>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of Dell tech world 2022. My name is Dave Volante and I'm here in our cube studios in Massachusetts getting ready for the first in person DT w since 2019, you know, Charles Phillips, the CEO of Infor and former Oracle ex once set on the cube friends, don't let friends build data centers anymore. It's just not the best use of capital for most companies, unless you happen to be in the data center business like Sexter organizations wanna make hybrid connections to the cloud. They need a partner that knows how to build and manage world class data centers that are both efficient and resilient. And in this segment, we're gonna talk about the importance of hybrid strategies for organizations, how they're approaching hybrid and why a partner strategy is important to support the next decade of digital transformation initiatives. And with me are Randy Roland. Who's the COO of six Tara and Holland Barry, who is the field CTO for the company. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. >>Good to meet her. Thanks for having us. >>Hey, Randy, as a relatively new player, unlike a lot of data center operators, Cera, you're not shackled by decades of technical debt. Tell us more about the company. >>Yeah. So as you, uh, already discussed Ceras a data center company, and we're one of the few that can provide colocation globally. And so that allows our customers to scale, uh, across the globe, as our business scales, we operate in 28 markets. We have over 60 data centers and we continue to add more dots to the map based on customer demand. And the primary way we differentiate is that we've built a true global data center platform. And what do I mean by that is that we have a combination of 2300 customers, uh, enterprises, technology, service providers, government agencies, we're a leader in interconnection. Uh, we have a commitment to carry neutrality and to provide low latency access to all the different cloud platforms. And we've made major investments in developing our own technology in house. And this will come out. As we talk about hybrid cloud is to make our data centers easier to consume. Uh, we live in a cloud first world, and so we've got to be able to be responsive and be able to deliver capacity on demand and to allow our customer members to dynamically connect to each other so they can start to consume these valuable services. And so that's really what we're doing at Cera. >>You know, Randy, just a follow up is because when the cloud first came out, everybody said, oh, companies like, like yours, Dana data center operations are toast. And the exact opposite happened. It was like this rising tide lifted all boats. The, the business is, is booming. It's, uh, it's actually quite room, isn't it? >>Yeah, actually it's a good point. We actually lean into, uh, cloud consumption. I think, uh, if you remember, the cloud operates in four walls. And so when a company, um, actually starts to deploy and leverage more, they need a place to land their digital infrastructure hub, where they can make connections to all the different cloud solutions they're gonna consume. And they're using their own internal resources at the same time. And so the more that we adopt cloud, um, and lean into cloud, the more likely our customer gonna choose us. And back to your opening comment about, uh, the, the quote from the Oracle executive in, in my career, I've been in the data center business for a long time and it, it's definitely a generational thing. We have newer generation of it leaders when they think about their internal data center, their actual internal data center is ours. They're thinking about their own four walls sitting on their own property like they did historically. And so, uh, they view internal data centers as the contracts they have, uh, with six companies like six. >>Excellent. All right, Holland, let's bring you into the conversation. What are you seeing with, with hybrid cloud strategies? You, why are companies choosing hybrid? Give us some color there. >>Yeah, I think, you know, we, as a company sit in an interesting confluence of some workload movements, if you will. Um, so I think there's been, in some cases, an overcorrection in the public cloud, people thought that a cloud first strategy meant that you have to throw everything up in a public cloud. Uh, especially over the last couple years when we had, you know, the surprise of a large remote workforce. And as you mentioned at the top of the call, Dave, we also have folks with the shrinking appetite to own and operate their data centers, right? So the hybrid approach is a, um, a selective methodology to really look at the applications, uh, look at the strengths of each one of those venues, where you can run your applications and workloads, and really choosing the one that uses the strengths. And there's several, uh, drivers behind that. Uh, some of them are cost. Some of them are performance. Some of them might have to do a security or data sovereignty. Um, so you can really match those requirements and those business outcomes that you're looking to achieve, uh, and align them with that platform. That's that's best suited to serve it. >>So you mentioned a few of 'em, but I wanna sort of stay on that for a minute. Is it, is it, you know, egress cost, everybody talks about that, you know, latency proximity to the cloud. I mean, I think there's a lot of times, I think the ideal situation is you put your high performance, you know, transaction low latency stuff in one of your data centers. And, you know, a lot of the data is, is in the cloud that you might need access to. But is there other innovation, you know, talk a little bit more about the drivers that you're seeing with customers? >>Absolutely. We, I think, um, as it relates to data gravity and the potential relation to egress charges, that is a huge, uh, consideration, cuz there's a cost and a performance component to that. If you decide you want to take that data and move somewhere else, if it's in the public cloud, you're gonna pay some, uh, pretty large egres fees, but there's certainly other drivers, um, performance being another big one. Uh, if I've got a, a data lake or, or a big data analytics platform or maybe an AI platform that needs to live close to the data. Um, and especially if those workloads that are associated with crunching, the data are kind of high steady state, maybe even mission critical workloads that is certainly a workload profile. That's better suited to run within our four walls. You can have those CPU or GPU comput nodes sitting right next to those large data sets, operating with each other at land speed. Um, so in terms of the drivers behind, uh, making a, a venue change, if you will, I think cost is one of the biggest ones that we see and, and maybe performance and security following close after. >>So, so how are customers approaching hybrid? Can you paint a picture of kinda what that connection looks like and how, how they, you know, land on their strategies? >>Yeah, absolutely. So they're doing, uh, what I like to call a workload appropriateness, uh, exercise. And as they think about recalibrating where those workloads live, exactly what I said before, they're looking at the strengths of the platform and, uh, lining up those application profiles to live in, in the appropriate place. We have a unique advantage, uh, because of our interconnection profile and our adjacency to public cloud platforms, where if people want to have application tiers that may be sent on both sides of the fence, if you will, uh, we have super, super low latency connections. You can connect, you know, layer two, uh, maybe out to AWS, um, and, you know, have your VPC on one side, have, uh, you know, dedicated single tenant environments on our side and have those applications interact with each other. And then in a super low latency fashion, >>Hey, lemme just ask a follow up question on that. Because I remember the Y2K days, there was a, a lot of activity, a lot of spending and then CIOs wanted to look at their portfolio and, and rationalize that portfolio. When you talk about workload appropriateness, are you seeing a similar application rationalization exercise going on or is it just a Hey can spending, >>Uh, absolutely. We're seeing rationalization and I think what's happening is folks are getting a little more savvy about forecasting, the growth of their application, uh, the growth of the data associated with it, what the cost may be associated with needing to move them around to different venues. Um, and so we're, we're definitely seeing people look at those numbers and make decisions about workload placement based on that analytics and, and kind of knowledge of what it means down the road and also where the data might need to live locally too. We're seeing people, uh, being a little more cognizant geographically around data where it lives and how that relates to where the computer associated with that data is. >>Yeah. Hey Randy, can you tell us a little bit more from a business perspective about the Dell partnership? How did that come about, you know, who does, what, what are the swim lanes overlaps? Maybe you can help us understand that. >>Yeah, so we're very excited about, uh, our Dell partnership, as you can imagine, with as many customers and many data centers, as we've got deployed, we have Dell, uh, located it in a large percentage of our customer environments. And so it's just natural that we work together to figure out how we can continue to meet, uh, our customer's needs. And so the core idea that I'm excited about around Dell is that Dell has an excellent technology platform in all fronts, they've got great compute and storage and all types of software solutions. And what we want to do is help them make their platform more on demand. And so what do I mean by that? If you think about the historical, uh, time, it takes to deploy a traditional colo environment from the time you spec the cage, do you ship the equipment, you install the network, you rack and stack the equipment, unload the cloud stack. >>It takes weeks to months to deploy. And so what we're doing is working very closely with Dell to look at our existing customers and new prospects that are interested in their platform and how can we pre-provision that capacity in, in the data center make it so it's already plugged into the data center already is powered up. It's connected to the network and a customer can purchase it on demand. And so the idea behind this is how can we give our customers all the benefits of Kolo, which is what, uh, Holland was talking about a minute ago, but deliver that platform at the speed of cloud. And that's really the essence of the partnership we have with Dell. Uh, we think it could be explosive. Uh, we think there's a lot of opportunity, not only, uh, for us, but also for Dell as they continue to retain their customers and their customers go through tech refresh cycles, if they can have on demand technology that they're already familiar with, they can get the benefits that you get from co-location at the speed of cloud. And that that's what our, the, the basis of our, our relationship. >>Yeah. Thank you. So Holland, I mean, Randy was saying one of the pillars of Dell tech world this year is the whole as a service thrust. And, you know, essentially what it is, my, my viewpoint is Dell's building out its own cloud. That's, you know, it's, it's its aspiration I think, is to connect on-prem to, through hybrid, to public clouds across clouds, out to the edge extract that all that complexity and you guys would be a key part of that from a, from a CTO's perspective, that's a different mindset. I mean, it changes the way we manage, think about procure, you know, spend, uh, um, and, and maybe that even the technical configurations of, of how we deliver and consume it, you give us some thoughts on that. >>Absolutely. Look, I think what we're doing is we're laying the foundation for a truly hybrid experience. Um, Randy mentioned, uh, us going through great lengths with our technology partners like Dell and make the data center consumable in an automated fashion. And so as we increasingly move into technologies like containers and using coordinators managers like Kubernetes, we really now have the ability to make a true hybrid experience. And if you think about the experience of deploying, you know, in a data center, whether it's your own or a co like ours, that was, you know, a 60 to 90 day conversation to, to get that infrastructure spun up. And so now if you can consume public cloud resources, just like we've been used to doing where you can swipe a card and get access to infrastructure in a matter of minutes or hours have the same experience with us, we've kind of closed that last mile of infrastructure delivery. And the other neat thing about this is, uh, if you have a cloud first mandate, if some of those workloads are running a ter data center, uh, we check all those same boxes, right? Uh, we, we have infrastructure that sits off X. We have a global platform. Uh, we have, you know, highly automated environment. So you can really now start extracting yourself a little bit from the infrastructure and start focusing on the important stuff, which the applications that sit on top. >>So from a security standpoint, you have a similar, you know, the cloud guys talk about the shared responsibility model. Is that a similar model that, that you guys have? Can you describe that? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's very analogous to this shared responsibility model and, and public cloud. We give a little bit more control to our customers, like things like, you know, dictate maintenance windows. Um, we give a little bit more control in terms of access to the infrastructure. Uh, it's one of the reasons that organizations like running infrastructure with us is because we can hand off control to these certain things that the lower levels of the infrastructure stack versus that higher level of abstraction that happens with public cloud. >>And what, what kind of skills are you after, uh, these days? Is it people that can squeeze, you know, more power and, you know, more efficient cooling, uh, is it infrastructure management? You mentioned Kubernetes before. What, what matters to a company like yours from a skill standpoint? >>Yeah. And to terms of our staff, it is at the lower, uh, levels of the stack, if you will. So maybe going, you know, up to, uh, layer two or three, if we think about the OSI model. So certainly power engineering, cooling engineering, the stuff that physically runs our, our data center, that's our meat and potatoes. That's important to us, but as you consider our digital platform, um, certainly the networking, uh, know how knowledge of the entire stack, knowing how things are architected, understanding how cloud works, how understanding how cloud connectivity works. These are all super, super important skill sets. So we span the spectrum a bit. Um, but it's less on the upper ends of it, you know, kind of going up to layer seven, >>Although I'd imagine that data center automation is obviously a big part of your, your IP, right. Is that something that you have guys bring to the table? Yes. >>Yeah, it's actually one of our key innovations is around how we've architected our software platform, how we do our automation, uh, how we run our network. Uh, we we've, uh, built a, a super, super innovative SDN fabric that powers all of our Metro regions that enables the delivery, the infrastructure that hangs off of it. Um, so yeah, a huge percentage of our I P is around that software innovation and, uh, networking automation. >>Great. Randy, I wonder if you could close it out for us. Uh, I'd love your thoughts on where you'd like to see the Dell partnership go and any other, you know, information you'd like to leave the audience with. >>Yeah. I think you've asked a couple questions about the perspective from a CTO and the way that we want to build our solutions is if you are a CTO or if you're a cloud architect, what we are trying to build is a set of Legos to allow you to assemble your ultimate hybrid it solution to use a combination of traditional colocation, where you have equipment that you own, that you manage on demand, bare metal from great partnerships, like where we have with Dell, that can augment what you have in colo have access to a rich ecosystem of technology providers that sit in the same data center markets so that you can start to, to actually augment your it architecture with a lot of our, um, uh, solution providers that sit within our, our, our markets access to cloud OnRamp. So you get low latency access to public cloud to start to leverage some of the technologies they have, and also have the ability to switch, right? If you start with one cloud cloud provider, and at some point you find something more cost efficient, or a little bit more architecturally, uh, built that we can, uh, uh, facilitate that switch. And then also to have connectivity to all the different network carriers that we have. And so, and, and also to do it globally, right? And so our mission is to give the CTO and the cloud architect, the ultimate Legos, uh, to build their custom solution, it's highly, um, cost effective and meets all the technology requirements. >>Yeah. Hedging that risk and having exit strategies, I think is huge. Every, every customer needs to think about that, uh, before they, they dive into the cloud. Okay, guys, we gotta leave it there. Thanks so much for coming in the cube. Great discussion. >>Thank you. Thanks for having us. >>And thank you for watching our ongoing coverage of Dell technologies, world 2022, the in-person live version where we insert great deep dive interviews like this one that focus on key customer topics. Keep it right there. You're watching the cube.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Hello Rod, we are here live in Las Vegas where Amazon Web Services' AWS re:Invent 2018. It's our sixth year covering re:Invent. We've been there from the beginning, as a customer using EC2 when it first launched in 2006, one of my first start-ups. What a scene it is here. Everyone in the industry is here full on, it's a Super Bowl of technology, Amazon is leading in the cloud game, and we're breaking it down for you in theCUBE. Our next guest is Holland Barry, Senior Vice President in Cybersecurity for Cyxtera, a hot company. Welcome to theCube, thanks for joining me. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, it's great to have a senior people, start-ups, technical people on theCube. Kind of extracting, kind of squint through the volume of data that's being announced here at the show. Huge set of announcements already out the door. More coming. I'm expecting to hear a big connectivity announcement at 11:30 involving satellite and remote coverage for IoT devices, VM containers, micro VMs, all this massive amount of tech. Putting it into reality is critical. This is what customers want to do, they want to lower their costs, they want more performance, lower cost, more capability. Ushering in a true programing model for DevOps. How do you guys fit here? What's your story? Why are you here? What's the value proposition? >> So we're really focused, especially at this show around the DevOps community, and enabling agility for those folks. Ten years ago, the word DevOps and the term DevOps came to life, and there was this tug-o-war going on between the development teams and the operations team. Where development team wanting to move fast, and have all the agility. And the operations team wanted to have stability, and then all these things. They came together in a matrimony, and 10 years later we're highly automated, everything looks great from a DevOpps perspective, but what we're seeing now is security, being a bit of a speed bump. They're having a hard time catching up with that. That's our focus on the show is unleashing the DevOps folks >> and letting security move at the speed of DevOps. >> Lets drill down on security. Obvious cyber security is a global issue. It's also a national security issue in the United States, but other countries too. It's a global policy thing. There's tech involved, right? Cyber warfare all those, we hear about the news. But for a basic enterprise, the perimeter's no longer there with cloud. You got to think differently around how you're going to secure things. Amazon is now seeing security, not a blocker. Used to be no cloud implementation, it's not secure at all. Now you're hearing people saying, it's actually pretty secure, but there's more things going on keep raising the bar on capabilities that are needed. Could you share your expert opinion on, state of security of the cloud. What are the key areas? Where are they kind of leveled out? What's the baseline now? How acceptable is that? And what are the gaps, what are people working on? >> I think we're seeing a lot more security components, move into that infrastructure as code conversations. Amazon is fantastic about launching stacks, via cloud formation template, or maybe using TerraForm And now we're seeing the need for security components to move into that as an extension, of that infrastructure type deployment. That's another are of deep focus for us. >> Is there a tech trend that's a tail win for this? Is there anything helping? Or is there more headwins then tailwins? What's the big focus? >> I think one of the big trends we're seeing, and we're getting a lot of analyst conformations on this trend too is, the whole thing around software to find perimeters. So a new approach to describing access, for the users, kind of getting away from the VPN model, where you have a central concentration entry point. And then having the traverse complicated, to maintain back haul lines right? We're seeing software define perimeter, allow users and DevOps professionals access multiple environments simultaneously, without the need of these more archaic architectures if you will. >> Now the way it works braided to VP is absolutely great. Very secure malware transmission to the inpoint. >> Absolutely, I mean you think about the old style of connectivity, and you've got a user, that has nearly unfettered access wants that VPN connection isn't created. They have way more access, they have way more ability to spread malware laterally, with a VPN connection. Software to find perimeter, greatly reduces that attack surface, by giving those users only access to those items, within the perpend infrastructure, that they're vetted to have access to, and nothing more. >> So hold on, I got to ask you a question around cloud architects, the hottest area that we're seeing from an educational, learning, progressionary, knowledge seeking area, what is a cloud architect? And what are the things that make up, how would you describe and ideal cloud architecture? So I'm enterprise, I realize I've got to straighten my data center down, I'm using the cloud, lot of great things about the cloud, lot of great things about having something around perimeters of low latency. Now we've got IOT Edge, I'm going to want to power that with power, and then have connectivity now, that's over the top. How do I architect this? 'Cause data is going to live there, human computes can move around from Amazon, that's the direction that they're going. How do I lay it all out? What's your view on Cloud architect these days, and how they should be thinking? >> Well the Cloud architect role I think has evolved a lot, So start off with right? It's no longer just being an infrastructure person, you've got to be sort of an expert on security, some of an expert on networking, and a lot of storage all these other components. I think it's different, the organization, I think there's a series of best practices. I think AWS does a fantastic job of delivering templatized best practices to folks who are looking to adopt a cloud architecture. I think that's a great guide post to go by. Is the recommendations. >> How about staffing? What are you seeing in the makeup of the kind of, you know, I don't want to sound....Ninja or pirate, or whatever metaphor you want to use. You see kind of a new bread of, DevOps engineering, >> Absolutely. >> Mixed with app developer emerging. >> Yeah I think you got it, I think that matrimony that happened between the develop and the operations team has continued to evolve, and we're seeing this new kind of combined specialty. Where you've got great programming chopped, You're a python or JavaScript ninja, and you also know a lot more about the infrastructure than traditionally, your development role would of necessitated in the past. >> What are the top security conversations are you having in a DevOps environment, because there's some really great DevOps shops, and DevOps thinking in a lot of companies. And then you've got the people who're now learning DevOps they're kind of getting cloud native. They see Kubernetes around the corner. They see.. they put containers around things. I could keep my work loads on premises. Okay I got some cloud. What is some of the thinking around that? What's your view on all this? >> So I think access is a big piece, I think, you know developers needing to get to heterogeneous set of hybrid environments. They might have some legacy, or new stuff on prem. They might have a couple of clouds they're working with, how do you have a single unified policy contract that talks about how it's users can interact with it. And we're also hearing a lot about DevSecOps to moving that detection of vulnerabilities, and code imperfections earlier on in that development cycle. And we're enabling a big compliment to that, we're not DevSecOps ourselves, but we're involved in that conversation from an access perspective. >> Can't you explain what you guys do I want to get that out there because board. What do you guys actually do? How do you make money? What's your business model? What's the product? >> Yeah, so Cyxtera is a cyber security company, that also happens to have a colocation data center footprint in 29 markets. We've got 50+ data centers. We're here focused on, once of our access products called Appgte STP Appgate is a secure access solution, that was really built with developers in mind, that allows that simultaneous secure access, to a multitude of environments. So if you're a native U.S customer, and you've got 20 or 30 accounts, we can seamlessly allow that connectivity with a very robust policy structure, to allow all those developers, those users, to interact with those environments, without having to do that VPN switching that we discussed earlier. A real real clean in sophisticated way to connect your users into your internal and sensitive infrastructure. >> And what're the...who's the buyer of the product? And why are they using you guys? >> It's typically going to be the security team, sometime we'll have the networking in the cloud, infrastructure teams involved in the conversations, but this is a security product. This is secured access product. And this is really a evolution, of what people are using for the VPN, and jumpboxes and things like that for these days. >> How dead is the VP if you had to put it on a scale? One being on life support, 10 being still state of the art. I mean VP is still around, people are using VPNs a lot. >> Totally. >> There's a role for VPNs. Is it a rip and replace? Or is it more of a functional, some spots VPNs are great, some spots they're not. What's the role of VPN? >> We're seeing them, and I think Gartner has a statistic, that 60% of VPNs will be dead by 2021, or something like that. We're seeing that evolution occur. Looking simple environment, A VPN might be a really appropriate approach. But when you have cloud workloads everywhere, you got on premise data, you've got your users everywhere. It simply can't keep up. That's really the problem space part of it. >> Where's the action for security in terms of good developing trends? Is it at the network layer? Is it the virtualization layer? The identity layer? Where are you seeing, security really advancing and excelling with cloud? What specifically, where's the action happening? >> I think it's at all airs. I mean, we've seen the identity access management, identity provider market explode. We're seeing great new technologies around, container security, virtual machine security. I can't pick any one category, I just wouldn't. I would argue though, that this access category in the software to find perimeter trend, is something. We're tuned into it obviously, maybe a little more than most. But we are seeing a huge uptake. >> Well what's the alternative? I mean most IT guys, obviously they're scared. I mean they're not... They're kind of running scared. They've been doing perimeter based security for years. Firewalls, routers, all classic all lock down. Now in comes API economy, and now they're like, "Okay." I got to figure out, buy them everything in the planet to figure it out. What are they doing now? What's state of the art for people who are moving off the perimeter completely? >> I think the adoption of, more cloud native controls. A lot folks right now, are very familiar with traditional firewall vendor, and they'll tend to take that, and implement a software version of that hardware box up in the cloud. And we're not arguing that, you need to get away from something, like a next generation firewall. This traffic exception is does a lot of things, that our solution specifically doesn't do on a lot of the SDP soluntions don't. Taking that layer approach, and seeking out the solutions that are, that are cloud native. Forcing an uptech on that, and it's really changing the way people think about the architecture in their environments too. We're familiar with one thing from OnFarm We try to shoehorn that, that methodology in the cloud >> So single sign on is critical >> SSO is critical, we're seeing a huge check up on that. Absolutely. >> How do I handle the sprawl of new environments, with IOT Edgefor instance, you'll see a lot more things connect in. How do you do that? Is it manual, was there any animation or machine learning? How are you guys bringing that to scale? Because that's a big challenge we hear a lot. >> Absolutely. One of the things we're doing, at Cyxtera, is allowing you to templatize what secured access should look like for these new environments. So just like you're deploying that infrastructure as code, we're just a secured access piece of that. All the connectivity has already been described, by the security team. So back to the comment about DevOps Where operations team needing to move fast. Thinking that would deploy a brand new environment, with that access me and you >> So you're splitting up the auto building, you're standing it up quickly. >> Yeah >> All built in a preconfigured policy just goes out. >> Absolutely. Data dog, one of our reg AWS customers a great example of someone who is highly automated everything. They don't even touch our UI They use APIs for everything. They've codeified all the elements of our platform, and so when they spin up a new environment, you know they'll actually check out, a configuration from their, whatever, get hub get lab they're using. And inject that into the spin up of the new environment. Super sophisticated, high level of automation. Really at the end of the day, what's it helping them do? Why are we doing any of this? Why are we doing DevOps? We can move faster to the live product and services, quicker to our customers. >> So you guys are basically DevOps version of security, you're instrumenting everything DevO.. Data Ghost is a great example. They're instrumenting every, all the application areas. You guys are taking the sim.... Devops approach to security. Is that your approach? >> DevOps approach to security and user access, yeah, very much so. >> And what's the big conversation you're having here, at reInvent? Obviously a lot going on, what's most exciting for you here? Every event. >> I think it's everything that we just talked about, we're hearing people finally get ready for this, message you know, we're practitioners and users of this platform ourselves, and the SDP speck. I use it everyday. I flip up my laptop in the morning, I get instantly connected from anywhere to seven and 10, what we call sites right? We're familiar with the power, we're leveraging the power internally. Now seeing other people come over, what people like Data Dog and Voicebase or tour AWS clients, seeing what they've done, seeing their story, and having them say, "Hey how did they do that, we want to do that too." >> And how 'about a global scale, you guys are agnostic on geography, so they play into it. >> Completely neutral to the underlying infrastructure, the geography our solution acts the same. It doesn't matter public, private, cloud, bare metal, it's a unified policy framework that allows you to, to whatever level of granularity you want. Just grab access from the user, even including, ingredient from a third party system. For instance, I may have a developer that's assigned to a task, or a story, or an epic. Inside a Jira project for instance. Popular development tool. I can dictate, his or her access, to the infrastructure. And the projects are working on, based on an API called the Jira saying, "Okay this person has access to these things." Now I have a conditional response to, should someone have access to this resource. It's well, it depends, are they working on this project? Are they in the office? Is there a machine patched? Who are they and the identity provider? All these things should feed in to.. >> And they're automated too. They're automating in? >> This is all completely automated, and all these checks that I just described, are actually done our system, preauthentication. So you're vetted first, and then you're handed an access passport, we call Live Entitlement. And that gets you to the infrastructure, and only the infrastructure and applications you're vetted to do. Based on that evaluation that happened preautentication >> How agile are you guys when new things have to change? There's a security threat, or something on the landscape or surface area changes. How do you guys respond to it from aj Jilly standpoint? >> Yeah so, our system can take hints VN and API as well, so if you have a, you know, a threat system or something giving you signals that something might be going on. You could come into our system for instance, and revoke everyone's accces, you could prompt someone, maybe for a step up authentication, to make the reprove who they are, they got a one time password. So lot of options. We want to take hints from third party systems, we're designed that way. We can adjust, network access and program the network, based on other things that are happening. >> Final question before we wrap up here. Let get a plug in for the company. How old is the company? How many people... So how about some of your customers? Give the plug for Cyxtera. >> 1500 employees, I think I mentioned, 50+ data centers across 29 markets, hundred and hundreds of customers on the security access product that I talk about. You know, many thousands of customers in our data center. >> So business is good? >> Business is good. Yeah. In terms of like focus areas for next year, we're all in on DevOps, we're investing heavily in this area. Expect to hear more about a richer API set. More prebundled integrations, and also a bigger focus on containers. >> Well I think you guys are a great example of, success with using cloud. Lot more work to do. >> Yep. >> I mean you've got, Global, you've got all kinds of new landscapes changes. Final question, What's the one problem you saw, summarize it in a sound bite, why do people buy Cyxtera? Why do they use you? >> For network platform access for your user with a single security contract. I can't stress that. It's a huge competitive differentiation, versus some of the web application proxys that are out there. I invite everyone to dig into the details about what we provide. You can go to appgateforaws.com if you want to test dive the product. Get a feel for the admin UI, the client setup all that stuff. It's really simple and I give ya real good taste. And please come by the booth and see a demo as well. >> Tell th em Johnathan, you get a 10% discount. Only kidding. Hey, thanks for sharing your insight on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> We're here at reInvent, lot of action happening. Obviously a crowd of great people. Lot of great networking, but more importantly than industry continues to power forward, with cloud, on premise, in the world. It's cute bringing all the action her in Las Vegas. We'll be back with more after this short break.

>> Announcer: From downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering RSA North America 2018. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the RSA conference in San Francisco 40,000 plus people talking about security, gets bigger and bigger every year. Soon it's going to eclipse Oracle Open World and Sales Force to be the biggest conference in all of San Francisco. But we've got somebody who's been coming here he said for 16 years, Ricardo Villidiego, the EDP and GM Security and Fraud for Cyxtera. Did I get that right, Cyxtera? >> Cyxtera. >> Jeff: Cyxtera Technologies, great to see you. >> Thank you Jeff, it's glad to be here. >> So you said you've been coming here for 16 years. How has it changed? >> Yeah, that's exactly right. You know it's becoming bigger, and bigger, and bigger I believe this is a representation of the size of the prowling out there. >> But are we getting better at it, or is it just the tax service is getting better? Why are there so many, why is it getting bigger and bigger? Are we going to get this thing solved or? >> I think it is that combination within we have the unique solution that is going to help significantly organizations to get better in the security landscape I think the issue that we have is there's just so many now use in general and I think that now is a representation of the disconnection that exists between the way technologies are deploying security and the way technologies are consuming IT. I think IT is completely, has a evolved significantly and is completely hybrid today and organizations are continuing to deploy security in a way like if we were in the 90s. >> Right. >> And that's the biggest connection that exists between the attacks and the protection. >> But in the 90s we still like, or you can correct me, and we can actually build some big brick walls and a moat and a couple crocodiles and we can keep the bad guys out. That's not the way anymore. >> It is not a way. And look, I believe we're up there every protection creates a reaction on the adversary. And that is absolutely true in security and it is absolutely true in the fraud landscape. Every protection measure will push the adversary to innovate and that innovation is what, for good and for bad, has created this big market which we can't complain. >> Right, right. So for folks that aren't familiar with Cyxtera give them the quick update on what you guys are all about. >> So see, I think Cyxtera is here to conquer the cyber security space. I think what we did is we put together technologies from the companies that we acquire. >> Right. >> With a combination of the call center facilities that we also acquired from Centurylink to build this vision of the secure infrastructure company and what we're launching here at the RSA conference 2018 is AppGate 4.0 which is the flagship offering around secure access. Secure access is that anchor up on which organizations can deploy a secure way to enable their workforce and their party relationships to get access the critical assets within the network in a secure way. >> Okay, and you said 4.0 so that implies that there was a three and a two and probably a one. >> Actually you're right. >> So what are some of the new things in 4.0? >> Well, it's great it gives it an evolution of the current platform we lounge what we call life entitlements which is an innovative concept upon which we can dynamically adjust the permitter of an an end point. And the user that is behind that end point. I think, you know, a permitter that's today doesn't exist as they were in the 90s. >> Right, right. >> That concept of a unique permitter that is protected by the firewall that is implemented by Enact Technology doesn't exist anymore. >> Right. >> Today is about agility, today is about mobility, today is about enabling the end user to securely access their... >> Their applications, >> The inevitable actions, >> They may need, right. >> And what AppGate does is exactly that. Is to identify what the security processor of the end point and the user behind the end point and deploy a security of one that's unique to the specific conditions of an end point and the user behind that end point when they're trying to access critical assets within the network. >> Okay, so if I heard you right, so instead of just a traditional wall it's a combination of identity, >> Ricardo: It's identity. >> The end point how their access is, and then the context within the application. >> That's exactly right. >> Oh, awesome so that's very significant change than probably when you started out years ago. >> Absolutely, and look Jeff, I think you know to some extent the way enterprises are deploying security is delusional. And I say that because there is a reality and it looks like we're ignoring ignoring the reality but the reality is the way organizations are consuming IT is totally different than what it was in the 90s and the early 2000s. >> Right. >> The way organizations are deploying security today doesn't match with the way they're consuming IT today. That's where AppGate SDP can breach that gap and enable organizations to deploy security strategies that match with the reality of IT obstacles today. >> Right. If they don't get it, they better get it quick 'cause else not, you know we see them in the Wall Street Journal tomorrow morning and that's not a happy place to be. >> Absolutely not, absolute not and we're trying to help them to stay aware of that. >> Right. Alright, Ricardo we'll have to leave it there we're crammed for time but thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. >> Alright Jeff, thank you very much I love to be here. >> Alright. He's Ricardo I'm Jeff you're watching theCUBE from RSAC 2018 San Francisco. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back to AWS re:Invent 2017. I am Lisa Martin with theCUBE, our day two of continuing coverage of this event that has attracted 44,000 people. Keith Townsend is my cohost, and we are very excited to welcome to theCUBE family Simon West, the CMO of Cyxtera. Welcome, Simon. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> Cyxtera, a six-month-old company. Tell us about it, what do you guys do? >> Sure, so as you said we are just six months old. It feels longer than that now, born at the intersection of five simultaneous acquisitions. One part of that was the acquisition of 57 data centers and a global co-location business that was formerly owned and operated by Century Link. Into that we've added the security and analytics capabilities of four modern startup software companies, and the vision is to provide a secure infrastructure solution both within our data centers, but interestingly even though I've got 57 data centers around the world, I want to be location agnostic. We recognize that today's enterprises are running multi-clouds, running hybrid environments, so we extend our security solutions on prem and into public clouds which is why we are here at AWS re:Invent. >> Fantastic. >> One of the big challenges that we hear from the enterprise perspective, hybrid IT is that the control that we have internally are very different from the controls that exist in AWS. How do you guys help even that out? >> You are exactly right, we would go so far as to gently suggest that the core method by which we protect access to infrastructure and applications which is still predicated on a physical perimeter is just fundamentally flawed in a 2017 world where your applications are everywhere, your users are everywhere connecting on a myriad of devices. You can't build a wall around that which doesn't exist. You have also obviously, as you say, you've got that problem of hydrogenous platforms, each with their own method of control. Our flagship product in that area is a product called AppGate SDP. SDP stands for software defined perimeter which is an emerging specification born out of the US government's disarm. Now a number of companies are offering software defined perimeter solutions. The basic premise that we hold is that security should be user centric rather than IP centric. A firewall is still predicated on granting access from one IP block to another IP block. The VPN may capture who is coming in, but once you are in, we give you basically unfettered access to flat corporate internal networks and we track you as an IP address rather than as a user. We think we should get more user centric. The user should be at the center of our policy. We think it should be more like cloud in the way we run security so rather than these hardware-based static central chokepoints, we think security should be real-time, it should be adaptive and intelligent, and it should be as agile as the cloud. You build cloud applications that are capable of spawning multiple copies of themselves, auto scaling up and down, moving from availability zone to availability zone yet our typical network security posture is still highly static. When you have some of the high profile attacks that we have seen over the last few months, our ability to change policy, immediately we recognize a problem. A particular operating system, apps in a particular service pack, is incredibly out of step with how agile the rest of our IT is. So more like cloud in terms of the way it operates, and finally we think, and so does the software defined perimeter spec, we think that access needs to be thought of as conditional rather than just a X, Y, yes or no. Jim has access to sensitive financial systems should be dependent on what operating system Jim is using whether Jim is on a coffee shop Wi-Fi network or on a structured corporate network, the time of day, the day of week, our overall security posture. The way AppGate works is when a user tries to access a system, the policy can ingest any one of these different conditional items. It can interrogate the device the user is using for the right software revisions. You can look at environmental variables. It can even look at internal business systems and check anything it can get to via an API, and only if those conditions are met will it provide access to a specific system, and then it can monitor that real time, so if your context changes, you move from a trusted network to an untested network, we can alter access. We can prime for a one time multifactor authentication or take any other steps the user wants. We offer that in cloud, on premise, integrated into our data centers to provide one central policy mechanism no matter what platform you are running on. In the case of AWS, we integrate with features like security groups, like AMI machine tagging, so you can build policy natively out of those Amazon features as well. >> Talk about that transition to this user based approach. I would imagine that a user can migrate their legacy systems into one of your 56, 57 data centers, and then as they start to expand out to the cloud, they have to change their operating model from they may migrate their traditional big firewall into your data center. What does that migration process look like? Is that an application by application spec, network by network? How do I transition? >> You know, it really varies. It feels a lot like I'm an old cloud guy, so it feels a lot like cloud did in the late 00s, in 2008, 2009. We think the software defined perimeter is going to have that big of an impact, a cloudlike impact on network and application security, but the way in which organizations will choose to implement it is going to vary. One of the things we did very early on was to integrate AppGate as a service into the data centers. If you think about co-location environments, when you bring new gear into a data center, you racket and stack it, the very next thing you do after that is drag a VPN back to the corporate office so you can access it remotely, which we would respectfully suggest is not necessarily the best way to do it in 2017 out of the chute. We've then integrated AppGate so organizations can just avail themselves of that as a service, and instantly have a kind of easy on-ramp. One of the big areas we see, and we've seen with customers here at re:Invent is customers who are moving workloads to cloud, and want to make sure that they can have that same sense of fine-grained access control common to those on premises and off premises environments, whether that's at migration or that's just an extension of an app into cloud environments, so it's kind of all over the place. >> Sorry Simon, what differentiates Cyxtera's approach to the software defined perimeter from your competitors? >> A couple of things, it's extremely robust in terms of one, being able to run in multiple environments, so a native AWS version, versions that run natively in other public cloud environments. Obviously we think the ability to offer it deeply integrated into the data centers is important. It's also capable of granting access to more than just web applications. You've got some solutions out there that are really web proxies and that are built for SAS apps and born on the cloud apps. This is more of a fundamental network platform by which you can gain access to any system or application you choose, and finally was introduced the concept of what we call scriptable entitlements which is the ability to interrogate third-party systems via API, and bring back those results as part of the building policy. An example there is we've got service provider customers who are running large multitenant environments. You then have a technical support organization who needs to support a huge multi thousands of servers environment with multiple customers running in multiple VLANs and typically the way you have to do that is a jam box in the middle and then giving these technical support folks access to that entire backend management network which is a security risk. With AppGate, you can actually integrate into a ticketing system and when John in support asks for access to a customer database server, at runtime, we can find out whether there is a trouble ticket open on that box assigned to that rep, and only then will we grant access. We don't grant level network access. We grant access to that specific application. We call it a segment of one, secure and cryptic connection between the user's device and the application or the applications they have access to but to nothing else. Everything else on the network is literally dark. It cannot be port scanned. It doesn't show up at all, so it's a much narrower sense of control, a much narrower sense of access, and again it's dynamic. If that trouble ticket that shut off, the access goes away automatically. We think the integration into business systems is a critical piece of the puzzle and an area where I think we have innovated with AppGate. >> Let's talk about security in depth. Obviously you guys are putting the software security perimeter around the data center, what we would classify as the data center which is kind of disappearing in a sense, and the edge. You talked about end-user protection. Where do you guys pickup and drop off when it comes to MDM, mobile device management, which is much more important now with mobile, and then laptops, desktops, et cetera, and you mentioned third parties, pieces of data center equipment that's not in your data center, like a wind farm. >> Sure, so you are right. We are absolutely moving to the edge. I think we continue to think that the data center will be as important as it ever was. The more cloud we have, the more data centers it needs to run in. The more public cloud we have the more people want to move some of their machines that might have historically run on prem to cloud data centers with low latency direct connect to public cloud environments. If you look at our data center footprint with regard to the edge, we are not just in the major markets, although in major metropolitan markets I've got half a dozen data centers all linked together, but I'm also in markets started across the country, so I've got half a dozen in New York and New Jersey, half a dozen in DC, half a dozen in the Bay Area, but I'm in Tampa, I'm in Columbus Ohio, I'm in Dallas, I'm in Denver, and so that distribution becomes particularly important as more customers move data to the edge. From a security perspective, again, we think of that data center as the nexus of enterprise at IT and the cloud. The data center is where our conversation about security in terms of access control starts. It's a physical security message of biometrics, and ID checks, and so forth, but there, we think is the missing piece of the puzzle. The principal point of ingress and egress into a data center today is not to the front door, the back door, or the loading dock. It's the massively clustered multicarrier network core, so if you are not providing some level of access control in and out of the network, I'd offer you are not providing a truly secure infrastructure solution. We start there. We are focused mainly at this point with AppGate at controlling the conversation between the user device and the system applications themselves. One of our other acquisitions, a company called Cat Bird has done some innovative work in terms of east/west segmentation in virtual environments, which is notoriously difficult otherwise to see, to stop the spread of how machines can talk to each other in a large virtualized forms as well, and so it's the infrastructure where we principally focus. >> Where are we, or maybe where are you guys in this revolution of information security? Are we at the forefront of massive change? What is Cyxtera's view on that? >> I think we are at the beginnings of a revolution that's about 20 years late. If you can kind of carbon date year zero of modern IT at around 1996, which is the advent of the Internet as a commercial and consumer force, that was the revolution for enterprise IT. That was the moment that we had to move IT outside the four walls of the machine room on the corporate campus. Prior to that, the applications all ran on big beige boxes in one room. The users were largely tethered to them by smaller beige boxes in other rooms, and the notion of perimeter security worked. It was a valid construct. As soon as enterprises had to start thinking about an increasingly global user base, as soon as users started to connect from all over the place, the concept of this perimeter goes away. Over the last 20 years, you've seen revolution after revolution and the way in which we design, provision, deploy, manage and operate our business applications, our development frameworks, and our infrastructure. We've revolutionized for availability. We've revolutionized agility. We've turned IT into a real-time API driven motion, and we've revolutionized for scalability with platforms like AWS just industrializing this real time IT on a global scale, and if you took a systems administrator from '96, and you showed them IT today, I think you have some explaining to do. If you took a security administrator from 1996 and showed him 2017, I think the construct would be familiar. We are still hardware driven in a software defined world. We are still assuming that access is static, that it's never changing, that it's predicated on the users being someplace, the applications being another, and again, in a world of real time IT, a world in which our underlying application footprint changes without any human intervention whatsoever, and I think you see with WannaCry, with NotPetya, with all of these attacks, the commonalities that they have in the terms of the reason they were so devastating is one, they take advantage of lateral spread. They take advantage of riding an authorized access into a corporate network where port scans show up 10,000s of ports where you can rattle the handles, break the locks, and spread like wildfire, and two, in the case of something like WannaCry, days after we realized what the problem was, we were unable to simply alter as an institution, as an industry, or as an enterprise access policy at the press of a button until we could get things patched. We had to sit, and wait, and watch the fires continue to burn, so it's a question of security being insufficiently agile, insufficiently automated and adaptive, and insufficiently software driven. We think that is just starting. I think on the SDP side, we've noticed in the last six months the conversation changing. We've noticed customers who now have SDP mandates internally who are seriously starting to evaluate these technologies. >> Wow, it sounds like Cyxtera is at the beginning of being potentially a great leader in this security revolution. We wish you, Simon, and the entire company the best of luck. We thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE, and we look forward to hearing great things from you guys down the road. >> Much appreciated, thank you both. >> Absolutely, for my cohost, Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You are watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2017. Stick around guys, we will be right back.

(upbeat music) >> The cloud is evolving. You know, it's no longer a set of remote services somewhere off in the cloud, in the distance. It's expanding. It's moving to on-prem. On-prem workloads are connecting to the cloud. They're spanning clouds in a way that hides the plumbing and simplifies deployment, management, security, and governance. So hybrid multicloud is the next big thing in infrastructure, and at the recent Nutanix .NEXT conference, we got a major dose of that theme, and with me to talk about what we heard at that event, what we learned, why it matters, and what it means to customers are Monica Kumar, who's the senior vice president of marketing and cloud go-to-market at Nutanix, and Tarkan Maner, who's the chief commercial officer at Nutanix. Guys, great to see you again. Welcome to the theCUBE. >> Great to be back here. >> Great to see you, Dave. >> Okay, so you just completed another .NEXT. As an analyst, I like to evaluate the messaging at an event like this, drill into the technical details to try to understand if you're actually investing in the things that you're promoting in your keynotes, and then talk to customers to see how real it is. So with that as a warning, you guys are all in on hybrid multicloud, and I have my takeaways that I'd be happy to share, but, Tarkan, what were your impressions, coming out of the event? >> Look, you had a great entry. Our goal, as Monica is going to outline, too, cloud is not a destination. It's an operating model. Our customers are basically using cloud as a business model, as an operating model. It's not just a bunch of techno mumbo-jumbo, as, kind of, you outlined. We want to make sure we make cloud invisible to the customer so they can focus on what they need to focus on as a business. So as part of that, we want to make sure the workloads, the apps, they can run anywhere the way the customer wants. So in that context, you know, our entire story was bringing customer workloads, use-cases, partner ecosystem with ISVs and cloud providers and service providers and ISPs we're working with like Citrix on end user computing, like Red Hat on cloud native, and also bringing the right products, both in terms of infrastructure capability and management capability for both operators and application developers. So bringing all these pieces together and make it simple for the customer to use the cloud as an operating model. That was the biggest goal here. >> Great, thank you. Monica, anything you'd add in terms of your takeaways? >> Well, I think Tarkan said it right. We are here to make cloud complexity invisible. This was our big event to get thousands of our customers, partners, our supporters together and unveil our product portfolio, which is much more simplified, now. It's a cloud platform. And really have a chance to show them how we are building an ecosystem around it, and really bringing to life the whole notion of hybrid multicloud computing. >> So, Monica, could you just, for our audience, just summarize the big news that came out of .NEXT? >> Yeah, we actually made four different announcements, and most of them were focused around, obviously, our product portfolio. So the first one was around enhancements to our cloud platform to help customers build modern, software-defined data centers to speed their hybrid multicloud deployments while supporting their business-critical applications, and that was really about the next version of our flagship, AOS six, availability. We announced the general availability of that, and key features really included things like built-in virtual networking, disaster recovery enhancements, security enhancements that otherwise would need a lot of specialized hardware, software, and skills are now built into our platform. And, most importantly, all of this functionality being managed through a single interface, right? Which significantly decreases the operational overhead. So that was one announcement. The second announcement was focused around data services and really making it easy for customers to simplify data management, also optimize big data and database workloads. We announced capability that now improves performances of database workloads by 2x, big data workloads by 3x, so lots of great stuff there. We also announced a new service called Nutanix Data Lens, which is a new unstructured data governance service. So, again, I don't want to go into a lot of details here. Maybe we can do it later. That was our second big announcement. The third announcement, which is really around partnerships, and we'll talk more about that, is with Microsoft. We announced the preview of Nutanix Clusters and Azure, and that's really taking our entire flagship Nutanix platform and running it on Azure. And so, now, we are in preview on that one, and we're super excited about that. And then, last but not least, and I know Tarkan is going to go into a lot more detail, is we announced a strategic partnership with Citrix around the whole future of hybrid work. So lots of big news coming out of it. I just gave you a quick summary. There's a lot more around this, as well. >> Okay. Now, I'd like to give you my honest take, if you guys don't mind, and, Tarkan, I'll steal one of your lines. Don't hate me, okay? So the first thing I'm going to say is I think, Nutanix, you have the absolute right vision. There's no question in my mind. But what you're doing is not trivial, and I think it's going to play out. It's going to take a number of years. To actually build an abstraction layer, which is where you're going, as I take it, as a platform that can exploit all the respective cloud native primitives and run virtually any workload in any cloud. And then what you're doing, as I see it, is abstracting that underlying technology complexity and bringing that same experience on-prem, across clouds, and as I say, that's hard. I will say this: the deep dives that I got at the analyst event, it convinced me that you're committed to this vision. You're spending real dollars on focused research and development on this effort, and, very importantly, you're sticking to your true heritage of making this simple. Now, you're not alone. All the non-hyperscalers are going after the multicloud opportunity, which, again, is really challenging, but my assessment is you're ahead of the game. You're certainly focused on your markets, but, from what I've seen, I believe it's one of the best examples of a true hybrid multicloud-- you're on that journey-- that I've seen to date. So I would give you high marks there. And I like the ecosystem-building piece of it. So, Tarkan, you could course-correct anything that I've said, and I'd love for you to pick up on your comments. It takes a village, you know, you're sort of invoking Hillary Clinton, to bring the right solution to customers. So maybe you could talk about some of that, as well. >> Look, actually, you hit all the right points, and I don't hate you for that. I love you for that, as you know. Look, at the end of the day, we started this journey about 10 years ago. The last two years with Monica, with the great executive team, and overall team as a whole, big push to what you just suggested. We're not necessarily, you know, passionate about cloud. Again, it's a business model. We're passionate about customer outcomes, and some of those outcomes sometimes are going to also be on-prem. That's why we focus on this terminology, hybrid multicloud. It is not multicloud, it's not just private cloud or on-prem and non-cloud. We want to make sure customers have the right outcomes. So based on that, whether those are cloud partners or platform partners like HPE, Dell, Supermicro. We just announced a partnership with Supermicro, now, we're selling our software. HPE, we run on GreenLake. Lenovo, we run on TruScale. Big support for Lenovo. Dell's still a great partner to us. On cloud partnerships, as Monica mentioned, obviously Azure. We had a big session with AWS. Lots of new work going on with Red Hat as an ISV partner. Tying that also to IBM Cloud, as we move forward, as Red Hat and IBM Cloud go hand in hand, and also tons of workarounds, as Monica mentioned. So it takes a village. We want to make sure customer outcomes deliver value. So anywhere, for any app, on any infrastructure, any cloud, regardless standards or protocols, we want to make sure we have an open system coverage, not only for operators, but also for application developers, develop those applications securely and for operators, run and manage those applications securely anywhere. So from that perspective, tons of interest, obviously, on the Citrix or the UC side, as Monica mentioned earlier, we also just announced the Red Hat partnership for cloud services. Right before that, next we highlighted that, and we are super excited about those two partnerships. >> Yeah, so, when I talked to some of your product folks and got into the technology a little bit, it's clear to me you're not wrapping your stack in containers and shoving it into the cloud and hosting it like some do. You're actually going much deeper. And, again, that's why it's hard. You could take advantage of those things, but-- So, Monica, you were on the stage at .NEXT with Eric Lockhart of Microsoft. Maybe you can share some details around the focus on Azure and what it means for customers. >> Absolutely. First of all, I'm so grateful that Eric actually flew out to the Bay Area to be live on stage with us. So very super grateful for Eric and Azure partnership there. As I said earlier, we announced the preview of Nutanix Clusters and Azure. It's a big deal. We've been working on it for a while. What this means is that a select few organizations will have an opportunity to get early access and also help shape the roadmap of our offering. And, obviously, we're looking forward to then announcing general availability soon after that. So that's number one. We're already seeing tremendous interest. We have a large number of customers who want to get their hands on early access. We are already working with them to get them set up. The second piece that Eric and I talked about really was, you know, the reason why the work that we're doing together is so important is because we do know that hybrid cloud is the preferred IT model. You know, we've heard that in spades from all different industries' research, by talking to customers, by talking to people like yourselves. However, when customers actually start deploying it, there's lots of issues that come up. There's limited skill sets, resources, and, most importantly, there's a disparity between the on-premises networking security management and the cloud networking security management. And that's what we are focused on, together as partners, is removing that barrier, the friction between on-prem and Azure cloud. So our customers can easily migrate their workloads in Azure cloud, do cloud disaster recovery, create a burst into cloud for elasticity if they need to, or even use Azure as an on-ramp to modernize applications by using the Azure cloud services. So that's one big piece. The second piece is our partnership around Kubernetes and cloud native, and that's something we've already provided to the market. It's GA with Azure and Nutanix cloud platform working together to build Kubernetes-based applications, container-based applications, and run them and manage them. So there's a lot more information on nutanix.com/azure. And I would say, for those of our listeners who want to give it a try and who want their hands on it, we also have a test drive available. You can actually experience the product by going to nutanix.com/azure and taking the test drive. >> Excellent. Now, Tarkan, we saw recently that you announced services. You've got HPE GreenLake, Lenovo, their Azure service, which is called TruScale. We saw you with Keith White at HPE Discover. I was just with Keith White this week, by the way, face to face. Awesome guy. So that's exciting. You got some investments going on there. What can you tell us about those partnerships? >> So, look, as we talked through this a little bit, the HPE relationship is a very critical relationship. One of our fastest growing partnerships. You know, our customers now can run a Nutanix software on any HPE platform. We call it DX, is the platform. But beyond that, now, if the customers want to use HPE service as-a-service, now, Nutanix software, the entire stack, it's not only hybrid multicloud platform, the database capability, EUC capability, storage capability, can run on HPE's service, GreenLake service. Same thing, by the way, same way available on Lenovo. Again, we're doing similar work with Dell and Supermicro, again, giving our customers choice. If they want to go to a public club partner like Azure, AWS, they have that choice. And also, as you know, I know Monica, you're going to talk about this, with our GSI partnerships and new service provider program, we're giving options to customers because, in some other regions, HPE might not be their choice or Azure not be choice, and a local telco might the choice in some country like Japan or India. So we give options and capability to the customers to run Nutanix software anywhere they like. >> I think that's a really important point you're making because, as I see all these infrastructure providers, who are traditionally on-prem players, introduce as-a-service, one of the things I'm looking for is, sure, they've got to have their own services, their own products available, but what other ecosystem partners are they offering? Are they truly giving the customers choice? Because that's, really, that's the hallmark of a cloud provider. You know, if we think about Amazon, you don't always have to use the Amazon product. You can use actually a competitive product, and that's the way it is. They let the customers choose. Of course, they want to sell their own, but, if you innovate fast enough, which, of course, Nutanix is all about innovation, a lot of customers are going to choose you. So that's key to these as-a-service models. So, Monica, Tarkan mentioned the GSIs. What can you tell us about the big partners there? >> Yeah, definitely. Actually, before I talk about GSIs, I do want to make sure our listeners understand we already support AWS in a public cloud, right? So Nutanix totally is available in general, generally available on AWS to use and build a hybrid cloud offering. And the reason I say that is because our philosophy from day one, even on the infrastructure side, has been freedom of choice for our customers and supporting as large a number of platforms and substrates as we can. And that's the notion that we are continuing, here, forward with. So to talk about GSIs a bit more, obviously, when you say one platform, any app, any cloud, any cloud includes on-prem, it includes hyperscalers, it includes the regional service providers, as well. So as an example, TCS is a really great partner of ours. We have a long history of working together with TCS, in global 2000 accounts across many different industries, retail, financial services, energy, and we are really focused, for example, with them, on expanding our joint business around mission critical applications deployment in our customer accounts, and specifically our databases with Nutanix Era, for example. Another great partner for us is HCL. In fact, HCL's solution SKALE DB, we showcased at .NEXT just yesterday. And SKALE DB is a fully managed database service that HCL offers which includes a Nutanix platform, including Nutanix Era, which is our database service, along with HCL services, as well as the hardware/software that customers need to actually run their business applications on it. And then, moving on to service providers, you know, we have great partnerships like with Cyxtera, who, in fact, was the service provider partner of the year. That's the award they just got. And many other service providers, including working with, you know, all of the edge cloud, Equinix. So, I can go on. We have a long list of partnerships, but what I want to say is that these are very important partnerships to us. All the way from, as Tarkan said, OEMs, hyperscalers, ISVs, you know, like Red Hat, Citrix, and, of course, our service provider, GSI partnerships. And then, last but not least, I think, Tarkan, I'd love for you to maybe comment on our channel partnerships as well, right? That's a very important part of our ecosystem. >> No, absolutely. You're absolutely right. Monica. As you suggested, our GSI program is one of the best programs in the industry in number of GSIs we support, new SP program, enterprise solution providers, service provider program, covering telcos and regional service providers, like you suggested, OVH in France, NTT in Japan, Yotta group in India, Cyxtera in the US. We have over 50 new service providers signed up in the last few months since the announcement, but tying all these things, obviously, to our overall channel ecosystem with our distributors and resellers, which is moving very nicely. We have Christian Alvarez, who is running our channel programs globally. And one last piece, Dave, I think this was important point that Monica brought up. Again, give choice to our customers. It's not about cloud by itself. It's outcomes, but cloud is an enabler to get there, especially in a hybrid multicloud fashion. And last point I would add to this is help customers regardless of the stage they're in in their cloud migration. From rehosting to replatforming, repurchasing or refactoring, rearchitecting applications or retaining applications or retiring applications, they will have different needs. And what we're trying to do, with Monica's help, with the entire team: choice. Choice in stage, choice in maturity to migrate to cloud, and choice on platform. >> So I want to close. First of all, I want to give some of my impressions. So we've been watching Nutanix since the early days. I remember vividly standing around the conference call with my colleague at the time, Stu Miniman. The state-of-the-art was converged infrastructure, at the time, bolting together storage, networking, and compute, very hardware centric. And the founding team at Nutanix told us, "We're going to have a software-led version of that." And you popularized, you kind of created the hyperconverged infrastructure market. You created what we called at the time true private cloud, scaled up as a company, and now you're really going after that multicloud, hybrid cloud opportunity. Jerry Chen and Greylock, they just wrote a piece called Castles on the Cloud, and the whole concept was, and I say this all the time, the hyperscalers, last year, just spent a hundred billion dollars on CapEx. That's a gift to companies that can add value on top of that. And that's exactly the strategy that you're taking, so I like it. You've got to move fast, and you are. So, guys, thanks for coming on, but I want you to both-- maybe, Tarkan, you can start, and Monica, you can bring us home. Give us your wrap up, your summary, and any final thoughts. >> All right, look, I'm going to go back to where I started this. Again, I know I go back. This is like a broken record, but it's so important we hear from the customers. Again, cloud is not a destination. It's a business model. We are here to support those outcomes, regardless of platform, regardless of hypervisor, cloud type or app, making sure from legacy apps to cloud native apps, we are there for the customers regardless of their stage in their migration. >> Dave: Right, thank you. Monica? >> Yeah. And I, again, you know, just the whole conversation we've been having is around this but I'll remind everybody that why we started out. Our journey was to make infrastructure invisible. We are now very well poised to helping our customers, making the cloud complexity invisible. So our customers can focus on business outcomes and innovation. And, as you can see, coming out of .NEXT, we've been firing on all cylinders to deliver this differentiated, unified hybrid multicloud platform so our customers can really run any app, anywhere, on any cloud. And with the simplicity that we are known for because, you know, our customers love us. NPS 90 plus seven years in a row. But, again, the guiding principle is simplicity, portability, choice. And, really, our compass is our customers. So that's what we are focused on. >> Well, I love not having to get on planes every Sunday and coming back every Friday, but I do miss going to events like .NEXT, where I meet a lot of those customers. And I, again, we've been following you guys since the early days. I can attest to the customer delight. I've spent a lot of time with them, driven in taxis, hung out at parties, on buses. And so, guys, listen, good luck in the next chapter of Nutanix. We'll be there reporting and really appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and, as always, we'll see you next time. (light music)