendor in the last couple of years they accidentally opened rights to their buckets. Hackers found it immediately and put malicious code into their APIs that were then downloaded and consumed by many, many of their customers so, it is happening out there. So the notion of ensuring configuration is good and proper, ensuring that data has not been augmented inappropriately and that it is safe for consumption is where we started and, we created a lightweight, highly scalable solution. At this point, we've scanned billions of files for customers and petabytes of data and we're seeing that it's such a critical piece to that to make sure that that data's safe. The big thing and you brought this up as well is the big thing is they're getting data from so many different sources now. It's not just data that they generate. You see one centralized company taking in from numerous sources, consolidating it, creating new value on top of it, and then releasing that and the question is, do you trust those sources or not? And even if you do, they may not be safe. >> We had an event around super Clouds is a topic we brought up to get bring the attention to the complexity of hybrid which is on premise, which is essentially Cloud operations. And the successful people that are doing things in the software side are essentially abstracting up the benefits of the infrastructures of service from HN AWS, right, which is great. Then they innovate on top so they have to abstract that storage is a key component of where we see the innovations going. How do you see your tech that kind of connecting with that trend that's coming which is everyone wants infrastructures code. I mean, that's not new. I mean, that's the goal and it's getting better every day but DevOps, the developers are driving the operations and security teams to like stay pace, so policy seeing a lot of policy seeing some cool things going on that's abstracting up from say storage and compute but then those are being put to use as well, so you've got this new wave coming around the corner. What's your reaction to that? What's your vision on that? How do you see that evolving? >> I think it's great, actually. I think that the biggest problem that you have to do as someone who is helping them with that process is make sure you don't slow it down. So, just like Cloud at scale, you must automate, you must provide different mechanisms to fit into workflows that allow them to do it just how they want to do it and don't slow them down. Don't hold them back and so, we've come up with different measures to provide and pretty much a fit for any workflow that any customer has come so far with. We do data this way. I want you to plug in right here. Can you do that? And so it's really about being able to plug in where you need to be, and don't slow 'em down. That's what we found so far. >> Oh yeah, I mean that exactly, you don't want to solve complexity with more complexity. That's the killer problem right now so take me through the use case. Can you just walk me through how you guys engage with customers? How they consume your service? How they deploy it? You got some deployment scenarios. Can you talk about how you guys fit in and what's different about what you guys do? >> Sure, so, we're what we're seeing is and I'll go back to this data coming from numerous sources. We see different agencies, different enterprises taking data in and maybe their solution is intelligence on top of data, so they're taking these data sets in whether it's topographical information or whether it's in investing type information. Then they process that and they scan it and they distribute it out to others. So, we see that happening as a big common piece through data ingestion pipelines, that's where these folks are getting most of their data. The other is where is the data itself, the document or the document set, the actual critical piece that gets moved around and we see that in pharmaceutical studies, we see it in mortgage industry and FinTech and healthcare and so, anywhere that, let's just take a very simple example, I have to apply for insurance. I'm going to upload my Social Security information. I'm going to upload a driver's license, whatever it happens to be. I want to one know which of my information is personally identifiable, so I want to be able to classify that data but because you're trusting or because you're taking data from untrusted sources, then you have to consider whether or not it's safe for you to use as your own folks and then also for the downstream users as well. >> It's interesting, in the security world, we hear zero trust and then we hear supply chain, software supply chains. We get to trust everybody, so you got kind of two things going on. You got the hardware kind of like all the infrastructure guys saying, "Don't trust anything 'cause we have a zero trust model," but as you start getting into the software side, it's like trust is critical like containers and Cloud native services, trust is critical. You guys are kind of on that balance where you're saying, "Hey, I want data to come in. We're going to look at it. We're going to make sure it's clean." That's the value here. Is that what I'm hearing you, you're taking it and you're saying, "Okay, we'll ingest it and during the ingestion process, we'll classify it. We'll do some things to it with our tech and put it in a position to be used properly." Is that right? >> That's exactly right. That's a great summary, but ultimately, if you're taking data in, you want to ensure it's safe for everyone else to use and there are a few ways to do it. Safety doesn't just mean whether it's clean or not. Is there malicious content or not? It means that you have complete coverage and control and awareness over all of your data and so, I know where it came from. I know whether it's clean and I know what kind of data is inside of it and we don't see, we see that the interesting aspects are we see that the cleanliness factor is so critical in the workflow, but we see the classification expand outside of that because if your data drifts outside of what your standard workflow was, that's when you have concerns, why is PII information over here? And that's what you have to stay on top of, just like AWS is control plane. You have to manage it all. You have to make sure you know what services have all of a sudden been exposed publicly or not, or maybe something's been taken over or not and you control that. You have to do that with your data as well. >> So how do you guys fit into the security posture? Say it a large company that might want to implement this right away. Sounds like it's right in line with what developers want and what people want. It's easy to implement from what I see. It's about 10, 15, 20 minutes to get up and running. It's not hard. It's not a heavy lift to get in. How do you guys fit in once you get operationalized when you're successful? >> It's a lightweight, highly scalable serverless solution, it's built on Fargate containers and it goes in very easily and then, we offer either native integrations through S3 directly, or we offer APIs and the APIs are what a lot of our customers who want inline realtime scanning leverage and we also are looking at offering the actual proxy aspects. So those folks who use the S3 APIs that our native AWS, puts and gets. We can actually leverage our put and get as an endpoint and when they retrieve the file or place the file in, we'll scan it on access as well, so, it's not just a one time data arrest. It can be a data in motion as you're retrieving the information as well >> We were talking with our friends the other day and we're talking about companies like Datadog. This is the model people want, they want to come in and developers are driving a lot of the usage and operational practice so I have to ask you, this fits kind of right in there but also, you also have the corporate governance policy police that want to make sure that things are covered so, how do you balance that? Because that's an important part of this as well. >> Yeah, we're really flexible for the different ways they want to consume and and interact with it. But then also, that is such a critical piece. So many of our customers, we probably have a 50/50 breakdown of those inside the US versus those outside the US and so, you have those in California with their information protection act. You have GDPR in Europe and you have Asia having their own policies as well and the way we solve for that is we scan close to the data and we scan in the customer's account, so we don't require them to lose chain of custody and send data outside of the accoun. That is so critical to that aspect. And then we don't ask them to transfer it outside of the region, so, that's another critical piece is data residency has to be involved as part of that compliance conversation. >> How much does Cloud enable you to do this that you couldn't really do before? I mean, this really shows the advantage of natively being in the Cloud to kind of take advantage of the IaaS to SAS components to solve these problems. Share your thoughts on how this is possible. What if there was no problem, what would you do? >> It really makes it a piece of cake. As silly as that sounds, when we deploy our solution, we provide a management console for them that runs inside their own accounts. So again, no metadata or anything has to come out of it and it's all push button click and because the Cloud makes it scalable because Cloud offers infrastructure as code, we can take advantage of that and then, when they say go protect data in the Ireland region, they push a button, we stand up a stack right there in the Ireland region and scan and protect their data right there. If they say we need to be in GovCloud and operate in GovCloud East, there you go, push the button and you can behave in GovCloud East as well. >> And with server lists and the region support and all the goodness really makes a really good opportunity to really manage these Cloud native services with the data interaction so, really good prospects. Final question for you. I mean, we love the story. I think it is going to be a really changing market in this area in a big way. I think the data storage relationship relative to higher level services will be huge as Cloud native continues to drive everything. What's the future? I mean, you guys see yourself as a all encompassing, all singing and dancing storage platform or a set of services that you're going to enable developers and drive that value. Where do you see this going? >> I think that it's a mix of both. Ultimately, you saw even on Storage Day the announcement of file cash and file cash creates a new common name space across different storage platforms and so, the notion of being able to use one area to access your data and have it come from different spots is fantastic. That's been in the on-prem world for a couple of years and it's finally making it to the Cloud. I see us following that trend in helping support. We're super laser-focused on Cloud Storage itself so, EBS volumes, we keep having customers come to us and say, "I don't want to run agents in my EC2 instances. I want you to snap and scan and I don't want to, I've got all this EFS and FSX out there that we want to scan," and so, we see that all of the Cloud Storage platforms, Amazon work docs, EFS, FSX, EBS, S3, we'll all come together and we'll provide a solution that's super simple, highly scalable that can meet all the storage needs so, that's our goal right now and where we're working towards. >> Well, Cloud Storage Security, you couldn't get a more a descriptive name of what you guys are working on and again, I've had many contacts with Andy Jassy when he was running AWS and he always loves to quote "The Innovator's Dilemma," one of his teachers at Harvard Business School and we were riffing on that the other day and I want to get your thoughts. It's not so much "The Innovator's Dilemma" anymore relative to Cloud 'cause that's kind of a done deal. It's "The Integrator's Dilemma," and so, it's the integrations are so huge now. If you don't integrate the right way, that's the new dilemma. What's your reaction to that? >> A 100% agreed. It's been super interesting. Our customers have come to us for a security solution and they don't expect us to be 'cause we don't want to be either. Our own engine vendor, we're not the ones creating the engines. We are integrating other engines in and so we can provide a multi engine scan that gives you higher efficacy. So this notion of offering simple integrations without slowing down the process, that's the key factor here is what we've been after so, we are about simplifying the Cloud experience to protecting your storage and it's been so funny because I thought customers might complain that we're not a name brand engine vendor, but they love the fact that we have multiple engines in place and we're bringing that to them this higher efficacy, multi engine scan. >> I mean the developer trends can change on a dime. You make it faster, smarter, higher velocity and more protected, that's a winning formula in the Cloud so Ed, congratulations and thanks for spending the time to riff on and talk about Cloud Storage Security and congratulations on the company's success. Thanks for coming on "theCUBE." >> My pleasure, thanks a lot, John. >> Okay. This conversation here in Palo Alto, California I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Thanks for watching.

(peaceful music) >> Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I am delighted to welcome back to the cube, cube veteran, Chen Goldberg, VP of engineering from Google. Chen, welcome back to the cube. >> Hey Dave, super happy to be here. >> Absolutely delighted to have you here. Let's dive right into this conversation. There was a, there was a blog post this week, talking about Google Cloud putting a lot of weight behind this idea of principles for software development. What are those principles and why are they important? >> The three principles that we put in that blog post is open, easy, and transformative. And I think what's really important to recognize with the three principles that those are not new principles, not for Google Cloud, and definitely not for me. I joined Google about, a little bit over five years ago. Right when just Kubernetes started to lead Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes engine team. And we immediately recognized, the idea of open and the importance of flexibility and choice is a foundation to the idea of Kubernetes and portability workloads. But pretty early on, it was clear that it's not enough just to have portability and flexibility because it creates a lot of complexity. So how can we still have that without creating a trade-off or tension for our customers? So really making sure that everything is also easy. You know, and one of the things, I use, I like to say it's not just portability of workloads, but also portability of skills and you achieve that through consistent experience, right? A lot of automation. And when you bring all of those things together, what I love about Google Cloud is that, you know, I'm an infrastructure person. I've always been infrastructure person. And what excites me the most is seeing others take this innovation and, and really empowers developers to make amazing, or, you know, unique ideas, a reality. And that's really the foundation principles for Google Cloud. >> So how does that translate into, from a customer perspective? >> So I would just start with some customer examples, right? Starting from, their perspective. So when we think about open, this is actually part of the, our customers cloud strategy, right? You say cloud, you immediately think only about public cloud, but from our customer perspectives, right? They think about public clouds, right? Most of them have more than one cloud, but they also think about the private cloud, you know, IOT edge and having that openness and flexibility to choose where they can run their workload, is critical. It's critical for them. What I hear mostly is of course, innovation, managing costs, and also making sure that they are not locked out of innovation that happens for example, in any cloud or, or somewhere else. So that's a really a key consideration for our customers when they think about their cloud strategy. The second thing that open matters is that it's really hard to hire talent that is expert and has the right skills. And we see that by using a leveraging open source technologies, it actually makes it easier to our customers to hire the best talent there is in the industry. At one of the previous Google Cloud Next sessions, we had the Loblaw for example, which is the biggest grocery in Canada. And, you know, we were joking on stage, that even though at our hiring for grocery shop, they still can hire the best talent because they are using the best technologies out there in the industry. So that's one, if you think about the importance of easy, I would just call out Western Digital that we've just announced how they decided to standardize on Anthos for their cloud strategy, right? Both of course, Google cloud platform, but On Prem and the Edge. And for them what's important is that when they have all of their amazing developers and operators, how can they provide them reach experience, right. We don't want our developers or operators to spend time on things that can be automated or managed by others. So having a smooth, intuitive experience is really critical. And we we've been announcing some new stuff like a, a Google Cloud deploy and really integrating the entire experience, especially integration for managing, deploying directly to Google Kubernetes engine. And of course, one of my favorite is Jiechi autopilot, which really takes all the goodness with Kubernetes and automatically managing. And then transformative, this is like what I said before, unleashing innovation. And we see Wendy's, for example, right, they want to actually have AI machine learning at run time at their branches, which will allow them to create a new experience for their customers. So this is how we see customers really appreciate these three principles. >> So whenever the subject of Kubernetes and Google comes up, we have to talk Anthos. We're now into what year three of Anthos. How has adoption looked what's the latest on that front? >> That has been really great. We actually have been seeing a 500% growth on the end of Q2 of year over year. And it's important you know to mention that the journey with Anthos is not something new, but something that we have built with our customers when they really love the experience they have on GCP, but needed to innovate elsewhere and not just on Google Cloud. So we've been seeing that, you know, I mentioned the Western Digital, blah, blah, and Wendy's we also have customers like MLB, which is really exciting how they've changed their entire fans' experience using Anthos. And for them, again, it was both the easy part, right? How can I deal with that complexity of having compute and storage everywhere in every one of the stadiums, but also how can I use AI and machine learning, which is unique to Google Cloud in order to create unique experiences for the fans, at real time, of course. >> Yeah. Now you've, touched on this a bit already, if you had to, if you thought about someone reviewing Anthos, their Anthos experience, because we're in the midst of people adopting Anthos and becoming new to Anthos at this point. What does a delighted customers response sound like to you? What is that Yelp review that they would write? If they were telling people we, doubled down on Anthos and we are thrilled because, fill in the blank for a second. >> The first thing that comes to mind is that it works everywhere and the developer experience that comes with it, right? So we have, of course the platform and the infrastructure, but where Anthos really shine is that experience, on top of thinking about all developers and operators that can really work in every environment without paying too much attention to that. And just having that intuitive experience, right? If you go to the Google Cloud console, you see all your clusters, and now we're actually also going to add your VMs into that view, and you can use tools like Anthos config managers, and Anthos service mash to manage your security posture or the configuration in all of those environments. >> So we hear a lot about Multicloud. Multicloud is fantastic, but it sounds like, dealing with the complexity associated with Multicloud is something that Anthos definitely helps with. >> Yes, you know, Google is best with complexity at scale, we've been running containers and really large environments for many years. And some of those principles really, you know, have been fundamental to the way we've started with Kubernetes. So the idea of the declarative intent and automation is really critical in managing large environment and high complexity because in those environments, lots of things can change, but with the declarative approach, you don't have to anticipate everything that is going to change, but you need to know what is your desired state. And that's really one way that Anthos is leveraging the Kubernetes primitives and those ideas to manage different types of environments. In addition to that, it's actually really adding that layer that I talked about before, around the easy can I make sure that my tools, right, if it's, for example, a cloud hybrid build or cloud deploy or Anthos service manager, Anthos config manager, can I make sure that this UI, the CLI the API will be consistent in all of those environments? Can I view in one place, all of my clusters, all of my applications, and this is really where Anthos shines. >> So the cloud data foundation had a, had to get together at the same time as, Google Cloud Next. And there's been a lot of discussion around topics like security. I just like to get your thoughts on, you know, what what's at the forefront of your mind, working in engineering at Google, working in this world where people are deploying Anthos, working in a world where in a multi-cloud environment, you don't necessarily have control as vice president of engineering at Google over what's happening in these other clouds. So what are some of the things that are at the front of your mind is security one of them, what are your thoughts? >> Security is top of mine. Similar to all of our customers and definitely internally. And there are many things that we are very worried about or create some risks. You know, we've just started talking about the secure central supply chain, by building with open source, how can we make sure that everything is secure, right? Then we know what is the contribution that's from the software that we are delivering, how can we make sure that the security posture is portable, right? We talked about workloads portability. We talked about skills portability, and experience, but really I think the next phase for us as an industry is to think about security posture portability. Can I really apply the same policy everywhere and still make sure that I have the right controls in place, which will have to be different depending on the environment, and to make sure that that really is the case. So lots of work around that, and again, talking about the other things we talked about. We talked about open and flexibility, how can you make sure that it's easy? One of the areas that we are very excited about is really around binary authorization, for example. So when you use our tools like cloud build, cloud deploy, artifact, registry, you can get your container images automatically scanned for vulnerabilities and tools like onto service mesh, which allows you to actually manage your security posture, traffic management, who can access what without doing any changes to your applications. >> Fantastic stuff. As we, as we wrap up our time here, do you have any final thoughts on the direction of cloud where we are in the adoption curve? You know, by some estimates, something like 75% of IT is still happening on premises. There've been some announcements coming out of Cloud Next regarding the ability to run all sorts of Google goodness on premises. So we seem to all be acknowledging that we're going to be in a bit of a hybrid world, in addition to a multicloud world, moving forward. Do you want to place any bets on, on when we'll hit the 50, 50 mark or the 25% on premises, 75% cloud mark. What do you think? >> Yeah, I'm not the best gambler to be honest, but I do have a thought about that. I think what's interesting is that customers started to talk, you know, few years back, it was, hey, I have my on-prem environment and I have the cloud. How can they, these two work together. And now what we see our customers talking, you know, they're on premises, their edge is part of their cloud strategy. It's not separated. And I think this is what we'll see more and more of, right? Regardless if this is your private cloud or public cloud, your edge, we would like to have a cloud like experience in that environment and consistency. And of course, we would love to leverage all the goodness of the cloud. If it's like machine learning, AI, and other capabilities, automation, everywhere we go. So I think this is the biggest change we're starting to see. And in addition to that, I think we will see, today everybody are already multicloud cloud, right? If it's recquisitions and just by cause of bottom up culture, you know, people choose different services. And I expect we'll see more strategic thinking about our customers multicloud strategy. Where do I deploy my workloads? What are the benefits? If it's latency, if it's specific services that are available, maybe cost, we'll see the customers becoming more intentional about that and this is really exciting. >> Well Chen, amazing insights. It's obvious why you're a cube veteran. It's obviously why we seek you out for your counsel and guidance on a variety of subjects. Thank you so much for spending time with us today in this cube conversation. With that I'd like to thank you for joining us. Until next time, I'm Dave Nicholson, thanks for joining (peaceful music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and this is continuing coverage of Google Cloud Next '21. I'm joined today by Sachin Gupta, General Manager and Vice President of Open Infrastructure at Google Cloud. Sachin, welcome to theCube. >> Thanks Dave, it's great to be here. >> So, you and I both know that the definition of what constitutes Cloud has been hotly contested by some over the last 20 years. But I think you and I both know that in some quarters there really has never been a debate. NIST, for example, the standard body that calls out what constitutes Cloud, has always considered Cloud an operational model, a set of capabilities, and it has never considered Cloud specifically tied to a location. With that in mind, how about if you share with us what was announced at Cloud Next '21 around Google Distributed Cloud? >> Yeah, thanks Dave. The power of Cloud in terms of automation, simplicity, observability, is undeniable, but our mission at Google Cloud is to ensure that we're meeting customers where they are, in their digital transformation journey. And so in talking to customers, we found that there are some reasons that could prevent them to move certain workloads to Cloud. And that could be because there's a low latency requirement. There is high amounts of data processing that needs to happen on-prem. So taking data from on-prem, moving into the Cloud to get it processed and all the way back may not be very efficient. There could be security, privacy, data residency, compliance requirements that they're dealing with. And then some industries, for some customers, there's some very strict data sovereignty requirements that don't allow them to move things into the public Cloud. And so when we talked to customers, we realized that we needed to extend the Cloud, and therefore we introduced Google Distributor Cloud at Next 2021. And what Google Distributed Cloud provides is all of that power of Cloud anywhere the customers need it. And this could be at a Google network edge, it could be at an operator or communication server provider edge as well. It could be at the customer edge, so right on-premise at their site, it could be in their data centers. And so a lot of flexibility in how you deploy three fully managed hardware and software solutions delivered through Google. >> Yeah it's interesting because often statistics are cited that somewhere near 75% of of what we do in IT, is still "on-premises." The reality is, however, that what's happening in those physical locations on the edge is looking a lot more Cloudy, isn't it. (laughs) >> Yes, and the customers are looking for that computational power, storage, automation, simplicity, in all of these locations. >> So what does this look like from an infrastructure stack perspective? Is there some secret sauce that you're layering into this that we should know about? >> Yeah, so let me just talk about it a little bit more. So we start off with third party hardware. So we're sourcing from Dell, HPE, Cisco, Nvidia, NetApp, bringing it together. We're using Anthos, you are hopefully familiar with Anthos, which is our hybrid multi-cloud software layer. And then on top of that, we use open source technologies. For example, built on Kubernetes. We offer a containerized environment, a VM environment, that enables both Google first-party services, as well as third-party services that customers may choose to deploy, on top of this infrastructure. And so the management of the entire infrastructure, top to bottom, is delivered to Google directly, and therefore customers can focus on applications, they can focus on business initiatives, and not worry about the infrastructure complexity. They can just leave that to us. >> So you mentioned both Kubernetes, thinking of containerization as Cloud native, you also said VMs. So this spans the divide between containerized microservices-based applications and say VM-ware style of virtual machines or other VMs? >> Yes, look, the majority of customers are looking to modernize and move to a containerized environment with Kubernetes, but there are some workloads that they may have that still require a VM-like environment, and having the simplicity and the efficiency of operating VMs like containers on top of Google Distributed Cloud, built on Anthos, is extremely powerful for them. And so it goes back to our mission. We're going to meet customers where they are, and if they need VM support as well, we're providing it. >> So let's talk about initial implementations of this. What kind of scale are you anticipating that customers will deploy? >> The scale is going to vary based on use case. So it could be a very small, let's think about it as a single server type of scale, all the way to many, many dozens of racks that could be going in to support Google Distributed Cloud. And so, for example, from a communication service provider point of view, looking to modernize their 5G network, in the core it could be many, many racks with Google Distributed Cloud the edge product. And for their RAM solutions, it could be a much smaller form factor, as an example. And so depending on use case, you're going to find all kinds of different form factors. And I didn't mention this before, but we also, in addition to scale, we offer two operational modes. One is the edge product. So Google Distributed Cloud edge that is connected to the Cloud. And so it gets operational updates, et cetera, directly through the Cloud. And the second one is something we call the hosted mode, and in hosted mode, it's completely air-gapped. So this infrastructure, what is modernized and provides rich 1PN third party services, does not connect to the Cloud at all. And therefore, the organizations that have the strictest data latency sovereignty requirements, can benefit from a completely air-gapped solution as well. >> So I'm curious, let's say you started with an air-gapped model. Often our capabilities in Cloud exceed our customer's comfort level for a period of time. Can that air-gapped, initial implementation be connected to the Cloud in the future? >> The air-gap implementation, typically customers, the same customer, may have multiple deployments, where one will require the air-gap solution, and another could be the hosted solution, and the other could be the edge product, which is connected. And in both cases, the underlying stack is consistent. So, while I don't hear customers saying, "I want to start from air-gap and move," we are providing Google Distributed Cloud as one portfolio to customers so that we can address these different use cases. In the air-gap solution, the software updates obviously still come from Google, and customers need to move that across the air gap check signatures, check for vulnerability, load it in the system, and the system will then automatically update itself. And so the software we still provide, but in that case, there's additional checks that that customer will typically go through before enabling that software onto their system. >> Yeah, so you mentioned at the outset, some of the drivers, latency security, et cetera, but can you restate that? I'd like to hear what the thinking behind this was at Google when customers were presenting you with a variety of problems they needed solutions for. I think it bears recapping that. >> Right, so let me give you a few examples here. So one is, when you think about 5G, when you think about what 4G did for the industry in terms of enabling the gig economy, with 5G we can really enable richer experiences. And this could be highly immersive experiences, it could be augmented reality, it could be all kinds of technologies that require lower latency. And for this, you need to build out the 5G infrastructure on top of a modernized solution like Google Distributed Cloud. Let me just get into a few use cases though, to just bring some color here. For example, for a retailer, instead of worrying about IP and infrastructure in the store, the people in the store can focus on their customers, and they can implement solutions using Google Distributed Cloud for things like inventory management, asset protection, et cetera, in the store. Inside a manufacturing facility, once again, you can reduce incidents, you can reduce injuries, you can look at your robotic solutions that require low latency feedback, et cetera. There's a whole bunch of emerging applications through ISVs, that a rich, on-prem or anywhere you want it in the edge infrastructure, can enable a new suite of possibilities that weren't possible before. In some cases, customers say, "You know what, I want 5G. But I actually you want a private 5G deployment." And that becomes possible with the Google Distributed Cloud as well. >> So we talked a little bit about scale. What's the smallest increment that someone could deploy? You just gave an example of retail. Some retail outfits are small stores, without any IT staff at all. There's the concept of a single-node Kubernetes cluster, which is something we love to come up with in our business terminology that makes no sense, single node cluster. The point is, these increments, especially in the containerized world, are getting smaller. What's the smallest increment that you can deliver, you're planning to deliver? >> I'll answer this two ways. First of all, we are planning to deliver a smallest increment, think of it as one server. We are planning to deliver that as well, all the way up to many, many racks. But in addition, there's something unique that I wanted to call out. Let's say you're in the medium or larger deployment in the racks, and you want to scale up, compute, and store it separately. That's something we enable as well, because we will work with customers in terms of what they need for their application, and then scale that hardware up and down based on their need. And so there's a lot of flexibility in that, but we will enable scale all the way down to a single server unit as well. >> So what is the feedback been from the partners that will be providing the hardware infrastructure, folks like Dell. What has their reaction been? >> I think that they're obviously very eager to work with us. We're happy to partner with them in order to provide customers flexibility, any kind of scale in any kind of location, different kind of hardware equipment that they need. But in addition to those partners on the hardware side, there are customers and partners as well who are enabling rich experiences and solutions for that retailer, for that manufacturer, for example. And so working with AT&T, we announced partnership on 5G and edge to enable experiences, especially in the areas of retail and manufacturing, like I talked about earlier, but then in Europe, we're partnering with OVHcloud, for example, in order to enable very strict data sovereignty requirements that are happening in that country. And so where there's many communication service providers, there's many partners trying to solve for different use cases for their end customers. >> Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Let's pretend for a minute that you're getting Yelp reviews of this infrastructure that you're responsible for moving forward. What would a delighted customer's comments look like? >> I think a delighted customer's comments will be probably in two or three areas, all right? So first up will be, it's all about the applications and the end user experience that this can enable. And so the power of Google AI ML technology, third-party software as well, that can run consistently single operational model, build once, deploy anywhere, is extremely powerful. So I would say, the power of the applications and the simplicity that it enables is number one. I think number two is the scale of operations experience that Google has. They don't need to worry about, "do I have 5 sites or 500 sites or 5,000 sites?" It doesn't matter. The fleet operations, the scaled operations capability, the global network capability that Google has, all that experience in site reliability engineering, we can now bring to all of these vast amounts of edge locations, so they don't need to worry about scale at all. And then finally, they can be sort of rest assured that this is built on Anthos, it's built on Kubernetes, there's a lot of open source components here, they have flexibility, they have choice, they can run our one-piece services, they can run third-party services on this, and so we're going to preserve the flexibility in choice. I think these are the things that would likely get highlighted. >> So Sachin, you talk to customers around the world. Where do you see the mix between net-neu stuff going into infrastructure like this, versus modernized and migrated workloads into the solution? What does that mix look like? And I know it's a bit of speculation, but what are your thoughts? >> I think, Dave, that's a great question, I think it's a difficult one to answer because we find that those conversations happen together with the same customers. At least that's what I find. And so they are looking to modernize, create a much richer environment for their developers, so that they can innovate much more quickly, react to business needs much more quickly, to cater to their own end customers in a much better way, get business insights from the data that they have. They're looking to do all of this, but at the same time, they have, perhaps, legacy infrastructure or applications that they just can't easily migrate off of, that may still be in a VM environment, more traditional type of storage environment, and they need to be able to address both worlds. And so, yes, there are some who are so-called "born in the Cloud," everything is Cloud native, but the vast majority of customers that I talked to, are absolutely looking to modernize, like you don't find a customer that says, "Just help me lift and shift, I'm not looking to modernize." I don't quite see that. They are looking to modernize but they want to make sure that we have the options that they need to support different kinds of environment that they have today. >> And you mentioned insights. We should explore that a little further. Can you give us an example of artificial intelligence, machine learning being used now at the edge, where you're putting more compute power at the edge? Can you give us an idea of the kinds of things that that enables specifically? >> Yes, so when you think about video processing, for example, if I have a lot of video feeds and I'm looking based on that, I want to apply artificial intelligence, I'm trying to detect object inventory movement, people movement, et cetera. Again, adhering to all the privacy and local regulations. When I have that much data streaming in, if I have to take that out of my edge all the way across the WHEN network, into the Cloud for processing, and bring it all the way back and then make a decision, I'm just moving a lot of data up and down into the Cloud. And in this case, what you're able to do is say, no, you don't actually need to move it into the public Cloud. You can keep that data locally. You can have a Google Distributed Cloud edge instance there, you're going to run your AI application right there, achieve the insights and take an action very, very quickly. And so it saves you, from a latency point of view, significantly, and it saves you from a data transmission up and down into the Cloud significantly, which you sometimes, you know, you're not supposed to send that data up, that there's data residency requirements, and sometimes the cost of just moving it, it doesn't make sense. >> So do you have any final thoughts? What else should we know about this? Anything that we didn't touch on? >> I think we've touched on a lot of great things. I think I'm just going to reiterate, you started with a "what is the definition of Cloud itself" and our mission once again, is to really understand what customers are trying to do and meet them where they are. And we're finding that they're looking for Cloud solutions in a public region. We've announced a lot more regions. We continue to grow our footprint globally, but in addition, they want to be able to get that power of Google Cloud infrastructure and all the benefits that it provides in many different edge locations all the way on onto their premises. And I think one of the things we perhaps spent less time on is, we're also very unique that in our strategy, we're bringing in underlying third-party hardware, but it's a fully managed solution that can operate in that connected edge mode, as well as a disconnected hosted mode, which just enables pretty much all the use cases we've heard about from customers. So one portfolio that can address any kind of need that they have. >> Fantastic. Well, I said at the outset Sachin, before we got started, you and I could talk for hours on this subject. Sadly, we don't have hours. I'd like to thank you for joining us in theCube. I'd like to thank everyone for joining us for this Cube conversation, covering the events at Google Cloud NEXT 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson. Thanks for joining. (upbeat music)

>> Hi, everyone; I am thrilled to personally invite you to a special event created and hosted by "theCUBE." On January 21st, we're holding "theCUBE on Cloud," our first editorial event of the year. We have lined up a fantastic guest list of experts in their respective fields, talking about CIOs, COOs, CEOs, and technologists, analysts, and practitioners. We're going to share their vision of Cloud in the coming decade. Of course, we also have guests from the big three Cloud companies, who are going to sit down with our hosts and have unscripted conversations that "theCUBE" is known for. For example, Mahlon Thompson Bukovec is the head of AWS's storage business, and she'll talk about the future of infrastructure in the Cloud. Amit Zavery is one of Thomas Kurian's lieutenants at Google, and he'll share a vision of the future of application development and how Google plans to compete in Cloud. And J.G. Chirapurath leads Microsoft's data and analytics business. He's going to address our questions about how Microsoft plans to simplify the complexity of tools in the Azure ecosystem and compete broadly with the other Cloud players. But this event, it's not just about the big three Cloud players. It's about how to take advantage of the biggest trends in Cloud, and, of course, data in the coming decade, because those two superpowers along with AI are going to create trillions of dollars in value, and not just for sellers, but for practitioners who apply technology to their businesses. For example, one of our guests, Zhamak Dehghani, lays out her vision of a new data architecture that breaks the decade-long failures of so-called big data architectures and data warehouse and data lakes. And she puts forth a model of a data mesh, not a centralized, monolithic data architecture, but a distributed data model. Now that dovetails into an interview we do with the CEO of Fungible, who will talk about the emergence of the DPU, the data processing unit, and that's a new class of alternative processors that's going to support these massively distributed systems. We also have a number of CXOs who are going to bring practical knowledge and experience to the program. Allen Nance, he led technology transformation for Phillips. Dan Sheehan is a CIO, COO, and CTO and has led teams at Dunkin' brands, Modell's Sporting Goods and other firms. Cathy Southwick has been a CIO at a large firm like AT&T and now is moving at the pace of Silicon Valley at Pure Storage. Automation in the Cloud is another theme we'll hit on with Daniel Dines, who founded and heads the top RPA company. And of course, we'll have a focus on developers in the Cloud with Rachel Stevens of RedMonk. That's a leading edge analyst firm focused exclusively on the developer community. And much more that I just don't have time to go into here, but rest assured, John Furrier and I will be bringing our thoughts, our hard-hitting opinions, along with some special guests that you don't want to miss. So click on the link below and register for this free event, "theCUBE on Cloud." Join us and join the conversation. We'll see you there.

>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome back to theCUBE on Cloud talking about really important topics as to how developers, were changing how they build their applications, where they live, of course, long discussion we've had for a number of years. You know, how do things change in hybrid environments? We've been talking for years, public cloud and private cloud, and really excited for this session. We're going to talk about how edge environment and AI impact that. So happy to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Simon Crosby, is currently the Chief Technology Officer with Swim. He's got plenty of viewpoints on AI, the edge and knows the developer world well. Simon, welcome back. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu, for having me. >> All right, so let's start for a second. Let's talk about developers. You know, it used to be, you know, for years we talked about, you know, what's the level of abstraction we get. Does it sit, you know, do I put it on bare metal? Do I virtualize it? Do I containerize it? Do I make it serverless? A lot of those things, you know that the app developer doesn't want to even think about but location matters a whole lot when we're talking about things like AI where do I have all my data that I could do my training? Where do I actually have to do the processing? And of course, edge just changes by orders of magnitude. Some of the things like latency and where data lives and everything like that. So with that as a setup, would love to get just your framework as to what you're hearing from developers and what we'll get into some of the solutions that you and your team are helping them to do their jobs. >> Well, you're absolutely right, Stu. The data onslaught is very real. Companies that I deal with are facing more and more real-time data from products from their infrastructure, from their partners whatever it happens to be and they need to make decisions rapidly. And the problem that they're facing is that traditional ways of processing that data are too slow. So perhaps the big data approach, which by now is a bit old, it's a bit long in the tooth, where you store data and then you analyze it later, is problematic. First of all, data streams are boundless. So you don't really know when to analyze, but second you can't store it all. And so the store then analyze approach has to change and Swim is trying to do something about this by adopting a process of analyze on the fly, so as data is generated, as you receive events you don't bother to store them. You analyze them, and then if you have to, you store the data, but you need to analyze as you receive data and react immediately to be able to generate reasonable insights or predictions that can drive commerce and decisions in the real world. >> Yeah absolutely. I remember back in the early days of big data, you know, real time got thrown around a little but it was usually I need to react fast enough to make sure we don't lose the customer, react to something, but it was, we gather all the data and let's move compute to the data. Today as you talk about, you know, real time streams are so important. We've been talking about observability for the last couple of years to just really understand the systems and the outputs more than looking back historically at where things were waiting for alerts. So could you give us some examples if you would, as to you know, those streams, you know, what is so important about being able to interact and leverage that data when you need it? And boy, it's great if we can use it then and not have to store it and think about it later, obviously there's some benefits there, because-- >> Well every product nowadays has a CPU, right? And so there's more and more data. And just let me give you an example, Swim processes real-time data from more than a hundred million mobile devices in real time, for a mobile operator. And what we're doing there is we're optimizing connection quality between devices and the network. Now that volume of data is more than four petabytes per day, okay. Now there is simply no way you can ever store that and analyze it later. The interesting thing about this is that if you adopt and analyze, and then if you really have to store architecture, you get to take advantage of Moore's Law. So you're running at CPU memory speeds instead of at disk speed. And so that gives you a million fold speed up, and it also means you don't have the latency problem of reaching out to, or about storage, database, or whatever. And so that reduces costs. So we can do it on about 10% of the infrastructure that they previously had for Hadoop style implementation. >> So, maybe it would help if we just explain. When we say edge people think of a lot of different things, is it, you know an IOT device sitting out at the edge? Are we talking about the Telecom edge? We've been watching AWS for years, you know, spider out their services and into various environments. So when you talk about the type of solutions you're doing and what your customers have, is it the Telecom edge? Is it the actual device edge, you know, where does processing happen and where do these you know, services that work on it live? >> So I think the right way to think about edge is where can you reasonably process the data? And it obviously makes sense to process data at the first opportunity you have, but much data is encrypted between the original device, say, and the application. And so edge as a place doesn't make as much sense as edge as an opportunity to decrypt and analyze data in the clear. So edge computing is not so much a place in my view as the first opportunity you have to process data in the clear and to make sense of it. And then edge makes sense, in terms of latency, by locating, compute, as close as possible to the sources of data, to reduce latency and maximize your ability to get insights and return them to users, you know, quickly. So edge for me often is the cloud. >> Excellent, one of the other things I think about back from, you know, the big data days or even earlier, it was that how long it took to get from the raw data to processing that data, to be able to getting some insight, and then being able to take action. It sure sounds like we're trying to collapse that completely, is that, you know, how do we do that? You know, can we actually, you know, build the system so that we can, you know, in that real time, continuous model that you talk about, you know. Take care of it and move on. >> So one of the wonderful things, one of the wonderful things about cloud computing is that two major abstractions have really served us. And those are rest, which is static disk computing, and databases. And rest means any old server can do the job for me and then the database is just an API call away. The problem with that is that it's desperately slow. So when I say desperately slow, I mean, it's probably thrown away the last 10 years of Moore's law. Just think about it this way. Your CPU runs at gigahertz and the network runs at milliseconds. So by definition, every time you reach out to a data store you're going a million times slower than your CPU. That's terrible. It's absolutely tragic, okay. So a model which is much more effective is to have an in-memory computer architecture in which you engage in staple computation. So instead of having to reach out to a database every time to update the database and whatever, you know, store something, and then fetch it again a few moments later when the next event arrives, you keep state in memory and you compute on the fly as data arrives. And that way you get a million times speed up. You also end up with this tremendous cost reduction because you don't end up with as many instances having to compute, by comparison. So let me give you a quick example. If you go to a traffic.swim.ai you can see the real time state of the traffic infrastructure in Palo Alto. And each one of those intersections is predicting its own future. Now, the volume of data from just a few hundred lights in Palo Alto is about four terabytes a day. And sure you can deal with this in AWS Lambda. There are lots and lots of servers up there. But the problem is that the end to end per event latency is about 100 milliseconds. And, you know, if I'm dealing with 30,000 events a second, that's just too much. So solving that problem with a stateless architecture is extraordinarily expensive, more than $5,000 a month. Whereas the staple architecture which you could think of as an evolution of, you know, something reactive or the actor model, gets you, you know something like a 10th of the cost, okay. So cloud is fabulous for things that need to scale wide but a staple model is required for dealing with things which update you rapidly or regularly about their changes in state. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think about if, I mentioned before AI training models, often, if you look at something like autonomous vehicles, the massive amounts of data that it needs to process, you know, has to happen in the public cloud. But then that gets pushed back down to the end device, in this case it's a car, because it needs to be able to react in real time and gets fed at a regular update, the new training algorithms that it has there. What are you seeing-- >> I have strong reason on this training approach and data science in general, and that is that there aren't enough data scientists or, you know, smart people to train these algorithms, deploy them to the edge and so on. And so there is an alternative worldview which is a much simpler one and that is that relatively simple algorithms deployed at scale to staple representatives, let's call them digital twins of things, can deliver enormous improvements in behavior as things learn for themselves. So the way I think the, at least this edge world, gets smarter is that relatively simple models of things will learn for themselves, create their own futures, based on what they can see and then react. And so this idea that we have lots and lots of data scientists dealing with vast amounts of information in the cloud is suitable for certain algorithms but it doesn't work for the vast majority of applications. >> So where are we with the state of what, what do developers need to think about? You mentioned that there's compute in most devices. That's true, but, you know, do they need some special Nvidia chip set out there? Are there certain programming languages that you are seeing more prevalent, interoperability, give us a little bit of, you know, some tips and tricks for those developing. >> Super, so number one, a staple architecture is fundamental and sure React is well known and there are ACA for example, and Spurling. Swim is another so I'm going to use some language and I would encourage you to look at swimos.org to go from play there. A staple architecture, which allows actors, small concurrent objects to stapely evolve their own state based on updates from the real world is fundamental. By the way, in Swim we use data to build these models. So these little agents, for things, we call them web agents because the object ID is a URI, they stapley evolve by processing their own real-world data, stapley representing it, And then they do this wonderful thing which is build a model on the fly. And they build a model by linking to things that they're related to. So a need section would link to all of its sensors but it would also link to all of its neighbors because the neighbors and linking is like a sub in Pub/Sub, and it allows that web agent then to continually analyze, learn, and predict on the fly. And so every one of these concurrent objects is doing this job of analyzing its own raw data and then predicting from that and streaming the result. So in Swim, you get streamed raw data in and what streams out is predictions, predictions about the future state of the infrastructure. And that's a very powerful staple approach which can run all their memory, no storage required. By the way, it's still persistent, so if you lose a node, you can just come back up and carry on but there's no need to store huge amounts of raw data if you don't need it. And let me just be clear. The volumes of raw data from the real world are staggering, right? So four terabytes a day from Palo Alto, but Las Vegas about 60 terabytes a day from the traffic lights. More than 100 million mobile devices is tens of petabytes per day, which is just too much to store. >> Well, Simon, you've mentioned that we have a shortage when it comes to data scientists and the people that can be involved in those things. How about from the developers side, do most enterprises that you're talking to do they have the skillset? Is the ecosystem mature enough for the company to get involved? What do we need to do looking forward to help companies be able to take advantage of this opportunity? >> Yeah, so there is this huge challenge in terms of, I guess, just cloud native skills. And this is exacerbated the more you get added to. I guess what you could think of is traditional kind of companies, all of whom have tons and tons of data sources. So we need to make it easy and Swim tries to do this by effectively using skills that people already have, Java or JavaScript, and giving them easy ways to develop, deploy, and then run applications without thinking about them. So instead of binding developers to notions of place and where databases are and all that sort of stuff if they can write simple object-oriented programs about things like intersections and push buttons, and pedestrian lights, and inroad loops and so on, and simply relate basic objects in the world to each other then we let data build the model by essentially creating these little concurrent objects for each thing, and they will then link to each other and solve the problem. We end up solving a huge problem for developers too, which is that they don't need to acquire complicated cloud-native skillsets to get to work. >> Well absolutely, Simon, it's something we've been trying to do for a long time is to truly simplify things. Want to let you have the final word. If you look out there, the opportunity, the challenge in the space, what final takeaways would you give to our audience? >> So very simple. If you adopt a staple competing architecture, like Swim, you get to go a million times faster. The applications always have an answer. They analyze, learn and predict on the fly and they go a million times faster. They use 10% less, no, sorry, 10% of the infrastructure of a store than analyze approach. And it's the way of the future. >> Simon Crosby, thanks so much for sharing. Great having you on the program. >> Thank you, Stu. >> And thank you for joining I'm Stu Miniman, thank you, as always, for watching theCUBE.

>> Hi, and this is theCUBE on Cloud. I'm Stu Miniman and really excited to welcome to a special Fireside Chat. CUBE Alumni has been on the program so many times. We always love talking to founders. We like talking to deep thinkers and that's why he was one of the early ones that I reached out to when we were working on this event. When we first started conversations, we were looking at how hyperscalers really were taking adoption of the brand new technologies, things like flash, things like software defined networking, and how that would invade the enterprise. That of course has had a huge impact, help create a category called hyperconverged infrastructure and I'm talking about Dheeraj Pandey. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Nutanix, taking HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure. So Dheeraj, welcome to the Fireside Chat. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu, and thank you for the last 10 years that we've grown together, both theCUBE and Nutanix and myself as a leader in the last 10 years. So bringing HCI from hyperconverged to hybrid cloud just reminds me of how the more things change, the more they remain the same. So looking forward to a great discussion here. >> So talk about that early discussion, what the hyperscalers were doing, how can the enterprise take advantage of that? Over time, enterprise has matured and looked a little bit more like the hyperscalers. Hybrid cloud of course is on everyone's lip, as well as we've seen the hyperscalers themselves look more and more like the enterprise. So hybrid and multicloud is where we are today. We think it'll be in the future. But give us a little bit as to how you've seen that progression today and where are we going down the road here? >> Yeah, I think I talked about this during my .NEXT keynote. And the whole idea of, in every recession, we make things smaller. In '91 we said we're going to go away from mainframes into Unix servers. And we made the unit of compute smaller. Then in the year 2000 when there was the next bubble burst and the recession afterwards, we moved from Unix servers to Wintel: Windows and Intel, x86 and eventually Linux as well. Again we made things smaller going from million dollar servers to $5,000 servers, shorter lived servers. And that's what we did in 2008/2009. I said, look, we don't even need to buy servers. We can do things with virtual machines which are servers that are an incarnation in the digital world. There is nothing in the physical world that actually went lives. But we made it even smaller. And now with cloud in the last three, four years and what will happen in this coming decade, they're going to make it even smaller, not just in space which is size with functions and containers and virtual machines, but also in time. So space and time, we're talking about hourly billing and monthly billing and a one-year term as opposed to really going and committing to five or seven years of hardware and CapEx. So I think as you make things smaller, I mean, and this is true for as consumers, we have short retention spans, things are going fast. The cycle of creative destruction of virtual machines is shrinking as well. So I think in many cases, we know we've gone and created this autonomy, massive sprawl. Like we created a massive sprawl of Intel servers back in '95 and 2005. Then we have to use virtualization to go and consolidate all of it, created beautiful data centers of Intel servers with VMware software. And then we created a massive sprawl of data centers, of consolidated data centers with one click private cloud in the last five years and hopefully in the next five too. But I think we're also now creating a proliferation of clouds. There is a sprawl, massive sprawl of cost centers and such. So we need yet another layer of software for governance to reign in on that chaos, hence the need for a new HCI, hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> Yeah, it's fascinating to kind of watch that progression over time. There was a phenomenal Atlantic article. I think it was from like the 1940s or 1950s where somebody took what was happening post-World War II and projected things out. We're talking really pre the internet, but just the miniaturization and the acceleration, kind of the Moore's law discussion. If you take things out, where it would go. When I talked to Amazon, they said the one thing that we know for sure, I'm talking to Amazon.com is that people will want it faster and cheaper in the future. I don't know which robot or drone or things that they have. But absolutely there are those certain characteristics. So from a leadership standpoint, Dheeraj, talk about these changes? We had the wave of virtualization, the wave of containerization, you talked about functions in serverless. Those are tools. But at the end of the day, it's about the outcomes and how do we take advantage of things? So how as a leader do you make sure that you know where to take the company as these technology waves and changes impact what you're doing? >> Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, we celebrate things in IT a lot, but we don't talk about what does it take? What's the underlying fabric to really use these things successfully and better than others and not just use buzzwords, because new buzzwords will come in the next three years. For example AI and ML has been a great buzzword for the last three, four years. But there's very few companies, probably less than even half a percent who know how to leverage machine learning, even understand the difference between machine learning and AI. And a lot of it comes down to a few principles. There's a culture principles, not the least of which is how you celebrate failure, because now you're doing shorter, smaller things. You've got a more agile, you'll have more velocity. Gone are the days of waterfall where you're doing yearly planning and pre-year releases and such. So as we get into this new world, not everything will be perfect, and you've got to really learn to pick yourself up and recover quickly, heal quickly and such. So that is the fundamental tenet of Silicon Valley. And we got to really go and use this more outside the Valley as well in every company out there. Whether it's East Coast company, the Midwest company that are outside the U.S. I think this idea that you will be vulnerable, more vulnerable as you go and learn to do things faster and shorter. I think product management is a term that we don't fully understand, and this is about the why before the how and the what. We quickly jump to the what: containers and functions and databases, servers, and AI, and ML, they're the what. But how do you really start with the why? You know my fascination for one of my distant mentors, Simon Sinek and how he thinks about most companies just focusing on the what, while very few actually start with why, then the how, then the what itself. And product management has to play a key role in this, which also subsumes design, thinking about simplification and elegance and reducing friction. I think again, very few companies, probably no more than 1% of the companies really understand what it means to start with design and APIs, user experience APIs for developers before you even get to writing any single line of code. So I think to me, that's leadership. When you can stay away from instant gratification of the end result, but start with the why, then the how, then the what. >> Yeah, as we know in the technology space, oftentimes the technology is the easy part. It's helping to drive that change. I think back to the early days when we were talking, it was, hyperconverge, it was a threat to storage. We're going to put you out of a job. And we'd always go and say, "Look, no, no, no. We're not putting you out of a job. We're going to free you up to do the things that you want to do. That security project that's been sitting on the shelf for six months, you can go do that. Helping build new parts of the business. Those things that you can do." It's that shifting a mindset can be so difficult. And Dheeraj, I mean, you look at 2020, everyone has had to shift their mindset for everything. I was spending half my time on the road. I don't miss the hotels. I do miss seeing lots and lots of people in person. So what's your advice for people, how they can stay malleable, be open to some change? What are you seeing out there? What advice do you give there? >> Yeah, I think, as you said, inertia is at the core of most things in our lives, including what we saw in healthcare for the last 20, 30 years. I mean, there was so much regulation. The doctor's community had to move forward, nurses had to move forward. I mean, not just providers, but insurance companies. And finally, all of a sudden, we're talking about telehealth because of the pandemic. We are talking about online learning. I mean the things that higher ed refused to do. I mean if you think about the last 20 years of what had happened with the cost of higher ed, I mean it's 200% growth when the cost of television has gone down by probably 100, 200% with more features. Healthcare, higher ed, education in general, all of a sudden is coming for this deep shock because of the pandemic. And I think it's these kind of black swan moments that really changed the world. And I know it's a cliche to say this. But I feel like we are going to be in a new normal, and we have been forced to this new change of digital. I mean, you and I are sitting and talking over the internet. It's a little awkward right now because there's a little bit of a delay in the way I'm looking at things. But I know it's going to directionally be right. I mean, we will go in a way where it just become seamless over time. So change is the only constant. And I believe that I think what we've seen in the pandemic is just the beginning of what digital will mean going forward. And I think the more people embrace it, the faster we do it. Speed is going to be the name of the game when it comes to survival and thriving in this new age. >> Dheeraj, it's interesting. We do hope, I'm a technologist. I know you're an optimist when it comes to things. So we always look at those silver linings. Like I hope healthcare and education will be able to move forward fast. Higher education costs, inequity out there for access to medicine. It would be wonderful if we could help solve some of that, despite this global pandemic. One of the other results, Dheeraj, we talked about some very shifts in the marketplace, the large tech players really have emerged in winter so far in 2020. I can't help, but watch the stock market. And Apple is bigger than ever, Amazon, Google, all ended up in front of Congress to talk about if they've gotten too big. You've partnered with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. They are potentially a threat but also a partner. From your standpoint, have they gotten too much power? Do we have an inequity in the tech world that they are creating the universes that they will just kind of block off and limit innovation? What's your take on big tech? >> Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's always been big something. I mean, if you go back to the '90s, Amazon, not Amazon, IBM was big, and Microsoft was big, and AT&T was big. I mean, there's always been big companies because the consumer effect that they've had as well, I mean. And I think what we're seeing right now is no different. I mean, at the end of the day, the great thing about this country is that there's always disruption happening. And sometimes small is way better and way more competitive than big. Now at the same time, I do look up to the way some of them have organized themselves. Like the way Amazon has organized itself is really unique and creative with general managers and very independent, highly autonomous groups. So some of these organizations will definitely survive and thrive in scale. And yet for others, I think decision-making and staying competitive and staying scrappy will come a lot harder. So to me when I look at these big names and what Congress is talking about and such, I feel like there's no different than 20, 30, 40 years ago. I mean, we talked about Rockefeller and the oil giants back from 100 years ago. And so in many ways, I mean, the more things change, the more they remain the same. All we have to do is we have to walk over to where the customer is. And that's what we've done with the partnerships. Like in Amazon and Azure, we're saying look, we can even use your commits and credits. I mean, that is a very elegant way to go to where the customer is, rather than force them to where we are. And the public cloud is facing this too. They've come to realize in the last two years that they cannot force all of enterprise computing to come to hyperscalers data centers. They'll have to take in these bite-size smaller clouds to where the customer is, where the customer's machines are, where the customers people are, where the customers data is. That's where we also take to disperse the cloud itself. So I think there's going to be a yin yang where we'll try to walk with the customer to where we want them to be, whether it's hyperscaler data center or the notion of hybrid cloud infrastructure. But many a time, we've got to walk over to where they are. I mean, and outside the U.S, I mean, the cloud is such a nuanced word. I mean, we're talking about sovereignty, we're talking about data gravity, we're talking about economics of owning versus renting. This trifecta, the laws of the land, the laws of physics, and the laws of economics will dictate many of these things as well. So I think the big folks are also humble and vulnerable to realize that there's nothing more powerful than market forces. And I think the rest will take care of itself. >> Yeah, my quick commentary on that, Dheeraj, I think most of us look back at AT&T and felt the government got it wrong. The way they broke it up and ended up consolidating back together, it didn't necessarily help consumers. Microsoft on the other hand might've had a little bit too much power and was leveraging that against competition and really squashing innovation. So in general, it's good to see that the politics are looking at that and chore felt. The last time I watched things, they were a little bit more educated than some previous times there, where it was almost embarrassing to watch our representatives fumbling around with technology. So it's always good to question authority, question what they have. And one of the things you've brought up many times is you're open to listening and you're bringing in new ideas. I remember one conversation I had with you is there's that direction that you hold on to, but you will assess and do new data. You've made adjustments in the product portfolio and direction based on your customers, based on the ecosystem. And you've mentioned some of the, bring thoughts that you've brought into the company and you share. So you mentioned black swan that seem to head you brought to one of the European .NEXT shows. It was great to be able to see that author and read through advisors like Condoleezza Rice who you've had at the conferences a couple of times. Where are you getting some of your latest inspiration from, any new authors or podcasts that you'd be recommending to the audience? >> Yeah, I look at adjacencies, obviously Simon has been great. He was .NEXT, talked about the Infinite Game. And we'll talk about the Infinite Game with Nutanix too with respect to also my decision. But Brene Brown was been very close to Nutanix. I was just looking at her latest podcast, and she was sitting with the author of Stretch, Scott Sonnenschein, and it's a fascinating read and a great listen, by the way, I think for worth an hour, talking about scrappiness, and talking about resourcefulness. What does it mean to really be resourceful? And we need that even more so as we go through this recession, as we are sheltered in place. I think it's an adjacency to everything that Brene does. And I was just blown away by just listening to it. I'd a love for others to even have a listen and learn to understand what we can do within our families, with our budgets, with our companies, with our startups. I mean, with CUBE, I mean, what does it mean to be scrappy? And celebrate scrappiness and resourcefulness, more so than AI always need more. I think I just found it fascinating in the last week itself listening through it. >> John Farinacci talk many times that founder, startup, that being able to pull themselves up, be able to drive forward, overcome obstacles. So Dheeraj, do you tee it up? It sounds like is the next step for you. There's a transition under discussion. Bain has made an investment. There's a search for new CEO. Are you saying there's a book club in your future to be able to get things ready? Why don't you explain a little bit, 11 years took the company public, over 6,500 employees public company. So tell us a little bit about that decision-making process and what you expect to see in the future? >> Yeah, it's probably one of the hardest things as an entrepreneur is to let go, because it's a creation that you followed from scratch, from nothing. And it was a process for me to rethink about what's next for the company and then what's next for me? And me and the company were so tightly coupled that I was like, wow, at some point, this has to be a little bit more like the way Bill Gates did it with Microsoft, and there's going to be buton zone and you will then start to realize that your identity is different from the company's identity. And maybe the company is built for bigger, better things. And maybe you're built for bigger, better things. And how do you really start to first do this decoupling of the identity? And it's really hard. I mean, I'm sure that parents go through this. I mean, our children are still very young. Our eldest is nine going on 10 and our twin girls are six. I know at some point in the next 10 years, eight to 10 years, we'll have to figure out what it means to let go. And I'm already doing this with my son. I tell him you're born free. I mean, the word born free which drives my wife crazy sometimes. I say this to them, it's about independence. And I think the company is also born free to really think about a life outside of me, as well outside of founder. And that was a very important process for me as I was talking to the board for the last six, seven, eight months. And when the Bain deal came in, I thought it was a great time. We ended the fiscal really well, all things considered. We had a good quarter. The transition has been a journey of a lifetime, the business model transition I speak of. Really three years, I mean, I have aged probably 10 years in these last three years. But I think I would not replaced it for anything. Just the experience of learning what it means to change as a public company when you have short-term goals and long-term goals, we need the conviction, knowing what's right, because otherwise we would not have survived this cloud movement, all this idea of actually becoming a subscription company, changing the core of the business in the on-prem world itself. It's a king to change the wings of a plane at 40,000 feet where none of the passengers blink. It's been phenomenal ride last 11 years, but it's also been nonstop monomaniacal. I mean, I use the word marathon for this, and I figured it's a good time to say figure out a way to let go of this, and think of what's bigger better for Nutanix. And going from zero to a billion six in annual billings, and looking at billion six to 3 billion to four to five, I think it'd be great &to look at this from afar. And at the same time, I think there's vulnerability. I mean, I've made the company vulnerable. I've made myself vulnerable. We don't know who the next leader will be. And I think the next three to six months is one of the most important baton zones that I have ever experienced to be a part of. So looking forward to make sure that baton doesn't fall, redefine what good to great looks like, both for the company and for myself. And at the same time, go read more. I mean, I've been passionate about developers in the last 10 years, 11 years. I was a developer myself. This company, Nutanix, was really built by developers for IT. And I'm learning more about the developer as a consumer. How do you think about their experience? Not just the things that we throw at them from open source point of view and from cloud and technologies and AI and ML point of view, but really their lives, having them think about revenue and business and really blurring the lines between architects and product managers and developers. I think it's just an unfathomable problem we've created in IT that I would love to go and read and write more about. >> Yeah, so many important things you said there. I absolutely think that there are certain things everybody of course will think of you for a long time with Nutanix, but there is that separation between the role in the company and the person itself, and really appreciated how much you've always shared along those lines. So last question I have and you hit it up a little bit when you talked about developers. Take off your Nutanix hat for a second here, now what do we need to do to make sure that the next decade is successful in this space, cloud as a general guideline? Yes, we know we have skill gap. We know we need more people, we need more diversity. But there's so much that we need and there's so much opportunity, but what do you see and any advice areas that you think are critical for success in the future? >> Yeah, I mean, you hit up on something that I have had a passion for, probably more late in this world, more so than conspicuous, and and you hit upon it right now, diversity and inclusion. It's an unresolved problem in the developer community: the black developer, the woman developer. The idea of, I mean, we've two girls, they're twins. I'd love for them to embrace computer science and even probably do a PhD. I mean, I was a dropout. I'd love for them to do better than I did. Get, embrace things that are adjacent to biology and computer science. Go solve really hard problems. And we've not done those things. I mean, we've not looked at the community of developers and said, you know, they are the maker. And they work with managers and the maker manager world is two different worlds. How do you make this less friction? And how do you make this more delightful? And how do you think of developers as business, as if they are the folks who run the business? I think there's a lot that's missing there. And again, we throw a lot of jargons at them, and we talk a lot about automation and tools and such. But those are just things. I think the last 10, 11 years of me really just thinking about product and product portfolio and design and the fact that we have so many developers at Nutanix. I think it has been a mind-boggling experience, thinking about the why and the how and the what of the day in the life of, the month in the life of, and thinking about simple things like OKRs. I mean, we are throwing these jargons of OKRs at them: productivity, offshoring, remote work, over the zoom design sessions. It's just full of conflict and friction. So I think there is an amazing opportunity for Nutanix. There's an amazing opportunity for the industry to elevate this where the the woman developer can speak up in this world that's full of so many men. The black developer can speak up. And all of us can really think of this as something that's more structured, more productive, more revenue-driven, more customer in rather than developer out. That's really been some of the things that have been in my head, things that are still unresolved at Nutanix that I'm pretty sure at many of the places out there. That's what thinking and reading and writing about. >> Well, Dheeraj, first of all, thank you so much again for participating here. It's been great having you in theCUBE community, almost since the inception of us doing it back in 2010. Wish you the best of luck in the current transition. And absolutely look forward to talking more in the future. >> Thank you. And again, a big fan of the tremor rate of John, Dave, and you. Always learn so much from you, folks. Looking forward to be a constant student. Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us at theCUBE on Cloud. Lots more coverage here. Be sure to look throughout the site, engage in the chats, and give us your feedback. We're here to help you with the virtual events. I'm Stu Miniman as always. Thanks for watching.

>> Okay, we're now going to explore what it's like to be the CIO of a fast-paced growth company in Silicon Valley, and how the cloud, however you want to define the cloud, public cloud, on-prem, hybrid, et cetera, how it's supported that growth, and with me is Cathy Southwick, who is the CIO of Pure Storage. Kathy has really deep experience managing technology organizations. She spent a number of years overseeing AT&T's cloud planning and engineering, and another few years overseeing a team of a couple thousand network and IT engineers, working to break the physical stranglehold of fossilized telco networks, implementing network function virtualization and a software-defined methodology for the company, and of course, she's spent the last couple of years as the CIO of Pure, so Cathy, it's great to see you again. Thank you for coming on the program. >> Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. >> You're very welcome. And so, given your experience with cloud, you know, dating back to really the early part of last decade, how did you look at cloud back then, and how has it evolved, from your point of view? >> You know, it's an interesting question, 'cause I think that there's some things that have moved very fast, and there's some things that are very much the same as they were even a decade ago. I think that all companies are very focused on how do you think about cloud? Do you think about it as on-prem, and when I started, we really were focused on an on-prem solution, and building an on-prem private cloud to help modernize our business, so I think that with that, all companies are still in that same mindset of how do I want to think about cloud, and how do I want to think about that on-prem versus public, versus a combination or some type of hybrid solution? So, I mean, all of us are on that journey. It just seems like it's taken us probably a little bit longer than most of us probably thought from the beginning. >> So as a CIO, thinking about that evolution, how has that informed the way you think about applying specifically the public cloud to Pure's business. >> You know, I think that we've been a-- For Pure ourself, I think we're in a really unique position. We were essentially born in the cloud, so we're a company that's 10, 11 years old, and if I give the contrast of that of AT&T being you know, 130 year old company, and having a lot of applications that have, you know, lived historically on-prem, there's very different issues and challenges that you have. Pure has had, I think, the advantage, just like many other companies that are born in the cloud, who can see what the advantages are very quickly and we made decisions early on that said that we were going to actually do both. We were going to look to say how do I put those applications and that data, whether it was on public or on-prem, and be able to do that both in the IT side as well as within the product side, so how we develop our products. >> Now, as I mentioned up front, you have obviously a lot of experience managing large technology teams. My question is when you first saw the emergence of the modern cloud, how did you communicate with your team members? I mean, you mentioned you were kind of building your own private cloud, so I guess that's less threatening to people, but what was it like? Was there a concern? Were they eager to jump in? What was that dynamic like, and how did you manage it? >> You know, it's really, it's different depending on the different part of the organization, so I'll give you kind of two things I learned. One of them was that our teams on the operation side, they saw it as a huge advantage. They saw it as an opportunity to really modernize, to really get themselves, both their own, individual skill sets advanced, as well as provide a better level of service for our internal customer, so to speak. Our application and our data partners that we had to work with, they saw it as an opportunity to bring agility to their applications, quicker speed to market, and more currency of their applications, so they actually got some benefits that they weren't actually I'll call planning for. They had the opportunity to get investment in their applications without having to put that investment on themselves. I would tell you the thing I learned from the teams, this is probably, might be a little bit of a surprise, but often, you know, leaders believe you got to have all the answers, you got to drive everything. You're going to make sure everyone knows what needs to get done. What I actually found, this was actually one of my big moments, I think, was our individuals, our employees, our teams, they are so brilliant and so bright on driving change, and a lot of times leaders, I think, get in the way of it. So for cloud and adoption, it was really about me getting out of the way. It was really about setting that north star for where we want to go, from the ability to deliver fast and quick for our business, and then get out of the way and let our teams actually drive. So it was a great-- I actually saw the reverse. I saw more employees wanting to drive, and I needed to back out and just say here's where we need to go. Let them drive us there. >> All right, so I got to ask you. Please don't hate me for asking this question, but was your gender an advantage? Was it a disadvantage, or was it really irrelevant in that regard? >> I think it was irrelevant. I think that it was-- Actually, I truly believe it's irrelevant. I think it was literally recognizing that leaders need to set vision in what we want to achieve, and let our teams help us drive to get there, and I think that that is gender neutral. I think it's really about kind of chucking your ego and everything else out to the side, and it's really about empowering people and our teams to help drive us there. >> So thinking about that learning specifically, are there any similar tectonic shifts that you're seeing today, where you can apply that experience? Like for instance, new modes of application development, and acquiring new skill sets, or maybe another that you can think of. >> Yeah, I think honestly, it traverses everything that we have to do as a leader of a technology team, and whether you're in a high growth company like Pure, or you're in a company that's trying to take costs out of your business, or trying to do things, I think that it really is a matter of leaders needing to set the stage, and so if we're trying to drive you know, change in a business, it's really making sure that we're doing, I'll call it more empowering of our employees, 'cause they will see the way that we can get there. It's just a matter of letting them have that ability to do it. >> So you joined Pure around two years ago, and obviously growing very quickly. I know the pandemic has changed the trajectory of that growth, but still, a good outlook. But Silicon Valley, fast-paced company. You know, I kind of put it in the camp of the Workday and the ServiceNow. It's kind of similar cultural patterns there, so you talked a little bit about this, but I wonder if we could come back and more specifically, how you're leveraging cloud, how you're thinking about it, you know, on-prem, hybrid, now the edge, and how did that contribute to Pure's growth? >> You know, it's a great question because I think that-- Well, I shared earlier, we were essentially born in the cloud. I think that what it's really driven us is to be thinking more forward about where customers are going and what their challenges are. So whether it's for the IT teams on what we're trying to do to deliver for our business and innovation, they're obviously trying to make sure they can hit their revenue goals, and all of those things that are important that every business deals with, but we also have that same mindset on how we develop our products. So it's really all driven by where the customer is going, that they need data mobility, they need application mobility, they need really portability, so that the moment that you have that ability where you can kind of control your destiny and define it, and you only can get that by having applications that are portable and data that is mobile and secure, that you have that kind of flexibility. So I think for Pure, we have been definitely in a great position to drive for our customers, or drive where our customers are going, and so we've defined our entire product set, so not just how we operate as a business and run our business, but then how we define for our customers, same mindset is if our customers are going to the cloud, then we need to have products that can help them to be in the cloud, or be on-prem, and let them decide what that looks like. >> Well, it's interesting you mention that, and I hearken back to the Portworx acquisition, which is an attempt to really change the way application development is done. It's another sort of approach to sort of modern data architecture. As the CIO of a technology company, most CIOs that I know inside of tech companies, they're sort of the dog-fooding or champagne drinking, testing, so had you already started to use that tech? Are you starting to? Does it support that vision that you just put forth? Maybe you could talk a little bit about that. >> Yeah, it does. So we had not been using Portworx as a product. We were just starting down that path of looking at how do we do containerization for the applications that we do have on-prem? That's both on our engineering side as well as within IT. But we quickly have recognized, just like you know, and part of that acquisition is applications, or companies, won't have the ability to have that portability of their applications and have that flexibility that they're all striving for unless they've done things like containerize their applications, made them that they're able to move them across different cloud environments, whether that's on-prem or off-prem, or some hybrid. So for ourselves, you know, Portworx was a really critical acquisition that will help us on our own journey of doing the application modernization and putting those capabilities in place, but it will also enable our customers to have that same flexibility, so again going back to the-- These things aren't like this is for this group and this is for this customer. It's really about how we operate, both internally and then what we are providing for our customers. So that portability and being able to have control of your own destiny, that's really, to me, what hybrid cloud is all about, and you can't really achieve that if you don't have some of these capabilities within your toolbox. >> Great, thank you for that. So I'm interested, as the head of a technology group at a tech company, and what are the meaningful differences? I mean there are a lot of differences, but relative to CIO of a large telco, or other incumbent, you know, what are some of the good, the bad, and the ugly of the differences? >> Yeah, you know, it's-- I meet with a lot of CIOs across Silicon Valley, and we kind of joke that when you are working in a company that is a technology based company, you know, everybody knows how to do-- Because you do, you have brilliant engineers, and they do know. I think the difference that you start to see is that IT is required to make sure that availability is there inherent in what you're doing on immediate rollout with like, you know, an application that's occurring. That's very different than how you do product life cycle management. What I've seen actually though, is more similarities. I know that's probably a surprise to you, but coming out of AT&T, what I had been working on those last couple of years was actually doing the combination of engineering and IT into one organization, and that you do have a lot of benefits for how you can then develop, how you can manage, and the skillsets. There's a lot of similarities, so there's actually probably more similarities between companies on what they're trying to achieve than you would probably think there would be, just because we're all trying to make sure that we can develop quickly. >> How about as it relates to cloud, Cathy? I mean, I remember in the early days of cloud, a lot of the big banks said we can build our own cloud. We can essentially compete at scale with Amazon. We're the big bank. And then I think they quickly realized well, the economics actually don't favor us necessarily. Do you think there's a different perception about the use of cloud between sort of traditional incumbents and a tech company in Silicon Valley, and if so, how so? >> I think that the-- If you are a bank, as you refer to, and having-- It really is where you're starting from. If you have a very large infrastructure footprint and application footprint, your applications probably are not born in the cloud. There's a lot of modernization that has to be done with those applications so that they can operate as efficiently in a public cloud, as an example. And I think that's something that sometimes gets overlooked, is there are enormous benefits with going to public cloud, but there's also costs if your applications or your data doesn't really fit as well in that type of environment. So I think that for large enterprises like the banks, some of the telcos, they've got very large footprints of infrastructure already. Those investments have been made, and what they're really looking for is how do I increase my ability to, whether it's agility or it's speed, or it's lower costs, or it's all those things, and I think they've got the different path, a different journey that they're on, so they're trying to balance all those equations of the economics, as well as the ability to have no more investment or minimal investment in that infrastructure. For companies like Pure, where we started off with those investments, our decision, and kind of the decision tree that we used is if it makes sense and I don't have to make that investment on-prem for whatever reason, then I should go ahead and make that investment in a public cloud strategy or a hybrid cloud strategy, and I'll kind of differentiate that, because I think that it's different depending on the company you are. And so, it really kind of depends on where you're starting from, and then it also depends on what you're trying to achieve, if you're just trying to achieve an economic solution, if you're trying to achieve a strategic solution, if you're trying to get agility, and I think it's different for companies and it's different depending where you're at in your journey. So for a Silicon Valley company who's hyper-growth, you know, one, we're very focused on agility, everything from scale, because we've got to scale quickly, and those are things that we don't want to have to start going and building all these data centers to go do that. We don't have those embedded investments, so it's a real difference in where your starting point is, and I think there's value in all those different type of approaches. >> Right, and it's a real advantage for you that you don't have to shell out all that cap-ex on data centers. >> That's right. >> As you look back at the last 10 years of cloud, it was largely about eliminating the heavy lift of infrastructure deployment, and SaaSifying the business. What do you see going forward? What do you think is going to unfold in the 2020s? Is it going to be more of the same, or do you expect meaningful differences? >> I think that we're going to get better as technology leaders on how to quickly make decisions and have it less political, and I think COVID's actually taught us a lot about that around companies more willing to make, I'll call it a faster decision, and remove some of the red tape. I've heard this from many of my peers, that things that might have taken them months and months to get approved, it's now days, even if they even have to go get approval, so I think that what we're going to see is, we'll see the continuance of public and I'll call it really hybrid cloud type of solutions, and I think it will be more purposeful about what goes there and how that can help us to you know, I'll call it enable us much faster than we've been able to do it before. I think that's been our challenge is we've-- You know, we get mired into some of the details of some of these things that maybe it would be easier for us to just make the decision and move forward than to keep going round and round on what's the right way to do it. >> Yeah, so that's interesting, what you're saying about the fast decisions. I felt like a lot of 2020 was you know, very tactical. Okay, go deal with the work from home, et cetera, although you definitely see IT spending suppressed in 2020. Our forecast was -4%, but we're saying it's going to grow. We actually see a decent snap back. You know, what are you seeing generally, not even necessarily Pure, but when you talk to some of your colleagues? You're obviously in the technology business. It's good to be in the technology business these days, but do you see spending generally coming back, and maybe the timing? First half maybe a little soft, second half-- What are you seeing there? >> Yeah, almost identical to what you said. I think that we'll see a little bit of a tendency to not really hold back, but really kind of see what's happening in the first quarter of the year. There's a lot going on with companies, and everyone's having to kind of balance that and what that looks like. I do see, and what I'm hearing from several of my peers is that you know, it's not necessarily budget cuts. It might be budget redirections, it might be reprioritization, but definitely technology investments are still there, and it's still important for businesses to keep on their journeys, and we do see that even at Pure, as a way to differentiate ourselves in the market as well. >> What about the work from home piece? I mean, prior to COVID, I think the average was about 15 or 16% of employees worked from home. You know, now it's got to be well over in the high 70s, and the CIOs that we've talked to suggest that that's going to come down in the first half, maybe down to still pretty high, 50, 60%, but then eventually it's going to settle at a higher rate than it was pre-COVID, maybe double that rate, maybe in the 30, 35, maybe even 40%. What are you expecting? >> Something probably very similar. I think that what companies have recognized, and I actually tell you, CIOs have thought this, many of them for many years, that there's a huge value in having some type of hybrid model. There's value in having, both from a business perspective as well as a personal perspective, so employees' work-life balance and trying to balance that. So I think that we at Pure, and myself as the CIO, hugely expect that we will see some type of I'll call it leveling off, figuring out what's the right for the right group, and I think what we don't want to get into is a prescriptive that says this is what the company will look like as a whole. I think it really is going to come down to certain types of work are more conducive to a more work remote environment. Others need to have, and I always kind of use this term of individual productivity versus team productivity. We've seen great advances in individual productivity. Team productivity is still a challenge when you're still trying to do very collaborative brainstorming sessions, and so we are looking at capabilities to be able to enable our employees to do that, but there's some things you just can't replace the human interaction and the ability to very quickly, interactively, you know, five minutes, catch someone and do that. So I think we'll see both. We'll see some leveling off, and I think we'll see some areas of businesses that had once thought you can't do that remote, they might actually say hey, that is work that can be remote, so I think we'll see a combination of both. >> That's an interesting perspective on productivity, and what's the old saying, is you can go faster alone, but further as a team. And not a lot of folks have been talking about that team productivity. We clearly saw the hit, the positive hit on productivity, especially in the technology business, so my question then is, so you expect, you know, HQ doesn't go away. Maybe it gets smaller, but so is there pent-up demand for technology spending at the headquarters? 'Cause you've been pushing tech out to the edge, out to the remote workers, securing those remote workers, figuring out better ways to collaborate. Is there pent-up demand at HQ? >> Absolutely, we've been-- You know, we've been actually exploring different technologies. We've been looking at what are things that could help create a different kind of experience? And it'll be some different types of technology. Those will be the things that maybe aren't even out there developed yet, on how do you create some of those comparable experiences? So I think that the notion of individuals will continue to thrive, but we've got to start working on how do we continue to enhance that team, collaborative productivity environment that looks and feels different than what it might look like today. >> Cathy, got to leave it there. Great, as always, having you on the CUBE. Thanks so much for participating in CUBE on Cloud. >> Great, it was great to be here, thank you. >> All right, keep it right there. Back with more content right after this short break.

>> Go on my lead. >> Dan: All right, very good. >> Five, four. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the special presentation from theCUBE, where we're exploring the future of cloud and its business impact in the coming decade, kind of where we've come from and where we're going. My name is Dave Vellante, and with me is a CIO/CTO/COO, and longtime colleague, Dan Sheehan. Hello, Dan, how're you doing? >> Hey, Dave, how are you doing? Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. So folks, Dan has been in the technology industry for a number of years. He's overseen, you know, large-multi, tens of millions of dollar ERP application development efforts, He was a CIO of a marketing, you know, direct mail company. Dan, we met at ADVO, it seems like such a (snickers) long time ago. >> Yeah, that was a long time ago, back in Connecticut. Back in the early 2000s. >> Yeah, ancient days. But pretty serious data for back then, you know, the early 2000s, and then you did a six-year stint as a EVP and CIO at Dunkin' Brands. I remember I came out to see you when I was starting Wikibon and trying to understand. >> Oh yeah. >> You know, what the CIOs cared about. You were so helpful and thanks for that. And that was a big deal. I mean, Dunkin', 17,000 points of distribution. I mean, that was sort of a complicated situation, right? >> Oh yeah. >> So, great experience. >> I mean, when you get involved with franchisees and trying to make everybody happy, yes, that was a lot of fun. >> And then you had a number of other roles, one was as COO at Modell's, and then to fast-forward, Beacon Health. You were EVP and CIO there. And you also, it looked like you had a kind of a business and operational role. You helped the company get acquired by Anthem Blue Cross. So awesome, congrats on that. That must've been a great experience. >> It was. A year of my life, yes. (both laugh) >> You're still standing. So anyway, you can see Dan, he's like this multi-tool star, he's seen a lot of changes in the technology business. So Dan, again, welcome back. Dan Sheehan. >> Oh, thank you. >> So when you started in your career, you know, there was no cloud, right? I mean, you had to do everything. It's funny, I remember I was... You probably know Bill Rucci, CIO of Hartford Steam Boiler. I remember we were talking one day, and this again was pre-cloud and he said, you know, I'm thinking, do I really need to manage my own email? I mean, back then, we did everything. So you had to provision infrastructure so you could write apps, and that was important. That frustrated CFOs, but it was a necessary piece of the value chain. So how have you seen that sort of IT value contribution shift over the years? Let's start there. >> Ah, well, I think it comes down to demand versus capacity. If you look at where companies want to go, they want to do a lot with technology. Technology has taken on a larger role. It's no longer and has not been a, so to speak, cost center. So I think the demand for making change and driving a company forward or reducing costs, there are other executives, peers to the CIO, to the CTO that are looking to do more, and when it comes to doing more, that means more demand, and you step back and you look at what the CIO has for capacity. Looking at Quick Solution's data, solutions in the cloud is appealing, and there are, you know, times where other functions talk to a vendor and see that they can get a vertical solution done pretty quickly. They go off and take that on, or it could be, you know, a ServiceNow capability that you want to implement across the company, and you do that just like an ERP type of roll up. But the bottom line is there are solutions out there that have pushed, I would say the IT organization to look at their capacity versus demand, and sometimes you can get things done quicker with a cloud type of solution. >> So how did you look at that shadow IT as a CIO? Was it something that kind of ticked you off or like you're sort of implying that it made you better? >> Well, I think it does ultimately make you better, but I think you have to partner with the functions because if you don't, you get these types of scenarios, and I've been involved in these just as well. You are busy with, you know, fulfilling your objectives as the leader of IT, and then you get a knock on the door from, let's say marketing or operations, and they say, hey, we just purchased this X solution and we want to integrate it with A, B and C. Well, that was not on the budget or on the IT roadmap or the IT strategy that was linked to the IT, I'm sorry, to the business strategy, and all of a sudden now you have more demand versus the capacity, and then you have to go start reprioritizing. So it's more of, yeah, kind of disrupted, but at the same time, it pushed, you know, the needle of the company forward. But it's all about just working together to make it happen. And that's a lot of, you know, hard conversations when you have to start reprioritizing capacity. >> Well, so let's talk about that alignment. I mean, there's always been a sort of a schism between IT and its ability to deliver, manage demand, and the business will always want you to go faster. They want IT to develop the systems, you know, of course, for less and then they want you to eat the cost of maintaining them, so (chuckles) there's been that tension. But in many ways, that CIO's job is alignment. I mean, it seems to me anyway that schism has certainly narrowed and the cloud's been been part of that, but what do you see as that trajectory over the years and where do you see it going? >> Well, I think it's going to continue to move forward, and depending upon the service, you know, companies are going to take advantage of those services. So yes, some of the non-mission critical capabilities that you would want to move out to the cloud or have somebody else do it, so to speak, that's going to continue to happen because they should be able to do it a lot cheaper than you can, just like use you mentioned a few moments ago about email. I did not want to maintain, you know, exchange service and keeping that all up and running. I moved quickly to Microsoft 365 and that's been a world of difference, but that's just one example. But when you have mission critical apps, you're going to have to make a decision if you want to continue to house them in-house or push them out to an AWS and house them there. So maybe you don't need a large data center and you can utilize some of the best and brightest around security, around managing size of the infrastructure and getting some of their engineering help, which can help. So it just depends upon the application, so to speak, or a function that you're trying to support. And you got to really look at your enterprise architecture and see where that makes sense. So you got to have a hybrid. I see and I have, you know, managed towards a hybrid way of looking at your architecture. >> Okay, so obviously the cloud played a role in that change, and of course, you were in healthcare too so you had to be somewhat careful, >> Yep. >> With the cloud. But you mentioned this hybrid architecture. I mean, from a technologist standpoint and a business standpoint, what do you want out of, you know, you hear a hybrid, multi, all the buzz words. What are you looking for then? Is it a consistent experience? Is it a consistent security? Or is it sort of more horses for courses, where you're trying to run a workload in the right place? What's your philosophy on that? >> Well, I mean, all those things matter, but you're looking at obviously, cost, you're looking at engagement. How does these services engage? Whether it's internal employees or external clients who you're servicing, and you want to get to a cost structure that makes sense in terms of managing those services as well as those mission critical apps. So it comes down to looking at the dollars and cents, as well as what type of services you can provide. In many cases, if you can provide a cheaper and increase the overall services, you're going to go down that path. And just like we did with ServiceNow, I did that at Beacon and also at DentaQuest two healthcare companies. We were able to, you know, remove duplicated, so to speak, ticketing systems and move to one and allow a better experience for the internal employee. They can do self-service, they can look at metrics, they can see status, real-time status on where their request was. So that made a bigger difference. So you engaged the employee differently, better, and then you also reduce your costs. >> Well, how about the economics? I mean, your experience that cloud is cheaper. You hear a lot of the, you know, a lot of the legacy players are saying, oh, no cloud's super expensive. Wait till you get that Amazon bill. (laughs) What's the truth? >> Well, I think there's still a lot of maturing that needs to go on, because unfortunately, depending upon the company, so let's use a couple of examples. So let's look at a startup. You look at a startup, they're probably going to look at all their services being in the cloud and being delivered through a SaaS model, and that's going to be an expense, that's going to be most likely a per user expense per month or per year, however, they structure the contract. And right out of the gate, that's going to be a top line expense that has to be managed going forward. Now you look at companies that have been around for a while, and two of the last companies I worked with, had a lot of technical debt, had on-prem applications. And when you started to look at how to move forward, you know, you had CFOs that were used to going to buy software, capitalize in that software over, you know, five years, sometimes three years, and using that investment to be capitalized, and that would sit below the line, so to speak. Now, don't get me wrong, you still have to pay for it, it's just a matter of where it sits. And when you're running a company and you're looking at the financials, not having that cost on your operational expenses, so to speak, if you're not looking at the depreciation through those numbers, that was advantageous to a CFO many years ago. Now you come to them and say, hey, we're going to move forward with a new HR system, and it's all increasing the expense because there's nothing else to capitalize. Those are different conversations, and all of a sudden your expenses have increased, and yes, you have to make sure that the businesses behind you, with respects to an ROI and supporting it. >> Yeah, so as long as the value is there, and that's a part of the alignment. I want to ask you about cloud pricing strategies because you mentioned ServiceNow, you know, Salesforce is in there, Workday. If you look at the way these guys price, it's really not true cloud pricing in a way, cause they're going to have you sign up for an annual license, you know, a lot of times you got pay up front, or if you want a discount, you're going to have to sign up for two years or three years. But now you see guys like Snowflake coming in, you know, big high-profile IPO. They actually charge you on a consumption-based model. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see that as sort of a trend in the coming decade? >> No, I absolutely think it's going to be on a trend, because consumption means more transactions and more transactions means more computing, and they're going to look at charging it just like any other utility charges. So yes, I see that trend continuing. Did a big deal with UltiPro HR, and yeah, that was all based upon user head count, but they were talking about looking at their payroll and changing their costing on payroll down the road. With their merger, or they went from being a public company to a private company, and now looking to merge with Kronos. I can see where time and attendance and payroll will stop being looked at as a transaction, right? It's a weekly or bi-weekly or monthly, however the company pays, and yes, there is dollars to be made there. >> Well, so let me ask you as a CIO and a business, you know, COO. One of the challenges that you hear with the cloud is okay, if I get my Amazon bill, it's something that Snowflake has talked about, where you know, to me, it's the ideal model, but on the other hand, the transparency is not necessarily there. You don't know what it's going to be at the end of (mumbles) Would you rather have more certainty as to what that bill's going to look like? Or would you rather have it aligned with consumption and the value to the business? >> Well, you know, that's a great question, because yes, I mean, budgets are usually built upon a number that's fixed. Now, no, don't get me wrong. I mean, when I look at the wide area network, the cost for internet services, yes, sometimes we need to increase and that means an increase in the overall cost, but that consumption, that transactional, that's going to be a different way of having to go ahead and budget. You have to budget now for the maximum transactions you anticipate with a growth of a company, and then you need to take a look at that you know, if you're budgeting. I know we were on a calendar fiscal year, so we started up budgeting process in August and we finalized at sometime in the end of October, November for the proceeding year, and if that's the case, you need to get a little bit better on what your consumptions are going to be, because especially if you're a public company, going out on the street with some numbers, those numbers could vary based upon a high transaction volume and the cost, and maybe you're not getting the results on the top end, on the revenue side. So I think, yeah, it's going to be an interesting dilemma as we move forward. >> Yeah. So, I mean, it comes back to alignment, doesn't it? I mean, I know in our small example, you know, we're doing now, we were used to be physical events with theCUBE, now it's all virtual events and our Amazon bill is going through the roof because we're supporting all these users on these virtual events, and our CFO's like, well, look at this Amazon bill, and you say, yeah, but look at the revenue, it's supporting. And so to your point, if the revenue is there, if the ROI is there, then it makes sense. You can kind of live with it because you're growing with it, but if not, then you really got to question it. >> Yeah. So you got to need to partner with your financial folks and come up with better modeling around some of these transactional services and build that into your modeling for your budget and for your, you know, your top line and your expenses. >> So what do you think of some of these SaaS companies? I mean, you've had a lot of experience. They're really coming at it from largely an application perspective, although you've managed a lot of infrastructure too. But we've talked about ServiceNow. They've kind of mopped up in the ITSM. I mean, there's nobody left. I mean, ServiceNow has sort of taken over the whole (mumbles) You know, Salesforce, >> Yeah. >> I guess, sort of similarly, sort of dominating the CRM space. You hear a lot of complaints now about, you know, ServiceNow pricing. There is somebody the other day called them the Oracle of ITSM. Do you see that potentially getting disrupted by maybe some cloud native developers who are developing tools on top? You see in, like, for instance, Datadog going after Splunk and LogRhythm. And there seem to be examples popping up. Well, what's your take on all this? >> No, absolutely. I think cause, you know, when we were talking about back when I first met you, when I was at the ADVO, I mean, Oracle was on it's, you know, rise with their suite of capabilities, and then before you know it, other companies were popping up and took over, whether it was Firstbeat, PeopleSoft, Workday, and then other companies that just came into play, cause it's going to happen because people are going to get, you know, frustrated. And yes, I did get a little frustrated with ServiceNow when I was looking at a couple of new modules because the pricing was a little bit higher than it was when I first started out. So yes, when you're good and you're able to provide the right services, they're going to start pricing it that way. But yes, I think you're going to get smaller players, and then those smaller players will start grabbing up, so to speak, market share and get into it. I mean, look at Salesforce. I mean, there are some pretty good CRMs. I mean, even, ServiceNow is getting into the CRM space big time, as well as a company like Sugar and a few others that will continue to push Salesforce to look at their pricing as well as their services. I mean, they're out there buying up companies, but you just can't automatically assume that they're going to, you know, integrate day one, and it's going to take time for some of their services to come and become reality, so to speak. So yes, I agree that there will be players out there that will push these lager SaaS companies, and hopefully get the right behaviors and right pricing. >> I've said for years, Dan, that I've predicted that ServiceNow and Salesforce are on a collision course. It didn't really happen, but it's starting to, because ServiceNow, the valuation is so huge. They have to grow into other markets much in the same way that Salesforce has. So maybe we'll see McDermott start doing some acquisitions. It's maybe a little tougher for ServiceNow given their whole multi-instance architecture and sort of their own cloud. That's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. >> Yeah. Yeah. You got to play in that type of architecture, let's put it that way. Yes, it'll be interesting to see how that does play out. >> What are your thoughts on the big hyperscalers; Amazon, Microsoft, Google? What's the right strategy there? Do you go all in on one cloud like AWS or are you more worried about lock-in? Do you want to spread your bets across clouds? How real is multi-cloud? Is it a strategy or more sort of a reality that you get M and A and you got shadow IT? What's your take on all that? >> Yeah, that's a great question because it does make you think a little differently around you know, where to put all your eggs. And it's getting tougher because you do want to distribute those eggs out to multiple vendors, if you would, service providers. But, you know, for instance we had a situation where we were building a brand new business intelligence data warehouse, and we decided to go with Microsoft as its core database. And we did a bake-off on business analytic tools. We had like seven of them at Beacon and we ended up choosing Microsoft's Power BI, and a good part of that reason, not all of it, but a good part of it was because we felt they did everything else that the Tableau's and others did, but, you know, Microsoft would work to give, you know, additional capabilities to Power BI if it's sitting on their database. So we had to take that into consideration, and we did and we ended up going with Power BI. With Amazon, I think Amazon's a little bit more, I'll put it horizontal, whereby they can help you out because of the database and just kind of be in that data center, if you would, and be able to move some of your homegrown applications, some of your technical debt over to that, I'll say cloud. But it'll get interesting because when you talk about integration, when you talk about moving forward with a new functionality, yeah, you have to put your architecture in a somewhat of a center point, and then look to see what is easier, cheaper, cost-effective, but, you know, what's happening to my functionality over the next three to five years. >> But it sounds like you'd subscribe to a horses for courses approach, where you put the right workload in the right cloud, as opposed to saying, I'm going to go all in on one cloud and it's going to be, you know, same skillset, same security, et cetera. It sounds like you'd lean toward the former versus going all in with, you know, MANO cloud. >> Yeah, I guess again, when I look at the architecture. There will be major, you know, breaks if you would. So yes, there is somewhat of a, you know, movement to you know, go with one horse. But, you know, I could see looking back at the Beacon architecture that we could, you know, lift and put the claims adjudication capabilities up in Amazon and then have that conduct, you know, the left to right claims processing, and then those transactions could then be moved into Microsoft's data warehouse. So, you know, there is ways to go about spreading it out so that you don't have all those eggs in one basket and that you reduce the amount of risk, but that weighed heavily on my mind. >> So I was going to ask you, how much of a factor lock-in is it? It sounds like it's more, you know, spreading your eggs around, as you say and reducing your risk as opposed to, you know, worried about lock-in, but as a CIO, how worried are you about lock-in? Where is that fit in the sort of decision tree? >> Ah, I mean, I would say it's up there, but unfortunately, there's no number one, there's like five number ones, if you would. So it's definitely up there and it's something to consider when you're looking at, like you said, the cost, risk integration, and then time. You know, sometimes you're up against the time. And again, security, like I said. Security is a big key in healthcare. And actually security overall, whether you're retail, you're going to always have situations no matter what industry, you got to protect the business. >> Yeah, so I want to ask you about security. That's the other number one. Well, you might've been a defacto CSO, but kind of when we started in this business security was the problem of the security teams, and you know, it's now a team sport. But in thinking about the cloud and security, how big of a concern is the cloud? Is it just more, you're looking for consistency and be able to apply the corporate edicts? Are there other concerns like the shared responsibility model? What are your thoughts on security in the cloud? >> Well, it probably goes back to again, the industry, but when I looked at the past five years in healthcare, doing a lot of work with the CMS and Medicaid, Medicare, they had certain requirements and certain restrictions. So we had to make sure that we follow those requirements. And when you got audited, you needed to make sure that you can show that you are adhering to their requirements. So over the past, probably two years with Amazon's government capabilities that those restrictions have changed, but we were always looking to make sure that we owned and managed how we manage the provider and member data, because yes, we did not want to have obviously a breach, but we wanted to make sure we were following the guidelines, whether it's state or federal, and then and even some cases healthcare guidelines around managing that data. So yes, top of mind, making sure that we're protecting, you know, in my case so we had 37 million members, patients, and we needed to make sure that if we did put it in the cloud or if it was on-prem, that it was being protected. And as you mentioned, recently come off of, I was going to say Amazon, but it was an acquisition. That company that was looking at us doing the due diligence, they gave us thumbs up because of how we were managing the data at the lowest point and all the different levels within the architecture. So Anthem who did the acquisition, had a breach back in, I think it was 2015. That was top of mind for them. We had more questions during the due diligence around security than any other functional area. So it is critical, and I think slowly, some of that type of data will get up into the cloud, but again, it's going to go through some massive risk management and security measures, and audits, because how fragile that is. >> Yeah, I mean, that could be a deal breaker in an acquisition. I got two other questions for you. One is, you know, I know you follow the technologies very closely, but there's all the buzz words, the digital transformation, the AI, these new SaaS models that we talked about. You know, a lot of CIOs tell me, look, Dave, get the business right and the technology is the easy part. It's people, it's process. But what are you seeing in terms of some of this new stuff coming out, there's machine learning, you know, obviously massive scale, new cloud workloads. Anything out there that really excites you and that you could see on the horizon that could be, you know, really change agents for the next decade? >> Yeah, I think we did some RPA, robotics on some of the tasks that, you know, where, you know, if the analysis types of situations. So I think RPA is going to be a game changer as it continues to evolve. But I agree with what you just said. Doing this for quite a while now, it still comes down to the people. I can get the technology to do what it needs to do as long as I have the right requirements, so that goes back to people. Making sure we have the partnership that goes back to leadership and the people. And then the change management aspects. Right out of the gate, you should be worrying about how is it going to affect and then the adoption and engagement. Because adoption is critical, because you can go create the best thing you think from a technology perspective, but if it doesn't get used correctly, it's not worth the investment. So I agree, whether it's digital transformation or innovation, it still comes down to understanding the business model and injecting and utilizing technology to grow or reduce costs, grow the business or reduce costs. >> Yeah, usage really means value. Sorry, my last question. What's the one thing that vendors shouldn't do? What's the vendor no-no that'll alienate CIO's? >> To this day, I still don't like, there's a company out there that starts with an O. I still don't like it to that, every single technology module, if you would, has a separate sales rep. I want to work with my strategic partners and have one relationship and that single point of contact that spark and go back into their company and bring me whatever it is that we're looking at so that I don't get, you know, for instance from that company that starts with an O, you know, 17 calls from 17 different sales reps trying to sell me 17 different things. So what irritates me is, you know, you have a company that has a lot of breadth, a lot of, you know, capability and functional, you know that I may want. Give me one person that I can deal with. So a single point of contact, then that makes my life a lot easier. >> Well, Dan Sheehan, I really appreciate you spending some time on theCUBE, it's always a pleasure catching up with you and really appreciate you sharing your insights with our audience. Thank you. >> Oh, thank you, David. I appreciate the opportunity. You have a great day. >> All right. You too. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE on Cloud. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after the short break. Awesome, Dan.

(gentle music) >> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube Conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, we're back at Cube on Cloud, and with me is Muddu Sudhakar. He's a long time alum of theCube, a technologist and executive, a serial entrepreneur and an investor. Welcome my friend, good to see you. >> Good to see you, Dave. Pleasure to be with you. Happy elections, I guess. >> Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to start, this work from home, pivot's been amazing, and you've seen the enterprise collaboration explode. I wrote a piece a couple months ago, looking at valuations of various companies, right around the snowflake IPO, I want to ask you about that, but I was looking at the valuations of various companies, at Spotify, and Shopify, and of course Zoom was there. And I was looking at just simple revenue multiples, and I said, geez, Zoom actually looks, might look undervalued, which is crazy, right? And of course the stock went up after that, and you see teams, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft doing a great job across the board, we've written about that, you're seeing Webex is exploding, I mean, what do you make of this whole enterprise collaboration play? >> No, I think the look there is a trend here, right? So I think this probably trend started before COVID, but COVID is going to probably accelerate this whole digital transformation, right? People are going to work remotely a lot more, not everybody's going to come back to the offices even after COVID, so I think this whole collaboration through Slack, and Zoom, and Microsoft Teams and Webex, it's going to be the new game now, right? Both the video, audio and chat solutions, that's really going to help people like eyeballs. You're not going to spend time on all four of them, right? It's like everyday from a consumer side, you're going to spend time on your Gmail, Facebook, maybe Twitter, maybe Instagram, so like in the consumer side, on your personal life, you have something on the enterprise. The eyeballs are going to be in these platforms. >> Yeah. Well. >> But we're not going to take everything. >> Well, So you are right, there's a permanence to this, and I got a lot of ground to cover with you. And I always like our conversations mood because you tell it like it is, I'm going to stay on that work from home pivot. You know a lot about security, but you've seen three big trends, like mega trends in security, Endpoint, Identity Access Management, and Cloud Security, you're seeing this in the stock prices of companies like CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Okta- >> Right >> Sailpoint- >> Right, I mean, they exploded, as a result of the pandemic, and I think I'm inferring from your comment that you see that as permanent, but that's a real challenge from a security standpoint. What's the impact of Cloud there? >> No, it isn't impact but look, first is all the services required to be Cloud, right? See, the whole ideas for it to collaborate and do these things. So you cannot be running an application, like you can't be running conference and SharePoint oN-Prem, and try to on a Zoom and MS teams. So that's why, if you look at Microsoft is very clever, they went with Office 365, SharePoint 365, now they have MS Teams, so I think that Cloud is going to drive all these workloads that you have been talking about a lot, right? You and John have been saying this for years now. The eruption of Cloud and SAS services are the vehicle to drive this next-generation collaboration. >> You know what's so cool? So Cloud obviously is the topic, I wonder how you look at the last 10 years of Cloud, and maybe we could project forward, I mean the big three Cloud vendors, they're running it like $20 billion a quarter, and they're growing collectively, 35, 40% clips, so we're really approaching a hundred billion dollars for these three. And you hear stats like only 20% of the workloads are in the public Cloud, so it feels like we're just getting started. How do you look at the impact of Cloud on the market, as you say, the last 10 years, and what do you expect going forward? >> No, I think it's very fascinating, right? So I remember when theCube, you guys are talking about 10 years back, now it's been what? More than 10 years, 15 years, since AWS came out with their first S3 service back in 2006. >> Right. >> Right? so I think look, Cloud is going to accelerate even more further. The areas is going to accelerate is for different reasons. I think now you're seeing the initial days, it's all about startups, initial workloads, Dev test and QA test, now you're talking about real production workloads are moving towards Cloud, right? Initially it was backup, we really didn't care for backup they really put there. Now you're going to have Cloud health primary services, your primary storage will be there, it's not going to be an EMC, It's not going to be a ETAP storage, right? So workloads are going to shift from the business applications, and this business App again, will be running on the Cloud, and I'll make another prediction, make customer service and support. Customer service and support, again, we should be running on the Cloud. You're not want to run the thing on a Dell server, or an IBM server, or an HP server, with your own hosted environment. That model is not because there's no economies of scale. So to your point, what will drive Cloud for the next 10 years, will be economies of scale. Where can you take the cost? How can I save money? If you don't move to the Cloud, you won't save money. So all those workloads are going to go to the Cloud are people who really want to save, like global gradual custom, right? If you stay on the ASP model, a hosted, you're not going to save your costs, your costs will constantly go up from a SAS perspective. >> So that doesn't bode well for all the On-prem guys, and you hear a lot of the vendors that don't own a Cloud that talk about repatriation, but the numbers don't support that. So what do those guys do? I mean, they're talking multi-Cloud, of course they're talking hybrid, that's IBM's big play, how do you see it? >> I think, look, see there, to me, multi-Cloud makes sense, right? You don't want one vendor that you never want to get, so having Amazon, Microsoft, Google, it gives them a multi-Cloud. Even hybrid Cloud does make sense, right? There'll be some workloads. It's like, we are still running On-prem environment, we still have mainframe, so it's never going to be a hundred percent, but I would say the majority, your question is, can we get to 60, 70, 80% workers in the next 10 years? I think you will. I think by 2025, more than 78% of the Cloud Migration by the next five years, 70% of workload for enterprise will be on the Cloud. The remaining 25, maybe Hybrid, maybe On-prem, but I get panics, really doesn't matter. You have saved and part of your business is running on the Cloud. That's your cost saving, that's where you'll see the economies of scale, and that's where all the growth will happen. >> So square the circle for me, because again, you hear the stat on the IDC stat, IBM Ginni Rometty puts it out there a lot that only 20% of the workloads are in the public Cloud, everything else is On-prem, but it's not a zero sum game, right? I mean the Cloud native stuff is growing like crazy, the On-prem stuff is flat to down, so what's going to happen? When you talk about 70% of the workloads will be in the Cloud, do you see those mission critical apps and moving into the car, I mean the insurance companies going to put their claims apps in the Cloud, or the financial services companies going to put their mission critical workloads in the Cloud, or they just going to develop new stuff that's Cloud native that is sort of interacts with the On-prem. How do you see that playing out? >> Yeah, no, I think absolutely, I think a very good question. So two things will happen. I think if you take an enterprise, right? Most businesses what they'll do is the workloads that they should not be running On-prem, they'll move it up. So obviously things like take, as I said, I use the word SharePoint, right? SharePoint and conference, all the knowledge stuff is still running on people's data centers. There's no reason. I understand, I've seen statistics that 70, 80% of the On-prem for SharePoint will move to SharePoint on the Cloud. So Microsoft is going to make tons of money on that, right? Same thing, databases, right? Whether it's CQL server, whether there is Oracle database, things that you are running as a database, as a Cloud, we move to the Cloud. Whether that is posted in Oracle Cloud, or you're running Oracle or Mongo DB, or Dynamo DB on AWS or SQL server Microsoft, that's going to happen. Then what you're talking about is really the App concept, the applications themselves, the App server. Is the App server is going to run On-prem, how much it's going to laureate outside? There may be a hybrid Cloud, like for example, Kafka. I may use a Purse running on a Kafka as a service, or I may be using Elasticsearch for my indexing on AWS or Google Cloud, but I may be running my App locally. So there'll be some hybrid place, but what I would say is for every application, 75% of your Comprende will be on the Cloud. So think of it like the Dev. So even for the On-prem app, you're not going to be a 100 percent On-prem. The competent, the billing materials will move to the Cloud, your Purse, your storage, because if you put it On-prem, you need to add all this, you need to have all the whole things to buy it and hire the people, so that's what is going to happen. So from a competent perspective, 70% of your bill of materials will move to the Cloud, even for an On-prem application. >> So, Of course, the susification of the industry in the last decade and in my three favorite companies last decade, you've worked for two of them, Tableau, ServiceNow, and Splunk. I want to ask you about those, but I'm interested in the potential disruption there. I mean, you've got these SAS companies, Salesforce of course is another one, but they can't get started in 1999. What do you see happening with those? I mean, we're basically building these sort of large SAS, platforms, now. Do you think that the Cloud native world that developers can come at this from an angle where they can disrupt those companies, or are they too entrenched? I mean, look at service now, I mean, I don't know, $80 billion market capital where they are, they bigger than Workday, I mean, just amazing how much they've grown and you feel like, okay, nothing can stop them, but there's always disruption in this industry, what are your thoughts on that. >> Not very good with, I think there'll be disrupted. So to me actually to your point, ServiceNow is now close to a 100 billion now, 95 billion market coverage, crazy. So from evaluation perspective, so I think the reason they'll be disrupted is that the SAS vendors that you talked about, ServiceNow, and all this plan, most of these services, they're truly not a multi-tenant or what do you call the Cloud Native. And that is the Accenture. So because of that, they will not be able to pass the savings back to the enterprises. So the cost economics, the economics that the Cloud provides because of the multi tenancy ability will not. The second reason there'll be disrupted is AI. So far, we talked about Cloud, but AI is the core. So it's not really Cloud Native, Dave, I look at the AI in a two-piece. AI is going to change, see all the SAS vendors were created 20 years back, if you remember, was an operator typing it, I don't respond administered we'll type a Splunk query. I don't need a human to type a query anymore, system will actually find it, that's what the whole security game has changed, right? So what's going to happen is if you believe in that, that AI, your score will disrupt all the SAS vendors, so one angle SAS is going to have is a Cloud. That's where you make the Cloud will take up because a SAS application will be Cloudified. Being SAS is not Cloud, right? Second thing is SAS will be also, I call it, will be AI-fied. So AI and machine learning will be trying to drive at the core so that I don't need that many licenses. I don't need that many humans. I don't need that many administrators to manage, I call them the tuners. Once you get a driverless car, you don't need a thousand tuners to tune your Tesla, or Google Waymo car. So the same philosophy will happen is your Dev Apps, your administrators, your service management, people that you need for service now, and these products, Zendesk with AI, will tremendously will disrupt. >> So you're saying, okay, so yeah, I was going to ask you, won't the SAS vendors, won't they be able to just put, inject AI into their platforms, and I guess I'm inferring saying, yeah, but a lot of the problems that they're solving, are going to go away because of AI, is that right? And automation and RPA and things of that nature, is that right? >> Yes and no. So I'll tell you what, sorry, you have asked a very good question, let's answer, let me rephrase that question. What you're saying is, "Why can't the existing SAS vendors do the AI?" >> Yes, right. >> Right, >> And there's a reason they can't do it is their pricing model is by number of seats. So I'm not going to come to Dave, and say, come on, come pay me less money. It's the same reason why a board and general lover build an electric car. They're selling 10 million gasoline cars. There's no incentive for me, I'm not going to do any AI, I'm going to put, I'm not going to come to you and say, hey, buy me a hundred less license next year from it. So that is one reason why AI, even though these guys do any AI, it's going to be just so I call it, they're going to, what do you call it, a whitewash, kind of like you put some paint brush on it, trying to show you some AI you did from a marketing dynamics. But at the core, if you really implement the AI with you take the driver out, how are you going to change the pricing model? And being a public company, you got to take a hit on the pricing model and the price, and it's going to have a stocking part. So that, to your earlier question, will somebody disrupt them? The person who is going to disrupt them, will disrupt them on the pricing model. >> Right. So I want to ask you about that, because we saw a Snowflake, and it's IPO, we were able to pour through its S-1, and they have a different pricing model. It's a true Cloud consumption model, Whereas of course, most SAS companies, they're going to lock you in for at least one year term, maybe more, and then, you buy the license, you got to pay X. If you, don't use it, you still got to pay for it. Snowflake's different, actually they have a different problem, that people are using it too much and the sea is driving the CFO crazy because the bill is going up and up and up, but to me, that's the right model, It's just like the Amazon model, if you can justify it, so how do you see the pricing, that consumption model is actually, you're seeing some of the On-prem guys at HPE, Dell, they're doing as a service. They're kind of taking a page out of the last decade SAS model, so I think pricing is a real tricky one, isn't it? >> No, you nailed it, you nailed it. So I think the way in which the Snowflake there, how the disruptors are data warehouse, that disrupted the open source vendors too. Snowflake distributed, imagine the playbook, you disrupted something as the $ 0, right? It's an open source with Cloudera, Hortonworks, Mapper, that whole big data that you want me to, or that market is this, that disrupting data warehouses like Netezza, Teradata, and the charging more money, they're making more money and disrupting at $0, because the pricing models by consumption that you talked about. CMT is going to happen in the service now, Zen Desk, well, 'cause their pricing one is by number of seats. People are going to say, "How are my users are going to ask?" right? If you're an employee help desk, you're back to your original health collaborative. I may be on Slack, I could be on zoom, I'll maybe on MS Teams, I'm going to ask by using usage model on Slack, tools by employees to service now is the pricing model that people want to pay for. The more my employees use it, the more value I get. But I don't want to pay by number of seats, so the vendor, who's going to figure that out, and that's where I look, if you know me, I'm right over as I started, that's what I've tried to push that model look, I love that because that's the core of how you want to change the new game. >> I agree. I say, kill me with that problem, I mean, some people are trying to make it a criticism, but you hit on the point. If you pay more, it's only because you're getting more value out of it. So I wanted to flip the switch here a little bit and take a customer angle. Something that you've been on all sides. And I want to talk a little bit about strategies, you've been a strategist, I guess, once a strategist, always a strategist. How should organizations be thinking about their approach to Cloud, it's cost different for different industries, but, back when the cube started, financial services Cloud was a four-letter word. But of course the age of company is going to matter, but what's the framework for figuring out your Cloud strategy to get to your 70% and really take advantage of the economics? Should I be Mono Cloud, Multi-Cloud, Multi-vendor, what would you advise? >> Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, I actually call it the tech stack. Actually you and John taught me that what was the tech stack, like the lamp stack, I think there is a new Cloud stack needs to come, and that I think the bottomline there should be... First of all, anything with storage should be in the Cloud. I mean, if you want to start, whether you are, financial, doesn't matter, there's no way. I come from cybersecurity side, I've seen it. Your attackers will be more with insiders than being on the Cloud, so storage has to be in the Cloud and encompass compute whoever it is. If you really want to use containers and Kubernetes, it has to be in the public Cloud, leverage that have the computer on their databases. That's where it can be like if your data is so strong, maybe run it On-prem, maybe have it on a hosted model for when it comes to database, but there you have a choice between hybrid Cloud and public Cloud choice. Then on top when it comes to App, the app itself, you can run locally or anywhere, the App and database. Now the areas that you really want to go after to migrate is look at anything that's an enterprise workload that you don't need people to manage it. You want your own team to move up in the career. You don't want thousand people looking at... you don't want to have a, for example, IT administrators to call central people to the people to manage your compute storage. That workload should be more, right? You already saw Sierra moved out to Salesforce. We saw collaboration already moved out. Zoom is not running locally. You already saw SharePoint with knowledge management mode up, right? With a box, drawbacks, you name anything. The next global mode is a SAS workloads, right? I think Workday service running there, but work data will go into the Cloud. I bet at some point Zendesk, ServiceNow, then either they put it on the public Cloud, or they have to create a product and public Cloud. To your point, these public Cloud vendors are at $2 trillion market cap. They're they're bigger than the... I call them nation States. >> Yeah, >> So I'm servicing though. I mean, there's a 2 trillion market gap between Amazon and Azure, I'm not going to compete with them. So I want to take this workload to run it there. So all these vendors, if you see that's where Shandra from Adobe is pushing this right, Adobe, Workday, Anaplan, all the SAS vendors we'll move them into the public Cloud within these vendors. So those workloads need to move out, right? So that all those things will start, then you'll start migrating, but I call your procurement. That's where the RPA comes in. The other thing that we didn't talk about, back to your first question, what is the next 10 years of Cloud will be RPA? That third piece to Cloud is RPA because if you have your systems On-prem, I can't automate them. I have to do a VPN into your house there and then try to automate your systems, or your procurement, et cetera. So all these RPA vendors are still running On-prem, most of them, whether it's UI path automation anywhere. So the Cloud should be where the brain should be. That's what I call them like the octopus analogy, the brain is in the Cloud, the tentacles are everywhere, they should manage it. But if my tentacles have to do a VPN with your house to manage it, I'm always will have failures. So if you look at the why RPA did not have the growth, like the Snowflake, like the Cloud, because they are running it On-prem, most of them still. 80% of the RP revenue is On-prem, running On-prem, that needs to be called clarified. So AI, RPA and the SAS, are the three reasons Cloud will take off. >> Awesome. Thank you for that. Now I want to flip the switch again. You're an investor or a multi-tool player here, but so if you're, let's say you're an ecosystem player, and you're kind of looking at the landscape as you're in an investor, of course you've invested in the Cloud, because the Cloud is where it's at, but you got to be careful as an ecosystem player to pick a spot that both provides growth, but allows you to have a moat as, I mean, that's why I'm really curious to see how Snowflake's going to compete because they're competing with AWS, Microsoft, and Google, unlike, Frank, when he was at service now, he was competing with BMC and with on-prem and he crushed it, but the competitors are much more capable here, but it seems like they've got, maybe they've got a moat with MultiCloud, and that whole data sharing thing, we'll see. But, what about that? Where are the opportunities? Where's that white space? And I know there's a lot of white space, but what's the framework to look at, from an investor standpoint, or even a CEO standpoint, where you want to put place your bets. >> No, very good question, so look, I did something. We talk as an investor in the board with many companies, right? So one thing that says as an investor, if you come back and say, I want to create a next generation Docker or a computer, there's no way nobody's going to invest. So that we can motor off, even if you want to do object storage or a block storage, I mean, I've been an investor board member of so many storage companies, there's no way as an industry, I'll write a check for a compute or storage, right? If you want to create a next generation network, like either NetSuite, or restart Juniper, Cisco, there is no way. But if you come back and say, I want to create a next generation Viper for remote working environments, where AI is at the core, I'm interested in that, right? So if you look at how the packets are dropped, there's no intelligence in either not switching today. The packets come, I do it. The intelligence is not built into the network with AI level. So if somebody comes with an AI, what good is all this NVD, our GPS, et cetera, if you cannot do wire speed, packet inspection, looking at the content and then route the traffic. If I see if it's a video package, but in UN Boston, there's high interview day of they should be loading our package faster, because you are a premium ISP. That intelligence has not gone there. So you will see, and that will be a bad people will happen in the network, switching, et cetera, right? So that is still an angle. But if you work and it comes to platform services, remember when I was at Pivotal and VMware, all models was my boss, that would, yes, as a platform, service is a game already won by the Cloud guys. >> Right. (indistinct) >> Silicon Valley Investors, I don't think you want to invest in past services, right? I mean, you might come with some lecture edition database to do some updates, there could be some game, let's say we want to do a time series database, or some metrics database, there's always some small angle, but the opportunity to go create a national database there it's very few. So I'm kind of eliminating all the black spaces, right? >> Yeah. >> We have the white spaces that comes in is the SAS level. Now to your point, if I'm Amazon, I'm going to compete with Snowflake, I have Redshift. So this is where at some point, these Cloud platforms, I call them aircraft carriers. They're not going to stay on the aircraft carriers, they're going to own the land as well. So they're going to move up to the SAS space. The question is you want to create a SAS service like CRM. They are not going to create a CRM like service, they may not create a sales force and service now, but if you're going to add a data warehouse, I can very well see Azure, Google, and AWS, going to create something to compute a Snowflake. Why would I not? It's so close to my database and data warehouse, I already have Redshift. So that's going to be nightlights, same reason, If you look at Netflix, you have a Netflix and you have Amazon prime. Netflix runs on Amazon, but you have Amazon prime. So you have the same model, you have Snowflake, and you'll have Redshift. The both will help each other, there'll be a... What do you call it? Coexistence will happen. But if you really want to invest, you want to invest in SAS companies. You do not want to be investing in a compliment players. You don't want to a feature. >> Yeah, that's great, I appreciate that perspective. And I wonder, so obviously Microsoft play in SAS, Google's got G suite. And I wonder if people often ask the Andy Jassy, you're going to move up the stack, you got to be an application, a SAS vendor, and you never say never with Atavist, But I wonder, and we were talking to Jerry Chen about this, years ago on theCube, and his angle was that Amazon will play, but they'll play through developers. They'll enable developers, and they'll participate, they'll take their, lick off the cone. So it's going to be interesting to see how directly Amazon plays, but at some point you got Tam expansion, you got to play in that space. >> Yeah, I'll give you an example of knowing, I got acquired by a couple of times by EMC. So I learned a lot from Joe Tucci and Paul Merage over the years. see Paul and Joe, what they did is to look at how 20 years, and they are very close to Boston in your area, Joe, what games did is they used to sell storage, but you know what he did, he went and bought the Apps to drive them. He bought like Legato, he bought Documentum, he bought Captiva, if you remember how he acquired all these companies as a services, he bought VMware to drive that. So I think the good angle that Microsoft has is, I'm a SAS player, I have dynamics, I have CRM, I have SharePoint, I have Collaboration, I have Office 365, MS Teams for users, and then I have the platform as Azure. So I think if I'm Amazon, (indistinct). I got to own the apps so that I can drive this workforce on my platform. >> Interesting. >> Just going to developers, like I know Jerry Chan, he was my peer a BMF. I don't think just literally to developers and that model works in open source, but the open source game is pretty much gone, and not too many companies made money. >> Well, >> Most companies pretty much gone. >> Yeah, he's right. Red hats not bad idea. But it's very interesting what you're saying there. And so, hey, its why Oracle wants to have Tiktok, running on their platform, right? I mean, it's going to. (laughing) It's going to drive that further integration. I wanted to ask you something, you were talking about, you wouldn't invest in storage or compute, but I wonder, and you mentioned some commentary about GPU's. Of course the videos has been going crazy, but they're now saying, okay, how do we expand our Team, they make the acquisition of arm, et cetera. What about this DPU thing, if you follow that, that data processing unit where they're like hyper dis-aggregation and then they reaggregate, and as an offload and really to drive data centric workloads. Have you looked at that at all? >> I did, I think, and that's a good angle. So I think, look, it's like, it goes through it. I don't know if you remember in your career, we have seen it. I used to get Silicon graphics. I saw the first graphic GPU, right? That time GPU was more graphic processor unit, >> Right, yeah, work stations. >> So then become NPUs at work processing units, right? There was a TCP/IP office offloading, if you remember right, there was like vector processing unit. So I think every once in a while the industry, recreated this separate unit, as a co-processor to the main CPU, because main CPU's inefficient, and it makes sense. And then Google created TPU's and then we have the new world of the media GPU's, now we have DPS all these are good, but what's happening is, all these are driving for machine learning, AI for the training period there. Training period Sometimes it's so long with the workloads, if you can cut down, it makes sense. >> Yeah. >> Because, but the question is, these aren't so specialized in nature. I can't use it for everything. >> Yup. >> I want Ideally, algorithms to be paralyzed, I want the training to be paralyzed, I want so having deep use and GPS are important, I think where I want to see them as more, the algorithm, there should be more investment from the NVIDIA's and these guys, taking the algorithm to be highly paralyzed them. (indistinct) And I think that still has not happened in industry yet. >> All right, so we're pretty much out of time, but what are you doing these days? Where are you spending your time, are you still in Stealth, give us a little glimpse. >> Yeah, no, I'm out of the Stealth, I'm actually the CEO of Aisera now, Aisera, obviously I invested with them, but I'm the CEO of Aisero. It's funded by Menlo ventures, Norwest, True, along with Khosla ventures and Ram Shriram is a big investor. Robin's on the board of Google, so these guys, look, we are going out to the collaboration game. How do you automate customer service and support for employees and then users, right? In this whole game, we talked about the Zoom, Slack and MS Teams, that's what I'm spending time, I want to create next generation service now. >> Fantastic. Muddu, I always love having you on you, pull punches, you tell it like it is, that you're a great visionary technologist. Thanks so much for coming on theCube, and participating in our program. >> Dave, it's always a pleasure speaking to you sir. Thank you. >> Okay. Keep it right there, there's more coming from Cuba and Cloud right after this break. (slow music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios (upbeat music) in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. I'm Stu Miniman, coming to you from our Boston area studio, and really happy to welcome to the program to dig into some of the latest on what's going on in the multi-cloud ecosystem. First of all, coming back to the program, not too far from where I'm sitting, Joe CaraDonna. He is the Vice President of Engineering Technologies, with Dell Technologies, and joining him, someone he knows quite well, is Rich Sanzi, who's Vice President of Engineering at Google Cloud. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining. >> Great to be here, Stu. >> Thank you. >> All right, so Joe, we've been watching Dell Technologies, how the cloud portfolio and solution has been maturing, and working with the ecosystem. Maybe set the table for us, what's Dell doing with cloud? Why are we sitting here with the ? >> Well, we're here to talk about our OneFS for Google Cloud offering. We did something really special with Google here. We brought together the power and scale of our OneFS file system, along with the economics and the simplicity of public cloud, and together, I think, what we did is define a new standard for scalable file in public cloud, where we have a game-changing performance and capacity. We have a full range of enterprise-grade data management capabilities, and we enable real hybrid cloud, and open up new use cases for our customers. >> Excellent, thanks Joe for setting the table on that. Rich, let's pull you into the conversation. Before we go into the Google thing, give us a little bit about your background. You've been in storage, as I hinted at. You worked with Joe before, and tell us about your role inside of Google. >> Yeah, so I actually joined Google a few years ago, responsible for storage, and storage for all of Google, in addition to Google Cloud. And then, you know, big company things. We've been growing rapidly, and an opportunity opened up where I could be much more engaged on the Compute side, and so I'm responsible for Compute, the IaaS infrastructure for Google Cloud Engine. So it's my pleasure to be here and support Joe and Dell Technologies in the launch of OneFS on Google Cloud. >> Yeah, Rich, I'd like to come back to you on something, 'cause when you look at cloud, for many years it was cloud versus, you know, taking over the world, destroying everything before it. And especially, you look at Compute, or storage specifically, people have a little bit of a hard time wrapping their heads around, where my application lives. Does it just live one place? Are my applications going a little bit hybrid there? I look back, you know the disclosure, I worked at EMP for years. You know that storage is complicated and diverse, that's why we have file, block, and object. We have lots of different types of solutions out there. There's never been a silver bullet that says, "Okay, 90% of the people can use this one thing "for everything." So Rich, let's start with you. Cloud definitely has changed the discussion of storage, but I feel like I've seen the enterprise solutions looking more like the hyperscalers, and the hyperscale solution blurring the lines with what was traditionally happening in the data center. Do you agree with some of that? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it's really nice when you control the horizontal and the vertical, and you can adapt your application stack, but that's just not the reality where we are today. The reality is that a cloud vendor, working with customers who bring their workloads in the cloud, have to be able to support all of the best-in-class types of storage that people are using. You're absolutely right, we're using cloud, or sorry, we're using objects, we're using block, we're using file. One of the great pieces of this, is that in the file space, you really need scalable file to go along with your scalable compute. >> Excellent, so-- >> Yeah, and I'll just add-- >> Please, go ahead Joe. >> Yeah, I mean, our customers, for a long time, have been asking, our Isilon customers in particular, asking for a long time to bring this type of capability to the cloud. They want the scalability of the elastic compute in the GPUs. They also want the OpEx model, right? And they want to be able to bring the high performance compute workloads to the cloud, but they need a scalable file system that can keep up with the demand, and that's what we set out to solve for. >> Excellent, so Joe you mentioned that the Isilon piece. You know, we've watched what has happened with that. You know, Isilon has always been software at the core and highly scalable, so we'd like you both, Joe you teed it up there, but Rich, why is this important for Google Cloud customers, and how's it different from, maybe, how they were doing things in the past? >> Well, I think one of the things that I think I'm really excited about, is that this enables customers to leverage the cloud, and not make a ton of changes on their server side. So it really allows them to preserve their investment, and their applications, and the way that they think about storage, and the way they think about how that scales and performs. So that, for me, is a, let's make it easy for customers to consume cloud, rather than make it a hurdle, and that's my view. >> Yeah, and Joe, help frame this for us a bit. You know, we watched Dell Technologies recently had the Power Store announcement. A lot of discussion about cloud native architectures, moving to micro-services. Google's one of the earliest and most prominent examples of innerized architectures out there. So, where does the file solution fit in this whole discussion that customers have about modernization of their applications, and the journey that they're going on? >> Yeah, well, not all applications lend themselves well to object. They need file semantics, as well as the performance characteristics that come along with that, in terms of throughput and latencies. But even beyond that, what our customer's looking for is the data management capability, right? Whether it's snapshots, or the multi-protocol data access for NFS, or SMB, or even HDFS. And they're looking for replication, native replication, so they can have their Isilon systems in the data center, replicate their data directly into the file service of the cloud so they can actually operate on that data, and then there's things that we take for granted now, at least in the data center, of that high availability and that high durability, that storage arrays deliver. So, it's a combination of things that make it attractive for customers, that open up these new workloads, especially in terms of a high performance compute. >> Excellent, you talked a bit about some of the reasons why customers wouldn't want file. Of course, scale is one of those things we've been talking about for many years. Scale means different things to many people. There's few companies that know scale better than Google, so Rich, talk a little bit about scalability, performance, what these types of evolutions mean, and what you're hearing from customers. >> Certainly from a scale perspective, things like objects and object store is super scalable. It's also, you know, requires application changes, to really make use of. Customers are really looking for scalable solutions that enable them to bring their existing applications to cloud, and not have to make a ton of changes to it. That's one of the things I think is great about the Dell offering, is that it is a full-fidelity solution that has the performance and scale of what customers are expecting from their on-premise, and then when we wire that up with the Google network into our Google Cloud compute regions, we get very high performance, and very high fidelity, low latency as a result. We think that that removes potential headaches that customers may have when they bring big applications in the HBC space, and related high performance computing space in the cloud. >> Great, and Joe, is all this available now? Tell us a little bit about availability. What do you expect the demand to be for this solution? >> Well, I expect the demand to be great, right? The kind of workloads we're talking about here cut across a wide range of verticals. So everything from whether it's like sciences for genomics research, oil and gas for seismic data processing, media and entertainment for video editing and rendering, or even finishing, automotive telemetry data that requires processing and scale, and EDA. So, I think it hits upon a wide variety of use cases and verticals, and we've even structured our pricing and our tiers to make it more accessible for use cases from high performance, all the way down to even archival. >> So, maybe just to clarify, this is GA today? >> Yeah, yes, it is GA. (laughs) >> Okay, excellent. >> Beta is behind 'em. >> Appreciate that, and how does, you mentioned flexibility on pricing. How much of this is what's available from Google, what's available from Dell? How does that relationship and go-to-market work together? >> Yeah, well it's a native service in Google. You can provision directly from the Google Portal. You can manage your file systems directly from the Google Portal, and the billing is integrated. So you get one bill from Google, whether it's for our OneFS file service, or any of Google's native services. >> Excellent, Rich, we'd love to hear, talk about from the Google side, the ecosystem. I know last year, I was at the Google Next event, really saw strong demand from the partner community. They're looking to work with Google, many have worked with Google for many years. What kind of feedback have you been getting and how this fits into the overall solution? >> So, from a partner perspective, one of the things that we really want to enable our partners, is to bring their services onto our platform, and to integrate them tightly as if they were a Google offering, and that's so things like the integrated billing, the provisioning from the Google Portal, things like that are core tenets for us for helping our customers and our partners' customers easily consume services in the cloud. So, sort of one of the P-zero requirements, from my perspective, for our product offering here, was that in fact it was just integrated into the Google Cloud platform, and that it would be discoverable and easily usable by customers. So I think that enables partners to deliver a first-class service on our platform. >> Yeah, I mean, Rich, absolutely. Some of the feedback I've gotten from the ecosystem, is, how do they put it? They say, "Google kind of puts you through the ringer. "By the time you get through that, "it is going to work." And of course, we know, Google's doing that to make sure that there are good, reliable, strong services by the time the end customer gets them. All right, Joe-- >> Yes, and-- >> (laughs) Go ahead, yeah. >> I was going to say, you know, delivering these services, and delivering them reliably, it's a multi-company partnership, but we understand that at the end of the day, the customer wants to be assured that there is, they have one contact for problems with the service, and so that's where Google very much wants to be that primary contact, 'cause who knows where the issues could be. Are they in the data center, or are they in the network, or are they on the customer side? We feel responsibility to front (audio distorts). >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Joe, I guess, final thing for you. Talk about the Dell Technologies Google Cloud relationship, why that's important, what differentiates it from some of the many other partnerships that Dell has. >> Yeah, sure, before I touch on that, I want to talk about, you mentioned scale, and scale means different things to different people. And when we're talking about scale here, capacity's one element of that, and we certainly scale that way, but performance is the other way. And ESG did a performance study on the OneFS file service that we're offering, and they fired up the biozone benchmark, which fired up over 1000 cores in Google, running NFS load to the file system. They sized the file system at 2 petabytes, which seems large, and it is, but you can scale much larger than that with our service, and their results on throughput was 200 gigabytes per second on the read, and 100 gigabytes per second on the write. Now, these are game changing numbers, right? It's numbers like that that enable compute-intensive, high performance workloads in Google Cloud, and we're opening that up. And it's also important to note that this is a scalable file system, so if you want to double those throughput numbers, you just double the capacity of your file system. So that's the power of scale that we're delivering here. And our file system can scale up to 50 petabytes, so a lot of runway there. As far as the partnership with Google goes, I mean, Google's been great. Their infrastructure is amazing. In order to hit those kind of performance numbers, your head goes to compute and the file system, but there's also a network in there, and to hit those kind of numbers, Google had to supply a two terabyte per second network, and they were able to supply the compute and the network with ease, and without hiccup. So it's together that we're solving for the compute, network, and storage equation, and that we can deliver a holistic solution. And lastly, I would just point out, the engineering teams work great bringing that cloud native experience into that Google Portal, really simplifying user experience. So, they can provision and manage the systems directly from the Portal, as well as unifying the billing. So I think the partnership's been great, and it's going to be interesting to see how our customers use the service to accelerate their cloud journey. >> Well, Joe and Rich, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on GA of this, and definitely look forward to hearing the customer journeys as they go on. >> Thank you, Stu. >> All right, thank you. And Rich, thank you for your partnership. >> Yeah, your welcome, Joe. Thank you, as well. >> All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all the coverage, the virtual events that we're participating, as well as the back catalog of interviews that we've done. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to the cube from our Boston area studios we've been doing a series of CXO leadership discussions talking about how everyone's dealing with the global global endemic I've been welcome program a first-time guest Katy Bullard she is the president of a tile guru of course a cloud guru a online learning company we've had on the cube many times over the years Katy thanks so much thank you so much sue for having me I really appreciate it all right so Katie I remember I saw the in I think the announce was the end of at the beginning of the year your based at the headquarters in Austin you know online you know learning is a huge topic cloud of course you know one of those mega waves that we've been walking a long time and then you know out of nowhere global pandemic you know it's striking us so you know bring us inside you know obviously you know taking a new role in a new organization as it own challenges normally it's like okay what am I going to do for the first 90 days and make that plan tell us you know how were you reacted in how the company has reacted with the koban 19 did you get a chance to look at my 90-day plan dude that was exactly where it was no well let me take you back I'll take you back to kind of why I chose to come to ECG because I think it informs actually what's happening right now as well when I when I was looking for the next opportunity what I look for is I look for two things primarily in a company one is a product that's in a market that's growing really really fast and a product that has raving customer bands and obviously ACG really you know check both of those boxes you think about this is pre Co but if you think about the cloud computing market growing you know 50 60 % a year and the number one challenge for people who are both moving to the cloud or moving to a multi cloud strategy was having enough skilled workers to to do that effectively there really wasn't a better intersection of two you know two who value propositions than what a CG offered which was serving the cloud computing market and skilling up workers in that market fast forward to February you know was interesting I actually went out to Australia offices in mid-february as this was starting to heat up came back just in time I think to not go into quarantine but we very quickly saw the impact and you know this isn't easy for anybody in in any situation but what we are hearing from our customers and from the market is that that move to the cloud is even more important now I think the latest that I saw from the the 2028 odd report said 65 percent of companies are planning a cloud migration 95 percent are of companies are employing a multi cloud strategy so that is accelerating and then of course we're all sitting at home right now and you're getting me in my in my dining room and we have the both learn online versus in person there's no longer in-person training there's no longer events for us to go to lives we're doing that online we also are seeing that you know the way that we use our time is changing so we're not spending hours anymore muting we have a lot of customers who are saying let's use that time instead of muting to learn improve ourselves improve our skills so you know everything is very unpredictable in this environment but we do feel like at ACG our fundamental mission is to help customers get through this to give them the skills that they need so that hopefully as everybody emerges from this later this year they're better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them ya know you hit on a lot of topics you know so much right now you know remote learning remote work or you know a big discussion the developer world has been looking at that for a long time and you know when I see you know the the the elementary and high school children as well as you know colleges and how they're handling distant learning I was well come on the Cronenberg's brothers you know built something in you know two or three week from your mother's basement Amazon and serverless and they framed millions of people now yeah you know good absolutely translate but it's challenging so I'm curious yes you know and you're working with the team is there anything you're doing to connect to some of the broader audience you know lessons that can be learned as I said you're you know highly scalable you know large scale and you know you have nowhere near the budget of you know these municipalities and colleges yet you do reach you know a very broad audience with some very important skill yes I mean if I think about the actual products itself and why it worked worked so well previously right why the Cronenberg brothers brought to market something that was so beloved but but more importantly why I think it's working so well now is that there was a recognition that we learn these days in bite-sized chunks right most of us don't have four hours a day or three days a week just to sit leave our job and go learn something and so from the very beginning their concept was let's break every single lesson up into these 20 minutes chunks so whether you know I'm on my commute in a previous world or whether I'm you know using some time that I used to spend on the road learning something new I can do it in very digestible forms and in a way that's really engaging to me so I think that model that they've employed from day one is even more valuable now in today's environment I think the other thing is that there was a recognition that we all have different learning styles right we all learn a little bit differently and so whether it's learning in 20 minute chunks so that's learning through video and PowerPoint or whether it's learning hands-on testing things breaking things building things the platform has evolved in a way to enable people no matter where they are in that cloud learning journey whether they're novice that's just getting started and wanting to learn kind of you know the PowerPoint basics like me when I first came on board right of the or a seasoned architect who's trying to get in and build new applications so I think those things are the things that allowed the platform to really resonate with the developer audience for so long and now as we have you know added out of the platform specifically for enterprises where previously you know is for individual developers we now have both I think that's the other thing that is really attractive to large enterprises is the fact that they now right are trying to train thousands of workers at the same time realizing again that every single one of them has a different learning style yeah Katie is as you said before there is you know a broad need or the skill set of cloud computing I'm curious have you seen anything in kind of your customer base either from the enterprise side or individuals is there are there any skill sets that are bubbling up right now that are a critical need or anything that is grown and you know we're curious we're always you know there's some people it's like oh I'm gonna come out of this you know whole experience and you know I love you know work in my home gym and you know learn new languages and become a master baker of sourdough you know me personally I've been really busy so you know I wish I had more spare time travel has definitely reduced thing but it's also given up the time that normally I was gonna you know read a book or you know catch up on raining yeah the sourdough bread is definitely not in my wheelhouse so we well we have seen some really interesting trends actually over the last few months the first one is that we've seen the percentage of our users that are logging in on a daily basis go up about 30 percent so people are taking advantage I think of a little bit of extra time to accelerate their learning the other thing that we are seeing and I was just looking at these stats last week is the kinds of courses and content that are being consumed are changing some of this was happening free covert and some of this was happening post covitz all split those up freako but what we've seen over the last order two 2/4 actually is a pretty significant increase in consumption across multi-cloud skills as you're in particular is seeing about a three times higher increase in consumption than the other two large CCS these although they're all three increasing rapidly so as we think about like the curriculum and our instructors that we're bringing on and what we're building up know historically ACG specifically had grown up in the AWS world but we are responding to that change very very late and in investing in you know a juror GCP and some of the other cloud adjacent courses so that we had been seeing happening over the last couple of quarters most recently what we're seeing is an increase in what i call our beginner or fundamental courses they think that is a direct reflection of people who are looking at this as an opportunity to rescale to set themselves up for a new career i'm so you know our introduction to AWS or introduction to Azure fundamentals or the introduction to DCP those are actually the courses that are increasing the fastest in ranking and anecdotally one of my favorite things to do is to go on LinkedIn or Twitter each day and look at you know what people are saying about ACG and over the last week especially I can't even count the number of folks who've said I'm using my lock down I'm for you know learning or I'm putting my my time and Quarantine to the best use by you know getting trained on ECG and so I think that what we are seeing there is a direct reflection of that alright yeah Katie maybe you can give us a little bit of the update on you know a cloud guru there was the Linux Academy acquisition and if you can share a little bit about this kind of the the the numbers of how many people have gone through your programmed you attract how many people actually get certifications afterwards which I know they need to go to the providers you know pay a fee for that kind of thing yeah we do yeah there's only been a few things happening over here in the last six months right I've got a small acquisition and then you know we're dealing with this now so we acquire Linux Academy in December so actually I came on board about the same time that we acquired the business one of my favorite stories is when I first started talking to Sam and team back in June a cg had about a hundred employees total by the time I was actually accepting an offer in October I think it was 200 employees in total so in a four month span the company had actually doubled we acquired Lenox Academy which was of equivalent size the ACG and so by the end of December we were a 400 person company a company that had been a hundred people know in in the middle of 2019 so 400 people now we are our biggest office is here in Austin we do have a large office in Melbourne Australia which was where the company was originally founded and where Sam is we have an office in London where Ryan is and Linux Academy was actually headquartered right outside of Fort Worth Texas so we've got an office there in Fort Worth as well so it's been amazing to see this company essentially quadruple in size over the last six months everything that goes into scaling a business like that bringing two competitors together integrating the business you know we are in the process of integrating the products and the content and the course dialogues right now so we're excited to bring that market later this year all in the midst of everyone also getting used to this very new and unprecedented environment yeah you know congratulations you know that you know always good to see great growth you know the thing I've noticed is you know ACG just as really goodwill in the community I see the orange shirts at many of the shows I you know right many of the other teams yeah we'll definitely have to get back to you about being on brain feed I was trying to coordinate with my background um one of the other things you know is some of my favorite content over the last few years that we've done the cube has been the serverless cough event so you know any discussion about you know will there be smokers to that or are we just going to need the weight or you know the physical events return before we see those so we actually have just started a new virtual event calendar actually our very first one was yesterday we had almost 3,000 people registering to attend and so it will be a series it's a series of virtual events and webinars that are done in partnership with other leading influencers and practitioners in the industry so expects if anyone's interested you can go online and register for one of the ACG webinars but we'll be having those every two week through the course of this year awesome love that and I guess the last thing Katie there's some other things you've been doing help unity in this need of the pandemic tell us a little bit about that yeah so two things in particular that we've really focused on the first one is across both the Linux Academy and the ACG platforms we have lowered permanently the price of our individual memberships so for individuals from 449 down to 379 we've seen that that has helped enable more people to be able to afford it who otherwise couldn't afford it so that's now in in market the other thing that we're really excited about that we launched this week is a free educational assistance program so we are offering 1,000 subscriptions to ACG for the year so annual subscriptions for people who have been most impacted by kovat so we have a couple of different specific criteria but if you've lost your job due to Ovid and you're in one of the the most heavily impacted industries whether that you know retail or hospitality or travel and are looking to really change careers get into the tech field get your initial certification we do now have a program for that so you go online to our website you're able to apply to that program we launched it yesterday maybe two days ago and I know we already have hundreds of applications so we're really excited to offer that all right well we'll make sure to get this out to the community is build out of that all right Katie thanks so much really pleasure to act up with you and I'm glad Congrats on all the progress thank you so much - thanks for having me alright serverless absolutely one of the topics I've been personally enjoying digging into the last couple years hope you've enjoyed I'm an attorney I'm sue minimun and as always thank you for watching thank you [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto office for remote interviews during this time of COVID-19. We're here with the quarantine crew here in our studio. We've got a great guest here from Google, Will Grannis, managing director, head of the office of the CTO with Google Cloud. Thanks for coming on, Will. Appreciate you spending some time with me. >> Oh, John, it's great to be with you. And as you said, in these times, more important than ever to stay connected. >> Yeah, and I'm really glad you came on because a couple of things. One, congratulations to Google Cloud for the success you guys had. Saw a lot of big wins under your belt, both on the momentum side, on the business side, but also on the technical side. Meet is available now for folks. Anthos is doing very, very well. Partner ecosystem's developing. Got some nice use cases in vertical markets, so I want to get in and unpack with you. But really, the bigger story here is that the world has seen the future before it was ready for it. And that is the at-scale challenge that the COVID-19 has shown everyone. We're seeing the future has been pulled forward. We're living in a virtualized environment. It's funny to say that, virtualization (laughs). Server virtualization is a tech term, but that enabled a lot of things. We're living in a virtualized world now 'cause we have to, but this is going to set in motion a series of new realities that you guys have been experiencing and supporting for many, many years. But now as a provider of Google Cloud, you guys have to operate at scale, you have. And now the whole world realizes that scale is a big deal. And so you guys have had some successes. I want to get your thoughts on the this at scale problem that the world now realizes. I mean, everyone's at home. That's a disruption that was unforecasted. Whether it's under-provisioning VPNs in IT to a surface area for security, to just work and play. And activities are now confined, so people aren't convening anymore and it's a huge issue. What's your take on all this? >> Well, I mean, to your point just now, the fact that we can have this conversation and we can have it fluidly from our respective remote locations just goes to show you the power of information technology that underlies so many of the things that we do today. And for Google Cloud, this is not a new thing. And for Google, this is not a new thing. For Google Cloud, we had a mission of trying to help companies accelerate their transformation and enable them in these new digital environments. And so many companies that we've been working with, they've already been on the path to operating in environments that are digital, that are fluid. And when you think about the cloud, that's one of the great benefits of cloud, is that scalability in common with the business demand. And it also helps the scale situation without having to do the typical, "Oh wait, "you need to find the procurement people. "We need to find the server vendors. "We need to get the storage lined up." It really allows a much more fluid response to unexpected and unforecasted situations. Whether that's customer demand or in this case a global pandemic. >> Yeah, one of the things I want to get in with you on, you have explained what your job is there 'cause obviously Google's got a new CEO now for over a year. Thomas Kurian came from Oracle, knows the enterprise up and down. You had Diane Greene before that. Again, another enterprise leader. Google Cloud has essentially rebuilt itself from the original Google Cloud to be very enterprise centric. You guys have great momentum, and this is a world where cloud-native is going to be required. I mean, everyone now sees it. The tide has been pulled out, everything's exposed, all the gaps in business from a tech standpoint is kind of exposed. And so the smart managers and companies are looking at things and saying, "Double down on that. "Let's kill that. "We don't want to pay that supplier. "They're not core to our business." This is going to be a very rapid acceleration of what I call a vetting of the new set of players that are going to emerge because the folks who don't adapt to this new cloud-native reality, whether it's app workloads for banking to whatever are going to have to reinvent themselves now and reset and tweak to come out of this crisis. So it's going to be very cloud-native. This is a big deal. Can you share your reaction to that? >> Absolutely. And so as you pointed out, there are kind of two worlds that exist right now. Companies that are moving to become more digital and transform, and you mentioned the momentum in Google Cloud just over the last year, greater than 50% revenue growth. And in a greater than $10 billion run rate business and adding customers at a really quick clip, including just yesterday, Splunk, and along the way, Telecom Italia, Major League Baseball, Vodafone, Lowe's, Wayfair, Activision Blizzard. This transformation and this digitization is not just for a few or just for any one industry. It's happening across the board. And then you add that to the implementations that have been happening across Shopify and the Spotify and HSBC, which was a early customer of ours in the cloud and it already has a little bit of a headstart into this transformation. So you see these new companies coming in and seeing the value of digital transformation. And then these other companies that have kind of lit the path for others to consider. And Shopify is a really good example of how seeing drastic uptick in demand, they're able to respond and keep roughly half a million shops up and running during a period of time where many retailers are trying to figure out how to stay online or even get online. >> Well, what is your role at Google? Obviously, you're the managing director. Title is managing director, head of the office of the CTO. We've seen these roles before, head of the CTO, obviously a technical role. Is it partnering with the CEO on strategy? Is it you're tire kicking new things? Are you overseeing any strategic initiatives? What is your role? >> So a little bit of all of those things combined into one. So I spent the first couple of decades of my career on the other side of the fence in the non-tech community, both in the enterprise. But we were still building technology and we were still digitally minded. But not the way that people view technology in Silicon Valley. And so spending a couple of decades in that environment really gave me insights into how to take technology and apply them to a specific problem. And when I came to Google five years ago, selfishly, it was because I knew the potential of Google's technology having been on the other side. And I was really interested in forming a better bridge between Google's technology and people like me who were CTOs of public companies and really wanted to leverage that technology for problems that I was solving. Whether it was aerospace, public sector, manufacturing, what have you. And so it's been great. It's the role of a lifetime. I've been able to build the team that I wanted as an enterprise technologist for decades and the entire span of technologies at our disposal. And we do two things. One is we help our most strategic customers accelerate their path to cloud. And two, we create these signals by working with the top companies moving to the cloud and digitally transforming. We learned so much, John, about what we need to build as an organization. So it also helps balance out the Google driven innovation with our customer driven innovation. >> Yeah, and I can attest. I've been watching you guys from day one. Hired a lot of great enterprise people that I personally know. So you get in the enterprise chops and stuff and you've seen some progress. I have to ask you though, because first of all, big fan of Google at scale from knowing them from when they were just a little search engine to what they are now. There was an expression a few years ago I heard from enterprise customers. It goes along the lines like this. "I want to be like Google," because you guys had a great network, you had large scale. You had all these things that were like awesome. And then they realized, "Well, we can't be like Google. "We don't have SREs. "We don't have large scale data centers." So there was a little bit of a translation, and I want to say a little bit of a overplay of the Google hand, and you guys had since realized that it wasn't just people are going to bang at your doorstep and be adopting Google Cloud because there was a little bit of a cultural disconnect from wanting to be like Google, then leveraging Google in their business as they transform. So as you guys have moved from that, what's changed? They still want to be like Google in the sense you have great security, got a great network, and you've got that scale. Enterprises are a little bit slower to adopt that, which you're focused on now. What is the story there? Because I think that's kind of the theme that I'm hearing. Okay, Google now understands me. They know I'm not as fast as Google. They got super great people (laughs). We are training our people. We're retraining them. This is the transformation that they're going through. So you might be a little bit ahead of them certainly, but now they need to level up. How do you respond to that? >> Well, a lot of this is the transformation that Thomas has been enacting over the last year plus. And it comes in kind of three very operational or tactical pillars that I think of. First, we expanded our customer and we continue to expand our customer facing teams. Three times what they were before because we need to be there. We need to be in those situations. We need to hear from the customer. We need to learn more about the problems they're trying to solve. So we don't just take a theoretical principle and try to overlay it onto a problem. We actually get very visceral understanding of what they're trying to solve. But you have to be there to gain that empathy and that understanding. And so one is showing up, and that has been mobilizing a much larger engine of customer facing personnel from Google. Second, it's also been really important that we evolve our own. Just as Google brought SRE principles and principles of distributed systems and software design out to the world, we also had a little bit to learn about transitioning from typical customer support and moving to more customer experience. So you've seen that evolution under Thomas as well with cloud changing... Moving from talking about support to talking about customer experience, that white glove experience that our customers get and our partners get from the beginning of their journey with us all the way through. And then finally making sure that our product roadmap has the solutions that are relevant across key priority industries for us. Again, that only comes from being present from having a focus in those industries and then developing the solutions that progress those companies. This isn't about taking a principle and trying to apply it blindly. This is about adding that connection, that really deep connection to our customers and our partners and letting that connection manifest the things that we have to do as a product company to best support them over a long period of time. I mean, look at some of these deals we've been announcing. These are 10-year, five-year, multi-year strategic partnerships that go across the canvas of all of Google. And those are the really exciting scaled partnerships. But to your point, you can't just take SRE from Google and apply it to company X, but you can things like error budgets or how we think about the principles of SRE, and you can apply them over the course of developing technology, collaborating, innovating together. >> Yeah, and I think cloud-native is going to be a key thing. It's just my opinion, but I think one of those situations where the better mouse trap will win. If you're cloud-native and you have APIs and you have the kind of services, people will beat it to your doorstep. So I got to ask you, with Thomas Kurian on board, obviously, we've been following his career as well at Oracle. He knows what he's doing. Comes into Google, it's being built out. It's like a rocket ship at this point. What bet is he making and what bet are you guys making on behalf of your customers? If you had to boil it down to Google Cloud's big bet, what is the bet on the technology side? And what's the bet on the business side? >> Sure. Well, I've already mentioned... I've already hinted at the big strategy that Thomas has brought in. And that's, again, those three pillars. Making sure that we show up and that we're present by having a scaled customer facing organization. Again, making sure that we transition from a typical support mindset into more of a customer experience mindset and then making sure that those solutions are tailored and available for our priority industries. If I was to add more color to that, I think one of the most important changes that Thomas has personally been driving is he's been converting us to a partner-led business and a partner-led organization. And this means a lot of investments in large global systems integrators like Accenture and Deloitte. But this also means that... Like the Splunk announcement from yesterday, that isn't just a sell to. This is a partnership that goes deep across go-to market product and sell to. And then we also bring in very specific partners like Temenos in Europe for financial services or a CETA or a Rackspace for migrations. And as a result, already, we're seeing really incredible lifts. So for example, nearly 200% year over year increase in partner influenced revenue in Google Cloud and almost like a 13X year over year increase in new customers won by partners. That's the kind of engine that builds a real hyper-scale business. >> Interesting you mentioned Splunk. I want to get to that in a second, but I also noticed there was a deal with TELUS Group on eSIM subscriptions, which kind of leads me into the edge piece. There's a real edge component here with Google Cloud, and I think I had a conversation with Jennifer Lynn a few years ago, really digging into the built-in security and the value of the Google network. I mean, a lot of the scuttlebutt around the Valley and the industry is Google's got an amazing network. Software-defined networking is going to be a hot programmable area. So you got programmable networking and you got edge and edge security. These are killer areas that need innovation. Could you comment on what you guys are doing there and do you agree? Obviously, you have a killer network and you're leveraging it. Can you just give some insight into what's going on in those two areas? Network and then the edge. >> Yeah, I think what you're seeing is the manifestation of the progression of cloud generally. And what do I mean by that? It started out as like get everything to the data center. We kind of had this thought that maybe we could take all the workloads and we could get them to these centralized hubs and that we could redistribute out the results and drive the latency down over time so we can expand the portfolio of applications and services that would become relevant over time. And what we've seen over the last decade really in cloud is an evolution to more of a layered architecture. And that layered architecture includes kind of core data centers. It includes CDN capacity, points of presence, it includes edge. And just in that list of customers over the last year I mentioned, there were at least three or four telcos in there. And you've also probably heard and seen quite a bit of telco momentum coming from us in recent announcements. I think that's an indication that a lot of us are thinking about, how can we take technology like Anthos, for example, and how could we orchestrate workloads, create a common control plane, manage services across those three shells, if you will, of the architecture? And that's a very strategic and important area for us. And I think generally for the cloud industry, is expanding beyond the data center as the place where everything happens. And you can look at Google Fi, you can look at Stadia. You can look at examples within Google that go well beyond cloud as to how we think about new ways to leverage that kind of criteria. >> All right, so we saw some earnings come out on Amazon side as Google, both groups and Microsoft as well, all three clouds are crushing it on the cloud side. That's a tailwind, I get that. But as it continues, we're expecting post-COVID some redistribution of development dollars in projects. Whether it's IT going cloud-native or whatever new workloads. We are predicting a Cambrian explosion of new things from core to edge. And this is going to create some lifts. So I want to get your thoughts on you guys' strategy with go-to market, as well as your customers as they now have the ability to build workloads and apps with AI and data. There seems to be a trend towards the verticalization of whether it's sales and go-to market and/or specialism because you have horizontal scalability with cloud and you now have data that has distinct (chuckles) value in these verticals. So it's really seems to be... I won't say ratification, but in a way, that seems to be the norm. Whether you come into a market and you have specialization, but the data is there so apps can be more agile. Are you guys seeing that? And is that something that you guys are considering from an organization standpoint? And how do customers think about targeting vertical industries and their customers? >> Yeah, I bring this to... And where you started going there at the end of the question is exactly the way that we think about it as well. Which is we've moved from, "Here are storage offers for everybody, "and here's basic infrastructure for everybody." And now we've said, "How can we make sure "that we have solutions that are tailored "to the very specific problems that customers "are trying to solve?" And we're getting to the point now where performance and variety of technologies are available to be able to impose very specific solutions. And if you think about the substrate that has to be there, we mentioned you have to have some really great partners, and you have to have a roadmap that is focused on priority solution. So for example, at Google Cloud, we're very focused on six priority vertical areas. So retail, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and industrials, healthcare life sciences, public sector. And as a result of being very focused in those areas, we can make more targeted investments and also align our entire go-to market system and our entire partner ecosystem... Excuse me, ecosystem around those bare specific priority areas. So for example, we work with CETA and HDA Healthcare very recently to develop and maintain a national response portal for COVID-19. And that's to help better inform communities and hospitals. We can use Looker to help with like a Commonwealth Care Alliance nonprofit and that helps monitor patient symptoms and risk factors. So we're using a very specific focus in healthcare and a partner ecosystem to develop very tailored solutions. You can also look at... I mentioned Shopify earlier. That's another great example of how in retail, they can use something like Google Meet, inherent reliability, scalability, security, to connect their employees during these interesting times. But then they can also use GCP, Google Cloud Platform to scale out. And as they come up with new apps and experiences for their shoppers, for their shops, they can rapidly deploy, to your point. And those solutions and how the database performs and how those tiers perform, that's a very tight-knit feedback loop with our engineering teams. >> Yeah, one of the things I'm seeing obviously with the virtualization of the COVID is that when the world gets back to normal, it'll be a hybrid. And it'll be a hybrid between reality, not physical and a hundred percent virtual, hybrid. And that's going to impact events too, media, to everything. Every vertical will be impacted. And I want to point out the Splunk deal and bring that back in because I want you to comment on the relevance of the Splunk deal in context to Splunk has a cloud. And they've got a great slogan, "Data for everywhere." "Data to everywhere," I think it is. But theCUBE, we have a cloud. Every company will have a cloud scale. At some level, we'll progress to having some sort of cloud because they have data. How are you guys powering those clouds? Because I think the Splunk deal is interesting. Their partner, their stock price was up out on the news of the deal. Nice bump there for Splunk, shout out to those guys. But they're a data company and now they're cross-platform. But they're not Google, but they have a cloud. So you know what I'm saying? So they need to play in all the clouds, but they need infrastructure (laughs), they need support. So how do you guys talk to that customer that says, "Hey, the next pandemic that comes, "the next crisis that's going to cause some "either social disruption or workflow disruption "or supply chain disruption. "I need to be agile. "I need to have full cloud scale. "And so I need to talk to Google." What do you say to them? What's the pitch? And does the Splunk deal mirror some of those capabilities? Or tie that together for us, the Splunk deal and how it relates to how to proof themselves for the future. Sorry. >> For example, with the Splunk cloud deal, if you take a look at what Google is already really good at, data processing at scale, log analytics, and you take a look at what Splunk is doing with their events and security incident monitoring and the rest, it's a really great mashup because they see by platforming on Google Cloud, not only do they get highly performing infrastructure. But they also get the opportunity to leverage data tools, data analytics tools, machine learning and AI that can help them provide enhanced services. So not just about capacity going up and down through periods of demand, but also enhancing services and continuing to offer more value to their customers. And we see that as a really big trend. And this gets at something, John, a little bit bigger, which is kind of the two views of the world. And we talked about very tailored, focused solutions. Splunk is an example of taking a very methodical approach to a partnership, building a solution specifically with partners. And in this case, Splunk on the security event management side. But we're always going to provide our data processing platform, our infrastructure for companies across many different industries. And I think that addresses one part of the topic, which is, how do we make sure that in periods of demand rapidly changing, and this goes back to the foundational elements of infrastructure as a service and elasticity. We're going to provide a platform and infrastructure that can help companies move through periods of... It's hard to forecast, and/or demand may rise and fall in very interesting ways. But then there's going to be times where we... Because we're not necessarily a focused use case where it may just be generalized platform versus a focused solution. So for example, in the oil and gas industry, we don't develop custom AI, ML solutions that facilitate upstream extraction, for example. But what we do do is work with renewable energy companies to figure out how they might be able to leverage some of our AI machine learning algorithms from our own data centers to make their operations more efficient and to help those renewable energy companies learn from what we've learned building out what I consider to be a world leading renewable energy strategy and infrastructure. >> It's a classic enablement model where you're enabling your platform for your customers. Okay, so I've got to ask the question. I asked this to the Microsoft guys as well because Amazon has their own SaaS stuff. But really more of end to end. The better product's usually on the ecosystem side. You guys have some killer SaaS. G Suite, we're a customer. We use the G Suite really deeply. We also use some Bigtable as well. I want to build a cloud, we have a cloud, CUBE cloud. But you guys have Meet. So I want to build my product on Google Cloud. How do I know you're not going to compete with me? Do you guys have those conversations around the trade-off between the pure Google services, which provide great value for the areas where the ecosystem needs to develop those new areas that are going to be great markets, potentially huge markets that are out there. >> Well, this is the power of partnership. I mentioned earlier that one of the really big moves that Thomas has made has been developing a sense of partners. And it kind of blurs the line between traditional, what you would call a customer and what you would call a partner. And so having a really strong sense of which industries we're in, which we prioritize, plus having a really strong sense of where we want to add value and where our customers and partners want to add that value. That's the foundational, that's the beginning of that conversation that you just mentioned. And it's important that we have an ability to engage not just in a, "Here's the cloud infrastructure piece of the puzzle." But one of the things Thomas has also done and a key strategy of his has been to make sure that the Google Cloud relationship is also a way to access all amazing innovation happening across all of Google. And also help bring a strategic conversation in that includes multiple properties from across Google so that an HSBC and Google and have a conversation about how to move forward together that is comprehensive rather than having to wonder and have that uncertainty sit behind the projects that we're trying to get out and have high velocity on because they offer so much to retail bank, for example. >> Well, I've got a couple more questions and then I'll let you go. I know you got some other things going on. I really appreciate you taking the time, sharing this great insight and updates. As a builder, you've been on the other side of the table. Now you're at Google heading up the CTO. Also working with Thomas, understanding the go-to market across the board and the product mix. As you talk to customers and they're thinking... The good customers are thinking, "Hey, "I want to come out of this COVID on an upward trajectory "and I want to use this opportunity "to reset and realign for the future." What advice do you have for those enterprises? They could be small, medium-sized enterprises to the full large big guys. And obviously, cloud-native, we've talked some of that already, but what advice would you have for them as they start to really prioritize, as some things are now exposed? The collaboration, the tooling, the scale, all these things are out there. What have you seen and what advice would you give a CXO or CSO or a leader in the industry to think about and how they should come out of this thing, how they should plan, execute, and move forward? >> Well, I appreciate the question because this is the crux of most of my day job, which is interacting with the C-suite and boards of companies and partners around the world. And they're obviously very interested to learn or get a data point from someone at Google. And the advice generally goes in a couple of different directions. One, collaboration is part of the secret sauce that makes Google what it is. And I think you're seeing this right now across every industry, and whether you're a small, medium-sized business or you're a large company, the ability to connect people with each other to collaborate in very meaningful ways, to share information rapidly, to do it securely with high reliability, that's the foundation that enables all of the projects that you might choose to... Applications to build, services to enable, to actually succeed in production and over the long haul. Is that culture of innovation and collaboration. So absolutely number one is having a really strong sense of what they want to achieve from a cultural perspective and collaboration perspective and the people because that's the thing that fuels everything else. Second piece of advice, especially in these times where there's so much uncertainty, is where can you buy down uncertainty with...? You can learn without a high penalty. This is why cloud I think is really, really finding super scale. It was already on the rise, but what you're seeing now as you've laid back to me during this conversation, we're seeing the same thing, which is a high increase in demand of, "Let's get this implemented now. "How can we do this more? "This is clearly one way to move through uncertainty." And so look for those opportunities. I'll give you a really good example. Mainframes, (chuckles) one of the classic workloads of the on-premise enterprise. There are all sorts of potential magic solves for getting mainframes to the cloud and getting out of mainframes. But a practical consideration might be maybe you just front-end it with some Java. Or maybe you just get closer to other data centers within a certain amount of milliseconds that's required to have a performant workload. Maybe you start chunking at art and treat the workload a little bit differently rather than just one thing. But there are a lot of years and investments in our workload that might run on a mainframe. And that's a perfect example of how biting off too much might be a little bit dangerous, but there is a path to... So for example, we brought in a company called Cornerstone to help with those migrations. But we also have partnerships with data center providers and others globally plus our own built infrastructure to allow even a smaller step per se for more close proximity location of the workload. >> It's great. Everything kind of has a technical metaphor connection these days when you have a internet, digitally connected world. We're living in the notion of a digital business, was a research buzzword that's been kicked around for years. But I think now COVID-19, you're seeing the virtual or digital, it's really digital, but virtual reality, augmented reality is going to come fast too. Really get people to go, "Wow. "Virtualization of my business." So we've been kind of kicking around this term business virtualization just almost as a joke, but it's really more about, okay, this is about a new world, new opportunity to think about when we come out of this, we're going to still go back to our physical world. Now, the hybrid now kicks in. This kind of connects all aspects of business in every vertical. It's not like, "Hey, I'm targeting this industry." So there might be unique solutions in those industries, but now the world is virtualized. It's connected, it's a digital environment. These are huge concepts that I think has kind of been a lunatic fringe idea, but now it's brought mainstream. This is going to be a huge tailwind for you guys as well as developers and entrepreneurs and application software. This is going to be, we think, a big thing. What's your reaction to that? Based on your experience, what do you see happening? Do you agree with it? And do you have anything you might want to add to that? >> Maybe one kind of philosophical statement and then one more... I bruised my shins a lot in this world and maybe share some of the black and blue coloration. First from a philosophical standpoint, the greater the crisis, the more open-minded people become and the more creative people get. And so I'm really excited about the creativity that I'm seeing with all of the customers that I work with directly, plus our partners, Googlers. Everybody is rallying together to think about this world differently. So to your point, a shift in mindset, there are very few moments where you get this pronounced change and everyone is going through it all at the same time. So that creates an opportunity, a scenario where you're bold thinking new strategies, creativity. Bringing people in in new ways, collaborating in new ways and offer a lot of benefits. More practically speaking and from my experience, building technology for a couple decades, it has an interesting parallel to building tightly coupled, really large maybe monoliths versus microservices and the debate around, "Do we build small things "that can be reconfigured and built out by others "or built upon by others more easily? "Or do we create a golden path and a more understood development environment?" And I'm not here to answer the question of which one's better because that's still a raging debate. But I can tell you that the process of going through and taking a service or an application or a thing that we want to deliver to a customer, that one of our customers wants to deliver to their customer. And thinking about it so comprehensively that you're able to think about it in, what are its core functions? And then thinking methodically about how to enable those core functions. That's a real opportunity, and I think technology to your point is getting to the place where if you want to run across multiple clouds, this is the Anthos conversation were recently GA'ed. Global scale platform, multicloud platform, that's a pretty big moment in technology. And that opens up the aperture to think differently about architectures and that process of taking an application service and making it real. >> Well, I think you're right on the money. I think philosophically, it's a flashpoints opportunity. I think that's going to prove to be accelerating and to see people win faster and lose faster. You're going to to see that quickly happen. But to your point about the monolith versus service or decoupled based systems, I think we now live in a world where it's a systems view now. You can have a monolith combined with decoupled systems. That's distributed computing. I think this is the trend, it's a system. It's not one thing or the other. So I think the debate will continue just like VI versus Emacs (chuckles). We don't know, right? People are going to have the debate, but if you think about it as a system, the use case defines your architecture. That's the beautiful thing about the cloud. So great insight, I really appreciate it. And how's everything going over there at Google Cloud? You've got Meet that's available. How's your staff? What's it like inside the Googleplex and the Google Cloud team? Tell us what's going on over there. People still working, working remote? How's everyone doing? >> Well, as you can tell from my scenario here, my backdrop, yes, still part at work. And we take this as a huge responsibility. These moments as a huge responsibility because there are educators, loved ones, medical professionals, critical life services that run on services that Google provides. And so I can tell you we're humbled by the opportunity to provide the backbone and the platform and the people and the curiosity and the sincere desire to help. And I mentioned a couple of ways already just in this conversation where we've been able to leverage some of our investments technology to help form people that really gets at the root of who we are. So while we just like any other humans are going through a process of understanding our new reality, what really fires us up and what really charges us up is because this is a moment where what we do really well is very, very important for the world in every geo, in every vertical, in every use case, in every solution type. We're taking that responsibility very seriously. And at the same time, we're trying to make sure that all of our teams as well as all of the teams that we work with and our customers and partners are making it through the human moment, not just the technology moment. >> Well, congratulations and thanks for spending the time. Great insight, Will. Appreciate, Will Grannis, managing director, head of technology office of the CTO at Google Cloud. This certainly brings to the mainstream what we've been in the industry been into for a long time, which is DevOps, large scale, role of data and technology. Now we think it's going to be even more acute around societal benefits. And thank God we have all those services for the frontline workers. So thank you so much for all that effort and thanks for spending the time here in theCUBE Conversation. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto studios for remote CUBE Conversation with Google Cloud, getting the update. Really looking at the future as it unfolds. We are going to see this moment in time as an opportunity to move to the next level, cloud-native and change not only the tech industry but society. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. (upbeat music) Now, here's your host Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this Cube Conversation on data protection. You know, I've been reporting for the last several months that spending on storage is reverting back to pre-2018 levels, but at the same time, it's not falling off a cliff. Now, one area of storage that is still very, very strong is the data protection segment. In the past 18 months, we've seen about a half a billion dollars in venture funding come into the market. We've just seen a big multi-billion dollar exit. And backup specifically in data protection, data management generally is where all the action is right now. And one of the leaders in data protection is Dell EMC. The company has the largest share of the market and the new entrants, believe me, want a piece of their pie. But anyone who follows this company knows that the firm is not likely to give up it's turf very easily. So much is changing in the market today. And I want to understand how Dell EMC's data protection division is responding to both the competitive threats and the changing market dynamics. With me are two experts from Dell EMC to address these issues. Nelson Hsu is Director of Solutions, Product Marketing for the data protection division at Dell EMC, and Colm Keegan is Senior Consultant, Product Marketing at Dell EMC. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you again. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> So you heard my intro. You guys are the leader. You got the biggest market share. You got all the upstarts coming at ya. What's your response? >> Want me to take that? >> Sure. >> Yeah. It's interesting, so we were talking about this before we came on set, you know and often times they want to poke holes at us 'cause you know we're perceived as being the old timers, or the stodgy ones of the group out there. And play a little jiu jitsu, you move in say you know well time in market counts for something. You know we've been solving data protection challenges for customers for literally decades now. You know and so, water under the boat and knowing the experience that we've derived from that allows us to bring solutions that are mature, that are proven. What we're doing is we're taking those proven solutions and pairing them with modern capabilities. So that, you know we look at it and say, hey, look, Mr. Customer. You have significant data protection challenges today because, as you said, the world's changing. It's changing rapidly. We can help you address those while also sowing the seeds for the foundation for the future. So we think that's a compelling message and we think that while some of our competitors, in particular the upstarts, have had some interesting things to say, big picture-wise, they don't know what they don't know. 'Cause they just don't have the time in the market. Their solutions are also largely absent upmarket, you know, when you look at the enterprise. So we're comfortable. We think we're in a very good spot right now. >> So cloud obviously was the huge mega trend of the past decade. You guys said from the beginning, it's going to be a hybrid world. Some of that was we hope it's going to be a hybrid world. Well you were right, it's a hybrid world. So how is cloud, hybrid cloud affecting your customer decisions around data protection, and how are you responding? >> Well, you know, there's no doubt that the growth in cloud and the growth in hybrid cloud is real. And it's there today. As we look, and as Colm mentioned, we've been protecting data across the enterprise, across the edge and in the cloud, and that growth continues. So today, we have over 1,000 customers that we're protecting their data in the cloud. To the tone of over 2.7 exabytes of data protected in the cloud by Dell EMC data protection. So there is absolutely no doubt that that growth is there. We have a lot of innovation that we're driving on, both in various ares of cloud native, cyber security and deep integration. >> Okay, so that's good, 1,000 customers. That's a pretty good observation space. But when you think about hybrid, what I think when I talk to customers is they want that same exact cloud experience. They don't want to have to context switch. They don't want to have to buy different platforms. So how are you specifically addressing that customer requirement? >> So there's a couple ways we look at that, right? For our customers, simplicity is very key in ease of use. So that's one of our core tenants as we go across both the edge, the core and the cloud. And the other aspect of that is consistency. So giving them and allowing them to use the tools that they know today to be able to protect their data, wherever that data resides. So with the cloud, with cloud native, your data becomes very, very distributed. And you have to be able to see all that data, and control and manage that data. So the whole aspect around cloud data management has now risen to the top as a major concern. We do that in a great way in a sense that we both have a hybrid strategy and a lot of that is working with Dell Technologies cloud. And it's based upon VMware. And so we have a very good deep relationship with VMware to utilize their tools that our customers use today. Whether it be vSphere or vcontrol that they can manage their data protection from one console, from one environment itself. >> Yeah, Dave, I think when you look at the split today, the latest cut of research is that roughly 52% of VM's are in the cloud, and 48 percent are on-prems so it's already hybrid, and as Nelson said, it's largely predicated on VMware. So as organizations start consuming cloud they're going to go with the platform that they've been operating under for years now. So it'll be VMware. We've always had very tight integration with VMware. We have a very strong partnership with them. And that's both on the existing portfolio as well as the agile portfolio that we're building out today under PowerProtect. So as that hybrid world evolves for the customers obviously we want to make sure they're protected from a virtual machine standpoint. And make that, as Nelson said, very simple for them because the last thing customers need is complexity particularly as their environments are becoming inherently more complex. Because now you look at most enterprises today, they're going to have a mix of workloads. It's physical, it's virtual, containers are unaccounted for. It's cloud native apps, it's SaaS. You know we were talking earlier about multi-clouds. Oftentimes it just kind of came up organically and now you've got this huge distribution of workloads and oftentimes, customers have been just sort of reactive to that. In other words, let me find a way to protect that and I'll worry about the details later. We're looking at that and saying, we have the portfolio to help you protect all your workloads, and as importantly, we'll help consolidate the management in that environment. It's going to start with VMware, but then longer term we're planning for things like a SaaS control plane so that we can give you a complete view of that environment and allow you to assign the policies you need in terms of SLA's, in terms of compliance. You're basically hitting all the security, hitting all the key things that you need and so directionally we think starting with VMware and building from there is probably the most realistic way we can get customers protected from a hyper cloud. >> So the vision is a single point of control that is SaaS based that lives in the cloud or lives wherever you want it to live? >> Right, it can be either. >> So one of our core tendencies here, right, is that we want and deliver the ability to protect our customer's data wherever it resides. Whether it's edge, core or cloud. >> So sticking on cloud for a second, and then sort of segue into the VMware conversation that I want to have is VMware is the sort of linchpin of your multi-cloud strategy. That makes a lot of sense. VMware is going to be a leader, if not the leader in multi-cloud. We'll see how that all shakes out. It's kind of jump ball right now but VMware is in pretty good position with 500,000 customers. But your perspective on cloud is different than say, take an AWS cloud provider, it's a place. Put your data in my cloud. You guys are talking about the experience. And that's really what you're trying to drive with VMware, whether is Ron-prem, whether it's in Google, Azure, AWS, wherever. The cloud, you name it. Is that the right way to think about your strategy? Specifically as it relates to multi-cloud. >> Yeah, so I think on the area of multi-cloud, it is a multi-cloud world. Years ago I was in a SaaS startup and we had customers that were looking to deploy to the cloud. And then that was the question. Okay, do we hedge on multi-cloud or not? As a SaaS provider, we actually implemented on both AWS and Azure at the time. Which became relevant, because now our customers are asking us, yes, my primary is with this particular hyper scaler. But do you also support this second hyper scaler? So the reality started to evolve. And so for us, yes, VMware is a very strategic aspect and partner with us, especially with Dell Technologies cloud. But we also have a multi-cloud relationship with AWS, with Azure and with Google. >> Yes, so the compatibility matrix, if you will, applies now to the cloud. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So now it's having that feature and functionality across multiple clouds. >> One of the things we obviously paid attention to is Project Tanzu with inside of VMware. All around bringing kind of Kubernetes and VMware together. How does that affect data protection? >> Well, I think it affects data protection in the sense that addressing the entire aspect of still your data is distributed now. And it's going to grow that way. I think that we've seen numbers upwards of 70% of applications will be container based. Some of that will be going forward to 2022 where there'll be multiple production applications that will be container based. I think what Tanzu will bring to the table is a cohesive way to manage and control that environment itself. >> Okay, and so maybe we could sort of drill into that a little bit. Containers, it's becoming more obvious that people want to persist some of that data. It's largely stateless, but you've got to figure out how to recover. So do you have solutions in that space, is that sort of more road mapping? You can talk about that a little bit. >> No, absolutely. So definitely we have concrete solutions with our Dell EMC PowerProtect data manager for Kubernetes. It's actually one of the first that was in the market to support cloud native environments. >> It is the first. >> Yeah, the first offering out there to support Kubernetes. And so the aspect there is that as cloud native has moved from DevOps, and now into production in the mission critical applications, now becomes the aspect of originally the DNA of DevOps was my data doesn't have to be persistent. Now when you move into a mission critical environment, you're entire environment needs to be protected. And to be able to bring those workloads back up should anything happen and to be able to protect that data that is critical to those workloads. >> Okay, and so you're saying you're first, and you see this as a differentiator in the marketplace, or is everybody going to have this, or it's one of these confusing ice cream cone of solutions. So why you guys? What's your big differentiation? Let's stick to containers. I have the same questions sort of overall come back to that. >> So great question, and the matter of fact is that with our experience across the edge, core and cloud, Kubernetes and containers will be prevalent throughout. And it'll be the way that applications will be developed. It's meeting the demands of the business and being agile. And I think that with our ability internally that would move to that agile emotion. We have that ability to address the customer's needs especially in the cloud native Kubernetes space. >> I think going back to what you said too about VMware, certainly our partnership there is differentiated. We even heard some echos of that during Vmworld. Pat Gelsinger usually doesn't give call outs on the main stage very frequently. And he said that they were working with us as a best-in-class partner for data protection with Tanzu. And so there is a very tight partnership there, so if I'm a customer and I'm looking at containers, I'm probably going to want to do it within the framework of VMware to start with. But it's important to point out that we're also not dependent on VMware. So we can still deliver protection for Kubernetes containers outside of say the VMware management domain. But I would say from a differentiation standpoint there are some real tight partnering going on to make these capabilities mature. >> Well it helps that your CEO owns 80% of the company. (laughing) But it's an interesting point you're making because again, dial back 10 years ago, VMware had much more of a Switzerland strategy under Maritz, almost to, at the time, EMC's detriment. I think Michael Dell is very clearly, as is Jeff Clarke, said look, we're going to do more integration. And Pat Gelsinger has been, look, I love all my partners. It's true but we're entering sort of a new era. And that integration is key, you know, again, because of the ownership structure, and your long history there. It's got to confer some advantages in the marketplace. >> Yeah, and he's also got to remove some of the headwinds to adoption of VMware cloud. And data protection, as we discussed often times can be a headwind if customers are concerned that they're not going to be able to protect their data, chances are they're going to stand pat for a while. So I mean you need to find ways to take some of those objections off the table. >> Yeah, and not to take anything away from your competitors. Look, it's an open API world, and again, people are going to compete. But at the end of the day this stuff is still really complex and if you can do some core engineering together it's definitely an advantage. Let's talk a little bit about cyber. I often say it's become a board level topic. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. SecOps teams are overtaxed. I think I put out a stat lately, I got it from Robert Herjavec actually. He said think about this. The worldwide economy is 86 trillion and we spend .014% on cyber, that's it. We're barely scratching the surface. And that's part of the problem. Okay, but with that limited resource we have to be as smart as possible. You've got this ransomware coming in. So what are your customers asking you for and how are you responding? >> So it's interesting, right, because it is top of mind, cyber and cyber attacks, and it takes many forms. The attacks can be malware, they could be encryption, they could be deletion. Which is ultimately the worst case scenario. And I think as you go forward and you look at it cyber is the number one concern for any CIO, CISO or anyone that's worried about their security infrastructure. >> Which is everybody >> Which is everybody, right, exactly. I think that we have delivered for the cloud data protection area a first and best offering with an air gap data protection solution. So inherently, we can insulate and protect our customer's data from cyber threats. So when a ransom event occurs you can recover your data without having to pay that ransom. Or not be concerned that in most severe cases your data gets deleted. I think most recently there was a healthcare provider who was threatened about their data being deleted. And that was the worst case. We were able to protect their data in the sense that with our cyber recovery offering they protected their data in an air gap vaulted solution. And they didn't have to pay for that ransom. >> So what I'm hearing from you guys is okay, cloud, very important. Hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, fundamental to our strategy. VMware, they say bet on sure things. VMware is pretty much a sure thing. Large customer base, leader in the space. And then cyber as a key concern of customers, you want to expand the notion of backup and data protection to really point it at cyber as well. >> Absolutely, in fact with this recent research, it's called the Global Data Protection Index Survey and we just refreshed it. And what customers identified as the most compelling reasons to adopt cloud is for better performance, better data protection, and better security. Not necessarily in that order but those were the top three. So we look at that and say, you know we've got plays there. Certainly we have capabilities protecting workloads in the cloud whether they be virtual machines, cloud native, containers. But the security aspect of it is huge. Because oftentimes customers, and Dave, you and I were talking about this, they make some broader assumptions about once data is in the clouds they can kind of wash their hands and walk away. Not so fast, because certainly there is a shared responsibility model that extends not only to data protection, but also to security. Look, don't get me wrong, the cloud service providers have fantastic security capabilities, have a great perimeter. But as you said, it's not a question of if, it's a question of when. And when something happens, are you ready for it? So these solutions extend not only to on-prem but into the cloud. So it's that ability wherever the workload lives that you can get the right protection and what we're really now referring to as safeguarding data. Because it's a combination of data protection and security that's embedded and doing it wherever the workload resides. >> I'm glad you brought that up Colm. I have a follow up on that, but Nelson, did you want to add something? >> Well, I just want to mention that one of the biggest concerns is making sure that that data you vaulted is actually clean and safe. So we have a cyber sense capability within our cyber recovery product, that when you vault that data it does about 100 analytics on that data to make sure that there's no malware. That it's not infected. And it does it automatically and even on incremental using machine learning. >> That's really important because mistakes happen really fast. (laughing) So if you're vaulting corrupted data, >> What do you do? >> Oops. >> Yeah, exactly. >> I want to come back, I think the shared responsibility model is not well understand and there's a lot of confusion in the industry. At a conference this year, AWS' CISO Stephen Schmidt was saying, look all this talk about security is broken it's not really productive. The state of security in the cloud is actually really good and to your point Colm, yeah, he's right about that. Then you hear Pat Gelsinger saying, he's told me many times in theCUBE security is a do-over. To my point, you know the 86 trillion. And so I kind of lean, when I talk to IT people what Pat is saying. So you say okay, where is the dissidence there? Well, the reality is is the cloud service providers and the shared security model, they'll secure the physical infrastructure. But it's up to the customer to be responsible for everything else. You know, the edicts of the organization are applied. We were talking to the CISO of a large insurance company and she said to us, oh no, shared responsibility means it's our responsibility. So you're not going to go after the cloud service provider, you're going to go after the insurance company, or the financial service institution. Their brand is the one that's going to get hurt. So that's misunderstood. My question, very long winded rant, but what role do you guys play in that shared responsibility model? >> Well, ultimately it comes down to the customer. And the shared responsibility model really is admissible, as you mentioned, right? And so at the end of the day, you as the customer own and are responsible to protect that data. So your data protection strategy, your cyber resilience strategy has to be sound. And it has to be secured by those that can actually do it across multiple distribution models and platforms, whether it's edge, core or cloud. Whether it's VM's, containers. It doesn't change. You're still ultimately responsible for it. >> I think maybe what you might be driving at the question, Dave, is empowering the customers to maintain control of their data. And having the tools in place so that they feel comfortable. And part of it too is moving more towards automation. Because as their applications grow, and as Nelson said, become more distributed, as the data grows exponentially, this just fundamentally isn't a task that humans can manage very much longer. >> I'm glad you brought that up, because you ask a CISO, what's your number one problem? And he or she will tell you the skill sets to keep up with all this complexity. And that's where automation comes in. >> Correct, it does. So that's where we're taking it. Is trying to make things more automated and take tasks away from humans that they just can't keep up with. >> All right guys, I'll give you the last word. We go back a decade or so ago and backup was a whole different situation. And we saw the rise of virtualization and now cloud and all these other things that we have been talking about. Edge, the cyber threats, et cetera. So bring us home, where do you see the future and how does Dell EMC data protection fit in? >> It's an exciting time, it really is. It's kind of like the coming of that second storm as you mentioned. Businesses have that demand of needing more services to load more quickly in an agile fashion. And as they pair that with the growth of their data which is distributed, they really have that challenge overall of how do I manage this environment? So you have to have the observability to understand where your data is and to be able to monitor it. You have to be able to orchestrate your workloads so that they're automated, and the data protection of those workloads are automated as well. And so the imperative that aspects like Tanzu are addressing with cloud native, that Kubernetes brings to the table to deliver containerized applications. That's really quite honestly is the biggest evolution I've seen in my last 20 to 30 years. This is definitely a different paradigm shift. >> Yeah, you know, six months ago I was with a competitor and was taking a look at EMC, sorry, I should say Dell EMC, and I was wondering, should I make a move over here? And really what convinced me was the fact that the company was willing to basically solve internally the innovator's dilemma. You're making so much money on your existing portfolio, now you're going to start investing in what appears to be almost internal competition to your portfolio. It's not, it's complimentary. So that's what drove the decision for me to come here, but I will also say it's great to be a part of an organization that has a long-term vision. You remember, I think the phrase that was being used, being held captive to the 90-day shot clock. You know, the earnings reports and stuff. And that drives behavior. Well, if your organization is looking at decade-long goals, that means that you can actually plan to do things that over time are going to actually bring real value to customers. So I think we're doing the right things. We're obviously innovating, we're on this agile software development cadence gives us the ability to solve the problems incrementally over time so customers can see that value instead of waiting for large batch releases. But is also gives us the ability to say, hey, when we've made mistakes or when we hadn't seen certain things come around the corner, we're agile enough to change with that. So I think the combination of having that vision and putting in the investments, and we've kind of likened ourselves to the biggest startup in the industry with the backing of a Fortune 50. And so from a customer standpoint you got to look at that and think, you know, that's interesting, because I need to solve my current problems today. I need to have a path forward for the future. And who am I betting on to deliver that? And the other thing I'll leave on is customers are trying to work with fewer suppliers, not more suppliers. Because they want to reduce the complexity. Well who has the ability to not only bring data protection to bear, but a whole portfolio of technology is really end to end. That can snap into those environments to again reduce complexity and drive more business value. >> That's a really interesting point you make about consolidations. Ever since I've been in this industry people want to deal with less suppliers and reduce the complexity. But you still see startups and VC's funding things. And what's happened is this consolidation, the big guys, you guys are the biggest consolidator. And I always say the rich get richer. There's always this tension between sort of, do I go out and buy the spoke, best of breed tools, or do I get them from somebody who can help me across the portfolio? That's really where your strength is. Guys, thank you so much. This is really a very important topic. Data protection is one of the most important areas that we've been covering. I've been reporting on it a lot. As I said, a lot of venture money has been flowing in. So I really appreciate you guys coming in, sharing your perspectives. And best of luck in the marketplace. >> Appreciate it, Dave. >> Thanks, this was great. >> You're welcome. All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. I've got a great guest here, CUBE alumni and very impressive, inspiring, Rachel Mushahwar Skaff, who's a managing director and general manager at AWS. Rachel, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to be here. You all make such a tremendous impact with reporting out what's happening in the tech space, and frankly, investing in topics like this, so thank you. >> It's our pleasure. Your career has been really impressive. You worked at Intel for almost a decade, and that company is very tech, very focused on Moore's law, cadence of technology power in the industry. Now at AWS, powering next-generation cloud. What inspired you to get into tech? How did you get here and how have you approached your career journey, because it's quite a track record? >> Wow, how long do we have? (Rachel and John laugh) >> John: We can go as long as you want. (laughs) It's great. >> You know, all joking aside, I think at the end of the day, it's about this simple statement. If you don't get goosebumps every single morning that you're waking up to do your job, it's not good enough. And that's a bit about how I've made all of the different career transitions that I have. You know, everything from building out data centers around the world, to leading network and engineering teams, to leading applications teams, to going and working for, you know, the largest semiconductor in the world, and now at AWS, every single one of those opportunities gave me goosebumps. And I was really focused on how do I surround myself with humans that are better than I am, smarter than I am, companies that plan in decades, but live in moments, companies that invest in their employees and create like artists? And frankly, for me, being part of a company where people know that life is finite, but they want to make an infinite impact, that's a bit about my career journey in a nutshell. >> Yeah. What's interesting is that, you know, over the years, a lot's changed, and a theme that we're hearing from leaders now that are heading up large teams and running companies, they have, you know, they have 20-plus years of experience under their belt and they look back and they say, "Wow, "things have changed and it's changing faster now, "hopefully faster to get change." But they all talk about confidence and they talk about curiosity and building. When did you know that this was going to be something that you got the goosebumps? And were there blockers in your way and how did you handle that? (Rachel laughs) >> There's always blockers in our way, and I think a lot of people don't actually talk about the blockers. I think they make it sound like, hey, I had this plan from day one, and every decision I've made has been perfect. And for me, I'll tell you, right, there are moments in your life that mark a differentiation and those moments that you realize nothing will be the same. And time is kind of divided into two parts, right, before this moment and after this moment. And that's everything from, before I had kids, that's a pretty big moment in people's lives, to after I had kids, and how do you work through some of those opportunities? Before I got married, before I got divorced. Before I went to this company, after I left this company. And I think the key for all of those is just having an insatiable curiosity around how do you continue to do better, create better and make better? And I'll tell you, those blockers, they exist. Coming back from maternity leave, hard. Coming back from a medical leave, hard. Coming back from caring for a sick parent or a sick friend, hard. But all of those things start to help craft who you are as a human being, not as a leader, but as a human being, and allows you to have some empathy with the people that you surround yourself with, right? And for me, it's, (sighs) you can think about these blockers in one of two ways. You can think about it as, you know, every single time that you're tempted to react in the same way to a blocker, you can be a prisoner of your past, or you can change how you react and be a pioneer of the future. It's not a blocker when you think about it in those terms. >> Mindset matters, and that's really a great point. You brought up something that's interesting, I want to bring this up. Some of the challenges in different stages of our lives. You know, one thing that's come out of this set of interviews, this, of day and in conversations is, that I haven't heard before, is the result of COVID, working at home brought empathy about people's personal lives to the table. That came up in a couple interviews. What's your reaction to that? Because that highlights that we're human, to your point of view. >> It does. It does. And I'm so thankful that you don't ask about balance because that is a pet peeve of mine, because there is no such thing as balance. If you're in perfect balance, you are not moving and you're not changing. But when you think about, you know, the impact of COVID and how the world has changed since that, it has allowed all of us to really think about, you know, what do we want to do versus what do we have to do? And I think so many times, in both our professional lives and our personal lives, we get caught up in doing what we think we have to do to get ahead versus taking a step back and saying, "Hey, what do I want to do? "And how do I become a, you know, "a better human?" And many times, John, I'm asked, "Hey, "how do you define success or achievement?" And, you know, my answer is really, for me, the greatest results that I've achieved, both personally and professionally, is when I eliminate the word success and balance from my vocabulary, and replace them with two words: What's my contribution and what's my impact? Those things make a difference, regardless of gender. And I'll tell you, none of it is easy, ever. I think all of us have been broken, we've been stretched, we've been burnt out. But I also think what we have to talk about as leaders in the industry is how we've also found endurance and resilience. And when we felt unsteady, we've continued to go forward, right? When we can't decide, the best answer is do what's uncomfortable. And all of those things really stemmed from a part of what happened with COVID. >> Yeah, yeah, I love the uncomfortable and the balance highlight. You mentioned being off balance. That means you're growing, you're not standing still. I want to get your thoughts on this because one thing that has come out again this year, and last year as well, is having a team with you when you do it. So if you're off balance and you're going to stretch, if you have a good team with you, that's where people help each other. Not just pick them up, but like maybe get 'em back on track again. So, but if you're solo, you fall, (laughs) you fall harder. So what's your reaction to that? 'Cause this has come up, and this comes up in team building, workforce formation, goal setting, contribution. What's your reaction to that? >> So my reaction to that that is pretty simple. Nobody gets there on their own at all, right? Passion and ambition can only take you so far. You've got to have people and teams that are supporting you. And here's the funny thing about people, and frankly, about being a leader that I think is really important: People don't follow for you. People follow for who you help them become. Think about that for a second. And when you think about all the amazing things that companies and teams are able to do, it's because of those people. And it's because you have leaders that are out there, inspiring them to take what they believe is impossible and turn it into the possible. That's the power of teams. >> Can you give an example of your approach on how you do that? How do you build your teams? How do you grow them? How do you lead them effectively and also make 'em inclusive, diverse and equitable? >> Whew. I'll give you a great example of some work that we're doing at AWS. This year at re:Invent, for the first time in its history, we've launched an initiative with theCUBE called Women of the Cloud. And part of Women of the Cloud is highlighting the business impact that so many of our partners, our customers and our employees have had on the social, on the economic and on the financials of many companies. They just haven't had the opportunity to tell their story. And at Amazon, right, it is absolutely integral to us to highlight those examples and continue to extend that ethos to our partners and our customers. And I think one of the things that I shared with you at re:Invent was, you know, as U2's Bono put it, (John laughs) "We'll build it better than we did before "and we are the people "that we've been waiting for." So if we're not out there, advocating and highlighting all the amazing things that other women are doing in the ecosystem, who will? >> Well, I've got to say, I want to give you props for that program. Not only was it groundbreaking, it's still running strong. And I saw some things on LinkedIn that were really impressive in its network effect. And I met at least half a dozen new people I never would have met before through some of that content interaction and engagement. And this is like the power of the current world. I mean, getting the voices out there creates momentum. And it's good for Amazon. It's not just personal brand building for my next job or whatever, you know, reason. It's sharing and it's attracting others, and it's causing people to connect and meet each other in that world. So it's still going strong. (laughs) And this program we did last year was part of Rachel Thornton, who's now at MessageBird, and Mary Camarata. They were the sponsors for this International Women's Day. They're not there anymore, so we decided we're going to do it again because the impact is so significant. We had the Amazon Education group on. It's amazing and it's free, and we've got to get the word out. I mean, talk about leveling up fast. You get in and you get trained and get certified, and there's a zillion jobs out (laughs) there in cloud, right, and partners. So this kind of leadership is really important. What was the key learnings that you've taken away and how do you extend this opportunity to nurture the talent out there in the field? Because when you throw the content out there from great leaders and practitioners and developers, it attracts other people. >> It does. It does. So look, I think there's two types of people, people that are focused on being and people who are focused on doing. And let me give you an example, right? When we think about labels of, hey, Rachel's a female executive who launched Women of the Cloud, that label really limits me. I'd rather just be a great executive. Or, hey, there's a great entrepreneur. Let's not be a great entrepreneur. Just go build something and sell it. And that's part of this whole Women of the cloud, is I don't want people focused on what their label is. I want people sharing their stories about what they're doing, and that's where the lasting impact happens, right? I think about something that my grandmother used to tell me, and she used to tell me, "Rachel, how successful "you are, doesn't matter. "The lasting impact that you have "is your legacy in this very finite time "that you have on Earth. "Leave a legacy." And that's what Women of the Cloud is about. So that people can start to say, "Oh, geez, "I didn't know that that was possible. "I didn't think about my career in that way." And, you know, all of those different types of stories that you're hearing out there. >> And I want to highlight something you said. We had another Amazonian on the program for this day earlier and she coined a term, 'cause inside Amazon, you have common language. One of them is bar raising. Raise the bar, that's an Amazonian (Rachel laughs) term. It means contribute and improve and raise the bar of capability. She said, "Bar raising is gender neutral. "The bar is a bar." And I'm like, wow, that was amazing. Now, that means your contribution angle there highlights that. What's the biggest challenge to get that mindset set in culture, in these- >> Oh. >> 'Cause it's that simple, contribution is neutral. >> It absolutely is neutral, but it's like I said earlier, I think so many times, people are focused on success and being a great leader versus what's the contribution I'm making and how am I doing as a leader, you know? And when it comes to a lot of the leadership principles that Amazon has, including bar raising, which means insisting on the highest standards, and then those standards continue to raise every single time. And what that is all about is having all of our employees figure out, how do I get better every single day, right? That's what it's about. It's not about being better than the peer next to you. It's about how do I become a better leader, a better human being than I was yesterday? >> Awesome. >> You know, I read this really cute quote and I think it really resonates. "You meditate to upgrade your software "and you work out to upgrade your hardware." And while it's important that we're all ourselves at work, we can't deny that a lot of times, ourselves still need that meditation or that workout. >> Well, I hope I don't have any zero days in my software out there, so, but I'm going to definitely work on that. I love that quote. I'm going to use that. Thank you very much. That was awesome. I got to ask you, I know you're really passionate about, and we've talked about this, around, so you're a great leader but you're also focused on what's behind you in the generation, pipelining women leaders, okay? Seats at the table, mentoring and sponsorship. What can we do to build a strong pipeline of leaders in technology and business? And where do you see the biggest opportunity to nurture the talent in these fields? >> Hmm, you know, that's great, great question. And, you know, I just read a "Forbes" article by another Amazonian, Tanuja Randery, who talked about, you know, some really interesting stats. And one of the stats that she shared was, you know, by 2030, less than 25% of tech specialists will be female, less than 25%. That's only a 6% growth from where we are in 2023, so in seven years. That's alarming. So we've really got to figure out what are the kinds of things that we're going to go do from an Amazon perspective to impact that? And one of the obvious starting points is showcasing tech careers to girls and young women, and talking openly about what a technology career looks like. So specifically at Amazon, we've got an AWS Git IT program that helps schools and educators bring in tech role models to show them what potential careers look like in tech. I think that's one great way that we can help build the pipeline, but once we get the pipeline, we also have to figure out how we don't let that pipeline leak. Meaning how do we keep women and, you know, young women on their tech career? And I think big part of that, John, is really talking about how hard it is, but it's also greater than you can ever imagine. And letting them see executives that are very authentic and will talk about, geez, you know, the challenges of COVID were a time of crisis and accelerated change, and here's what it meant to me personally and here's what we were able to solve professionally. These younger generations are all about social impact, they're about economic impact and they're about financial impact. And if we're not talking about all three of those, both from how AWS is leading from the front, but how its executives are also taking that into their personal lives, they're not going to want to go into tech. >> Yeah, and I think one of the things you mentioned there about getting people that get IT, good call out there, but also, Amazon's going to train 30 million people, put hundreds of millions of dollars into education. And not only are they making it easier to get in to get trained, but once you're in, even savvy folks that are in there still have to accelerate. And there's more ways to level up, more things are happening, but there's a big trend around people changing careers either in their late 20s, early 30s, or even those moments you talk about, where it's before and after, even later in the careers, 40s, 50s. Leaders like, well, good experience, good training, who were in another discipline who re-skilled. So you have, you know, more certifications coming in. So there's still other pivot points in the pipeline. It's not just down here. And that, I find that interesting. Are you seeing that same leadership opportunities coming in where someone can come into tech older? >> Absolutely. You know, we've got some amazing programs, like Amazon Returnity, that really focuses on how do we get other, you know, how do we get women that have taken some time off of work to get back into the workforce? And here's the other thing about switching careers. If I look back on my career, I started out as a civil engineer, heavy highway construction. And now I lead a sales team at the largest cloud company in the world. And there were, you know, twists and turns around there. I've always focused on how do we change and how do we continue to evolve? So it's not just focused on, you know, young women in the pipeline. It's focused on all gender and all diverse types throughout their career, and making sure that we're providing an inclusive environment for them to bring in their unique skillsets. >> Yeah, a building has good steel. It's well structured. Roads have great foundations. You know, you got the builder in you there. >> Yes. >> So I have to ask you, what's on your mind as a tech athlete, as an executive at AWS? You know, you got your huge team, big goals, the economy's got a little bit of a headwind, but still, cloud's transforming, edge is exploding. What's your outlook as you look out in the tech landscape these days and how are you thinking about it? What your plans? Can you share a little bit about what's on your mind? >> Sure. So, geez, there's so many trends that are top of mind right now. Everything from zero trust to artificial intelligence to security. We have more access to data now than ever before. So the opportunities are limitless when we think about how we can apply technology to solve some really difficult customer problems, right? Innovation sometimes feels like it's happening at a rapid pace. And I also say, you know, there are years when nothing happens, and then there's years when centuries happen. And I feel like we're kind of in those years where centuries are happening. Cloud technologies are refining sports as we know them now. There's a surge of innovation in smart energy. Everyone's supply chain is looking to transform. Custom silicon is going mainstream. And frankly, AWS's customers and partners are expecting us to come to them with a point of view on trends and on opportunities. And that's what differentiates us. (John laughs) That's what gives me goosebumps- >> I was just going to ask you that. Does that give you goosebumps? How could you not love technology with that excitement? I mean, AI, throw in AI, too. I just talked to Swami, who heads up the AI and database, and we just talked about the past 24 months, the change. And that is a century moment happening. The large language models, computer vision, more compute. Compute's booming than ever before. Who thought that was going to happen, is still happening? Massive change. So, I mean, if you're in tech, how can you not love tech? >> I know, even if you're not in tech, I think you've got to start to love tech because it gives you access to things you've never had before. And frankly, right, change is the only constant. And if you don't like change, you're going to like being irrelevant even less than you like change. So we've got to be nimble, we've got to adapt. And here's the great thing, once we figure it out, it changes all over again. And it's not something that's easy for any of us to operate. It's hard, right? It's hard learning new technology, it's hard figuring out what do I do next? But here's the secret. I think it's hard because we're doing it right. It's not hard because we're doing it wrong. It's just hard to be human and it's hard to figure out how we apply all this different technology in a way that positively impacts us, you know, economically, financially, environmentally and socially. >> And everyone's different, too. So you got to live those (mumbles). I want to get one more question in before we, my last question, which is about you and your impact. When you talk to your team, your sales, you got a large sales team, North America. And Tanuja, who you mentioned, is in EMEA, we're going to speak with her as well. You guys lead the front lines, helping customers, but also delivering the revenue to the company, which has been fantastic, by the way. So what's your message to the troops and the team out there? When you say, "Take that hill," like what is the motivational pitch, in a few sentences? What's the main North Star message in today's marketplace when you're doing that big team meeting? >> I don't know if it's just limited to a team meeting. I think this is a universal message, and the universal message for me is find your edge, whatever that may be. Whether it is the edge of what you know about artificial intelligence and neural networks or it's the edge of how do we migrate our applications to the cloud more quickly. Or it's the edge of, oh, my gosh, how do I be a better parent and still be great at work, right? Find your edge, and then sharpen it. Go to the brink of what you think is possible, and then force yourself to jump. Get involved. The world is run by the people that show up, professionally and personally. (John laughs) So show up and get started. >> Yeah as Steve Jobs once said, "The future "that everyone looks at was created "by people no smarter than you." And I love that quote. That's really there. Final question for you. I know we're tight on time, but I want to get this in. When you think about your impact on your company, AWS, and the industry, what's something you want people to remember? >> Oh, geez. I think what I want people to remember the most is it's not about what you've said, and this is a Maya Angelou quote. "It's not about what you've said to people "or what you've done, "it's about how you've made them feel." And we can all think back on leaders or we can all think back on personal moments in our lives where we felt like we belonged, where we felt like we did something amazing, where we felt loved. And those are the moments that sit with us for the rest of our lives. I want people to remember how they felt when they were part of something bigger. I want people to belong. It shouldn't be uncommon to talk about feelings at work. So I want people to feel. >> Rachel, thank you for your time. I know you're really busy and we stretched you a little bit there. Thank you so much for contributing to this wonderful day of great leaders sharing their stories. And you're an inspiration. Thanks for everything you do. We appreciate you. >> Thank you. And let's go do some more Women of the Cloud videos. >> We (laughs) got more coming. Bring those stories on. Back up the story truck. We're ready to go. Thanks so much. >> That's good. >> Thank you. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. It's not just going to be March 8th. That's the big celebration day. It's going to be every quarter, more stories coming. Stay tuned at siliconangle.com and thecube.net here, with bringing all the stories. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat instrumental music) >> TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (uplifting instrumental music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE Live at MWC '23. I'm Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, our co-founder, our co-CEO of theCUBE, you know him, you love him. He's here as my co-host. Dave, we have a great couple of guests here to break down day one keynote. Lots of meat. I can't wait to be part of this conversation. Chris Lewis joins us, the founder and MD of Lewis Insight. And Sarbjeet Johal, one of you know him as well. He's a Cube contributor, cloud architect. Guys, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me today. >> Lovely to be here. >> Thank you. >> Chris, I want to start with you. You have covered all aspects of global telecoms industries over 30 years working as an analyst. Talk about the evolution of the telecom industry that you've witnessed, and what were some of the things you heard in the keynote that excite you about the direction it's going? >> Well, as ever, MWC, there's no lack of glitz and glamour, but it's the underlying issues of the industry that are really at stake here. There's not a lot of new revenue coming into the telecom providers, but there's a lot of adjustment, readjustment of the underlying operational environment. And also, really importantly, what came out of the keynotes is the willingness and the necessity to really engage with the API community, with the developer community, people who traditionally, telecoms would never have even touched. So they're sorting out their own house, they're cleaning their own stables, getting the cost base down, but they're also now realizing they've got to engage with all the other parties. There's a lot of cloud providers here, there's a lot of other people from outside so they're realizing they cannot do it all themselves. It's quite a tough lesson for a very conservative, inward looking industry, right? So should we be spending all this money and all this glitz and glamour of MWC and all be here, or should would be out there really building for the future and making sure the services are right for yours and my needs in a business and personal lives? So a lot of new changes, a lot of realization of what's going on outside, but underlying it, we've just got to get this right this time. >> And it feels like that monetization is front and center. You mentioned developers, we've got to work with developers, but I'm hearing the latest keynote from the Ericsson CEOs, we're going to monetize through those APIs, we're going to charge the developers. I mean, first of all, Chris, am I getting that right? And Sarbjeet, as somebody who's close to the developer community, is that the right way to build bridges? But Chris, are we getting that right? >> Well, let's take the first steps first. So, Ericsson, of course, acquired Vonage, which is a massive API business so they want to make money. They expect to make money by bringing that into the mainstream telecom community. Now, whether it's the developers who pay for it, or let's face it, we are moving into a situation as the telco moves into a techco model where the techco means they're going to be selling bits of the technology to developer guys and to other application developers. So when he says he needs to charge other people for it, it's the way in which people reach in and will take going through those open APIs like the open gateway announced today, but also the way they'll reach in and take things like network slicing. So we're opening up the telecom community, the treasure chest, if you like, where developers' applications and other third parties can come in and take those chunks of technology and build them into their services. This is a complete change from the old telecom industry where everybody used to come and you say, "all right, this is my product, you've got to buy it and you're going to pay me a lot of money for it." So we are looking at a more flexible environment where the other parties can take those chunks. And we know we want collectivity built into our financial applications, into our government applications, everything, into the future of the metaverse, whatever it may be. But it requires that change in attitude of the telcos. And they do need more money 'cause they've said, the baseline of revenue is pretty static, there's not a lot of growth in there so they're looking for new revenues. It's in a B2B2X time model. And it's probably the middle man's going to pay for it rather than the customer. >> But the techco model, Sarbjeet, it looks like the telcos are getting their money on their way in. The techco company model's to get them on their way out like the app store. Go build something of value, build some kind of app or data product, and then when it takes off, we'll take a piece of the action. What are your thoughts from a developer perspective about how the telcos are approaching it? >> Yeah, I think before we came here, like I said, I did some tweets on this, that we talk about all kind of developers, like there's game developers and front end, back end, and they're all talking about like what they're building on top of cloud, but nowhere you will hear the term "telco developer," there's no API from telcos given to the developers to build IoT solutions on top of it because telco as an IoT, I think is a good sort of hand in hand there. And edge computing as well. The glimmer of hope, if you will, for telcos is the edge computing, I believe. And even in edge, I predicted, I said that many times that cloud players will dominate that market with the private 5G. You know that story, right? >> We're going to talk about that. (laughs) >> The key is this, that if you see in general where the population lives, in metros, right? That's where the world population is like flocking to and we have cloud providers covering the local zones with local like heavy duty presence from the big cloud providers and then these telcos are getting sidetracked by that. Even the V2X in cars moving the autonomous cars and all that, even in that space, telcos are getting sidetracked in many ways. What telcos have to do is to join the forces, build some standards, if not standards, some consortium sort of. They're trying to do that with the open gateway here, they have only eight APIs. And it's 2023, eight APIs is nothing, right? (laughs) So they should have started this 10 years back, I think. So, yeah, I think to entice the developers, developers need the employability, we need to train them, we need to show them some light that hey, you can build a lot on top of it. If you tell developers they can develop two things or five things, nobody will come. >> So, Chris, the cloud will dominate the edge. So A, do you buy it? B, the telcos obviously are acting like that might happen. >> Do you know I love people when they've got their heads in the clouds. (all laugh) And you're right in so many ways, but if you flip it around and think about how the customers think about this, business customers and consumers, they don't care about all this background shenanigans going on, do they? >> Lisa: No. >> So I think one of the problems we have is that this is a new territory and whether you call it the edge or whatever you call it, what we need there is we need connectivity, we need security, we need storage, we need compute, we need analytics, and we need applications. And are any of those more important than the others? It's the collective that actually drives the real value there. So we need all those things together. And of course, the people who represented at this show, whether it's the cloud guys, the telcos, the Nokia, the Ericssons of this world, they all own little bits of that. So that's why they're all talking partnerships because they need the combination, they cannot do it on their own. The cloud guys can't do it on their own. >> Well, the cloud guys own all of those things that you just talked about though. (all laugh) >> Well, they don't own the last bit of connectivity, do they? They don't own the access. >> Right, exactly. That's the one thing they don't own. So, okay, we're back to pipes, right? We're back to charging for connectivity- >> Pipes are very valuable things, right? >> Yeah, for sure. >> Never underestimate pipes. I don't know about where you live, plumbers make a lot of money where I live- >> I don't underestimate them but I'm saying can the telcos charge for more than that or are the cloud guys going to mop up the storage, the analytics, the compute, and the apps? >> They may mop it up, but I think what the telcos are doing and we've seen a lot of it here already, is they are working with all those major cloud guys already. So is it an unequal relationship? The cloud guys are global, massive global scale, the telcos are fundamentally national operators. >> Yep. >> Some have a little bit of regional, nobody has global scale. So who stitches it all together? >> Dave: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. >> Absolutely. >> I know that saying never gets old. It's true. Well, Sarbjeet, one of the things that you tweeted about, I didn't get to see the keynote but I was looking at your tweets. 46% of telcos think they won't make it to the next decade. That's a big number. Did that surprise you? >> No, actually it didn't surprise me because the competition is like closing in on them and the telcos are competing with telcos as well and the telcos are competing with cloud providers on the other side, right? So the smaller ones are getting squeezed. It's the bigger players, they can hook up the newer platforms, I think they will survive. It's like that part is like any other industry, if you will. But the key is here, I think why the pain points were sort of described on the main stage is that they're crying out loud to tell the big tech cloud providers that "hey, you pay your fair share," like we talked, right? You are not paying, you're generating so much content which reverses our networks and you are not paying for it. So they are not able to recoup the cost of laying down their networks. By the way, one thing actually I want to mention is that they said the cloud needs earth. The cloud and earth, it's like there's no physical need to cloud, you know that, right? So like, I think it's the other way around. I think the earth needs the cloud because I'm a cloud guy. (Sarbjeet and Lisa laugh) >> I think you need each other, right? >> I think so too. >> They need each other. When they said cloud needs earth, right? I think they're still in denial that the cloud is a big force. They have to partner. When you can't compete with somebody, what do you do? Partner with them. >> Chris, this is your world. Are they in denial? >> No, I think they're waking up to the pragmatism of the situation. >> Yeah. >> They're building... As we said, most of the telcos, you find have relationships with the cloud guys, I think you're right about the industry. I mean, do you think what's happened since US was '96, the big telecom act when we started breaking up all the big telcos and we had lots of competition came in, we're seeing the signs that we might start to aggregate them back up together again. So it's been an interesting experiment for like 30 years, hasn't it too? >> It made the US less competitive, I would argue, but carry on. >> Yes, I think it's true. And Europe is maybe too competitive and therefore, it's not driven the investment needed. And by the way, it's not just mobile, it's fixed as well. You saw the Orange CEO was talking about the her investment and the massive fiber investments way ahead of many other countries, way ahead of the UK or Germany. We need that fiber in the ground to carry all your cloud traffic to do this. So there is a scale issue, there is a competition issue, but the telcos are very much aware of it. They need the cloud, by the way, to improve their operational environments as well, to change that whole old IT environment to deliver you and I better service. So no, it absolutely is changing. And they're getting scale, but they're fundamentally offering the basic product, you call it pipes, I'll just say they're offering broadband to you and I and the business community. But they're stepping on dangerous ground, I think, when saying they want to charge the over the top guys for all the traffic they use. Those over the top guys now build a lot of the global networks, the backbone submarine network. They're putting a lot of money into it, and by giving us endless data for our individual usage, that cat is out the bag, I think to a large extent. >> Yeah. And Orange CEO basically said that, that they're not paying their fair share. I'm for net neutrality but the governments are going to have to fund this unless you let us charge the OTT. >> Well, I mean, we could of course renationalize. Where would that take us? (Dave laughs) That would make MWC very interesting next year, wouldn't it? To renationalize it. So, no, I think you've got to be careful what we wish for here. Creating the absolute clear product that is required to underpin all of these activities, whether it's IoT or whether it's cloud delivery or whether it's just our own communication stuff, delivering that absolutely ubiquitously high quality for business and for consumer is what we have to do. And telcos have been too conservative in the past. >> I think they need to get together and create standards around... I think they have a big opportunity. We know that the clouds are being built in silos, right? So there's Azure stack, there's AWS and there's Google. And those are three main ones and a few others, right? So that we are fighting... On the cloud side, what we are fighting is the multicloud. How do we consume that multicloud without having standards? So if these people get together and create some standards around IoT and edge computing sort of area, people will flock to them to say, "we will use you guys, your API, we don't care behind the scenes if you use AWS or Google Cloud or Azure, we will come to you." So market, actually is looking for that solution. I think it's an opportunity for these guys, for telcos. But the problem with telcos is they're nationalized, as you said Chris versus the cloud guys are still kind of national in a way, but they're global corporations. And some of the telcos are global corporations as well, BT covers so many countries and TD covers so many... DT is in US as well, so they're all over the place. >> But you know what's interesting is that the TM forum, which is one of the industry associations, they've had an open digital architecture framework for quite some years now. Google had joined that some years ago, Azure in there, AWS just joined it a couple of weeks ago. So when people said this morning, why isn't AWS on the keynote? They don't like sharing the limelight, do they? But they're getting very much in bed with the telco. So I think you'll see the marriage. And in fact, there's a really interesting statement, if you look at the IoT you mentioned, Bosch and Nokia have been working together 'cause they said, the problem we've got, you've got a connectivity network on one hand, you've got the sensor network on the other hand, you're trying to merge them together, it's a nightmare. So we are finally seeing those sort of groups talking to each other. So I think the standards are coming, the cooperation is coming, partnerships are coming, but it means that the telco can't dominate the sector like it used to. It's got to play ball with everybody else. >> I think they have to work with the regulators as well to loosen the regulation. Or you said before we started this segment, you used Chris, the analogy of sports, right? In sports, when you're playing fiercely, you commit the fouls and then ask for ref to blow the whistle. You're now looking at the ref all the time. The telcos are looking at the ref all the time. >> Dave: Yeah, can I do this? Can I do that? Is this a fair move? >> They should be looking for the space in front of the opposition. >> Yeah, they should be just on attack mode and commit these fouls, if you will, and then ask for forgiveness then- >> What do you make of that AWS not you there- >> Well, Chris just made a great point that they don't like to share the limelight 'cause I thought it was very obvious that we had Google Cloud, we had Microsoft there on day one of this 80,000 person event. A lot of people back from COVID and they weren't there. But Chris, you brought up a great point that kind of made me think, maybe you're right. Maybe they're in the afternoon keynote, they want their own time- >> You think GSMA invited them? >> I imagine so. You'd have to ask GSMA. >> I would think so. >> Get Max on here and ask that. >> I'm going to ask them, I will. >> But no, and they don't like it because I think the misconception, by the way, is that everyone says, "oh, it's AWS, it's Google Cloud and it's Azure." They're not all the same business by any stretch of the imagination. AWS has been doing loads of great work, they've been launching private network stuff over the last couple of weeks. Really interesting. Google's been playing catch up. We know that they came in readily late to the market. And Azure, they've all got slightly different angles on it. So perhaps it just wasn't right for AWS and the way they wanted to pitch things so they don't have to be there, do they? >> That's a good point. >> But the industry needs them there, that's the number one cloud. >> Dave, they're there working with the industry. >> Yeah, of course. >> They don't have to be on the keynote stage. And in fact, you think about this show and you mentioned the 80,000 people, the activity going on around in all these massive areas they're in, it's fantastic. That's where the business is done. The business isn't done up on the keynote stage. >> That's why there's the glitz and the glamour, Chris. (all laugh) >> Yeah. It's not glitz, it's espresso. It's not glamour anymore, it's just espresso. >> We need the espresso. >> Yeah. >> I think another thing is that it's interesting how an average European sees the tech market and an average North American, especially you from US, you have to see the market. Here, people are more like process oriented and they want the rules of the road already established before they can take a step- >> Chris: That's because it's your pension in the North American- >> Exactly. So unions are there and the more employee rights and everything, you can't fire people easily here or in Germany or most of the Europe is like that with the exception of UK. >> Well, but it's like I said, that Silicone Valley gets their money on the way out, you know? And that's how they do it, that's how they think it. And they don't... They ask for forgiveness. I think the east coast is more close to Europe, but in the EU, highly regulated, really focused on lifetime employment, things like that. >> But Dave, the issue is the telecom industry is brilliant, right? We keep paying every month whatever we do with it. >> It's a great business, to your point- >> It's a brilliant business model. >> Dave: It's fantastic. >> So it's about then getting the structure right behind it. And you know, we've seen a lot of stratification where people are selling off towers, Orange haven't sold their towers off, they made a big point about that. Others are selling their towers off. Some people are selling off their underlying network, Telecom Italia talking about KKR buying the whole underlying network. It's like what do you want to be in control of? It's a great business. >> But that's why they complain so much is that they're having to sell their assets because of the onerous CapEx requirements, right? >> Yeah, they've had it good, right? And dare I say, perhaps they've not planned well enough for the future. >> They're trying to protect their past from the future. I mean, that's... >> Actually, look at the... Every "n" number of years, there's a new faster network. They have to dig the ground, they have to put the fiber, they have to put this. Now, there are so many booths showing 6G now, we are not even done with 5G yet, now the next 6G you know, like then- >> 10G's coming- >> 10G, that's a different market. (Dave laughs) >> Actually, they're bogged down by the innovation, I think. >> And the generational thing is really important because we're planning for 6G in all sorts of good ways but actually what we use in our daily lives, we've gone through the barrier, we've got enough to do that. So 4G gives us enough, the fiber in the ground or even old copper gives us enough. So the question is, what are we willing to pay for more than that basic connectivity? And the answer to your point, Dave, is not a lot, right? So therefore, that's why the emphasis is on the business market on that B2B and B2B2X. >> But we'll pay for Netflix all day long. >> All day long. (all laugh) >> The one thing Chris, I don't know, I want to know your viewpoints and we have talked in the past as well, there's absence of think tanks in tech, right? So we have think tanks on the foreign policy and economic policy in every country, and we have global think tanks, but tech is becoming a huge part of the economy, global economy as well as national economies, right? But we don't have think tanks on like policy around tech. For example, this 4G is good for a lot of use cases. Then 5G is good for smaller number of use cases. And then 6G will be like, fewer people need 6G for example. Why can't we have sort of those kind of entities dictating those kind of like, okay, is this a wiser way to go about it? >> Lina Khan wants to. She wants to break up big tech- >> You're too young to remember but the IT used to have a show every four years in Geneva, there were standards around there. So I think there are bodies. I think the balance of power obviously has gone from the telecom to the west coast to the IT markets. And it's changing the balance about, it moves more quickly, right? Telecoms has never moved quickly enough. I think there is hope by the way, that telecoms now that we are moving to more softwarized environment, and God forbid, we're moving into CICD in the telecom world, right? Which is a massive change, but I think there's hopes for it to change. The mentality is changing, the culture is changing, but to change those old structured organizations from the British telecom or the France telecom into the modern world, it's a hell of a long journey. It's not an overnight journey at all. >> Well, of course the theme of the event is velocity. >> Yeah, I know that. >> And it's been interesting sitting here with the three of you talking about from a historic perspective, how slow and molasseslike telecom has been. They don't have a choice anymore. As consumers, we have this expectation we're going to get anything we want on our mobile device, 24 by seven. We don't care about how the sausage is made, we just want the end result. So do you really think, and we're only on day one guys... And Chris we'll start with you. Is the theme really velocity? Is it disruption? Are they able to move faster? >> Actually, I think invisibility is the real answer. (Lisa laughs) We want communication to be invisible, right? >> Absolutely. >> We want it to work. When we switch our phones on, we want it to work and we want to... Well, they're not even phones anymore, are they really? I mean that's the... So no, velocity, we've got... There is momentum in the industry, there's no doubt about that. The cloud guys coming in, making telecoms think about the way they run their own business, where they meet, that collision point on the edges you talked about Sarbjeet. We do have velocity, we've got momentum. There's so many interested parties. The way I think of this is that the telecom industry used to be inward looking, just design its own technology and then expect everyone else to dance to our tune. We're now flipping that 180 degrees and we are now having to work with all the different outside forces shaping us. Whether it's devices, whether it's smart cities, governments, the hosting guys, the Equinoxis, all these things. So everyone wants a piece of this telecom world so we've got to make ourselves more open. That's why you get in a more open environment. >> But you did... I just want to bring back a point you made during COVID, which was when everybody switched to work from home, started using their landlines again, telcos had to respond and nothing broke. I mean, it was pretty amazing. >> Chris: It did a good job. >> It was kind of invisible. So, props to the telcos for making that happen. >> They did a great job. >> So it really did. Now, okay, what have you done for me lately? So now they've got to deal with the future and they're talking monetization. But to me, monetization is all about data and not necessarily just the network data. Yeah, they can sell that 'cause they own that but what kind of incremental value are they going to create for the consumers that... >> Yeah, actually that's a problem. I think the problem is that they have been strangled by the regulation for a long time and they cannot look at their data. It's a lot more similar to the FinTech world, right? I used to work at Visa. And then Visa, we did trillion dollars in transactions in '96. Like we moved so much money around, but we couldn't look at these things, right? So yeah, I think regulation is a problem that holds you back, it's the antithesis of velocity, it slows you down. >> But data means everything, doesn't it? I mean, it means everything and nothing. So I think the challenge here is what data do the telcos have that is useful, valuable to me, right? So in the home environment, the fact that my broadband provider says, oh, by the way, you've got 20 gadgets on that network and 20 on that one... That's great, tell me what's on there. I probably don't know what's taking all my valuable bandwidth up. So I think there's security wrapped around that, telling me the way I'm using it if I'm getting the best out of my service. >> You pay for that? >> No, I'm saying they don't do it yet. I think- >> But would you pay for that? >> I think I would, yeah. >> Would you pay a lot for that? I would expect it to be there as part of my dashboard for my monthly fee. They're already charging me enough. >> Well, that's fine, but you pay a lot more in North America than I do in Europe, right? >> Yeah, no, that's true. >> You're really overpaying over there, right? >> Way overpaying. >> So, actually everybody's looking at these devices, right? So this is a radio operated device basically, right? And then why couldn't they benefit from this? This is like we need to like double click on this like 10 times to find out why telcos failed to leverage this device, right? But I think the problem is their reliance on regulations and their being close to the national sort of governments and local bodies and authorities, right? And in some countries, these telcos are totally controlled in very authoritarian ways, right? It's not like open, like in the west, most of the west. Like the world is bigger than five, six countries and we know that, right? But we end up talking about the major economies most of the time. >> Dave: Always. >> Chris: We have a topic we want to hit on. >> We do have a topic. Our last topic, Chris, it's for you. You guys have done an amazing job for the last 25 minutes talking about the industry, where it's going, the evolution. But Chris, you're registered blind throughout your career. You're a leading user of assertive technologies. Talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, some of the things you're doing there. >> Well, we should have had 25 minutes on that and five minutes on- (all laugh) >> Lisa: You'll have to come back. >> Really interesting. So I've been looking at it. You're quite right, I've been using accessible technology on my iPhone and on my laptop for 10, 20 years now. It's amazing. And what I'm trying to get across to the industry is to think about inclusive design from day one. When you're designing an app or you're designing a service, make sure you... And telecom's a great example. In fact, there's quite a lot of sign language around here this week. If you look at all the events written, good to see that coming in. Obviously, no use to me whatsoever, but good for the hearing impaired, which by the way is the biggest category of disability in the world. Biggest chunk is hearing impaired, then vision impaired, and then cognitive and then physical. And therefore, whenever you're designing any service, my call to arms to people is think about how that's going to be used and how a blind person might use it or how a deaf person or someone with physical issues or any cognitive issues might use it. And a great example, the GSMA and I have been talking about the app they use for getting into the venue here. I downloaded it. I got the app downloaded and I'm calling my guys going, where's my badge? And he said, "it's top left." And because I work with a screen reader, they hadn't tagged it properly so I couldn't actually open my badge on my own. Now, they changed it overnight so it worked this morning, which is fantastic work by Trevor and the team. But it's those things that if you don't build it in from scratch, you really frustrate a whole group of users. And if you think about it, people with disabilities are excluded from so many services if they can't see the screen or they can't hear it. But it's also the elderly community who don't find it easy to get access to things. Smart speakers have been a real blessing in that respect 'cause you can now talk to that thing and it starts talking back to you. And then there's the people who can't afford it so we need to come down market. This event is about launching these thousand dollars plus devices. Come on, we need below a hundred dollars devices to get to the real mass market and get the next billion people in and then to educate people how to use it. And I think to go back to your previous point, I think governments are starting to realize how important this is about building the community within the countries. You've got some massive projects like NEOM in Saudi Arabia. If you have a look at that, if you get a chance, a fantastic development in the desert where they're building a new city from scratch and they're building it so anyone and everyone can get access to it. So in the past, it was all done very much by individual disability. So I used to use some very expensive, clunky blind tech stuff. I'm now using mostly mainstream. But my call to answer to say is, make sure when you develop an app, it's accessible, anyone can use it, you can talk to it, you can get whatever access you need and it will make all of our lives better. So as we age and hearing starts to go and sight starts to go and dexterity starts to go, then those things become very useful for everybody. >> That's a great point and what a great champion they have in you. Chris, Sarbjeet, Dave, thank you so much for kicking things off, analyzing day one keynote, the ecosystem day, talking about what velocity actually means, where we really are. We're going to have to have you guys back 'cause as you know, we can keep going, but we are out of time. But thank you. >> Pleasure. >> We had a very spirited, lively conversation. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you very much. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live in Barcelona, Spain at MWC '23. We'll be back after a short break. See you soon. (uplifting instrumental music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> While never really meant to be a consumer tech event, the rapid ascendancy of smartphones sucked much of the air out of Mobile World Congress over the years, now MWC. And while the device manufacturers continue to have a major presence at the show, the maturity of intelligent devices, longer life cycles, and the disaggregation of the network stack, have put enterprise technologies front and center in the telco business. Semiconductor manufacturers, network equipment players, infrastructure companies, cloud vendors, software providers, and a spate of startups are eyeing the trillion dollar plus communications industry as one of the next big things to watch this decade. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we bring you part two of our ongoing coverage of MWC '23, with some new data on enterprise players specifically in large telco environments, a brief glimpse at some of the pre-announcement news and corresponding themes ahead of MWC, and some of the key announcement areas we'll be watching at the show on theCUBE. Now, last week we shared some ETR data that showed how traditional enterprise tech players were performing, specifically within the telecoms vertical. Here's a new look at that data from ETR, which isolates the same companies, but cuts the data for what ETR calls large telco. The N in this cut is 196, down from 288 last week when we included all company sizes in the dataset. Now remember the two dimensions here, on the y-axis is net score, or spending momentum, and on the x-axis is pervasiveness in the data set. The table insert in the upper left informs how the dots and companies are plotted, and that red dotted line, the horizontal line at 40%, that indicates a highly elevated net score. Now while the data are not dramatically different in terms of relative positioning, there are a couple of changes at the margin. So just going down the list and focusing on net score. Azure is comparable, but slightly lower in this sector in the large telco than it was overall. Google Cloud comes in at number two, and basically swapped places with AWS, which drops slightly in the large telco relative to overall telco. Snowflake is also slightly down by one percentage point, but maintains its position. Remember Snowflake, overall, its net score is much, much higher when measuring across all verticals. Snowflake comes down in telco, and relative to overall, a little bit down in large telco, but it's making some moves to attack this market that we'll talk about in a moment. Next are Red Hat OpenStack and Databricks. About the same in large tech telco as they were an overall telco. Then there's Dell next that has a big presence at MWC and is getting serious about driving 16G adoption, and new servers, and edge servers, and other partnerships. Cisco and Red Hat OpenShift basically swapped spots when moving from all telco to large telco, as Cisco drops and Red Hat bumps up a bit. And VMware dropped about four percentage points in large telco. Accenture moved up dramatically, about nine percentage points in big telco, large telco relative to all telco. HPE dropped a couple of percentage points. Oracle stayed about the same. And IBM surprisingly dropped by about five points. So look, I understand not a ton of change in terms of spending momentum in the large sector versus telco overall, but some deltas. The bottom line for enterprise players is one, they're just getting started in this new disruption journey that they're on as the stack disaggregates. Two, all these players have experience in delivering horizontal solutions, but now working with partners and identifying big problems to be solved, and three, many of these companies are generally not the fastest moving firms relative to smaller disruptive disruptors. Now, cloud has been an exception in fairness. But the good news for the legacy infrastructure and IT companies is that the telco transformation and the 5G buildout is going to take years. So it's moving at a pace that is very favorable to many of these companies. Okay, so looking at just some of the pre-announcement highlights that have hit the wire this week, I want to give you a glimpse of the diversity of innovation that is occurring in the telecommunication space. You got semiconductor manufacturers, device makers, network equipment players, carriers, cloud vendors, enterprise tech companies, software companies, startups. Now we've included, you'll see in this list, we've included OpeRAN, that logo, because there's so much buzz around the topic and we're going to come back to that. But suffice it to say, there's no way we can cover all the announcements from the 2000 plus exhibitors at the show. So we're going to cherry pick here and make a few call outs. Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced an acquisition of an Italian private cellular network company called AthoNet. Zeus Kerravala wrote about it on SiliconANGLE if you want more details. Now interestingly, HPE has a partnership with Solana, which also does private 5G. But according to Zeus, Solona is more of an out-of-the-box solution, whereas AthoNet is designed for the core and requires more integration. And as you'll see in a moment, there's going to be a lot of talk at the show about private network. There's going to be a lot of news there from other competitors, and we're going to be watching that closely. And while many are concerned about the P5G, private 5G, encroaching on wifi, Kerravala doesn't see it that way. Rather, he feels that these private networks are really designed for more industrial, and you know mission critical environments, like factories, and warehouses that are run by robots, et cetera. 'Cause these can justify the increased expense of private networks. Whereas wifi remains a very low cost and flexible option for, you know, whatever offices and homes. Now, over to Dell. Dell announced its intent to go hard after opening up the telco network with the announcement that in the second half of this year it's going to begin shipping its infrastructure blocks for Red Hat. Remember it's like kind of the converged infrastructure for telco with a more open ecosystem and sort of more flexible, you know, more mature engineered system. Dell has also announced a range of PowerEdge servers for a variety of use cases. A big wide line bringing forth its 16G portfolio and aiming squarely at the telco space. Dell also announced, here we go, a private wireless offering with airspan, and Expedo, and a solution with AthoNet, the company HPE announced it was purchasing. So I guess Dell and HPE are now partnering up in the private wireless space, and yes, hell is freezing over folks. We'll see where that relationship goes in the mid- to long-term. Dell also announced new lab and certification capabilities, which we said last week was going to be critical for the further adoption of open ecosystem technology. So props to Dell for, you know, putting real emphasis and investment in that. AWS also made a number of announcements in this space including private wireless solutions and associated managed services. AWS named Deutsche Telekom, Orange, T-Mobile, Telefonica, and some others as partners. And AWS announced the stepped up partnership, specifically with T-Mobile, to bring AWS services to T-Mobile's network portfolio. Snowflake, back to Snowflake, announced its telecom data cloud. Remember we showed the data earlier, it's Snowflake not as strong in the telco sector, but they're continuing to move toward this go-to market alignment within key industries, realigning their go-to market by vertical. It also announced that AT&T, and a number of other partners, are collaborating to break down data silos specifically in telco. Look, essentially, this is Snowflake taking its core value prop to the telco vertical and forming key partnerships that resonate in the space. So think simplification, breaking down silos, data sharing, eventually data monetization. Samsung previewed its future capability to allow smartphones to access satellite services, something Apple has previously done. AMD, Intel, Marvell, Qualcomm, are all in the act, all the semiconductor players. Qualcomm for example, announced along with Telefonica, and Erickson, a 5G millimeter network that will be showcased in Spain at the event this coming week using Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset platform, based on none other than Arm technology. Of course, Arm we said is going to dominate the edge, and is is clearly doing so. It's got the volume advantage over, you know, traditional Intel, you know, X86 architectures. And it's no surprise that Microsoft is touting its open AI relationship. You're going to hear a lot of AI talk at this conference as is AI is now, you know, is the now topic. All right, we could go on and on and on. There's just so much going on at Mobile World Congress or MWC, that we just wanted to give you a glimpse of some of the highlights that we've been watching. Which brings us to the key topics and issues that we'll be exploring at MWC next week. We touched on some of this last week. A big topic of conversation will of course be, you know, 5G. Is it ever going to become real? Is it, is anybody ever going to make money at 5G? There's so much excitement around and anticipation around 5G. It has not lived up to the hype, but that's because the rollout, as we've previous reported, is going to take years. And part of that rollout is going to rely on the disaggregation of the hardened telco stack, as we reported last week and in previous Breaking Analysis episodes. OpenRAN is a big component of that evolution. You know, as our RAN intelligent controllers, RICs, which essentially the brain of OpenRAN, if you will. Now as we build out 5G networks at massive scale and accommodate unprecedented volumes of data and apply compute-hungry AI to all this data, the issue of energy efficiency is going to be front and center. It has to be. Not only is it a, you know, hot political issue, the reality is that improving power efficiency is compulsory or the whole vision of telco's future is going to come crashing down. So chip manufacturers, equipment makers, cloud providers, everybody is going to be doubling down and clicking on this topic. Let's talk about AI. AI as we said, it is the hot topic right now, but it is happening not only in consumer, with things like ChatGPT. And think about the theme of this Breaking Analysis in the enterprise, AI in the enterprise cannot be ChatGPT. It cannot be error prone the way ChatGPT is. It has to be clean, reliable, governed, accurate. It's got to be ethical. It's got to be trusted. Okay, we're going to have Zeus Kerravala on the show next week and definitely want to get his take on private networks and how they're going to impact wifi. You know, will private networks cannibalize wifi? If not, why not? He wrote about this again on SiliconANGLE if you want more details, and we're going to unpack that on theCUBE this week. And finally, as always we'll be following the data flows to understand where and how telcos, cloud players, startups, software companies, disruptors, legacy companies, end customers, how are they going to make money from new data opportunities? 'Cause we often say in theCUBE, don't ever bet against data. All right, that's a wrap for today. Remember theCUBE is going to be on location at MWC 2023 next week. We got a great set. We're in the walkway in between halls four and five, right in Congress Square, stand CS-60. Look for us, we got a full schedule. If you got a great story or you have news, stop by. We're going to try to get you on the program. I'll be there with Lisa Martin, co-hosting, David Nicholson as well, and the entire CUBE crew, so don't forget to come by and see us. I want to thank Alex Myerson, who's on production and manages the podcast, and Ken Schiffman, as well, in our Boston studio. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE.com. He does some great editing. Thank you. All right, remember all these episodes they are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcasts. I publish each week on Wikibon.com and SiliconANGLE.com. All the video content is available on demand at theCUBE.net, or you can email me directly if you want to get in touch David.Vellante@SiliconANGLE.com or DM me @DVellante, or comment on our LinkedIn posts. And please do check out ETR.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at Mobile World Congress '23, MWC '23, or next time on Breaking Analysis. (bright music)