>>Well, hello everybody at John Wallace here on the Cube, and glad to have you along here for day two of our coverage here at AWS Reinvent 22. We're up in the global startup program, which is part of AWS's Startup Showcase, and I've got Kevin Farley with me. He is the director of Strategic Alliances with Maria Day db. And Kevin, good to see you this morning. Good to see you, John. Thanks for joining us. Thank >>You. >>Appreciate it. Yeah. First off, tell us about Maria db. Sure. Obviously data's your thing. Yep. But to share that with some folks at home who might not be familiar with your offering. >>Yeah. So Maria DB's been around as a corporate entity for 10 plus years, and we have a massive customer base. You know, there's a billion downloads from Docker Hub, 75% of the Fortune 500. We have an enormous sea of really happy users. But what we realize is that all of these users are really thinking about what do we, what does it mean to transform it? What does cloud modernization mean? And how do we build a strategy on something we really love to drive it into the cloud and take it to the future. So what we launched about two years ago, two and a half years ago, is Skye. It's our database as a service. It leverages all the best elements, what we provide on the enterprise platform. It marries to the AWS cloud, and it really provides the best of both worlds for our >>Customers. So in your thought then, what, what problem is that solving? >>I think what you see in the overall database market is that many people have been using what we would call legacy technology. There's been lots of sort of stratification and mixes of different database solutions. All of them come with some promise, and all of 'em come with a lot of compromise. So I think what the market is really looking for is something that can take what they know and love, can bring it to the cloud and can survive the port drive the performance and scale. That completely changes the landscape, especially as you think about what modern data needs look like, right? What people did 10 years ago with the exponential scale of data no longer works. And what they need is something that not only can really deliver against their core business values and their core business deliverables, but gets 'em to the future. How do we drive something new? How do we innovate? How do we change the game? And I think what we built with AWS really delivers what we call cloud scale. It's taking something that is the best technology, and I as a V can build, marrying it to, you know, Kubernetes layer, marrying it to global availability, thinking about having true global high availability across all of your environments and really delivering that to customers through an integrated partnership. >>Could we see this coming? I mean, because you know data, right? I mean, yeah, we, we, everybody talked about the tsunami of growth, you know, >>Back 10 >>Sure. 11 years ago. But, but maybe the headlights didn't go far enough or, or, but, but you could see that there was going to be crunch time. >>There's no doubt. And I think that this has been a, there's, there's been these sort of pocket solutions, right? So if you think at the entire no sequel world, right? People said, oh, I need scale, I can get it, but what do I have to give up asset compliance? So I have to change the way I think about what data is and how I, I can govern it. So there's been these things that deliver on half the promise, but there's never been something that comes together and really drives what we deliver through CIQ is something called expand. So distributed SQL really tied to the SQL Query language, having that asset data. So having everything you need without the compromise built on the cloud allows you to scale out and allows you to think about, I can actually do exponential layers of, of data, data modeling, data querying, complete read, write, driving that forward. And I think it gives us a whole nother dynamic that we can deliver on in a way that hasn't been before. And I think that's kind of the holy grail of what people are looking for is how am I building modern applications and how do I have a database in the cloud that's really gonna support >>It? You know, you talk about distributed, you know, sequel and, and I mean, there's a little mystery behind it, isn't there? Or at least maybe not mystery. There's a little, I guess, confusion or, or just misunderstanding. I mean, I, how, nail that down a little bit. I >>Would say the best way to say it, honestly, this is the great thing, is it people believe it's too good to be true. And I think what we see over and over >>Again, you know, what they say about that. >>But this is the great part is, you know, you know, we've just had two taste studies recently with aws, with HIT labs and Certified power, both on expand, both proof in the pudding. They did the POCs, they're like, oh my God, this works. If you watch the keynote yesterday, you know, Adam had a slide that was, you know, as big as the entire room and it highlighted Samsung and they said, you know, we're doing 80,000 requests per second. So the, you know, the story there is that AWS is able as, as an entity with their scale and their breadth to handle that kind of workload. But guess what that is? That's MariaDB expand underneath there driving all of that utilization. So it's already there, it's already married, it's already in the cloud, and now we're taking it to a completely different level with a fully managed database solution. Right? >>How impressive is that? Right? I mean, you would think that somebody out there who, I mean that that volume, that kind of capacity is, is mind blowing. >>I mean, to your kind of previous point, it's like one of those things, do I see what's coming and it's here, right? You know, it's, is it actually ever gonna be possible? And now we're showing that it really is on a daily basis for some of the biggest brands in the world. We're also seeing companies moving off not only transitioning from, you know, MariaDB or myse, but all of the big licensed, you know, conversions as well. So you think about Oracle DBS Bank is one of our biggest customers, one of the largest Oracle conversions in the world onto MariaDB. And now thinking about what is the promise of connecting that to the cloud? How do you take things that you're currently doing, OnPrem delivering a hybrid model that also then starts to say, Hey, here's my path to cloud modernization. Skye gives me that bridge. And then you take it one layer farther and you think about multi-cloud, right? That's one of the things that's critical that ISVs can really only deliver in a meaningful way, is how can we have a solution for a customer that we can take to any availability zone. We can have performance, proximity, cost, proximity. We're always able to have that total data dexterity across any environment we need and we can build on that for the future. >>So if, if we're talking about cloud database and there's so many good things going forward here. You're talking about easy use and scalability and all that. But as with ever have you talked about this, there's some push and there's some pull. Yeah. So, so what's the, what's the other side that's still, you know, you that you think has to be >>Addressed? And I think that's a great question. So there's, we see that there's poll, right? We've seen these deals, this pipeline growth, this, there's great adoption. But what I think we're still not at the point of massive hockey stick adoption is that customers still don't fully understand the capabilities distributed SQL and the power they can actually deliver. So the more we drive case studies, the more we drive POCs, the more we prove the model, I think you're gonna see just a massive adoption scale. And I also think customers are tired of doing lots of different things in lots of different pockets. So neither one of the key elements of Sky SQL is we can do both transactional and analytical data out of the same database driven by the same proxy. So what, instead of having DBAs and developers try to figure out, okay, I'm gonna pull from this database here. >>Yeah. That there, it's, it's this big spaghetti wire concept that is super expensive and super time intensive. So the ability to write modern applications and pull data from both pockets and really be able to have that as a seamless entity and deliver that to customers is massive. I mean, another part of the keynote yesterday was a new deliverable, like kind of no etl. Adam talked about Aurora and Redshift and the massive complexity of what used to exist for getting data back and forth. You also have to pay for two different databases. It's super expensive. So I think the idea that you can take the real focus of AWS and US is customer value. How do you deliver that next thing that changes the game? Always utilizes AWS delivers on that promise, but then takes a net new technology that really starts to think about how do we bring things together? How do we make it more simple? How do we make it more powerful? And how do we deliver more customer value as we go forward? >>But you know, if, if I'm, I'm still an on-prim guy, just pretend I'm not saying I am. Just pretend I just for the sake of the discussion here, it's like I just can't let it go. Yeah. Right. I, I still, you know, there's control, there's the known versus the unknown. The uncertain. Yeah. So twist my arm just a little bit more and get me over the hum. >>Well, first of all, you don't have to, right? And there's gonna be some industries and some verticals that will always have elements of their business that will be OnPrem. Guess what? We make the best based in the world. It can be MariaDB, but there's those that then say, these, these elements of our business are gonna be far more effective moving to the cloud. So we give you Skye, there's a natural symbiotic bridge between everything we do and how we deliver it. Where you can be hybrid and it's great. You can adopt the cloud as your business needs grow. And you can have multi-cloud. This is that, that idea that you can, can have your cake and eat it too, right? You can literally have all these elements of your business met without these big pressure to say, you gotta throw that away. You gotta move to this. It's really, how do you kind of gracefully adopt the cloud in a way that makes sense for your business? Where are you trying to drive your business? Is it time to value, right? Is it governance? Is it is there's different elements of what matters the most to individual businesses. You know, we wanna address those and we can address >>Those. So you're saying you don't have to dive >>In, you don't have to dive >>In. You, you can, you can go ankle deep, knee deep, whatever you wanna >>Do. Absolutely. And you know, some of the largest MariaDB users still have massive, massive on-prem implementations. And that's okay. But there's elements that are starting to fall behind. There's cost savings, there's things that they need to do in the cloud that they can't do. OnPrem. And that's where expand Skye really says, okay, here is your platform. Grow as you want to, migrate as you want to. And we're there every step along the way. We, we also provide a whole Sky DBA team. Some guys just say, I wanna get outta the database world at all. This is, this is expensive, it's costly and it's difficult to be an expert. So you can bring in our DBA team and they'll man and run, they'll, they'll run your entire environment. They'll optimize it, you know, they'll troubleshoot it, they'll bug fix, they'll do everything for you. So you can just say, I just wanna focus on building phenomenal applications for my customers. And the database game as we knew it is not something that I know I want to invest in anymore. Right. I wanna make that transition >>That makes that really, yeah. You know, I mean really attractive to a lot of people because you are, you talk about a lot of headache there. Yeah. So let's talk about AWS before Sure. I let you go just about that relationship. Okay. You've talked about the platform that it provides you and, and obviously the benefits, but just talk about how you've worked with AWS over the years Yep. And, and how you see that relationship allowing you to expand your services, no pun intended. >>For sure. So, I mean, I would start with the way we even contemplated architecture. You know, we worked with the satisfactory team. We made sure that the things that we built were optimized in their environment. You know, I think it was a lot of collaboration on how does this combined entity really make the most value for our customers? How does it make the most sense for our developers as we build it out? Then we work in the, in the global startup team. So the strategic element of who we are, not all startups are created equal, right? We have, right, we have 75% of the Fortune 100, we've got over a billion downloads. So, you know, we come in with promise. And the reason this partnership is so valuable and the reason there's so much investment going forward is cuz what really, what do the cloud guys care about? >>The very, very most, they want all of these mission critical, big workloads that are on prem to land in their cloud. What do we have a massive, massive TAM sitting out there, these customers that could go to aws. So we both see, like if we can deliver incredible value to that customer base, these big workloads will end up in aws. They'll use other AWS services. And as we scale and grow, you know, we have that platform that's already built for it. So I think that when you go back to like the tenants, the core principles of aws, the one that always stands out, the one that we always kind of lean back on is, are we delivering customer value? Is this the best thing for the customer? Because we do have some competition just like many other, other partners do, right? So there is Aurora and there is rds and there is times when that's a great service for a customer. But when people are really thinking about where do I need my database to go? Where do I really need to be set for the future growth? Where am I gonna get the kind of ROI I need going forward? That's where you can go, Hey, sky sql, expand distributed sql. This is the best game in town. It's built on aws and collectively, you know, we're gonna present that to a customer. I'm >>Sold. Done. >>I love it. Right? >>Maria db, check 'em out, they're on the show floor. Great traffic. I know at at the, at the booth. They're here at AWS Reinvent. So check 'em out. Maria db. Thanks >>Kevin. Hey, thanks John. Appreciate your >>Time. Appreciate Great. That was great. Right back with more, you're watching the cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of Couchbase connect online, where the theme of the event is, or is modernized now. Yes, let's talk about that. And with me is Ravi, who's the senior vice president of engineering and the CTO at Couchbase Ravi. Welcome. Great to see you. >>Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here with you. >>I asked you what the new requirements are around modern applications. I've seen some, you know, some of your comments, you gotta be flexible, distributed, multimodal, mobile edge. It, that those are all the very cool sort of buzz words, smart applications. What does that all mean? And how do you put that into a product and make it real? >>Yeah, I think what has basically happened is that, uh, so far, uh, it's been a transition of sorts. And now we are come to a point where, uh, the tipping point and the tipping point has been, uh, uh, more because of COVID and there COVID has pushed us to a world where we are living, uh, in a sort of, uh, occasionally connected manner where our digital, uh, interactions, precede our physical interactions in one sense. So it's a world where we do a lot more stuff that's less than, uh, in a digital manner, as opposed to sort of making a more specific human contact that has really been the, uh, sort of accelerant to this modernized. Now, as a team in this process, what has happened is that so far all the databases and all the data infrastructure that we have built historically, are all very centralized. >>They're all sitting behind. Uh, they used to be in mainframes from where they came to like your own data centers, where we used to run hundreds of servers to where they're going now, which is the computing marvelous change to consumption-based computing, which is all cloud oriented now. And so, uh, but they are all centralized still. Uh, but where our engagement happens with the data is, uh, at the edge, uh, at your point of convenience at your point of consumption, not where the data is actually sitting. So this has led to, uh, you know, all those buzzwords, as you said, which is like, oh, well we need a distributed data infrastructure, where is the edge? Uh, but it just basically comes down to the fact that the data needs to be where you are engaging with it. And that means if you are doing it on your mobile phone, or if you are sitting, uh, doing something in your body or traveling, or whether you are in a subway, whether you're in a plane or a ship, wherever the data needs to come to you, uh, and be available as opposed to every time you going to the data, which is centrally sitting in some place. >>And that is the fundamental shift in terms of how the modern architecture needs to think, uh, when they, when it comes to digital transformation and, uh, transitioning their old applications to, uh, the, the modern infrastructure, because that's, what's going to define your customer experiences and your personalized experiences. Uh, otherwise people are basically waiting for that circle of death that we all know, uh, and blaming the networks and other pieces. The problem is actually, the data is not where you are engaging with. It has got to be fetched, you know, seven seas away. Um, and that is the problem that we are basically solving in this modern modernization of that data, data infrastructure. >>I love this conversation and I love the fact that there's a technical person that can kind of educate us on, on this, because date data by its very nature is distributed. It's always been distributed, but w w but distributed database has always been incredibly challenging, whether it was a global SIS Plex or an eventual consistency of getting recovery for a distributed architecture has been extremely difficult. You know, I hate that this is a terrible term, lots of ways to skin a cat, but, but you've been the visionary behind this notion of optionality, how to solve technical problems in different ways. So how do you solve that, that problem of, of, of, uh, of, uh, of a super rock solid database that can handle, you know, distributed data? Yes. >>So there are two issues that you're a little too over there with Forrest is the optionality piece of it, which is that same data that you have that requires different types of processing on it. It's almost like fractional distillation. It is, uh, like your crude flowing through the system. You start all over from petrol and you can end up with Vaseline and rayon on the other end, but the raw material, that's our data in one sense. So far, we never treated the data that way. That's part of the problem. It has always been very purpose built and cast first problem. And so you just basically have to recast it every time we want to look at the data. The first thing that we have done is make data that fluid. So when you're actually, uh, when you have the data, you can first look at it to perform. >>Let's say a simple operation that we call as a key value store operation. Given my ID, give him a password kind of scenarios, which is like, you know, there are customers of ours who have billions of user IDs in their management. So things get slower. How do you make it fast and easily available? Log-in should not take more than five minutes. Again, this is a, there's a class of problem that we solve that same data. Now, eventually, without you ever having to, uh, sort of do a casting it to a different database, you can now do a solid, uh, acquire. These are classic sequel queries, which is our next magic. We are a no SQL database, but we have a full functional sequel. The sequel has been the language that has talked to data for 40 odd years successfully. Every other database has come and try to implement their own QL query language, but they've all failed only sequel as which stood the test of time of 40 odd years. >>Why? Because there's a solid mathematics behind it. It's called a relational calculus. And what that helps you is, is, uh, basically, uh, look at the data and any common tutorial, uh, any, uh, any which way you look at the data. All it will come, uh, the data in a format that you can consume. That's the guarantee sort of gives you in one sense. And because of that, you can now do some really complex in the database signs, what we call us, predicate logic on top of that. And that gives you the ability to do the classic relational type queries, select star from where Canada stuff, because it's at an English level, it becomes easy to, so the same data, you didn't have to go move it to another database, do your, uh, sort of transformation of the data and all this stuff. Same day that you do this. >>Now, that's where the optionality comes in. Now you can do another piece of logic on top of this, which we call search. This is built on this concept of inverted index and TF IDF, the classic Google in a very simple terms, but Google tokenized search, you can do that in the same data without you ever having to move the data to a different format. And then on top of it, they can do what is known as a eventing or your own custom logic, which we all which we do on a, on programming language called Java script. And finally analytics and analytics is the ability to query the operational data in a different way. I'll talk budding. What was my sales of this widget year over year on December 1st week, that's a very complex question to ask, and it takes a lot of different types of processing. >>So these are different types of that's optionality with different types of processing on the same data without you having to go to five different systems without you having to recast the data in five different ways and find different application logic. So you put them in one place. Now is your second question. Now this has got to be distributed and made available in multiple cloud in your data center, all the way to the edge, which is the operational side of the, uh, the database management system. And that's where the distributed, uh, platform that we have built enables us to get it to where you need the data to be, you know, in a classic way, we call it CDN in the data as in like content delivery networks. So far do static, uh, uh, sort of moving of static content to the edges. Now we can actually dynamically move the data. Now imagine the richness of applications you can develop. >>The first part of the, the answer to my question, are you saying you could do this without skiing with a no schema on, right? And then you can apply those techniques. >>Uh, fantastic question. Yes. That's the brilliance of this database is that so far classically databases have always demanded that you first define a schema before you can write a single byte of data. Couchbase is one of the rare databases. I, for one don't know any other one, but there could be, let's give the benefit of doubt. It's a database which writes data first and then late binds to schema as we call it. It's a schema on read things. So because there is no schema, it is just a on document that is sitting inside. And Jason is the lingua franca of the web, as you very well know by now. So it just Jason that we manage, you can do key lookups of the Jason. You can do full credit capability, like a classic relational database. We even have cost-based optimizers and the other sophisticated pieces of technology behind it. >>You can do searching on it, using the, um, the full textual analysis pipeline. You can do ad hoc wedding on the analytic side, and you can write your own custom logic on it using our eventing capabilities. So that's, that's what it allows because we keep the data in the native form of Jason. It's not a data structure or a data schema imposed by a database. It is how the data is produced. And on top of it, we bring different types of logic, five different types of it's like the philosophy is bringing logic to data as opposed to moving data to logic. This is what we have been doing, uh, in the last 40 years because we developed various, uh, database systems and data processing systems of various points. In time in our history, we had key value stores. We had relational systems, we had search systems, we had analytical systems. >>We had queuing systems, all the systems, if you want to use any one of them, our answer has always been, just move the data to that system. Versus we are saying that do not move the data as we get bigger and bigger and data just moving this data is going to be a humongous problem. If you're going to be moving petabytes of data for this is not one to fly instead, bring the logic to the data. So you can now apply different types of logic to the data. I think that's what, in one sense, the optionality piece of this, >>As you know, there's plenty of schema-less data stores. They're just, they're called data swamps. I mean, that's what they, that's what they became, right? I mean, so this is some, some interesting magic that you're applying here. >>Yes. I mean, the one problem with the data swamps as you call them is that that was a little too open-ended because the data format itself could change. And then you do your, then everything became like a game data casting because it required you to have it in seven schema in one sense at the end of the day, for certain types of processing. So in that where a lot of gaps it's probably flooded, but it not really, uh, how do you say, um, keep to the promise that it actually meant to be? So that's why it was a swamp I need, because it was fundamentally not managing the data. The data was sitting in some file system, and then you are doing something, this is a classic database where the data is managed and you create indexes to manage it, and you create different types of indexes to manage it. You distribute the index, you distribute the data you have, um, like we were discussing, you have acid semantics on top of, and when you, when you put all these things together, uh, it's, it's, it's a tough proposition, but they have solved some really tough problems, which are good computer science stuff, computer science problems that we have to solve to bring this, to bring this, to bear, to bring this to the market. >>So you predicted the trend around multimodal and converged, uh, databases. Um, you kind of led Couchbase through that. I want to, I always ask this question because it's clearly a trend in the industry and it, it definitely makes sense from a simplification standpoint. And, and, and so that I don't have to keep switching databases or the flip side of that though, Ravi. And I wonder if you could give me your opinion on this is kind of the right tool for the right job. So I often say isn't that the Swiss army knife approach, we have a little teeny scissors and a knife. That's not that sharp. How do you respond to that? Uh, >>A great one. Um, my answer is always, I use another analogy to tackle that, but is that, have you ever accused a smartphone of being a Swiss army knife? No. No. Nobody does that because it's actually 40 functions in one is what a smartphone becomes. You never call your iPhone or your Android phone, a Swiss army knife, because here's the reason is that you can use that same device in the full capacity. That's what optionality is. It's not, I'm not, it's not like your good old one where there's a keyboard hiding half the screen, and you can do everything only through the keyboard without touching and stuff like that. That's not the whole devices available to you to do one type of processing when you want it. When you're done with that, it can do another completely different types of processing. Like as in a moment, it could be a Tom, Tom telling you all the directions, the next one, it's your PDA. >>Third one, it's a fantastic phone. Uh, four, it's a beautiful camera, which can do your f-stop management and give you a nice SLR quality picture. Right? So next moment is a video camera. People are shooting movies with this thing in Hollywood, these days for God's sake. So it gives you the full power of what you want to do when you want it. And now, if you just taught that iPhone is a great device or any smartphone is a great device, because you can do five things in one or 50 things in one, and at a certain level, they missed the point because what that device really enabled is not just these five things in one place. It becomes easy to consume and easy to operate. It actually started the app is the economy. That's the brilliance of bringing so many things in one place, because in the morning, you know, I get the alert saying that today you got to leave home at eight 15 for your nine o'clock meeting. >>And the next day it might actually say 8 45 is good enough because it knows where the phone is sitting. The geo position of it. It knows from my calendar where the meeting is actually happening. It can do a traffic calculation because it's got my map and all of the routes. And then it's gone there's notification system, which eventually pops up on my phone to say, Hey, you got to leave at this time. Now five different systems have to come together and they can because the data is in one place without that, you couldn't even do this simple function, uh, in a, in a sort of predictable manner in a, in a, in a manner that's useful to you. So I believe a database which gives you this optionality of doing multiple data processing on the same set of data allows you will allow you to build a class of products, which you are so far been able to struggling to build, because half the time you're running sideline to sideline, just, you know, um, integrating data from one system to the other. >>So I love the analogy with the smartphone. I w I want to, I want to continue it and double click on it. So I use this camera. I used to, you know, my kid had a game. I would bring the, the, the big camera, the 35 millimeter. So I don't use that anymore no way, but my wife does, she still uses the DSLR. So is, is there a similar analogy here? That those, and by the way, the camera, the camera shop in my town went out of business, you know? And so, so, but, but is there, is that a fair, where, in other words, those specialized databases, they say there still is a place for them, but they're getting >>Absolutely, absolutely great analogy and a great extension to the question. That's, that's the contrarian side of it in one sense is that, Hey, if everything can just be done in one, do you have a need for the other things? I mean, you gave a camera example where it is sort of, it's a, it's a slippery slope. Let me give you another one, which is actually less straight to the point better. I've been just because my, I, I listened to half of the music on the iPhone. Doesn't stop me from having my full digital receiver. And, you know, my Harman Kardon speakers at home because they haven't, they produce a kind of sounded immersive experience. This teeny little speaker has never in its lifetime intended to produce, right? It's the convenience. Yes. It's the convenience of convergence that I can put my earphones on and listen to all the great music. >>Yes, it's 90% there or 80% there. It depends on your audio file mess of your, uh, I mean, you don't experience the super specialized ones do not go away. You know, there are, there are places where, uh, the specialized use cases will demand a separate system to exist, but even there that has got to be very closed. Um, how do you say close, binding or late binding? I should be able to stream that song from my phone to that receiver so I can get it from those speakers. You can say that, oh, there's a digital divide between these two things done, and I can only play CDs on that one. That's not how it's going to work going forward. It's going to be, this is the connected world, right? As in, if I'm listening to the song in my car and then step off the car and walk into my living room, that's same songs should continue and play in my living room speakers. Then it's a world because it knows my preference and what I'm doing that all happened only because of this data flowing between all these systems. >>I love, I love that example too. When I was a kid, we used to go to Twitter, et cetera. And we'd to play around with, we take off the big four foot speakers. Those stores are out of business too. Absolutely. Um, now we just plug into Sonos. So that is the debate between relational and non-relational databases over Ravi. >>I believe so. Uh, because I think, uh, what had happened was the relational systems. Uh, I've been where the norm, they rule the roost, if you will, for the last 40 odd years, and then gain this no sequel movement, which was almost as though a rebellion from the relational world, we all inhibited, uh, uh, because we, it was very restrictive. It, it had the schema definition and the schema evolution as we call it, all those things, they were like, they required a committee, they required your DBA and your data architect. And you have to call them just to add one column and stuff like that. And the world had moved on. This was the world of blogs and tweets and, uh, you know, um, mashups and, um, uh, uh, a different generation of digital behavior, digital, native people now, um, who are operating in these and the, the applications, the, the consumer facing applications. >>We are living in this world. And yet the enterprise ones were still living in the, um, in the other, the other side of the divide. So all came this solution to say that we don't need SQL. Actually, the problem was never sequel. No sequel was, you know, best approximation, good marketing name, but from a technologist perspective, the problem was never the query language, no SQL was not the problem, the schema limitations, and the inability for these, the system to scale, the relational systems were built like, uh, airplanes, which is that if, uh, San Francisco Boston, there is a flight route, it's so popular that if you want to add 50 more seats to it, the only way you can do that is to go back to Boeing and ask them to get you a set in from 7 3 7 2 7 7 7, or whatever it is. And they'll stick you with a billion dollar bill on the alarm to somehow pay that by, you know, either flying more people or raising the rates or whatever you have to do. >>These are called vertically scaling systems. So relational systems are vertically scaling. They are expensive. Versus what we have done in this modern world, uh, is make the system how it is only scaling, which is more like the same thing. If it's a train that is going from San Francisco to Boston, you need 50 more people be my guests. I'll add one more coach to it, one more car to it. And the better part of the way we have done this year is that, and we have super specialized on that. This route actually requires three, three dining cars and only 10 sort of sleeper cars or whatever. Then just pick those and attach the next route. You can choose to have ID only one dining car. That's good enough. So the way you scale the plane is also can be customized based on the route along the route, more, more dining capabilities, shorter route, not an abandoned capability. >>You can attach the kind of coaches we call this multi-dimensional scaling. Not only do we scale horizontally, we can scale to different types of workloads by adding different types of coaches to it quite. So that's the beauty of this architecture. Now, why is that important? Is that where we land eventually is the ability to do operational and analytical in the same place. This is another thing which doesn't happen in the past, because you would say that I cannot run this analytical Barre because then my operational workload will suffer. Then my friend, then we'll slow down millions of customers that impacted that problem. We will solve the same data in which you can do analytical buddy, an operational query because they're separated by these cars, right? As in like we, we fence the, the, the resources, so that one doesn't impede the other. So you can, at the same time, have a microsecond 10 million ops per second, happening of a key value or equity. >>And then yet you can run this analytical body, which will take a couple of minutes to run one, not impeding the other. So that's in one sense, sort of the, part of the, um, uh, problems that we have solved here is that relational versus, uh, uh, the no SQL portion of it. These are the kinds of problems we have to solve. We solve those. And then we yet put back the same quality language on top. Y it's like Tesla in one sense, right underneath the surface is where all the stuff that had to be changed had to change, which is like the gasoline, uh, the internal combustion engine, uh, I think gas, uh, you says, these are the issues we really wanted to solve. Um, so solve that, change the engine out, you don't need to change the steering wheel or the gas pedal or the, you know, the battle shifters or whatever else you need, or that are for your shifters. >>Those need to remain in the same place. Otherwise people won't buy it. Otherwise it does not even look like a car to people. So, uh, even when you feed people the most advanced technology, it's got to be accessible to them in the manner that people can consume. Only in software, we forget this first design principle, and we go and say that, well, I got a car here, you got the blue harder to go fast and lean back for, for it to, you know, uh, to apply a break that's, that's how we seem to define, uh, design software. Instead, we should be designing them in a manner that it is easiest for our audience, which is developers to consume. And they've been using SQL for 40 years or 30 years. And so we give them the steering wheel on the, uh, and the gas bottle and the, um, and the gear shifter is by putting cul back on underneath the surface, we have completely solved, uh, the relational, uh, uh, limitations of schema, as well as scalability. >>So in, in, in that way, and by bringing back the classic acid capabilities, which is what relational systems, uh, we accounted on and being able to do that with the sequel programming language, we call it like multi-state SQL transaction. So to say, which is what a classic way all the enterprise software was built by putting that back. Now, I can say that that debate between relational and non-relational is over because this has truly extended the database to solve the problems that the relational systems had to grow up the salt in the modern times, but rather than get, um, sort of pedantic about whether it's, we have no SQL or sequel or new sequel, or, uh, you know, any of that sort of, uh, jargon, oriented debate, uh, this, these are the debates of computer science that they are actually, uh, and they were the solve and they have solved them with, uh, the latest release of $7, which we released a few months ago. >>Right, right. Last July, Ravi, we got to leave it there. I, I love the examples and the analogies. I can't wait to be face to face with you. I want to hang with you at the cocktail party because I've learned so much and really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming to the cube. >>Fantastic. Thanks for the time. And the Aboriginal Dan was, I mean, very insightful questions really appreciate it. Thank you. >>Okay. This is Dave Volante. We're covering Couchbase connect online, keep it right there for more great content on the cube.

(upbeat music) >> From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, It's theCUBE. Covering UiPath FORWARD IV. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV. Live from the Bellagio, in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're here all day today and tomorrow. We're going to talk about process mining next. We've got two guests here. Mike Engel is here, intelligent automation and process intelligence leader at PWC. And Ryan McMahon, the SVP of growth at UiPath. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> So Ryan, I'm going to start with you. Talk to us about process mining. How does UiPath do it differently and what are some of the things being unveiled at this event? >> So look, I would tell you it's actually more than process mining and hopefully, not only you but others saw this this morning with Param. It's really about the full capabilities of that discovery suite. In which, obviously, process mining is part of. But it starts with task capture. So, going out and actually working with subject matter experts on a process. Accounts payable, accounts receivable, order to cash, digitally capturing that process or how they believe it should work or execute across one's environment. Right Mike? And then from there, actually validating or verifying with things or capabilities like process mining. Giving you a full digital x-ray of actually how that process is being executed in the enterprise. Showing you process bottlenecks. For things like accounts payable, showing you days outstanding, maverick buying, so you can actually pin point and do a few things. Fix your process, right? Where process should be fixed. Fix your application because it's probably not doing what you think it is, and then third, and where the value comes, is in our platform of which process mining is a capability, our PA platform. Really moving directly to automations, right? And then, having the ability with even task mining to drill into a specific bottleneck. Capturing keystrokes, clicks, and then moving to, with both of those, process mining and task mining, into Automation Hub, as part of our discovery platform as well. Being able to crowdsource, prioritize, all of those potential, if you will, just capabilities of automations, and saying, "Okay, let's go and prioritize these. These deliver to the greatest value," and executing across them. So, as much as it is about process mining, it's actually the whole entire discovery suite of capabilities that differentiates UiPath from other RPA vendors, as the only RPA vendor that delivers process mining, task mining and this discovery suite as part of our enterprise automation platform. >> Such a critical point, Ryan. I mean, it's multi-dimensional. It's not just one component. It's not just process mining or task mining, it's the combination that's really impactful. Agree with you a hundred percent. >> So, one of the things that people who watch our shows know, I'm like a broken record on this, the early days of RPA, I called it paving the cow path. And that was good because somebody knew the process, they just repeat it. But the problem was, the process wasn't necessarily the best process. As you just described. So, when you guys made the acquisition of ProcessGold, I said, "Okay, now I'm starting to connect the dots," and now a couple years on, we're starting to see that come together. This is what I think is most misunderstood about UiPath, and I wonder, from a practitioner's perspective, if you can sort of fill in some of those gaps. It's that, it's different from a point tool, it's different from a productivity tool. Like Power Automate, I'll just say it, that's running in Azure Cloud, that's cool or a vertically integrated part of some ERP Stack. This is a horizontal play that is end to end. Which is a bigger automation agenda, it's bold but it's potentially huge. $60 billion dollar TAM, I think that's understated. Maybe you could, from a practitioner's perspective, share with us the old way, >> Yeah. >> And kind of, the new way. >> Well obviously, we all made a lot of investments in this space, early on, to determine what should we be automating in the first place? We even went so far as, we have platforms that will transcribe these kind of surveys and discussions that we're having with our clients, right. But at the end of the day all we're learning is what they know about the process. What they as individuals know about the process. And that's problematic. Once we get into the next phase of actually developing something, we miss something, right? Because we're trying to do this rapidly. So, I think what we have now is really this opportunity to have data driven insights and our clients are really grabbing onto that idea, that it's good to have a sense of what they think they do but it's more important to have a sense of what they actually do. >> Are you seeing, in the last year in a half we've seen the acceleration of a lot of things, there's some silver linings but we've also seen the acceleration in automation as a mandate. Where is it? In terms of a priority, that you're seeing with customers, and are there any industries that you're seeing that are really leading the edge here? >> Well I do see it as a priority and of course, in the role that I have, obviously everybody I talk to, it's a priority for them. But I think it's kind of changing. People are understanding that it's not just a sense of, as Ryan was pointing out, it's not just a sense of getting an understanding of what we do today, it's really driving it to that next step of actually getting something impactful out the other end. Clients are starting to understand that. I like to categorize them, there's three types of clients, there's starters, there's stall-ers and those that want to scale. >> Right? So we're seeing a lot more on the other ends of this now, where clients are really getting started and they're getting a good sense that this is important for them because they know that identifying the opportunities in the first place is the most difficult part of automation. That's what's stalling the programs. Then on the other end of the spectrum, we've got these clients that are saying, "Hey, I want to do this really at scale, can you help us do that?" >> (Ryan) Right. >> And it's quite a challenge. >> How do I build a pipeline of automations? So I've had success in finance and accounting, fantastic. How do I take this to operations? How do I take this this to supply chain? How do I take this to HR? And when I do that, it all starts with, as Wendy Batchelder, Chief Data Officer at VMware, would say and as a customer, "It starts with data but more importantly, process." So focusing on process and where we can actually deliver automation. So it's not just about those insights, it's about moving from insights to actionable next steps. >> Right. >> And that is where we're seeing this convergence, if you will, take place. As we've seen it many times before. I mentioned I worked at Cisco in the past, we saw this with Voice Over IP converging on the network. We saw this at VMware, who I know you guys have spoken to multiple times. When a move from a hypervisor to including NSX with the network, to including cloud management and also VSAN for storage, and converging in software. We're seeing it too with process, really. Instead of kids and clipboards, as they used to call it, and many Six Sigma and Lean workshops, with whiteboards and sticky papers, to actually showing people within, really, days how a process is being executed within their organization. And then, suggesting here's where there's automation capabilities, go execute against them. >> So Ryan, this is why sometimes I scoff at the TAM analysis. I get you've got to do the TAM analysis, you've got to communicate to Wall Street. But basically what you do is you pull out IDC or Gartner data, which is very stovepipe, and you kind of say, "Okay we're in this market." It's the convergence of these markets. It's cloud, it's containers, it's IS, it's PaaS, it's Saas, it's blockchain, it's automation. They're all coming together to form this, it sound like a buzzword but this digital matrix, if you will. And it's how well you leverage that digital matrix, which defines your digital business. So, talk about the role that automation, generally, RPA specifically, process mining specifically, play in a digital business. >> Do you want to take that Mike or do you want me to take it? >> We can both do it? How about that? >> Yeah, perfect. >> So I'll start with it. I mean all this is about convergence at this point, right? There are a number of platform providers out there, including UiPath, that are kind of teaching us that. Often times led by the software vendors in terms of how we think of it but what we know is that there's no one solution. We went down the RPA path, lots of clients and got a lot of excitement and a lot of impact but if you really want to drive it broader, what clients are looking at now, is what is the ecosystem of tools that we need to have in place to make that happen? And from our perspective, it's got to start with really, process intelligence. >> What I would say too, if you look at digital transformation, it was usually driven from an application. Right? Really. And what I think customers found was that, "Hey," I'm going to name some folks here, "Put everything in SAP and we'll solve all your problems." Larry Ellison will tell you, "Put everything into Oracle and we'll solve all your problems." Salesforce, now, I'm a salesperson, I've never used an out of the box Salesforce dashboard in my life, to run my business because I want to run it the way I want to run it. Having said that though, they would say the same thing, "Put everything into our platform and we'll make sure that we can access it and you can use it everywhere and we'll solve all of your problems." I think what customers found is that that's not the case. So they said, "Okay, where are there other ways. Yes, I've got my application doing what it's doing, I've improved my process but hang on. There's things that are repeatable here that I can remove to actually focus on higher level orders." And that's where UiPath comes in. We've kind of had a bottom up swell but I would tell you that as we deliver ROI within days or weeks, versus potentially years and with a heavy, heavy investment up front. We're able to do it. We're able to then work with our partners like PWC, to then demonstrate with business process modeling, the ability to do it across all those, as I call, Silo's of excellence in an organization, to deliver true value, in a timeline, with integrated services from our partner, to execute and deliver on ROI. >> You mentioned some of the great software companies that have been created over the years. One you didn't mention but I want you to comment on it is Service Now. Because essentially McDermott's trying to create the platform of platforms. All about workflow and service management. They bought an RPA company, "Hey we got this too." But it's still a walled garden. It's still the same concept is put everything in here. My question is, how are you different? Yeah look, we're going to integrate with customers who want to integrate because we're an open platform and that's the right approach. We believe there will be some overlap and there'll be some choices to be made. Instead of that top down different approach, which may be a little bit heavy and a large investment up front, with varied results, as far as what that looks like, ours is really a bottoms up. I would tell you too, if you look at our community, which is a million and a half, I believe, strong now and growing, it's really about that practitioner and those people that have embraced it from the bottom up that really change how it gets implemented. And you don't have what I used to call the white blood cells, pushing back when you're trying to say, "Hey, let's take it from this finance and accounting to HR, to the supply chain, to the other sides of the organization," saying, "Hey look, be part of this," instead of, "No, you will do." >> Yeah, there's no, at least that I know of, there's no SAP or Salesforce freemium. You can't try it before you buy. And the entry price is way higher. I mean generally. I guess Salesforce not necessarily but I could taste automation for well under $100,000. I could get in for, I bet you most of your customers started at 25 of $50,000 departmental deployments. >> It's a bottoms up ground swell, that's exactly right. And it's really that approach. Which is much more like an Atlassian, I will tell you and it's really getting to the point where we obviously, and I'm saying this, I work at UiPath, we make really good software. And so, out of the box, it's getting easier and easier to use. It all integrates. Which makes it seamless. The reason people move to RPA first was because they got tired of bouncing between applications to do a task. Now we deliver this enterprise automation platform where you can go from process discovery to crowd sourcing and prioritizing your automations with your pipeline of automations, into Studio, into creating those automations, into testing them and back again, right? We give you the opportunity not to leave the platform and extract the most value out of our, what we call enterprise automation platform. Inclusive of process mining. Inclusive of testing and all those capabilities, document understanding, which is also mine, and it's fantastic. It's very differentiated from others that are out there. >> Well it's about having the right framework in place. >> That's it. From an automation perspective. I think that's a little bit different from what you would expect from the SAP's of the world. Mike, where are you seeing, in the large organizations that you work with, we think of what you describe as the automation pipeline, where are some of the key priorities that you're finding in large organizations? What's in that pipeline and in what order? >> It's interesting because every time we have a conversation whether it's internal or with our clients, we come up with another use case for this type of technology. Obviously, when we're having the initial conversations, what we're talking about is really automation. How do we stuff that pipe with automation. But you know, we have clients that are saying, "Hey listen, I'm trying to carve out of a parent company and what I need to do is document all of my processes in a meaningful way, that I can, at some point, take action on, so there's meaningful outcomes." Whether it be a shared services organization that's looking to outsource, all different types of use cases. So, prioritizing is, I think, it's about impact and the quickest way to impact seems to be automation. >> Is it fair to say, can I look at you UiPath as automation infrastructure? Is that okay or do you guys want to say, "Oh, we're an application." The reason I ask, so then you can answer, is if you look at the great infrastructure plays, they all had a role. The DBA, the CCIE from Cisco, the Cloud Architect, the VMware admin, you've been at all of them, Ryan. So, is there a role emerging here and if it's not plumbing or infrastructure, I know, okay that's cool but course correct me on the infrastructure comment and then, is there a role emerging? >> You know, I think the difference between UiPath and some of the infrastructure companies is, it used to take, Dave, years to give an ROI, really. You'd invest in infrastructure and it's like, if we build it they will come. In fact, we've seen this with Cloud, where we kind of started doing some of that on prem, right? We can do this but then you had Amazon, Azure and others kind of take it and say, "Look, we can do it better, faster and cheaper." It's that simple. So, I would say that we are an application and that we reference it as an enterprise automation platform. It's more than infrastructure. Now, are we going to, as I mentioned, integrate to an open platform, to other capabilities? Absolutely. I think, as you see with our investments and as we continue to build this out, starting in core RPA, buying ProcessGold and getting into our discovery suite of capabilities I covered, getting into, what I see next is, as you start launching many bots into your organization, you're touching multiple applications, so you got to test it. Any time you would launch an application you're going to test it before you go live, right? We see another convergence with testing and I know you had Garrett on and Matt, earlier, with testing, application testing, which has been a legacy, kind of dinosaur market, converging with RPA, where you can deliver automations to do it better, faster and cheaper. >> Thank you for that clarification but now Mike, is that role, I know roles are emerging in RPA and automation but is there, I mean, we're seeing centers of excellence pop up, is there an analogy there or sort of a similar- >> Yeah, I think the new role, if you will, it's not super new but it's really that sense of an automation solution architect. It's a whole different thing. We're talking about now more about recombinant innovation. >> Mike: Yeah. >> Than we are about build it from scratch. Because of the convergence of these low-code, no-code types of solutions. It's a different skill set. >> And we see it at PWC. You have somebody who is potentially a process expert but then also somebody who understands automations. It's the convergences of those two, as well, that's a different skill set. It really is. And it's actually bringing those together to get the most value. And we see this across multiple organizations. It starts with a COE. We've done great with our community, so we have that upswell going and then people are saying, "Hang on, I understand process but I also understand automations. let me put the two together," and that's where we get our true value. >> Bringing in the education and training. >> No question. >> That's a huge thing. >> The traditional components of it still need to exist but I think there are new roles that are emerging, for sure. >> It's a big cultural shift. >> Oh absolutely, yeah. >> How do you guys, how does PWC and UiPath, and maybe you each can answer this in the last minute or so, how do you help facilitate that cultural shift in a business that's growing at warp speed, in a market that is very tumultuous? How do you do that? >> Want to go first or I can go? >> I'll go ahead and go first. It's working with great partners like Mike because they see it and they're converging two different practices within their organization to actually bring this value to customers and also that executive relevance. But even on our side, when we're meeting with customers, just in general, we're actually talking about, how do we deal with, there's what? 13 and a half million job openings, I guess, right now and there's 8500 people that are unemployed, is the last number that I heard. We couldn't even fill all of those jobs if we wanted to. So it's like, okay, what is it that we could potentially automate so maybe we don't need all those jobs. And that's not a negative, it's just saying, we couldn't fill them anyway. So let's focus on where we can and where, there again, can extract the most value in working with our partners but create this new domain that's not networking or virtualization but it's actually, potentially, process and automation. It's testing and automation. It might even be security and automation. Which, I will tell you, is probably coming next, having come out of the security space. You know, I sit there and listen to all these threats and I see these people chasing, really, automated threats. It's like, guys a threat hunter that's really good goes through the same 15 steps that they would when they're chasing a false positive, as if a bot would do that for them. >> I mean, I've written about the productivity declines over the past several decades in western countries, it's not universal around the world and maybe we have a productivity boost because of Covid but it's like this perpetual workday now. That's not sustainable. So we're not going to be able to solve the worlds great problems. Whether it's climate change, diversity, massive deaths, on and on and on, unless we deal with that labor gap. >> That's right. >> And the only way to do that is automation. It's so clear to me that that's the answer. Part of the answer. >> It is part of the answer and I think, to your point Lisa, it's a cultural shift that's going to happen whether we want it to or not. When you think about people that are coming into the work force, it's an expectation now. So if you want to retain or you know, attract and retain the right people, you'd better be prepared for it as an organization. >> Yeah, remember the old, proficient in Word and Excel. Makes it almost trivial. It's trivial compared to that. I think if you don't have automation chops, going forward, it's going to be an issue. Hey, we have whatever, 5000 bots running at our company, how could you help? Huh? What's a bot? >> That's right. You're right. We see this too. I'll give you an example at Cisco. One of their financial analysts, junior starter, he says, "Part of our training program, is creating automations. Why? Because it's not just about finance anymore. It's about what can I automate in my role to actually focus on higher level orders and this for me, is just amazing." And you know, it's Rajiv Ramaswamy's son who's over there at Cisco now as a financial analyst. I was sitting on my couch on a Saturday, no kidding, right Dave? And I get a text from Rajiv, who's now CEO at Nutanix, and he says, "I can't believe I just created a bot." And I said, "I'm at the right place." Really. >> That's cool, I mean hey, you're right too. You want to work for Amazon, you got to know how to provision a EC2 instance or you don't get the job. >> Yeah. >> You got to train for that. And these are the types of skills that are expected- >> That's right. >> For the future. >> Awesome. Guys- >> I'm glad I'm older. >> Are you no longer proficient in Word is the question. >> Guys, thanks for joining us, talking about what you guys are doing together, how you're really facilitating this massive growth trajectory. It's great to be back in person and we look forward to hearing from some of your customers later today. >> Terrific. >> Great. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you guys. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from the Bellagio in Las Vegas, at UiPath FORWARD IV. Stick around. We'll be back after a short break. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Announcer: It's theCUBE. Covering the Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference 2020, brought to you by Vertica. Hello everybody, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Vertica Big Data Conference, the Virtual BDC. My name is Dave Volante, and you're watching theCUBE. And we're here with Joe Gonzalez, who is a Vertica DBA, at MassMutual Financial. Joe, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE I'm sorry that we can't be face to face in Boston, but at least we're being responsible. So thank you for coming on. >> (laughs) Thank you for having me. It's nice to be here. >> Yeah, so let's set it up. We'll talk about, you know, a little bit about MassMutual. Everybody knows it's a big financial firm, but what's your role there and kind of your mission? >> So my role is Vertica DBA. I was hired January of last year to come on and manage their Vertica cluster. They've been on Vertica for probably about a year and a half before that started out on on-prem cluster and then move to AWS Enterprise in the cloud, and brought me on just as they were considering transitioning over to Vertica's EON mode. And they didn't really have anybody dedicated to Vertica, nobody who really knew and understood the product. And I've been working with Vertica for about probably six, seven years, at that point. I was looking for something new and landed a really good opportunity here with a great company. >> Yeah, you have a lot of experience in Vertica. You had a role as a market research, so you're a data guy, right? I mean that's really what you've been doing your entire career. >> I am, I've worked with Pitney Bowes, in the postage industry, I worked with healthcare auditing, after seven years in market research. And then I've been with MassMutual for a little over a year now, yeah, quite a lot. >> So tell us a little bit about kind of what your objectives are at MassMutual, what you're kind of doing with the platform, what application just supporting, paint a picture for us if you would. >> Certainly, so my role is, MassMutual just decided to make Vertica its enterprise data warehouse. So they've really bought into Vertica. And we're moving all of our data there probably about to good 80, 90% of MassMutual's data is going to be on the Vertica platform, in EON mode. So, and we have a wide usage of that data across corporation. Right now we're about 50 terabytes and growing quickly. And a wide variety of users. So there's a lot of ETLs coming in overnight, loading a lot of data, transforming a lot of data. And a lot of reporting tools are using it. So currently, Tableau MicroStrategy. We have Alteryx using it, and we also have API's running against it throughout the day, 24/7 with people coming in, especially now these days with the, you know, some financial uncertainty going on. A lot of people coming and checking their 401k's, checking their insurance and status and what not. So we have to handle a lot of concurrent traffic on top of the normal big query. So it's a quite diverse cluster. And I'm glad they're really investing in using Vertica as their overall solution for this. >> Yeah, I mean, these days your 401k like this, right? (laughing) Afraid to look. So I wonder, Joe if you could share with our audience. I mean, for those who might not be as familiar with the history of just Vertica, and specifically, about MPP, you've had historically you have, you know, traditional RDBMS, whether it's Db2 or Oracle, and then you had a spate of companies that came out with this notion of MPP Vertica is the one that, I think it's probably one of the few if only brands that they've survived, but what did that bring to the industry and why is that important for people to understand, just in terms of whatever it is, scale, performance, cost. Can you explain that? >> To me, it actually brought scale at good cost. And that's why I've been a big proponent of Vertica ever since I started using it. There's a number, like you said of different platforms where you can load big data and store and house big data. But the purpose of having that big data is not just for it to sit there, but to be used, and used in a variety of ways. And that's from, you know, something small, like the first installation I was on was about 10 terabytes. And, you know, I work with the data warehouses up to 100 terabytes, and, you know, there's Vertica installations with, you know, hundreds of petabytes on them. You want to be able to use that data, so you need a platform that's going to be able to access that data and get it to the clients, get it to the customers as quickly as possible, and not paying an arm and a leg for the privilege to do so. And Vertica allows companies to do that, not only get their data to clients and you know, in company users quickly, but save money while doing so. >> So, but so, why couldn't I just use a traditional RDBMS? Why not just throw it all into Oracle? >> One, cost, Oracle is very expensive while Vertica's a lot more affordable than that. But the column-score structure of Vertica allows for a lot more optimized queries. Some of the queries that you can run in Vertica in 2, 3, 4 seconds, will take minutes and sometimes hours in an RDBMS, like Oracle, like SQL Server. They have the capability to store that amount of data, no question, but the usability really lacks when you start querying tables that are 180 billion column, 180 billion rows rather of tables in Vertica that are over 1000 columns. Those will take hours to run on a traditional RDBMS and then running them in Vertica, I get my queries back in a sec. >> You know what's interesting to me, Joe and I wonder if you could comment, it seems that Vertica has done a good job of embracing, you know, riding the waves, whether it was HDFS and the big data in our early part of the big data era, the machine learning, machine intelligence. Whether it's, you know, TensorFlow and other data science tools, it seems like Vertica somehow in the cloud is the other one, right? A lot of times cloud is super disruptive, particularly to companies that started on-prem, it seems like Vertica somehow has been able to adopt and embrace some of these trends. Why, from your standpoint, first of all, from your standpoint, as a customer, is that true? And why do you think that is? Is it architectural? Is it true mindset engineering? I wonder if you could comment on that. >> It's absolutely true, I've started out again, on an on-prem Vertica data warehouse, and we kind of, you know, rolled kind of along with them, you know, more and more people have been using data, they want to make it accessible to people on the web now. And you know, having that, the option to provide that data from an on-prem solution, from AWS is key, and now Vertica is offering even a hybrid solution, if you want to keep some of your data behind a firewall, on-prem, and put some in the cloud as well. So data at Vertica has absolutely evolved along with the industry in ways that no other company really has that I've seen. And I think the reason for it and the reason I've stayed with Vertica, and specifically have remained at Vertica DBA for the last seven years, is because of the way Vertica stays in touch with it's persons. I've been working with the same people for the seven, eight years, I've been using Vertica, they're family. I'm part of their family, and you know, I'm good friends with some of these people. And they really are in tune not only with the customer but what they're doing. They really sit down with you and have those conversations about, you know, what are your needs? How can we make Vertica better? And they listen to their clients. You know, just having access to the data engineers who develop Vertica to be arranged on a phone call or whatnot, I've never had that with any other company. Vertica makes that available to their customers when they need it. So the personal touch is a huge for them. >> That's good, it's always good to get the confirmation from the practitioners, just not hear from the vendor. I want to ask you about the EON transition. You mentioned that MassMutual brought you in to help with that. What were some of the challenges that you faced? And how did you get over them? And what did, what is, why EON? You know, what was the goal, the outcome and some of the challenges maybe that you had to overcome? >> Right. So MassMutual had an interesting setup when I first came in. They had three different Vertica clusters to accommodate three different portions of their business. The data scientists who use the data quite extensively in very large queries, very intense queries, their work with their predictive analytics and whatnot. It was a separate one for the API's, which needed, you know, sub-second query response times. And the enterprise solution, they weren't always able to get the performance they needed, because the fast queries were being overrun by the larger queries that needed more resources. And then they had a third for starting to develop this enterprise data platform and started, you know, looking into their future. The first challenge was, first of all, bringing all those three together, and back into a single cluster, and allowing our users to have both of the heavy queries and the API queries running at the same time, on the same platform without having to completely separate them out onto different clusters. EON really helps with that because it allows to store that data in the S3 communal storage, have the main cluster set up to run the heavy queries. And then you can set up sub clusters that still point to that S3 data, but separates out the compute so that the API's really have their own resources to run and not be interfered with by the other process. >> Okay, so that, I'm hearing a couple of things. One is you're sort of busting down data silos. So you're able to have a much more coherent view of your data, which I would imagine is critical, certainly. Companies like MassMutual, have been around for 100 years, and so you've got all kinds of data dispersed. So to the extent that you can break down those silos, that's important, but also being able to I guess have granular increments of compute and storage is what I'm hearing. What does that do for you? It make that more efficient? Well, they are other business benefits? Maybe you could elucidate. >> Well, one cost is again, a huge benefit, the cost of running three different clusters in even AWS, in the enterprise solution was a little costly, you know, you had to have your dedicated servers here and there. So you're paying for like, you know, 12, 15 different servers, for example. Whereas we bring them all back into EON, I can run everything on a six-node production cluster. And you know, when things are busy, I can spin up the three-node top cluster for the API's, only paid for when I need them, and then bring them back into the main cluster when things are slowed down a bit, and they can get that performance that they need. So that saves a ton on resource costs, you know, you're not paying for the storage, you're paying for one S3 bucket, you're only paying for the nodes, these are two instances, that are up and running when you need them., and that is huge. And again, like you said, it gives us the ability to silo our data without having to completely separate our data into different storage areas. Which is a big benefit, it gives us the ability to query everything from one single cluster without having to synchronize it to, you know, three different ones. So this one going to have there's, this one going to have there's, but everyone's still looking at the same data and replicate that in QA and Devs so that people can do it outside of production and do some testing as well. >> So EON, obviously a very important innovation. And of course, Vertica touts the difference between others who separate huge storage, and you know, they're not the only one that does that, but they are really I think the only one that does it for on-prem, and virtually across clouds. So my question is, and I think you're doing a breakout session on the Virtual BDC. We're going to be in Boston, now we're doing it online. If I'm in the audience, I'm imagining I'm a junior DBA at an organization that maybe doesn't have a Joe. I haven't been an expert for seven years. How hard is it for me to get, what do I need to do to get up to speed on EON? It sounds great, I want it. I'm going to save my company money, but I'm nervous 'cause I've only been at Vertica DBA for, you know, a year, and I'm sort of, you know, not as experienced as you. What are the things that I should be thinking about? Do I need to bring in? Do I need to hire somebody? Do I need to bring in a consultant? Can I learn it myself? What would you advise? >> It's definitely easy enough that if you have at least a little bit of work experience, you can learn it yourself, okay? 'Cause the concepts are still there. There's some you know, little bits of nuances where you do need to be aware of certain changes between the Enterprise and EON edition. But I would also say consult with your Vertica Account Manager, consult with your, you know, let them bring in the right people from Vertica to help you get up to speed and if you need to, there are also resources available as far as consultants go, that will help you get up to speed very quickly. And we did work together with Vertica and with one of their partners, Clarity, in helping us to understand EON better, set it up the right way, you know, how do we take our, the number of shards for our data warehouse? You know, they helped us evaluate all that and pick the right number of shards, the right number of nodes to get set up and going. And, you know, helped us figure out the best ways to get our data over from the Enterprise Edition into EON very quickly and very efficient. So different with yourself. >> I wanted to ask you about organizational, you know, issues because, you know, the guys like you practitioners always tell me, "Look, the tech, technology comes and goes, that's kind of the easy part, we're good at that. It's the people it's the processes, the skill sets." What does your, you know, team regime look like? And do you have any sort of ideal team makeup or, you know, ideal advice, is it two piece of teams? Is it what kind of skills? What kind of interaction and communications to senior leadership? I wonder if you could just give us some color on that. >> One of the things that makes me extremely proud to be working for MassMutual right now, is that they do what a lot of companies have not been doing and that is investing in IT. They have put a lot of thought, a lot of money, and a lot of support into setting up their enterprise data platform and putting Vertica at the center. And not only did they put the money into getting the software that they needed, like Vertica, you know, MicroStrategy, and all the other tools that we were using to use that, they put the money in the people. Our managers are extremely supportive of us. We hired about 40 to 45 different people within a four-month time frame, data engineers, data analysts, data modelers, a nice mix of people across who can help shape your data and bring the data in and help the users use the data properly, and allow me as the database administrator to make sure that they're doing what they're doing most efficiently and focus on my job. So you have to have that diversity among the different data skills in order to make your team successful. >> That's awesome. Kind of a side question, and it's really not Vertica's wheelhouse, but I'm curious, you know, in the early days of the big data, you know, movement, a lot of the data scientists would complain, and they still do that, "80% of my time is spent wrangling data." The tools for the data engineer, the data scientists, the database, you know, experts, they're all different. And is that changing? And to what degree is that changing? Kind of what ending are we in and just in terms of a more facile environment for all those roles? >> Again, I think it depends on company to company, you know, what resources they make available to the data scientists. And the data scientists, we have a lot of them at MassMutual. And they're very much into doing a lot of machine learning, model training, predictive analytics. And they are, you know, used to doing it outside of Vertica too, you know, pulling that data out into Python and Scalars Bar, and tools like that. And they're also now just getting into using Vertica's in-database analytics and machine learning, which is a skill that, you know, definitely nobody else out there has. So being able to have one somebody who understands Vertica like myself, and being able to train other people to use Vertica the way that is most efficient for them is key. But also just having people who understand not only the tools that you're using, but how to model data, how to architect your tables, your schemas, the interaction between your tables and schemas and whatnot, you need to have that diversity in order to make this work. And our data scientists have benefited immensely from the struct that MassMutual put in place by our data management delivery team. >> That's great, I think I saw, somewhere in your background, that you've trained about 100 people in Vertica. Did I get that right? >> Yes, I've, since I started here, I've gone to our Boston location, our Springfield location, and our New York City location and trained, probably about this point, about 120, 140 of our Vertica users. And I'm trying to do, you know, a couple of follow-up sessions per year. >> So adoption, obviously, is a big goal of yours. Getting people to adopt the platform, but then more importantly, I guess, deliver business value and outcomes. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, I wanted to ask you about encryption. You know, in the perfect world, everything would be encrypted, but there are trade offs. Are you using encryption? What are you doing in that regard? >> We are actually just getting into that now due to the New York and the CCPA regulations that are now in place. We do have a lot of Person Identifiable Information in our data store that does require encryption. So we are going through a month's long process that started in December, I think, it's actually a bit earlier than that, to start identifying all the columns, not only in our Vertica database, but in, you know, the other databases that we do use, you know, we have Postgres database, SQL Server, Teradata for the time being, until that moves into Vertica. And identify where that data sits, what downstream applications, pull that data from the data sources and store it locally as well, and starts encrypting that data. And because of the tight relationship between Voltage and Vertica, we settled on Voltages as the major platform to start doing that encryption. So we're going to be implementing that in Vertica probably within the next month or two, and roll it out to all the teams that have data that requires encryption. We're going to start rolling it out to the downstream application owners to make sure that they are encrypting the data as they get it pulled over. And we're also using another product for several other applications that don't mesh well as well with both. >> Voltage being micro, focuses encryption solution, correct? >> Right, yes. >> Yes, of course, like a focus for the audience's is the, it owns Vertica and if Vertica is a separate brand. So I want to ask you kind of close on what success looks like. You've been at this for a number of years, coming into MassMutual which was great to hear. I've had some past experience with MassMutual, it's an awesome company, I've been to the Springfield facility and in Boston as well, and I have great respect for them, and they've really always been a leader. So it's great to hear that they're investing in technology as a differentiator. What does success look like for you? Let's say you're at MassMutual for a few years, you're looking back, what success look like? Go. >> A good question. It's changing every day just, you know, with more and more, you know, applications coming onboard, more and more data being pulled in, more uses being found for the data that we have. I think success for me is making sure that Vertica, first of all, is always up made, is always running at its most optimal to keep our users happy. I think when I started, you know, we had a lot of processes that were running, you know, six, seven hours, some of them were taking, you know, almost a day long, because they were so complicated, we've got those running in under an hour now, some of them running in a matter of minutes. I want to keep that optimization going for all of our processes. Like I said, there's a lot of users using this data. And it's been hard over the first year of me being here to get to all of them. And thankfully, you know, I'm getting a bit of help now, I have a couple of system DBAs, and I'm training up to help out with these optimizations, you know, fixing queries, fixing projections to make sure that queries do run as quickly as possible. So getting that to its optimal stage is one. Two, getting our data encrypted and protected so that even if for whatever reasons, somehow somebody breaks into our data, they're not going to be able to get anything at all, because our data is 100% protected. And I think more companies need to be focusing on that as well. And third, I want to see our data science teams using more and more of Vertica's in-database predictive analytics, in-database machine learning products, and really helping make their jobs more efficient by doing so. >> Joe, you're awesome guest I mean, we always like I said, love having the practitioners on and getting the straight, skinny and pros. You're welcome back anytime, and as I say, I wish we could have met in Boston, maybe next year at the BDC. But it's great to have you online, and thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> And thank you for having me and hopefully we'll meet next year. >> Yeah, I hope so. And thank you everybody for watching that. Remember theCUBE is running concurrent with the Vertica Virtual BDC, it's vertica.com/bdc2020. If you want to check out all the keynotes, and all the breakout sessions, I'm Dave Volante for theCUBE. We'll be going. More interviews, for people right there. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark it's the CUBE. Covering Nutanix.Next2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of Nutanix.Next here in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside, Stew Miniman. We're joined by Monica Kumar, she is the SVP product marketing at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming back on the Cube. >> Sure, thank you for having me, I really appreciate it. >> So the last time we met, we were in Anaheim at the last big Nutanix conference and you were fresh into the job, six weeks in, you (laughs) and now you're seven months in, this is after a 22 year career at Oracle. >> Yes >> So you're a tech veteran, but tell us a little bit about how it's going, what you've seen so far, why the opportunity appeal and if it's living up to what your expectations were. It's been an absolute adventure at Nutanix. It's been, actually it's going to be close to eight months now and it was a bit scary for me to take the plunge after 26 years in the tech industry, I've had a fulfilling career. But there was a, actually couple reasons why Nutanix was so appealing to me and it's been a fantastic ride so far. One was, this intense focus on providing technology that's so innovative, that it's geared to simplifying IT's live, and geared to its business outcomes. But there's a bigger goal for Nutanix, which really drew me to the company, which is this obsession with customer delight and providing outstanding customer experience. So here I am, almost eight months later, I'm living it, in the Nutanix world and hoping we're delighting customers as well as we go along. >> Monica, it's a very much a different company. I look at Oracle and Nutanix. Many of the Nutanix executives and team have background in Oracle, you know, Oracle, Software at its heart, and helped deliver one of the stickiest applications in Enterprise as well as a role in IT, I mean the DBA is there. Lot of discussion here at the show here about moving from the discussion of HyperConverge to HyperCloud. Give us your thought as to where you see your customers, today, kind of the state of the industry, and where you see Nutanix fitting in going beyond Hyperconverge into the broader Cloud discussion. >> Yeah I think that's a great question to set up the context. If I think about companies like Oracle, Nutanix, and some of the larger software companies that been around for a while, there's a lot of commonality, I think, between them, right. One is catering to enterprise customers, so even the Nutanix is only 10 years old, I was surprised as to how many big global 2000 companies, big brands actually use Nutanix today. So we've actually almost been born in the enterprise and now we expanding out to the commercial space. So by that what I mean is, when you're born in the enterprise, you know how important data centers are to our customers. They've invested huge amounts, in some cases billions of dollars to create these fully functional data centers that are hosting all the applications and data and all the business critical databases in the data center. And now, they're trying to figure out how do they bring agility and flexibility and speed while preserving all this investment made in the data centers. So I think from that perspective, we very much understand it's about helping our customers who've built big data centers on premises to bring Cloud agility to those customers, whether it's on premises or in public Cloud, and actually the combination of both is where hybrid comes in. >> So what is the status of things, in terms of where are most companies at right now, would you say. >> Yeah, interestingly, we've run a number of surveys and in 2018 when we ran the survey around HybridCloud, 86 percent of the survey respondents said that's the IT model they would prefer because they can exponentially enhance the computing resources, they can actually without investing money in wheeling in servers and storage and space and pulling, they can actually advance and expand the stack where they can deploy applications, right. So it's the most preferred IT model, however, there's lots of issues in making it a reality. And I think we can talk about that. Almost 70 percent said they would love to make it a preferred model, but they are unable to deploy it because of multiple reasons. >> Yeah, it's interesting when I think of what I've heard from customers for years and years, you go talk to IT and they say, "I don't have enough headcount, I don't have enough money," "I can't keep up." Yet, some of the new deployment models, Oh my gosh, you're going to put me out of a job, you know, I won't be able to do anything it's like, wait I thought you didn't have time to do any of the things you want to do and didn't have enough money. If we could make it easier, if some of the pieces could be invisible or just handled, you could go work on all of those other projects that you've been wanting to. How is Nutanix helping customers through kind of that transition to, as you said, they want agility, they want choice, they need to be able to have IT be a participant with, if not a driver for the business. >> Yes, you know, if you think about in the last decade, IT has been very focused on infrastructure modernization or what we call data center modernization. So whatever we have, we want to make it simple, cut costs so it's most efficient, and I think that's a great initiative to embark on, but it's almost very inside, inward-centric. It's about how do I make my life easy, make myself more productive, cut costs in my work. I think if we turn it around to customer delight and IT wanted to delight the customers, and really focus on becoming a service organization, that's when things start changing because now we are talking about consumerization of IT. In our lives, we all are so used to delight, our smartphone response as soon as we click something or swipe something, we get the answers. There're lots of things in life that have changed where it's instant gratification in a way, and I think companies are also asking and demanding that of IT. It's like hey if I want IT resources, I want it right away. So I think IT as an organization is changing and really focusing more on becoming a service organization and delighting their customers and that's where automation comes in. That's where cutting down all the manual tasks, which a machine or a robot or software can do, so the human being can focus on what's more important to them, what's more strategic, and I think that's where having and choosing the right platform comes in, so that IT can provide more resilient services and really provide services at the speed the business is demanding. So to me, I think that's where companies like Nutanix come in, where we can help IT become that service organization. >> So when you're talking about this evolution of IT, I mean, what does that mean for the skills that become the in-demand skills, what does that mean for how IT is placed within an organization and how it interacts with other functions, I mean how does this change really manifest itself. >> Yeah, and I think to your point as well too, I think IT has to become a change agent, no longer can IT just be in a supporting role and just help advance the business because I think now businesses are realizing that if they don't delight customers, they can't really grow. They won't stay competitive, so IT has to become the change agent to use technology to advance and grow the business, and I think from that perspective, if you look at IT admins, Cis admins, storage admins, data administrators, all of them need to start thinking about what is the next level of skillset, which makes me become more of a dev-ops or a data-ops person, or an IT-ops person. As it was to simply just administering something, simply badgering provisioning is not good enough anymore. There needs to be some element of programming, some element of continuous delivery and some element of bridging the gap between a public and private cloud solution, where apps can run on both places, where data can be in both places. So we do want the IT skillsets to evolve in a way that they can become more cloud engineers in my opinion, as opposed to staying administrators. >> Yeah, Monica, I had a great discussion with a customer earlier in the show, and he said that customers what we used to do in IT is follow the rules and what I don't want you doing in the future is following the rules, I want you to try things, I want you to try to break things and they felt that Nutanix was a platform that enabled them to be able to do that. >> Yes, absolutely, I think IT is in such a powerful position today to drive change, and really by uplevelling the skills, the IT administrators would realize they become more strategic to the organization but they even have better job prospects for themselves like individually right. I think they can do so much better in their career as well. >> Yeah, there's the great line that the executives say: what if we train our people up on new stuff and they leave, and the response is what if we don't and they stay. (laughs) >> Yes, I totally agree. >> The danger. So in terms of this evolution of IT as a functional unit in an organization and also as a human being who just works in the industry. We're talking about all these changes. How is it also changing the way organizations work? Do you know what I'm saying, in the sense of how is this evolution of IT driving change in the workplace. >> Absolutely, I think some of the old sidewalls are breaking. Just let's use Nutanix as an example when we first came out with a hybrid on which infrastructure solution, we broke the sidewalls between compute storage and virtualization. You know there was >> Altogether now. >> Yeah, exactly all together now, exactly. So there was either sys-admin, storage admins, already with using hybrid conversions, they started to work together. Now more-so, as dev-ops becomes, like I said you know, it's dev-ops , AI-ops, IT-ops, data-ops, I think we're going to start to seeing the organizations merging almost, right, and maybe there won't be a need for having a separate DBA versus a separate storage admin, versus a separate sys-admin. Maybe we are going to a place where it's going to be dev-ops or some ops, you know, all ops. That organization that's going to help create the platform for apps and data working together because the technology will be so seamless and so simple to actually use that they can focus on the process that they need to create with the organization to deploy the technology and benefit from it. >> Monica, since you've now been at the company almost eight months, I'm wondering if there's anything now being on the inside that you've learned that you'd say, Gee I wish more people on the outside understood this about Nutanix. >> Yes, absolutely I think the one thing which I knew coming in, but you don't really realize it 'till you actually realize it, and you internalize it, it really is the intense focus we have on customer success. I mean we live and breathe by that, every single person from executive level down and I give you a very small example. About two months ago, I got an email, this random email from somebody saying, "Hey I just bought Nutanix" "last week and I'm having some issue" "and I just saw you joined Nutanix, you know," "I want to reach out to you." At first, I thought hm, but I responded and I said, "Well I'm glad you reached out to me." "Is there anybody you're working with at Nutanix?" And turns out he was working with some channel partners and somebody he gave me a name. Within 24 hours, we had done enough trouble-shooting and trying to figure out what the problem was. I reached back out to him saying, you can get the part that you need, and within 48 hours he had a spot and he emailed me saying, "Thank you so much", and by the way this was a really small customer in terms of the size of the opportunity that we had, but it doesn't matter to us. Every customer counts, and every customer's success is paramount to us. >> So all hands on deck kind of base-- >> It is all hands on deck kind of thing, yep, so I can say, to me, even though I knew going into it that that's a Big Four philosophy, but to live it, it's a totally different level. >> Great, well Monica thank you so much and congrats on the new job. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, first Stew Miniman, stay tuned on more of the Cube's live coverage of .Next. (techno music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. (energetic techno music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2019 in San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We're at Moscone Center, the rejuvenated Moscone Center. Welcoming a first-time guest to theCUBE: Matthias Funke, Director of Offering Management, Hybrid Data Management from IBM. Matthias, thanks for joining us on the program. >> I'm glad to be here. >> So talk to us about what you're responsible for: products and strategy for hybrid data management. Unpack that for us. >> Yeah so my role in the business is to define a strategy for our hybrid data management offerings. So set the priorities and then very much focus on alignment across the different functions we have in the business in support of those priorities and the strategy. So think of marketing, sales, development, offering management all coming together and align themselves in support of those priorities. And then bring new capabilities and offerings to market together. >> Great, so Matthias we'd love to have you on because in our open this morning we were talking about in all the shows we go to, everybody talks about how important data is. Now of course the database is one of those places that data has always been. And now we have things like AI and developers and everything else, modernizing how we think about that sort of environment. Seems that's something that's central to what you are doing. Maybe you'd explain how some of these mega waves are impacting your products and your customers. >> So obviously given my role, I believe in the importance of the database. I think it's at the core and the foundation of what we at IBM currently describe as the AI letter. So anybody who wants to realize business benefits by delivering better insights on data to the business differentiate themselves as a company to the competition. It all starts with data and the ability to collect data and bring it together and make it accessible for the business. So yeah the role of the database cannot be underestimated in my opinion. >> There's so much, we talk about this Stu at every event that we go to on theCUBE, the power of data data's the new oil, et cetera. We also talk a lot about trust and how trust is essential. There are what I think, this data I saw the other day Stu is that 80% of the world's data is not searchable. Companies understand that data is valuable. It's liquid gold for example. But extracting, finding that data, finding the insights rather in that data, is hugely challenging. IBM is great at dealing with complexities. Talk to us about what IBM is doing to bring modern technologies like AI to the database for example to help customers start extracting quickly the value in these massive pools of data. >> Right. So first of all I think we all live, at least on my side of the business, we sometimes, we tend to live in our own bubble. We believe that the world already embraced AI and embraced-- everybody has embarked on a journey to AI. The reality is that many companies struggle. Now we did an ASIS survey out there. I don't recall exactly the source but like 49% of all this CIO's of the companies out that day they struggled in executing a strategy towards AI. If you think about Gardener as an analyst Gardener would say: today 60% of the companies have an AI strategy. And for years from now, 90% of companies have an AI strategy. It's an expression of the importance of the data and in the strategy for their respective businesses. But many companies haven't, are not there yet, right? So it's our job to help them get there. And yes, in the database and data management the ability to collect data and make it accessible is key for success. When it comes to AI on the data layer I look at it in two ways. So how do we bring intelligence into the database to make the life of the user, like the DBA the database administrator easier all right? Alter my things that use similar amount of labor. That use the skills and quiet to operate a database. And the other angle is how do you help people build intelligent applications with database, right? And simplify the access to the data. >> Yeah, you bring up some great points there. We love talking about the role of what's happening inside of jobs today. It used to be the DBA was kind of they had their own silo there. They would manage everything else. The whole wave of big data was I should be able to have, almost anybody in the business should be able to access data in (mumbles). You'd be able to leverage it. Help connect the dots with us as we go to this AI world. Where does the DBA sit compared to the rest of the business? How was their role different today than it was just a few years ago? >> Right. So in order to democratize access to data and make it available, the cloud has promised a lot. We have public cloud. We have private cloud. At the end of the day, the expectation is that you use the number of dependencies that the end user who wants to deal with the data has on different people in the organization. The DBA plays a core role in making sure that the data is available. Especially in traditional or in premises environments. But also in the private cloud. When it comes to public cloud, often that role is now delegated to the public cloud provider. You're thinking about public managed database services. So you delegate that role. But still that job is to make sure that data is available. That communities perform in an efficient way. And so the business can depend on those datasets being available and just create a (mumbles) on every day, day in and day out. >> Yeah, absolutely. When we look at a hybrid world so much of what IT specifically has asked for they now need to manage of bunch of stuff that's outside of their purview. So I've got the stuff that I own plus everything else. So what does a hybrid data management solution look like >> for customers today? >> Yeah, it's a huge challenge. Because think about different heterogeneous repositories datasets is hiding in different locations. How do you abstract that to the user or the application that you have in your organization? Alright, so data virtualization is a term that comes up quite often in this context. But how do you virtualize all that physical topology? >> How do you protect investments that people make as the bird? Let's say their solution on a certain data is stayed in one specific form factor. But then later on the side we want to move that to a different form factor because of the economics. How do you preserve that investment? And the answer here is often, well you got to make sure that the integration points are consistent. The experience and the way you interact with those data management properties is consistent and unified across that hybrid environment. If you have enough datasets of premises or in the cloud or in private cloud you want this all to look and feel the same essentially. >> Do you have an example of some customers that you've worked with across the globe that 'cause you've been with IBM a long time you said 21 years? >> Oh, I was hoping you would not say that. >> Ha! Ha! I'm sorry. >> (laughs) >> (laughs) You're a veteran. You're an expert on this. I'm curious, some of the evolution that you've witnessed? Whether it's in the role of the database or the DBA the administrator themselves. What are some of the trends that you have seen IBM really help to, help companies achieve and be really successful across industries in the last 20 years? >> So I don't really recall what happened 20 years ago but I can give you some recent examples and there is (mumbles) There is an insurance company that I've been working with for a while. And the example that they gave me at a time was hey we takes us, when we as a business user, and our business user or business analysts, they have a new question to answer for the business. It takes them like eight to 10 weeks to actually get access to the data that allows them to answer the question. And by the time the data is available to them the question has moved on. They have a different question to ask. And the reason it takes eight to 10 weeks is that there's so many different functions involved in the business to find where the data is at in the organization. How to bring it into the environment that these business users have access to. It's tremendous. It challenges that complex organization's face here. So IBM Cloud Private for Data is an example, right? And it's our answer to, in delivering in the experience that basically accelerates that whole work flow. And skips or avoids dependencies between different persona types that are associated with that work flow. So simplify that journey, make it easy so that the business user feels fully empowered to access the data that they want to without depending on anyone else in the organization. >> Yeah, Matthias, one of the strengths that IBM has is just a long history of really owning that application and understanding the people that use it. And how I get that all the way through the infrastructure through the data and the piece. What should people be looking for? I know there'll be some announcements that we can't specifically talk about today. But what sort of things should we be looking for from IBM? >> So I'm very excited about what's coming up later this week, what we will be talking about. We think it's disrupting 40 years of database technology in the way we put in jest or infuse intelligence into our database to make the life of the different users easier. Or to the way we bring different vocal types together over a single copy of data that deals with all kinds of challenges that you have in a complex state of architectures. Think about data latency, moving data from A to B. Which is very costly. So how to avoid that, I make it more effective and efficient for the organization. >> So Matthias you said, disrupt 40 years of database-- >> Yes. >> I looked through-- >> I know. >> my career. I've got a couple of years in the industry also. Intelligence and automation, things we've been talking about for a long time, they explain why 2019, we have the tools so that AI can actually offer up something disruptive that isn't just what we've been talking about for decades. >> Yeah so, the analogy I would use is the car industry. For a hundred years we have been using combustion engines, right? And you have porteous engines and (mumbles) engines at different form factors like a truck, like a regular car. And you might get available a different consumption models. Think about a taxi or Uber or you buy a car right? So, but what happen with the engine is Tesla took that to the next levels. I know, we go all electric. That's disruptive, right? When you bring that back to IT and data management the cost-space optimizer in a database has been there for 40 years. So the way people compile their career-ities execute their career plans on data has been the same for 40 years. On whence they would be talking about a new method to do that. And it has tremendous gains in terms of performance in terms of simplicity for the users. So I'm very excited about that. But that's just one aspect of what we going to talk about on Wednesday. >> When you talk about, disruption's the word that's used a lot, but 40 years, four decades of, I won't say status quo but I think you'd understand what I'm talking about. When IBM has a massive install base of big companies like IBM, what are, along the lines of this big disruption things that we'll learn about in the next couple of days what are some of the things that excite you about helping some of these massive companies, such as IBM to actually embrace this disruption, leverage it for competitive advantage and be able to find new revenue streams? >> So yeah that's a great question, Lisa, because you can have all kinds of innovative ideas and technologies. What matters is how you productize it, how you give it into the hands of your clients, and how you help them gain value from that. All right, so that's my job. That's why I get out of bed everyday because I see this as a very exciting journey, a very exciting mission for myself and for our team at IBM. And seeing these clients and benefiting from it by saying hey we have reduced so much cost or we have gained new agility in the way we can bring new capabilities to our lines of businesses and become more competitive in the industry is really exciting. >> Excellent. Well Matthias thanks so much for joining Stu and me on the program this morning. We appreciate your time, look forward to hearing some of these announcements coming out later this week. >> (laughs) Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we are live, Day One, of IBM Think 2019. Stick around. Our next guest will be joining us shortly. (energetic techno music)

(enlightening music) >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier here at theCUBE headquarters in Palo Alto, California, for a special CUBE Conversation. I'm the host of theCUBE here with my special guest, Monica Kumar, vice president of Oracle Cloud platform. Monica, thanks for joining me today. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> So Oracle Cloud has got some great stuff goin' on, one of the things I'm most intrigued about, I've heard a lot about, is this autonomous database. I have a lot of questions, want to dig into it and really unpack that, so first take a minute to explain, what is the autonomous database? >> You know, before I do that, John, can I ask you a question? >> Sure! >> You use a smartphone, right? >> Yep. >> Do you know what happens every minute of when we use a smartphone and use the internet, how much data gets generated? >> No. >> Okay, I'm going to tell you. >> Alright, good. >> 16 million text messages happen every single minute, about four million Google searches, we're talking four million YouTube videos watched, about a million Facebook pages are open, and half a million Tweets. Now think about the impact of all this data in just one minute. Somebody, somewhere, is finding this data useful, and can actually extract some value out of it. Now, you might have heard this also, that in the last two years, the world's 90 percent of data has actually been created, and it's doubling every two years. >> So my kid's LTE bill, that's why, they're watching Netflix, that's why I'm paying all this extra bandwidth. (laughs) This is a real world. I mean, I can imagine my iPhone, I got multiple apps on there, lot of power being used, but that's just one piece, like when I'm buying with Apple Pay, or I'm doing things around, there's a lot of mobility involved, what's the value of all this? >> Well see, there's also a lot of devices, I mean we talk about IoT. By the year 2021, or in about the next five years, there'll be 50 billion devices that will be collecting data, analyzing data, sharing data. So what we're talking about is the sheer volume of the data that's being generated. And ultimately, every organization is trying to figure out how to extract insights from this data, how to make their businesses run better because of those insights. Whether create new revenue streams, maybe optimize for efficiency, deliver better customer services. So that is the problem we are dealing with today is, how do we get more value out of that data? >> So how does it all work, I mean autonomous driving, you see cars around, Uber's been trying to do it, other people have fleets, cars all over the place. Autonomous database, I mean it sounds like it's self-driving, which implies that's what cloud is all about, automation. How does the check work, what's goin' on under the hood? >> Yeah so let me explain to you, I mean this is where Oracle comes in. We've been in the data and information business for over four decades. This is what we've done. We've actually been solving the hard problem for our customers when it comes to data management, and using data. And now with this new whole deluge of more and more data, who better than Oracle to solve this problem? And one of the more important ways in which we can solve this problem is by automation, is by the use of machine learning. So that's where we're moving as a company, is you're moving to adopt and embed more and more machine learning across our entire cloud portfolio. And one of the biggest things we're doing is what you're talking about, autonomous database, which is exactly that, it's combining machine learning with the decades and decades of the database optimizations that we've been putting out in the industry. It's the power of that combination, which has culminated into what we call autonomous database today. >> Is autonomous database on-premises and Cloud, or both, how does that work? >> Yes, Oracle's always been about choice, so definitely it's both. And I'll explain to you the cloud offering, in fact, you eluded to self-driving cars. It's very similar to that. So there are three core attributes of autonomous database. It's self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing, and let me explain to you what I mean by each of those. So self-driving is really the database provisioning itself, upgrading itself, patching, tuning, monitoring, backing up, all of the functions that are very manual today, are all done by autonomous database itself, so that's the self-driving part. Self-securing, applying all of the security patches by itself so the user doesn't have to worry about it. And the self-repairing is really focused on maximizing uptime, productivity. So today we offer with autonomous 99.995 percent uptime, which means 2.5 minutes of downtime or less per month, per month, which includes, by the way, both planned and unplanned downtime. So that's what autonomous database is, it's using the power of machine learning to automate all of the manual tasks that a human being is doing, which is really not of high value, which is really very administrative type of work. >> So I can see some of the time things are great for customers, what other benefits do those customers have in terms of having this, obviously automation takes away a lot of, makes free time, but what specific benefits do you guys see coming out of this for customers? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think for businesses it's all about outcome. So there are three major benefits of autonomous. The first one is reducing cost, it's making sure that the administrative times, I'll give you an example, we now with autonomous can cut off the administrative time by 80 percent, the cost of administering a database. So that's real hard savings for the customer, and they can then take that and put into something else that more strategic to them. It's about reducing risk. The risk of breeches, which could cause reputational damage to companies, which could cause, shareholder value loss. So the fact that we are reducing risk with autonomous technology is another big benefit. And the third, and the most important one, is really innovation, the time to innovation, the time to insights, more productivity for the customer. So those three, in my opinion, are the top three benefits >> To organizations. >> Now being agile, having flexibility, the cloud certainly brings that scale out mentality, that server list we hear things like that in the industry, so certainly very relevant, and machine learning makes that automation happen. Love that message. The question I would have for you is okay, in my mind, I'm trying to think, how would I buy this, how would I use it? What are some of the offerings that you guys have, is it turnkey box, is it software, how do you roll this out to customers, how do they consume it? Take us through the offering itself. >> Sure, today we offer autonomous in our cloud in two different offerings. One is autonomous data warehouse, which is purely for analytics, so you can actually create new data warehouses, or data mods to get insights from your data. The second one is transaction processing, it's autonomous transaction processing, which can be used to develop applications, to deploy applications, high-performance workloads, mission-critical workloads in the cloud. So those are the two ways we can do, in fact, we have many customers who are using our technology today in our cloud. But like I said, this is also going to be available in on-premises as well. >> That's awesome. So, when you get into the customer examples, who's using this now? Is it shipping? What's the status of it? I mean this gets a lot of attention, and the press articles are great. We covered it on SiliconANGLE, what are the customer examples? >> Absolutely, so of course it's shipping, and it's the first and only self-driving database in the industry. We have many, many customers for the last few months who are using it. I'll give you a few examples. We have a major Enterprise car rental company who is using it, and they were able to cut down their time to provision databases from two weeks to eight minutes. Now what does that mean? That means they can now roll out projects faster, and improve their customer services and offers they are making to customers. We have another customer who is in the shipping and oil industry, and they've cut down their time to querying complex data sets from 20 minutes to a few seconds. Again, which means they can get access to insights much faster to make decisions. And they've also eliminated downtime from patching because everything is done online, patching is done automatically on the database while it's running online. And then we have another customer who's a managed service provider. They're now able to provision their customers 10 times faster. So that means they can grow their business, they can provision more customers, their current customers can be happier because they are supporting them better and faster. >> What are some of the comments and messages, to kind of go off tangent for a second here but, I mean, they go "Wow, this is amazing"? What's some of the feedback you're getting? What are they saying, what are some the anecdotal comments? Share some color around that. >> Sure, I mean one of the big comments is "Wow! Me, I'm a DB, I thought this was "going to take my job away, but actually, "to the contrary, it's making my job easier." DBAs are now realizing they can actually manage many more databases efficiently in the same time that they were doing before. And secondly, they don't have to be involved in manual drudgery tasks, they can now offload all of that to autonomous database, and they can now focus on more strategic tasks. They can become a partner to the business, they can focus on application life-cycle management, on data security, on data architectures. So that's the one reaction we are getting is like "Wow, I didn't realize how much of my time "I was spending doing maintenance stuff, "which really adds no value to the organization." So customers are seeing a lot of productivity gains. I think the second thing is the speed of innovation. The fact that it would take them three months, six months, to deploy new projects, and now they can do it quickly within a few minutes is actually unbelievable to them. >> This is a real good point, I just want more double-down on that real quick, because one of the things we're seeing is, across all the events we go to, that message of the fear of "Oh my god, "I'm going to lose my job" or "I'm going to be automated away" actually isn't true. If they get re-deployed in other easier jobs, I don't want to say easier, but all the mundane tasks can be automated, that's a good thing. The security thing about the patching and self-updating, that's amazing. But the skill gaps is a huge problem CIOs face is that they need more people. And cloud architects are the number-one demand jobs, so I mean this must be really refreshing to hear that when you say "Hey, you were doing "a DBA job before, or something else, "now you're a cloud architect." Are you seeing the cloud architect role become important, and if so, what are they doing? What's the role of a cloud architect, and how does this fit into that? >> Yeah, I think the way we describe it, I think it's close to cloud architect, but think about it from administering data, or managing databases to actually using databases to mine insights, it's a different mindset. So you're becoming a data professional from a data administrator. So as opposed to having a job of managing a database, that's not important, what's important is you use the database to get insights and make your business smarter. So now we are working with, for example, our DBA stakeholders, which have been our Oracle family for four decades, to help them re-skill, to new ways of thinking, to becoming data professionals, to becoming data architects, and like I said, focusing on things like data life-cycle management, how do you work with application developers, how do you work with lines of businesses when your line of business comes to you and says "Hey, I want a database tag deployed for XYZ", the ability for them to say "Of course, I can give it to you in minutes." as opposed to saying "Oh, you'll have to wait two months." Imagine that. >> Yeah they're helping people, and they're also, more important, they're powerful. >> Right, right. >> Okay, Oracle OpenWorld is happening, and so one of the conversations we're hearing, and certainly this is consistent throughout the industry, the role of security. I put my skeptic hat on like okay Monica, tell me the truth, is it really self-updating the security patches? What about the phishing attacks? There's a real paranoia on the security. Take me through the security, while you guys are comfortable with the security, what's the big message and what's the big feature of why it's so secure? >> Right. But before I do that, let me paint a picture for you. We all know the opportunity that comes with Cloud, it presents huge opportunities to organizations. But with every opportunity, there comes a challenge that needs to be solved. And like you said, security is a big challenge. We are talking about massive scale of security breeches happening in the industry. We are talking about bad guys having access to very sophisticated technologies to wage this war against us, the organizations, to get access to core data. And we are talking about the number of security issues that are happening multiplying and compounding, and I'll give you some data points. There are 3.5 million cyber security jobs that are open in the next couple years. We don't have enough people to fill those jobs, even if we did, we can't keep pace with the amount of security threats and challenges that we need to navigate and address. >> And by the way, that's a data problem by the way, too. >> Back to your data is the central value proposition. >> Exactly, and also the other point I want to give you, which is equally important is of all the breeches that have happened, 85 percent actually had to fix available, and yet it wasn't applied and the breech happened. So again, we are talking about human beings who are very busy >> The human error on the patch side is huge. Spear phishing and also patches are the two number one areas of security. >> Right, but also people are busy. You kind of say "Okay, I'm going to do this later, "I have so many other 10 things to take care of first, "and I'm going to apply this patch later." Now what happens is, that's why we need to throw automation and machine learning at this problem. I don't think we can solve it by throwing just more and more human man-power on it. We need to combine the power of human and machine to tackle this security problem, and that's what we're doing with autonomous database. Not only can we predict a breech before it happens, we can actually fix it before it becomes an issue. And that's what I'm talking about with the whole self-securing notion. That's the power of autonomous database. >> A few Oracle OpenWorlds ago, Larry Ellison said on stage, I'll never forget this, I actually loved the line, other people kind of gave him some heat for it, but he said "Security should always be on. "Off is the exception." Has that view permeated through Oracle? >> Oh, Oracle was built on that view. We have, if you look again at our history, and our customer base, we are supporting the largest and the biggest governments in the world. We support from federal governments, to state governments, to public sector, to every organization who cares deeply about security, and it's not just a government issue, it's every organization has to safeguard the data of their customers. I mean that's the law. Every single organization cares about it. Oracle was built on that, that's the foundation that we are built on. So for us, security is very important, that's the first design principle of our data management, and all of our technology solutions. >> Well you guys are in the middle of all the cloud action, for sure, we're covering you guys, it's great to have you on theCUBE. Monica, thanks for coming and sharing your story. Where can people find out more information on the autonomous database, this awesome new product? >> Well, it's going to be all over oracle.com, so I'd say go there at first and from there you can navigate to a lot of great content on autonomous database. We have customer studies, we have free trials, so you can take us for a spin. It's like driving a self-driving car, it's self-driving database. >> It's a Tesla. >> Yeah, it's like the Tesla of databases, exactly. >> Monica, thanks for coming, I'm John Furrier here for CUBE Conversation, we are in Palo Alto at our headquarters, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (enlightening music)

(music) >> Live from Orlado, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. and theCube's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCube's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. Happy hour has started. The crowd is roaring. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Thomas LaRock. >> He is the Head Geek at SolarWinds. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having me. >> Great title: Head Geek >> Yes. >> So, tell our viewers a little bit about what - tell us about SolarWinds and also about what you do. >> SolarWinds is a company that offers about forty different products to help with your enterprise infrastructure monitoring. Really unify management of your systems. Been in the business for about twenty years and I've been with them for about eight now. Head Geek is really, uh, you can equate it to being a technical evangelist. >> Okay. So you're out there trying to win the hearts and minds, trying to tell everyone what you do. >> Yes, I need you all to love me. (laughing) and love my products. >> So, Thomas, and for those who don't already follow you on Twitter, you're a SQL rockstar. >> Yes, yes [Stu] - I need to say, "thank you," because you helped connect me with a lot of the community here, especially on the data side of the house. You and I have known each other for a bunch of years. You're a Microsoft MVP. So maybe give us a little bit of community aspect: what it means to be a Microsoft MVP for those who don't know. You're an evangelist in this space and you've been on this show many times. >> I usually don't talk about myself a lot, but sure. (Rebecca laughing) Let's go for it. I've been a Microsoft data platform MVP for about 10 year now. And it was intresting when you reached out, looking to get connected. I was kind of stunned by how many people I actually knew or knew how to get in touch with for you. I help you line up, I guess, a handful of people to be on the show because you were telling me you hadn't been here at Microsoft Ignite and I just thought, "well I know people," and they should know Stu, and we should get them connected so that you guys can have some good conversations. But, yeah, it's been a wild ride for me those ten years where Microsoft awards people MVP designation. It's kind of being an evangelist for Microsoft and some of the great stuff that they've been doing over the past ten years. >> It's a phenomenal program. Most people in the technology industry know the Microsoft MVP program. I was a Vmware expert for a number of years. Many of the things were patterned off of that. John Troyer is a friend of mine. He said that was one the things he looked at. Sytrics has programs like this. Many of the vendors here have evangelists or paragons showing that technology out here. Alight. So talk a little bit about community. Talk about database space. Data and databases have been going through such, you know, explosion of what's going on out there, right? SQL's still around. It's not all cosmos and, you know, microservices-based, cloud, native architecture. >> So the SQL Server box product is still around, but what I think is more amazing to me has been the evalution of...Let's take for example, one of the announcements today, the big data cluster. So, it's essentially a container that's going to run SQL servers, Spark and Hadoop, all in one. Basically, a pod that will get deployed by kubernetes. When you wrap all that together, what you start to realize is that the pattern that Microsoft has been doing for the past few years, which is, essentially, going to where the people are. What I mean is: you have in the open-source world, you have people and developers that have embraced things like DevOps much faster than what the Windows developers have been doing. So instead of taking your time trying to drag all these people where you want them to be, they've just start building all the cool stuff where all the cool kids already are, and everybody's just going to gravitate. Data has gravity, right? So, you're building these things, and people are going to follow it. Now, it's not that they're expecting to sell a billion dollars woth of licenses. No. They just need to be a part of the conversation. So if you're a company that's using those technologies, now all of a sudden, it's like, this is an option. Are you interested in it? Microsoft is the company that's best poised to bring enterprises to the cloud. Amazon has a huge share. We all know that, but Microsoft's already that platform of choice for these enterprises. Microsoft is going to be the one to help them get to the cloud. [Stu]- Thomas, Explain what you mean by that because the strength I look at Microsoft is look, they've got your application. Business productivity: that's where they are. Apologize for cutting you off there. Is that what you mean? The applications are changing and you trusted Microsoft and the application and therefore, that's a vendor of choice. >> Absolutely. If it's already your vendor of choice then, I don't want to say, "Lock in," but if it's already your preference and if they can help get to the cloud, or in the hybrid situation or just lift and shift and just get there, then that's the one you going to want to do it. Everything they're building and all the services they're providing... At the end of the day, they and Amazon, they're the new electric company. They want data. That's the electricity. They don't care how you get it, but between... even Vmware. Between Amazon, Vmware and Microsoft, they're going to be the ones to help... They're going to be your infrastructure companies. Microsoft-managed desktop now. We'll manage your laptop for you. >> Everything that they're doing essentially like, don't even need my own IT department. Microsoft's going to be the largest MSP in history, right? That's where they're headed. They're going to manage everything for you. The data part of it, of course for me, I just love talking about data. But the data part of it...Data is essential to everything we do. It's all about the data. They're doing their best to manage it and secure it. Security is a huge thing. There were some security announcements today as well, which were awesome. The advanced threat detection, the protection that they have. I'm always amazed when I walk through the offering they have for SQL injection protection. I try and ask people, "Who's right now monitoring for SQL injection?" And they're like, "We're not doing that." For fifteen dollars a month, you could do this for your servers. They're like, "that's amazing what they're offerening." Why wouldn't you want that as a service? Why wouldn't you sign-up tomorrow for this stuff? So, I get excited about it. I think all this stuff they're building is great. The announcements today were great. I think they have more coming out over the next couple days. Or at least in the sessions, we'll start seeing a lot of hands-on stuff. I'm excited for it. >> So when you were talking about Microsoft being the automatic vendor of choice. Why wouldn't you? You treated it as a no brainer. What does Microsoft need to do to make sure customers feel that way too? >> I think Microsoft is going to do that... How I would do that. A couple ways. One, at the end of the day, Microsoft wants what we all want, what I want, is they want happy customers. So they're going to do whatever it takes so their customers are happy. So one way you do that is you get a lot of valuable feedback from customers. So, one thing Microsoft has done in the past is they've increased the amount telemetry they're collecting from their products. So they know the usage. They know what the customers want. They know what the customers need. But they also collect simple voice to the customer. You're simply asking the customer, "What do you want?" And you're doing everything you can to keep them happy. And you're finding out where the struggles are. You're helping them solve those problems. How do you not earn trust as a result of all that, right? I think that's the avenue they've been doing for, at least, ten years. Well, let's say, eight years. That's the avenue and the approach they've been doing. I'd say it's been somewhat successful. >> Thomas, as our team was preparing for this show, we understand that Microsoft has a lot of strengths, but if I look at the AI space, Microsoft is not the clear leader today. Um, we think that some of the connections that Microsoft has, everything that you said, down to the desktop. Heck, even in the consumer space, they're down to the Xbox. There's a lot of reasons why Microsoft... You can say, "Here's a path of how Microsoft could become. You know number one, number two in the AI space over time. But, we're listening to things, like the Open Data Initiative that they announced today, which, obviously, Microsoft's working with a lot of partners out there, but it's a big ecosystem. Data plays everywhere. I mean, Google obviously has strong play in data. We've talked plenty about Amazon. What does Microsoft need to do to take the strength that they have in data move forward in AI and become even stronger player in the marketplace? >> So, AI, itself, is kind of that broad term. I mean, AI is a simple if-then statement. It doesn't really have to do anything, right? So let's talk about machine learning, predictive analytics, or even deep learning. That's really the are that we're talking about. What does Microsoft have to do? Well, they have to offer the services. But they don't have offer, say, new things. They just have to offer things that already exist. For example, the idea of, um, incorperating Jupiter notebooks into the Azure Data Studio. So if that could be achieved, you know, now you're bringing the workspaces people are using into the Microsoft platform a little bit, making it a little bit easier. So instead of these people in these enterprises... They already trust Microsoft. They already have the tools. But I got to go use these other things. Well, eventually, those other things come into the Microsoft tools, and now you don't have to use that other stuff either. I would talk about the ability to publish these models as a service. I've done the Academy program. I've earned a few certifications on some of this stuff. I was amazed at how easy it was with a few clicks, you know, published as a service as an API. It's sitting there. I sent in my data and I get back a result, a prediction. I was like, that was really easy. So I know they're not the leaders, but they're making it easy, especially for somebody like me who can start at zero and get to where I need to be. They made it incredibly easy and in some cases, it was intuative. I'm like, oh, I know what to do next with this widgit I'm building. I think it will take time for them to kind of get all that stuff in place. I don't know how long. But does Microsoft have to be the leader in AI? They have the Cognitive Toolkit. They have all that stuff with Cortana. They have the data. I think the customers are coming along. I think they get there just by attrition. I'm not sure there's something they're going to build where everybody just says, "There it is." Except there's the Quantum stuff. And last year's announcement of Quantum, I thought was one of the most stunning things. It just hit me. I had no idea working on it. So, who knows? A year from now there could be something similar to that type of announcement, where we're like, now I get it, now I got to go have this thing. I don't think we all need, you know, a hotdog not hotdog app, which seems to be the bulk of the examples out there. Some of the image classification stuff that you have out there is fabulous. There are a lot of use cases for it. Um, I'm not sure how they get there. But, I do think eventually over time, the platform that they offer, they do get just through attrition. >> One of the things you brought up earlier in this conversation was the Open Source Initiative and Stu, we had expressed a bit of skepticism that it's still going to take three to five years, for, really, customers to see the value of this. But once...The announcement was made today, so now we're going to go forward with this Initiative. What do you see as the future? >> Yeah, I was trying to, even, figure it out. So it sounds like the three companies are sharing data with each other. They pledged to be open. So if you buy one of their products, that data can seamlessly go into that other product is what it sounded like. And they were open, if I heard it right, they were open to partnering with other companies as well. >> Correct. >> Yes. Yes. >> Other vendors or customers, even that could tie in into these APIs, doing everything that they're doing. Open data models. >> Speaking as a data guy, that means if I trust one, I have to trust them all. (Stu Laughing) >> Right? So I don't know. I have trus&t issues. (Rebecca laughing) >> Clearly. >> I'm a DBA, by heart, so I have trust issues. I need to know a little more about it, but on the surface, just the words, "open data," sound great. I just don't know the practical, uh, practicality of it. It sounds like it's a way for people, or these companies, to partner with each other to get more of your data into their platform and their infrastructure. >> Yeah. I think next time we have Thomas on, we're going to spend some time talking about the dark side of data. >> Yes, indeed. >> We can talk dark data. Oh, sure. (Rebecca laughing) >> Well, Thomas, it was so much fun having you on this show and I should just plug your book. You are the author of "DBA Survivor." >> I am. Yes. It was a little book. So being a DBA, uh, I had some challenges in my role and I decided, as my friend Kevin Kline put it to me, he goes, "You should write the book you wish had written for you and handed to you on day zero of being a DBA." And I said, "Oh." It took m&e, I think, like, three weeks. It was just so easyto write all of that. >> It just flowed (laughing.) >> It was just stuff I had to say. But, yeah, thank you. >> Excellent. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit. (music playing)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (soft electronic music) >> And welcome back here on The Cube which, of course, is the flagship broadcast of Silicon Angle TV. Proud to be here at Dell Technologies World 2018. We've been live Monday, now today Tuesday, back live again tomorrow. Hope you join us for all three days of coverage. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls. We're joined by Jim Franklin who's the director of solution management at Dell EMC. Jim, good to see you this afternoon. >> Hey, nice to see you as well. >> How's the show been for you so far? >> Fantastic, and there's always a lot of energy at Dell World. It's always exciting to be around, see our partners, our customers, hear our executives speak, gives us some clarity on what we're doing at my level. [Men Laugh] So it's a fun time, it's energetic, it's Vegas. >> Get's ya. >> Good combination right? >> Yeah, so. (laughs) Get you energized. >> So before we jump in, what are you hearing from customers now? Because we've been talking to a lot of folks in your shoes at Dell and just kind of curious what are people bending your ear about? What are they most curious about? >> Yeah, so a lot of our customers and our partners are interested in, I'll call them hot trends. So what from my perspective are we seeing, where are there problems? So for that, things like how do I continue to try and outpace the data that keeps coming, because like death and taxes, the data keeps growing and growing and growing so they're looking at it going, how do I start to consume all this data? Can you help out? Hey but what about this cloud and how do I make the cloud a reality? Several of them haven't actually even started on a cloud strategy, so they're saying, hey what's the best way to look at that? And then they're looking at it saying, if they're the infrastructure guy or if they're the backup administrator, they're saying, how do I actually flip my economic model from a cost model to a profit model? So these are the sorts of conversations we're seeing, not only with our customers, but our partners are trying to help them out as well. >> So take us back. Let's go to the most simple or at least maybe the most elementary stage and say they're not even thinking of a cloud strategy yet or they're just now embarking on that. >> Jim: Just sniffing out. >> Yeah, walk us through that. What do you do because you would think by now obviously, their awareness is viable. We should be there, but they don't know where to go. >> So most customers know that this is now trusted technology, a trusted operating model. The problem has to be is how do you actually get there? What does that journey look like and what choices do I have? So even those early adopters that jumped out to public cloud for sort of a quick fix, we see them especially for my area, which is business critical applications, SAP Oracle, Splunk, they're coming back to an on-premise cloud for reasons like being able to recover out of that or this now they've discovered is their intellectual property and there's a little bit of reluctance just to go send that out to sort of an unknown place, so we see a lot of customers that are not bringing it back, but they now learn how that economic model can work, so they're trying to go in with sort of a cloud mentality. So still do the operational, the show back, the charge back, but maybe bring that in house, so you're more comfortable with it, so you can innovate on that. >> So as we're talking about these traditional, mission-critical apps, SAP, Splunk, Oracle Suite, these applications that are very rigid. The cash register, SAP, the cash register of the world. We don't want to change, you get the product guy. He's like, hey we want access to the mission-critical data. We want to be able to change it on the fly. You have the SAP guys going back and saying, no, no, no. >> Jim: Wait a minute, yeah. >> Wait a minute, we'll give you N+1 environment to develop in and then you prove to us, but it takes nine months to get an N+1 environment so you can do the development. How is Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, helping solve that agility problem for these legacy applications? >> So the first thing that we have to do, if you're going to keep it on premise is we advise our customers, modernize the infrastructure, because a lot of times you'll come up on a server or a storage refresh, right? This is the plumbing, right? This is underneath the guts of the house. It's not exactly attractive stuff, so if you can actually move to speed based technologies, things like Flash, right, fantastic technology. If you can virtualize it, if you can start to consider scale out and scale up technologies that are ready to go. Software Define has been a boon for these things. SAP is now adopting this like Software Define. That's fantastic for our folks, I guess. You guys know the advantages of Software Define. It can spin up, spin out, scale up, scale, in a much more pragmatic, quicker way. So these are sort, see now we're entering into things like VX Rack, VX Rail, and they have the resiliency, the stability, the scale in order to support these applications. They're built now solid enough that you can trust them to run, so now you get those operational efficiencies, you get that ability to scale, you get the performance, and you get it at a little bit better price point as well, so I think that's where customers are starting to be less reluctant to move those big humongous SAP, Oracle workloads, because it can be trusted. It's now that technology's aged enough and is resilient enough, then now customers are doing it and they're doing it quite rapidly. >> So step two of this is once I get some agility, what I thought was, traditional rational, you know what, Dell should never move SAP to the cloud, because it's static, it doesn't change, and it's costly. Well I now have these use cases where I'm spinning up N+1s all the time and I'm bringing them down. That's elastic. That sounds like the cloud. How do you help make that transition? >> So SAP actually, as one of the trigger points is this move to HANA, the memory database. And the economic model was, it's a little pricey, that software, right? So SAP has actually gone in with a cloud-first mentality. So they've actually helped us out here. They've promoted them as, so HANA enterprise cloud, for instance, is a way for you to get in on HANA at a price point that's a little better, the subscription based model. And you can start to migrate some, like a BW app, something a little smaller. Remember back in the days when we first virtualized? You wouldn't virtualize your mission-critical app right off the bat. You picked something small that you could eat. We don't eat our meal one big hunk at a time, right, we eat little bites of it, so we're doing the same thing with-- >> Keith: Unless you have four brothers. >> What's that? Unless-- (laughs) >> You have four brothers. >> You eat quickly. >> You use those. >> You do it all, right. >> Or you get real quick with your elbows. So we advise our customers, take a small BW app that you got on Oracle right now, flop it over there, put it in the cloud. You'll be able to cost-justify this much, much better and then with the work on tangible use cases, start to pull in more data-rich, hydrate that really fast, awesome analytics engine, and start to use it for the power of good. It's a super hero. It's a super hero technology, so we want to invoke it. We want to bring it alive. We want to apply it towards new innovations and that's what our customers are doing now. Financial services, health care, the retail market. So now our customers are starting to say, hey how can I apply this super awesome, super hero technology to my retail space. How can I inflate my tires 5 PSI more so I save my company 10 million dollars? So these, all these use cases now are coming. Now I call this, my personal thing, I call it now cool IT. We're no longer in the trenches doing the plumbing for SAP, we're now moving on to cool IT where we can start to do data analytics, we can start to apply use cases, start to ingest more data, maybe that oil rig out there in the gulf, I can start to pull in more of that data, I can start to do analytics on it. I can start to show the business that I'm meaningful, that I am a profit center, I know what's going on. >> Yeah, what's from the big jump there in terms of opening people's eyes, opening a company's eyes to how rich that data is for them and how applicable it is and how actionable it is, because that's been one of the bugaboos, right? People were like, I got all this data, where there's treasure there. >> Jim: There is. >> You got to find it, you got to get there. >> Right, right. So that advancement, some of the technology, like HANA's a hardened database now, not hardened in terms of its access, but hardened in terms of the technology itself, so I can actually put more in it and ingest it. The other thing that's happened is we've moved out to the edge, things like the gateways and things like that. Now I can apply that technology, but I don't have to suck it all in. And we'll go back to the original point, the cloud has enabled a lot of this traffic, the data traffic to go out there and what we see our customers now doing is now they're able to actually quiesce the data and just, we always could do this, but it never came together in such a way that it was cohesive, that I could have universal translators of all this different data coming in and I could actually quiesce it. And now, to me, the part that always matters, the UI work, like I can actually visualize and then SAP, and Oracle, and all the, they can now make it visual. I think that's the key. So if I'm a CFO or I'm a CEO and I'm talking to my CIO and I don't need to talk about numbers. I can literally visualize the data on my screen, on my iPad or whatever device I have. That now, what we see with our eyes, is much more believable than what we hear with our ears. >> John: Absolutely. >> So you can see it. And that's, I think, that's the big differentiator I've seen is we don't do customer presentations anymore. We show them with their own data. So we used to do that design thinking way back in the day, but now you can actually apply that with the technology we have and I can visualize it. >> John: Seeing is believing, right? >> Immediately customers, you don't have to do a business justification. They see it. They see it right there in front of their own eyes. It's fantastic. >> So, talking about design theory or design approach, there has to be a point where industry-wide or even within your practice where you're at the 50, 60% of the solution for most customers and there's a customization point. Where are you guys at in that? Is it 50, 60, 70, 80% at that point? What-- >> Well that's what makes it fun for a guy like me, because in solutions we can validate, we can do performance optimization and that's, for the most part you're talking servers, network storage, stuff we've always done and we can optimize that to a large extent, but once you flip the script and you look from the application down, you can start to tune from that perspective, so we can get about 70, 80% of this well constructed. It's that last 20% where the customer's saying, hey I'm a financial services arm and I'm trying to catch the flashboys or the stock traders that are manipulating the market. Well that requires a new set of tools, right, a new set of approach to how to do this, how to analyze your data, how to introduce automation, so for us, the last mile, particularly with our SI partners, who are really good at doing this. SAP is really good at doing this design thinking session. We could sit down with a customer now, we could ask them where do they want to make money. How do you want to invest in IT so that your analytics is fully realized, your data is fully realized, and they have wonderful use cases. So now we're not talking about how does widget X work with application Y, we're talking about how do I apply this data in the direction of the use case you're trying to solve for and that's the last 20% or something like that. >> Is that where art meets science in a way? All of the sudden, like you said, you've got your 80%, this is the way it's going to be. >> Now, now. >> This stuff works. >> Now we're going to fine tune. >> Jim: Yeah. >> So there is some art maybe that comes into play there. >> There is. We found that it tends to be vertical specific and there is an art form to it, which is why our global system integrators are wonderful, because they're artists. We could go in with them and we could have that conversation. We could sit down for, you could even sit down just for a couple hours and pretty soon you're having a great conversation, understanding really what the customer's business is like and then targeting that particular use case and making it tangible. >> So that's pretty interesting. You say you sit down. Who exactly are you sitting down with, because traditionally Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, talked to the infrastructure group. You're talking about a completely different level. This sounds like application level folks, analysts, not the traditional Dell contact. >> Yeah, which makes us a little bit specialized. So you still want to sell to the back of the house, the infrastructure guys, the folks that are-- >> Keith: It's going to need a PowerMax. >> Right, and it's a completely different conversation though and I'll connect the two in just a minute, but we go in and we'll talk to the VP of applications, we'll talk to the DBA. These are the folks that actually, they're not worried about the widget, the disc behind it. We'll sell them a VMAX, or a PowerMax, excuse me, at the end of the day, but they're not so worried about that. They're worried about how do I get fiduciary responsibility out of this? How do I control my regulations? What do I do about data locality? How do I look at the pressure on that oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico and make sure it's not going to burst? How do I proactively send out my maintenance man, not on every month, but when I know on the 5,000th open of that train door, that I need to proactively go do that, because at 5,000 open and closes, it's going to fail. We've done that with analytics. We know that. So for us, most of those conversations tend to be at the, you look for the DBA or the VP of applications or the CIO and in this way, this is the beauty of how this all, we're actually going in with the Rainmaker ISV. So we're going in with SAP, we're going in with Oracle, and now we combine what traditionally has been Dell, the infrastructure guys with SAP and we never used to call, we used to call six months detached from each other. Not anymore. Design thinking, IOT, use case, data analytics has brought us right together and we're in the glide path together now. It's a much different partnership now with those guys. >> Yeah, good recipe, right? >> It's fabulous. >> It really is. >> It's great, it's a fun time. >> Yeah I can tell, I can tell. And thank you for being with us. We appreciate the birds-eye view but as you said, this is kind of an exciting time, right? Because you're able to, you're transforming your business and other businesses at the same time. >> Jim: Yeah, best thing to do, yeah, love it. >> Very cool. Jim, thanks for being with us, appreciate your time. >> Yeah, appreciate it, thanks for having me. >> Joining us for Dell EMC. Back with more from Dell Technologies World 2018. We're live here in Las Vegas. (soft upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Flink Forward, brought to you by data Artisans. (upbeat music) >> This is George Gilbert. We are at Flink Forward, the user conference for the Apache Flink community, sponsored by data Artisans, the company behind Flink. And we are here with Shuyi Chen from Uber, and Shuyi works on a very important project which is the Calcite Query Optimizer, SQL Query Optimizer, that's used in Apache Flink as well as several other projects. Why don't we start with, Shuyi tell us where Calcite's used and its role. >> Calcite is basically used in the Flink Table and SQL API, as the SQL POSSTR and query optimizer in planner for Flink. >> OK. >> Yeah. >> So now let's go to Uber and talk about the pipeline or pipelines you guys have been building and then how you've been using Flink and Calcite to enable the SQL API and the Table API. What workloads are you putting on that platform, or on that pipeline? >> Yeah, so basically I'm the technical lead of the streaming platform, processing platform in Uber, and so we use Apache Flink as the stream processing engine for Uber. Basically we build two different platforms one is the, called AthenaX, which use Flink SQL. So basically enable user to use SQL to compose the stream processing logic. And we have a UI, and with one click, they can just deploy the stream processing job in production. >> When you say UI, did you build a custom UI to take essentially, turn it a business intelligence tool so you have a visual way of constructing your queries? Is that what you're describing, or? >> Yeah, so it's similar to how you compose your, write a SQL query to query database. We have a UI for you to write your SQL query, with all the syntax highlight and all the hint. To write a SQL query so that, even the data scientists and also non engineers in general can actually use that UI to compose stream processing lock jobs. >> Okay, give us an example of some applications 'cause this sounds like it's a high-level API so it makes it more accessible to a wider audience. So what are some of the things they build? >> So for example, in our Uber Eats team, they use the SQL API to, as the stream processing tool to build their Restaurant Manager Dashboard. Restaurant Manager Dashboard. >> Okay. >> So basically, the data log lives in Kafka, get real-time stream into the Flink job, which it's composed using the SQL API and then that got stored in our lab database, P notes, then when the restaurant owners opens the Restaurant Manager, they will see the dashboard of their real-time earnings and everything. And with the SQL API, they no longer need to write the Flink job, they don't need to use Java or skala code, or do any testing or debugging, It's all SQL, so they, yeah. >> And then what's the SQL coverage, the SQL semantics that are implemented in the current Calcite engine? >> So it's about basic transformation, projection, and window hopping and tumbling window and also drawing, and group eye, and having, and also not to mention about the event time and real time, processing time support. >> And you can shuffle from anywhere, you don't have to have two partitions with the same join key on one node. You can have arbitrary, the data placement can be arbitrary for the partitions? >> Well the SQL is the collective, right? And so once the user compose the logic the underlying panel will actually take care of how the key by and group by, everything. >> Okay, 'cause the reason I ask is many of the early Hadoop based MPP sequel engines had the limitation where you had to co-locate the partitions that you were going to join. >> That's the same thing for Flink. >> Oh. >> But it just the SQL part is just take care of that. >> Okay. >> So you do describe what you do, but underlying get translated into a Flink program that actually will do all the co-location. >> Oh it redoes it for you, okay >> Yeah, yeah. So now they don't even need to learn Flink, they just need to learn the SQL, yeah. >> Now you said there a second platform that Uber is building on top of Flink. >> Yeah, the second platform is the, we call it the Flink as a service platform. So the motivation is, we found that SQL actually cannot satisfy all the advanced need in Uber to build stream processing, due to the reason, like for example, they will need to call up RPC services within their stream processing application or even training the RCP call, so which is hard to express in SQL and also when they are having a complicated DAG, like a workflow, it's very difficult to debug individual stages, so they want the control to actually to use delative Flink data stream APL dataset API to build their stream of batch job. >> Is the dataset API the lowest level one? >> No it's on the same level with the data stream, so it's one for streaming, one for batch. >> Okay, data stream and then the other was table? >> Dataset. >> Oh dataset, data stream, data set. >> Yeah. >> And there's one lower than that right? >> Yeah, there's one lower API but it's usually, most people don't use that API. >> So that's system programmers? >> Yeah, yeah. >> So then tell me, who is using, like what type of programmer uses the data stream or the data set API, and what do they build at Uber? >> So for example, in one of the talk later, there's a marketplace team, marketplace dynamics team, it's actually using the platform to do online model update, machinery model update, using Flink, and so basically they need to take in the model that is trained offline and do a few group by, time and location and then apply the model, and then incrementally update the model. >> And so are they taking a window of updates and then updating the model and then somehow promoting it as the candidate or, >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something similar, yeah. >> Okay, that's interesting. And what type of, so are these the data scientists who are using this API? >> Well data scientists are not really, it's not designed for data scientists. >> Oh so they're just going the models off, they're preparing the models offline and then they're being updated in line on the stream processing platform. >> Yes. >> And so it's maybe, data engineers who are essentially updating the features that get fed in and are continually training, or updating the models. >> Basically it's a online model update. So as Kafka event comes in, continue to refine the model. >> Okay, and so as Uber looks out couple years, what sorts of things do you see adding to one of these, either of these pipelines, and do you see a shift away from the batch and request response type workloads towards more continuous processing. >> Yes actually there we do see that trend, actually, before becoming entirely of stream processing platform team in Uber, I was in marketplace as well and at that point we always see there's a shift, like people would love to use stream processing technology to actually replace some of the normal backhand service applications. >> Tell me some examples. >> Yeah, for example... So in our dispatch platform, we have the need to actually shard the workload by, for example, writers, to different hosts to process. For example, compute say ETA or compute some of the time average, and this is before done in back hand services and say use our internal distribution system things to do the sharding. But actually with Flink, this can be just done very easily, right. And so actually there's a shift, those people will also want to adopt stream processing technology and, so long as this is not a request response style application. >> So the key thing, just to make sure I understand it's that Flink can take care of the distributed joins, whereas when it was a data base based workload, DBA had to set up the sharding and now it's sort of more transparent like it's more automated? >> I think, it's... More of the support, so if before people writing backhand services they have to write everything: the state management, the sharding, and everything, they need to-- >> George: Oh it's not even data base based-- >> Yeah, it's not data base, it's real time. >> So they have to do the physical data management, and Flink takes care of that now? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Oh got it, got it. >> For some of the application it's real time so we don't really need to store the data all the time in the database, So it's usually keep in memory and somehow gets snapshot, But we have, for normal backhand service writer they have to do everything. But with Flink it has already built in support for state management and all the sharding, partitioning and the time window, aggregation primitive, and it's all built in and they don't need to worry about re-implement the logic and we architect the system again and again. >> So it's a new platform for real time it gives you a whole lot of services, higher abstraction for real time applications. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Okay. Alright with that, Shuyi we're going to have to call it a day. This was Shuyi Chen from Uber talking about how they're building more and more of their real time platforms on Apache Flink and using a whole bunch of services to complement it. We are at Flink Forward, the user conference of data Artisans for the Apache Flink community, we're in San Francisco, this is the second Flink Forward conference and we'll be back in a couple minutes, thanks. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Jose, it's the Cube. Presenting Big Data Silicon Valley. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Cube's continuing coverage of Big Data SV. >> This is out tenth Big Data event, our fifth year in San Jose. We are down the street from the Strata Data Conference. We invite you to come down and join us, come on down! We are at Forager Tasting Room & Eatery, super cool place. We've got a cocktail event tonight, and a endless briefing tomorrow morning. We are excited to welcome back to the Cube, Scott Gnau, the CTO of Hortonworks. Hey, Scott, welcome back. >> Thanks for having me, and I really love what you've done with the place. I think there's as much energy here as I've seen in the entire show. So, thanks for having me over. >> Yeah! >> We have done a pretty good thing to this place that we're renting for the day. So, thanks for stopping by and talking with George and I. So, February, Hortonworks announced some news about Hortonworks DataFlow. What was in that announcement? What does that do to help customers simplify data in motion? What industries is it going to be most impactful for? I'm thinking, you know, GDPR is a couple months away, kind of what's new there? >> Well, yeah, and there are a couple of topics in there, right? So, obviously, we're very committed to, which I think is one of our unique value propositions, is we're committed to really creating an easy to use data management platform, as it were, for the entire lifecycle of data, from one data created at the edge and as data are streaming from one place to another place, and, at rest, analytics get run, analytics get pushed back out to the edge. So, that entire lifecycle is really the footprint that we're looking at, and when you dig a level into that, obviously, the data in motion piece is usually important, and So I think one a the things that we've looked at is we don't want to be just a streaming engine or just a tool for creating pipes and data flows and so on. We really want to create that entire experience around what needs to happen for data that's moving, whether it be acquisition at the edge in a protected way with provenance and encryption, whether it be applying streaming analytics as the data are flowing and everywhere kind of in between, and so that's what HDF represents, and what we released in our latest release, which, to your point, was just a few weeks ago, is a way for our customers to go build their data in motion applications using a very simple drag and drop GUI interface. So, they don't have to understand all of the different animals in the zoo, and the different technologies that are in play. It's like, "I want to do this." Okay, here's a GUI tool, you can have all of the different operators that are represented by the different underlying technologies that we provide as Hortonworks DataFlow, and you can stream them together, and then, you can make those applications and test those applications. One of the biggest enhancements that we did, is we made it very easy then for once those things are built in a laptop environment or in a dev environment, to be published out to production or to be published out to other developers who might want to enhance them and so on. So, the idea is to make it consumable inside of an enterprise, and when you think about data in motion and IOT and all those use cases, it's not going to be one department, one organization, or one person that's doing it. It's going to be a team of people that are distributed just like the data and the sensors, and, so, being able to have that sharing capability is what we've enhanced in the experience. >> So, you were just saying, before we went live, that you're here having speed dates with customers. What are some of the things... >> It's a little bit more sincere than that, but yeah. >> (laughs) Isn't speed dating sincere? It's 2018, I'm not sure. (Scott laughs) What are some of the things that you're hearing from customers, and how is that helping to drive what's coming out from Hortonworks? >> So, the two things that I'm hearing right, number one, certainly, is that they really appreciate our approach to the entire lifecycle of data, because customers are really experiencing huge data volume increases and data just from everywhere, and it's no longer just from the ERP system inside the firewall. It's from third party, it's from Sensors, it's from mobile devices, and, so, they really do appreciate kind of the territory that we cover with the tools and technologies we bring to market, and, so, that's been very rewarding. Clearly, customers who are now well into this path, they're starting to think about, in this new world, data governance, and data governance, I just took all of the energy out of the room, governance, it sounds like, you know, hard. What I mean by data governance, really, is customers need to understand, with all of this diverse, connected data everywhere, in the cloud, on PRIM, then Sensors, third party, partners, is, frankly, they need a trail of breadcrumbs that say what is it, where'd it come from, who had access to it, and then, what did they do with it? If you start to piece that together, that's what they really need to understand, the data estate that belongs to them, so they can turn that into refined product, and, so, when you then segway in one of your earlier questions, that GDPR is, certainly, a triggering point where if it's like, okay, the penalties are huge, oh my God, it's a whole new set of regulations that I have to comply with, and when you think about that trail of breadcrumbs that I just described, that actually becomes a roadmap for compliance under regulations like GDPR, where if a European customer calls up and says, "Forget my data.", the only way that you can guarantee that you forgot that person's data, is to actually understand where it all is, and that requires proper governance, tools, and techniques, and, so, when I say governance, it's, really, not like, you know, the governor and the government, and all that. That's an aspect, but the real, important part is how do I keep all of that connectivity so that I can understand the landscape of data that I've got access to, and I'm hearing a lot of energy around that, and when you think about an IOT kind of world, distributed processing, multiple hybrid cloud footprints, data is just everywhere, and, so, the perimeter is no longer fixed, it's kind of variable, and being able to keep track of that is a very important thing for our customers. >> So, continuing on that theme, Scott. Data lakes seem to be the first major new repository we added after we had data warehouses and data marts, and it looked like the governance solutions were sort of around that perimeter of the data lake. Tell us, you were alluding to, sort of, how many more repositories, whether at rest or in motion, there are for data. Do we have to solve the governance problem end-to-end before we can build meaningful applications? >> So, I would argue personally, that governance is one of the most strategic things for us as an industry, collectively, to go solve in a universal way, and what I mean by that, is throughout my career, which is probably longer than I'd like to admit, in an EDW centric world, where things are somewhat easier in terms of the perimeter and where the data came from, data sources were much more controlled, typically ERP systems, owned wholly by a company. Even in that era, true data governance, meta data management, and that provenance was never really solved adequately. There were 300 different solutions, none of which really won. They were all different, non-compatible, and the problem was easier. In this new world, with connected data, the problem is infinitely more difficult to go solve, and, so, that same kind of approach of 300 different proprietary solutions I don't think is going to work. >> So, tell us, how does that approach have to change and who can make that change? >> So, one of the things, obviously, that we're driving is we're leveraging our position in the open community to try to use the community to create that common infrastructure, common set of APIs for meta data management, and, of course, we call that Apache Atlas, and we work with a lot of partners, some of whom are customers, some of whom are other vendors, even some of whom could be considered competitors, to try to drive an Apache open source kind of project to become that standard layer that's common into which vendors can bring their applications. So, now, if I have a common API for tracking meta data in that trail of breadcrumbs that's commonly understood, I can bring in an application that helps customers go develop the taxonomy of the rules that they want to implement, and, then, that helps visualize all of the other functionality, which is also extremely important, and that's where I think specialization comes into play, but having that common infrastructure, I think, is a really important thing, because that's going to enable data, data lakes, IOT to be trusted, and if it's not trusted, it's not going to be successful. >> Okay, there's a chicken and an egg there it sounds like, potentially. >> Am I the chicken or the egg? >> Well, you're the CTO. (Lisa laughs) >> Okay. >> The thing I was thinking of was, the broader the scope of trust that you're trying to achieve at first, the more difficult the problem, do you see customers wanting to pick off one high value application, not necessarily that's about managing what's in Atlas, in the meta data, so much as they want to do an IOT app and they'll implement some amount of governance to solve that app. In other words, which comes first? Do they have to do the end-to-end meta data management and governance, or do they pick a problem off first? >> In this case, I think it's chicken or egg. I mean, you could start from either point. I see customers who are implementing applications in the IOT space, and they're saying, "Hey, this requires a new way to think of governance, "so, I'm going to go and build that out, but I'm going to "think about it being pluggable into the next app." I also see a lot of customers, especially in highly regulated industries, and especially in highly regulated jurisdictions, who are stepping back and saying, "Forget the applications, this is a data opportunity, "and, so, I want to go solve my data fabric, "and I want to have some consistency across "that data fabric into which I can publish data "for specific applications and guarantee "that, wholistically, I am compliant "and that I'm sitting inside of our corporate mission "and all of those things." >> George: Okay. >> So, one of the things you mention, and we talk about this a lot, is the proliferation of data. It's so many, so many different sources, and companies have an opportunity, you had mentioned the phrase data opportunity, there is massive opportunity there, but you said, you know, from even a GDR perspective alone, I can't remove the data if I don't know where it is to the breadcrumbs. As a marketer, we use terms like get a 360 degree view of your customer. Is that actually really something that customers can achieve leveraging a data. Can they actually really get, say a retailer, a 360, a complete view of their customer? >> Alright, 358. >> That's pretty good! >> And we're getting there. (Lisa laughs) Yeah, I mean, obviously, the idea is to get a much broader view, and 360 is a marketing term. I'm not a marketing person, >> Yes. But it, certainly, creates a much broader view of highly personalized information that help you interact with your customer better, and, yes, we're seeing customers do that today and have great success with it and actually change and build new business models based on that capability, for sure. The folks who've done that have realized that in this new world, the way that that works is you have to have a lot of people have access to a lot of data, and that's scary, because that's not the way it used to be, right? >> Right. >> It used to be you go to the DBA and you ask for access, and then, your boss has to sign off and say it's what you asked for. In this world, you need to have access to all of it. So, when you think about this new governance capability where as part of the governance integrated with security, personalized information can be encrypted, it can be blurred out, but you still have access to the data to look at the relationships to be found in the data to build out those sophisticated models. So, that's where not only is it a new opportunity for governance just because the sources, the variety at the different landscape, but it's, ultimately, very much required, because if you're the CSO, you're not going to give access to the marketing team all of its customer data unless you understand that, right, but it has to be, "I'm just giving it to you, "and I know that it's automatically protected." versus, "I'm going to let you ask for it." to be successful. >> Right. >> I guess, following up on that, it sounds like what we were talking about, chicken or egg. Are you seeing an accelerating shift from where data is sort of collected, centrally, from applications, or, what we hear on Amazon, is the amount coming off the edge is accelerating. >> It is, and I think that that is a big drive to, frankly, faster clouded option, you know, the analytic space, particularly, has been a laggard in clouded option for many reasons, and we've talked about it previously, but one of the biggest reasons, obviously, is that data has gravity, data movement is expensive, and, so, now, when you think about where data is being created, where it lives, being further out on the edge, and may live its entire lifecycle in the cloud, you're seeing a reversal of gravity more towards cloud, and that, again, creates more opportunities in terms of driving a more varied perimeter and just keeping track of where all the assets are. Finally, I think it also leads to this notion of managing entire lifecycle of data. One of the implications of that is if data is not going to be centralized, it's going to live in different places, applications have to be portable to move to where the data exists. So, when I think about that landscape of creating ubiquitous data management within Hortonworks' portfolio, that's one of the big values that we can create for our customers. Not only can we be an on-ramp to their hybrid architecture, but as we become that on-ramp, we can also guarantee the portability of the applications that they've built out to those cloud footprints and, ultimately, even out to the edge. >> So, a quick question, then, to clarify on that, or drill down, would that mean you could see scenarios where Hortonworks is managing the distribution of models that do the inferencing on the edge, and you're collecting, bringing back the relevant data, however that's defined, to do the retraining of any models or recreation of new models. >> Absolutely, absolutely. That's one of the key things about the NiFi project in general and Hortonworks DataFlow, specifically, is the ability to selectively move data, and the selectivity can be based on analytic models as well. So, the easiest case to think about is self-driving cars. We all understand how that works, right? A self-driving car has cameras, and it's looking at things going on. It's making decisions, locally, based on models that have been delivered, and they have to be done locally, because of latency, right, but, selectively, hey, here's something that I saw as an image I didn't recognize. I need to send that up, so that it can be added to my lexicon of what images are and what action should be taken. So, of course, that's all very futuristic, but we understand how that works, but that has application in things that are very relevant today. Think about jet engines that have diagnostics running. Do I need to send that terabyte of data an hour over an expensive thing? No, but I have a model that runs locally that says, "Wow, this thing looks interesting. "Let me send a gigabyte now for immediate action." So, that decision making capability is extremely important. >> Well, Scott, thanks so much for taking some time to come chat with us once again on the Cube. We appreciate your insights. >> Appreciate it, time flies. This is great. >> Doesn't it? When you're having fun! >> Yeah. >> Alright, we want to thank you for watching the Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with George Gilbert. We are live at Forager Tasting Room in downtown San Jose at our own event, Big Data SV. We'd love for you to come on down and join us tonight, today, tonight, and tomorrow. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest after a short break. (techno music) >> Narrator: Since the dawn of the cloud, the Cube

(mid-tempo music) >> Announcer: Live, from Los Angeles, it's The Cube. Covering Open source Summit North America 2017. Brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. >> Okay welcome back and we're live in Los Angeles for The Cube's exclusive coverage of the Open Source Summit North America. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman, Our next guest is Steve Pousty, who's the Director of Developer Advocacy for Red Hat, Cube alumni, we last spoke at the Cisco Devnet Create, which is their new kind of cloud-native approach. Welcome Back. >> Thank you, thank you, glad to be here. >> We're here at the Open Source Summit, which is a recognition that of all these kind of ... With LinuxCon, all these things, coming events, it's a big ten event, love the direction, >> Yeah Validation to what's already happened and the recognition of open source, where Linux is at the heart of all that, Red Hat also you guys are the Linux standard, and gold standard, but there's more- >> We like to think of it that way, but- >> But there's more than Linux on top of it now, so this is a recognition that open source is so much more. >> For sure, I'm mean you can even see ... Who would've thought that there'd be a whole huge hubbub about Facebook doing a separate license for their react libraries and all the interactions with Apache, the Apache Foundation. Open source is so much ... it's the mainstream now. Like, basically, it's very hard to release a proprietary product right now and come up with some justification about why you have to do it. >> And why, and can it even be as good. >> Steve: Right. >> There's two issues, justification and performance. >> Yeah, quality, all that stuff. And also, customers' acceptability of that. Like, "Oh wait, you mean I can't actually even see the code? "I can't modify the code, I can't pay you to modify the code "and share it with everybody else?" I think customers have come to a whole ... Users of open source stuff, it's so permeated now that I think it's hard to be in the market without ... I mean, look at everybody who's here. Some of the people that are here were some of the biggest closed source people before. >> John: Microsoft is here. >> Exactly. >> John: IBM is here, although they've always been open, they were big on Linux early on. >> Yes. >> But now you're seeing the ecosystem grow, so we see some scale coming, but there's still a lot of work that needs to get done. We see greatness, like Kubernetes and Serverless offering great promise and hope for either multi-cloud workflow, workload management, all those cool stuff. But there's still some work to be done. >> Steve: For sure. >> What's your take on progress, where are we, what's the ... some of those under the hood things that need to get worked on? >> Well so, progress, I think ... the funny part is our expectations have changed so much over time that, so Kubernetes is about a little over two years old, and we're all like, oh it's moving so s-- why is it not doing this, this, and this? Whereas if this was like 10 years ago, the rate at which Kubernetes is moving is phenomenal. So, basically, every quarter there is a new release of Kubernetes, and we basically built OpenShift as a distribution on top of Kubernetes, and so we're delivering to our customers every quarter as well, and a bunch of them are like, "This is too fast, this is too fast, "like, we can't integrate all these changes." But at the same time, they say, "But don't slow down." Because, "Oh, next release we're going to get this thing "that we want and we know we want to go to that release." So, I think Kubernetes definitely has more growing room, but the thing is, how much it's already being seen as the standard, it's the ... so the way I like to talk about it, and I'll talk about this in my talk later, I think for Red Hat, Kubernetes is the cloud Linux kernel. It's the exact same story all over again. It's this infrastructure that everybody's going to build on. Now there are people who are standing up OpenStack on Kubernetes, or on OpenShift. So basically saying, "I don't want to install and manage "my Openstack, it's too difficult. "Give me some JSON and some components "and I'll just use Kubernetes as my operating plane." >> We saw Kubernetes right out of the gates, Stu and I, at the first Cube-Con, we were present at creation, and just on the doorstep of that thing just unfolded, and we saw the orchestration piece is huge, but I want to get your take if you can share with the audience, why Kubernetes has taken the world by storm. Why is it so relevant? What's all the hubbub about with Kubernetes? Share your opinion. >> Okay, so remember ... okay so this is a red shirt, and remember I work at Red Hat, so this obviously a biased opinion. I want to be up front about that. >> John: In your biased opinion ... >> Right, well as opposed to a neutral opinion, right, we definitely, so, I say that in front of my audiences just so that ... go do your own research, but from my perspective and what I've seen in the market place, there was a lot of orchestration and scheduling out there, then it kind of narrowed down, there's three players I would say right now. The three players all end with Kubernetes, but I just started with it (laughs). There's Kubernetes, there is Mesosphere, and there's Docker Swarm. I see those as being the three that are out there right now. And I think the reason we're ... So I won't talk about the others, but I see those ... Why Kubernetes has won is, one, community. So they have done a great job of being upstream, working with all people, being a very open community, open to working with others, not trying to make things just so it benefits Google's business but to benefit everybody. The other reason is the size of that community, right, everybody working together. The third is I think they, so some of it's luck, right? >> John: Yeah, timing is everything. >> Timing is everything. >> John: You're on a wave, and you're on your board and a big wave comes, you surf it, right? >> That's exactly, so I think what happened with Mesosphere is they're a great scheduler, and a lot of people said they were the best scheduler to start with. But they didn't really focus on containers to start with and it seems like they missed ... Like, Kubernetes said, "No, it's all about containers "and we're going to focus on container workload." And that's right where everybody else was. And so it was like, "I don't want to write "all that extra stuff from Mesosphere. "I want to do it with Kubernetes 'cause that's containers." And so that's the bit of luck lining up with the market. So I'd say it's the community but also recognizing that it's about containers to start with and containers are kind of taking over. >> Yeah, Steve, take us inside containers. You're wearing a shirt that says "Linux is Containers" on the front, if our audience could see the back it says "Containers are Linux." >> Steve: Exactly. >> Of course, Red Hat heavily involved. You're in the weeds, dealing with things that we're doing to make stability of containers, make sure it works in other environments. Tell us some of the things you're working on, some of the projects, and the like. >> So, some of the projects I'll be showing today, one is based off of OpenScap, Open S-C-A-P, it's another open consortium for scanning for vulnerabilities. We've written something called Atomic Scan, so it can take any OpenScap provider, plug it in to Atomic Scan, and you can scan a container image without having to actually run it. So, you don't actually have to start it up, it actually just goes in. The other thing I'm going to be talking about today is Bilda, this is part of the CNCF stuff. This is the ability to actually build a runC-compatible container without ever using Docker or MOBI. The way, a totally different approach to it, what you basically do is you say, "I want this container from this other container, or from blank," then you have a container there and then you actually mount the file system. So rather than actually booting a container and doing all sorts of steps in the container itself, you actually mount the file system, do normal operations on your machine like it was your normal file system, and then actually commit at the end. So it's another way for some of our customers that really like that idea of how they want to build and manage containers. But also, there's a bunch more. There's Kryo, which is the common runtime interface, and the implementation of it, so that Kubernetes can now run on an alternative container technology. This is Kryo, it's agnostic. If you looked at Kelsey Hightower's latest "Kubernetes and Anger," I think, or "Kubernetes the Hard Way" or something. His latest is building it all on Kryo. So rather than running on Docker, it runs ... All your container running happens on Kryo. I'm not trying to say, well of course I think it's better, but I think the point that we're really seeing is, by everything moving in to CNCF and the Linux Foundation and getting around standards, it's really enabled the ecosystem to take off. Like, TekTonic and CoreOS have done that with Rocket. We're going to see a lot more blossoming. The fertilizer has been applied, back from our ... >> Yeah, CNCF of two years old, I mean their fertilizer down big time, you got the manure and all the thousand flowers are blooming from that. >> Yeah, between Prometheus, I mean just, Prometheus, Istio, there's just ... I can't even keep track of it all. >> So Steve, you were talking earlier. Customers are having a hard time with that quarterly release. >> Steve: Yes. >> How do they keep up with all these projects, I mean you know, we rattled through all of 'em. You've got 'em all down pat, but the typical customer, do they need to worry about what do they have to focus on, how do they keep up with the pace change, how do they absorb all of this? >> Okay so it highly depends on the customer. There are some customers who are not our customers, I'll just say users, who are advanced enough on their own, who they're out there basically just, they're consuming the tip of what's coming out of CNCF. All that stuff, and they're picking and choosing and they're doing that all. For Red Hat, a lot of our customers are, "I like all that technology, you're our trusted advisor, "when you release it as a product "and I know I can sit on it for three years, "because you'll support it for at least three years, "maybe five years, then I'm going to start to consume it "and you'll actually probably put it into a more usable form for me." 'Cause a lot of the upstream stuff isn't necessary made direct for consumption. >> How are you guys dealing with the growth prospects. We've been talking about this all morning, this has been the big theme of this show is, not only just the renaming of a variety of different events, LinuxCon, but Open Source Summit is an encapsulation of all the projects that are blossoming across the board. So, the scale issues, and as a participant, Red Hat, >> Steve: Yes. >> Your biased opinion, but you're also incentive and you guys are active in the community. The growth that's coming is going to put pressure on the system. It may change the relationship between communities and vendors and how they're all working together, so again, to use the river analogy, there's a lot of water going to be pumping through the system. And so how's that going to impact the ecosystem, is it going to be the great growth that could flood everything, is there a potential for that, I mean you're an ecosystem guy, so the theory is there, it's like, Jim's stepping up with the Linux Foundation. I talked to him yesterday and he recognizes it. >> Steve: Yeah. >> But he also doesn't want to get in the way, either. >> Steve: No, no, no- >> So there's a balance of leadership that's needed. Your thoughts. >> So, I mean I think one of the things ... So I mean you know the Linux kernel has its benevolent dictator, and that works well for that one community, but then you'll see something like Kubernetes, where it's much more of a community base, there is no benevolent dictator for life on Kubernetes. I think one of the nice things that the Linux Foundation has done, and which Red Hat has acknowledged is, you know, let the community govern the way that works for that community. Don't try to force necessarily one model on it. In terms of the flood part that you were talking about, I think, if you want to go back to rivers, there's cycles in terms of 10 year floods, 100 year floods, I think what we're seeing right now is a big flood, and then what'll happen out of this is some things will shake out and other things won't. I don't expect every vendor that's here to be here next year. >> And find the high ground, I mean, I mean the numbers that Jim shared in his opening keynote is by 2026, 400 million libraries are going to be out there versus today's 64 roughly million. >> Steve: Right. >> You know, Ed from Cisco thinks that's understated, but now there's more code coming in, more people, and so a new generation is coming on board. This is going to be the great flood in open source. >> I also think it's a great opportunity for some companies. I mean, I'm not high enough in Red Hat to know what we're doing in that space, but it's also a great opportunity for some companies to help with that. Like, I think, that's one of the other things that Linux Foundation did was set up the Javascript Foundation. That is a community that-- >> But that doesn't have Node.js, it's a little bit separate. >> No, I know, but think-- >> You're talking about the js, okay. >> But I'm talking about, but if you think about the client-side javascript, forget Node. Just think about client-side javascript and how many frameworks are coming up all the time, and new libraries. >> Stu: That's a challenge. >> So I think actually that community could be one that could be good to maybe gain some lessons from, as things happen more in open source. I think there are other open source communities. Like, I'm wondering like GNOME-- >> But the feedback on the js community is that there's a lot of challenges in the volume of things happening. >> And that's coming for us though, right? >> Yeah. >> That's what's coming, that's what's going to come for this larger ecosystem, so I think maybe there's market opportunity, maybe there's new governance models, maybe there's ... I mean, this is where innovation comes from. There's a new problem that's come, it's a good problem. >> Your next point of failure is your opportunity to innovate. >> Exactly, and it's a good problem to have, right, as opposed to, we have too few projects, and we don't really, no one really likes them. Instead, now it's like, we've got so many projects and people are contributing, and everybody's excited, how do we manage that excitement? >> So another dynamic that we're observing, and again we're just speculating, we're pontificating, we're opining ... is fashion. Fashion, fashionable projects. Never fight fashion, my philosophy is. In marketing, don't fight the fashion. >> Steve: Right. >> CNCF is fashionable right now, people love it. It's popular, it's trendy, it's the hip new night club if you will in open source. Other projects are just as relevant. So, relevance and trending sometimes can be misconstrued. How do you guys think about that, because this is a dynamic, everyone wants to go to the best party. There a fear of missing out, I'm going to go check out Kubernetes, but also relevance matters. >> Yes. >> John: Your thoughts. >> So I've seen this discussion internally in engineering all the time, when we're talking about, 'cause you know OpenShift is trying to build a real distribution, not like, "Oh here is Kubernetes," but a real distribution. Like when Red Hat ships you the Linux, gives you Linux, we don't just say, "Here's the Linux kernel, have a good time." We put a whole bunch of stuff around it, and we're trying to do that with Kubernetes as well, so we're constantly evaluating all the like, "Should we switch to Prometheus now, "when's the time to switch to Prometheus? "Oh it's trending really hot. "Oh but does it give us the features?" >> John: It's a balance. >> It's a balance, it's going to have to come down to, I hate to say it-- >> It's a community, people vote with their code, so if something has traction, you got to take a look at it. >> But I would say, and this has been going on for a while, and I've seen other people talk about it, if you are the lead on an open source project, and you want a lot of community, you have to get into marketing. You can't just do-- >> John: You got to market the project. >> You got to, and not in the nasty term of market, which is that I'm going to lie to you and like, what a lot of developers think about like, "Oh I'm just going to give you bullshit and lie to you, "and it's not going to be helpful." No, market in terms of just getting your word out there so at least people know about it. Lead with all your-- >> John: Socialize it. >> Yeah. I mean, that's what you got to get it, so there is a lot of chatter now. How do you get it noticed as a Twitter person, right? You have to do some, it's the same, it's going to be more like that for open source projects. >> John: So we're doing our share to kind of extract the signal from some of the noise out there, and it's great to talk to you about it because you help give perspective. And certainly Red Hat, you're biased, that's okay, you're biased. Now, take your Red Hat off. >> Okay. >> Hat off. Take your Red Hat hat off >> Steve: Propaganda hat off. >> and put your neutral hat on. An observation of Open Source Summit, I'll see that name change kind of significance in the sense it's a big ten event. This event here, what's your thoughts on what it means? >> Hey c'mon Steve, you've got a PhD in ecology, so we want some detailed analysis as to how this all goes together. >> I mean it's good marketing, Open Source Summit, good name change, little bit broader. >> I'm actually glad for it. So, I've gone to some other smaller events, and I actually like this, because it was hard for me to get to the smaller events, or to get quite enough people. Like this actually builds a critical mass, and more cross-fertilization, right, so it's much easier for me to talk to containers to car people. 'Cause automotive Linux is here as well, right? >> John: You can't avoid it, you see 'em in the hallways, you can say, "Hey, let's chat." >> "Let's talk about that stuff," whereas in the small ... So, you know, this is more about conferences. There's a good side and a bad side to everything, just like I tell my kids, "When you pick up a stick, you also have to pick up the other end of the stick." You can't just like have, "Oh this is a great part," but you don't get the bad part. So the great part about this, really easy to see a lot of people, see a lot of interesting things that are happening. Bad part about this, it's going to be hard, like if this was just CNCF, everybody here would be CNCF, all the talks would be CNCF, it's like you could deep dive and really go. So, I think this is great that they have this. I don't think this gets, should get rid of smaller, more focused events. >> Well at CubeCon, our CubeCon, the CNCF event in Austin, we'll be there for The Cube. That will be CNCF all the time. >> Steve: Exactly. I'm glad they're still doing that. >> So they're going to have the satellite event, and I think that's the best way to do it. I think a big ten event like this is good because, this is small even today, but with the growth coming, it'll be convention hall size in a matter of years. >> Well, exactly, and the fact that you made it into a big, and the fact that you've made it into this cohesive event, rather than going to somebody and saying, "Hey, sponsor these five events." Like, No. Sponsor this one big event, and then we'll get most of the people here for you. >> It's also a celebration, too. A lot of these big ten events are ... 'Cause education you can get online, there are all kinds of collaboration tools online, but when you have these big ten events, one of the rare things is it's the face to face, people-centric, in the moment, engagement. So you're learning in a different way. It's a celebration. So I think open source is just too important right now, that this event will grow in my opinion. >> Steve: For sure. >> Bring even thousands and thousands of people. >> I mean, another way-- >> John: 30,000 at some point, easily. >> Yeah, I think definitely it's theirs to lose, let's put it that way. >> John: (laughing) I'll tell that to Jim "Hey, don't screw it up!" >> Don't screw it up. I think the way that you could almost think of this is OSS-Con, right, instead of Comic-Con, this is like, this can become OSS-Con, which is like, they should probably ... In the same way that the Kubernetes Foundation works and grows with a lot of other people, it would be great if they could bring in other Foundations as well to this. I know this is being run by the Linux, but it'd be great if we could get some Apache in here, some Eclipse in here, I mean that would just be-- >> John: A total home run. >> Those foundations bringing it in-- >> That would truly make it an open source summit. >> Yeah, exactly, as opposed to the World Series that's only in the United States. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> Although you know, I was at a hotel recently, and they had baseball on, it was little league baseball though. Their World Series is actually, Little League World Series is actually the World Series. >> John: It's a global World Series. >> Yeah, like their-- >> John: It's the world. >> Yeah, as opposed to the MLB, right? >> Alright, Steve, great to have you on, any final thoughts on interactions you've had, things you've learned from this event you'd like to share and pass on? >> No, I just think the space is great, I'm really excited to be in it. I'm starting to move a little bit more up to the application tier at my role at the company and I'm excited about that, to actually ... So I've been working down at the container tier, and orchestration tier for a while, and now I'm excited to get back to like, "Well now let's actually build some cool stuff "and see what this enables on the up--" >> And DevOps is going mainstream, which is a great trend, you're starting to see that momentum beachhead on the enterprises, so-- >> Oh, one takeaway message, for microservices people, please put an Ops person on your microservice team. Usually they start with the DBA, and then they say the middle person and the front-end people. I really want to make sure that they start including Ops in your microservice teams-- >> John: And why is that, what'd you learn there? >> Well because if you're going to do microservices, you're going to be, the team's going to end up doing Ops-y work. And it's kind of foolish not to bring in someone who already knows ... The reason you want all the team together is because they're going to own that. And you also want them to share knowledge. So, if I was on a microservice team, I would definitely want an Ops person teaching me how to do Ops for our stuff. I don't want to reinvent that myself. >> You got to have the right core competencies on that team. >> Steve: Yeah. It's like having the right people in the right position. >> Steve: Exactly. >> Skill player. >> Steve: Yeah, exactly. Okay we're here live in Los Angeles, The Cube's coverage of Open Source Summit North America. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. More live coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCube. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat techno music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with Justin Warren. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld2017. Believe it or not it's our eighth year covering this show. About 23,000 here in attendance and pulls from around the world even though there is a European show. But happen to welcome to the program, a first time guest, to theCUBE, someone I've known for a number of years. So, great to pull you in front of the camera. Dan Frith who is a consultant with Penguin Punk. We had one of my guests this morning said, you know this is the punk rock set so it only makes sense that, you know, you've got the shoes and the hair, and even hit a punk show >> Dan: Yep. >> here in Vegas >> Dan: I did, I did. >> when you first got here. >> Dan: Yep. >> So, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> So, Dan, just for our audience, give us a little bit about your background. You're heavily involved in the VMware community. You're a VIMA leader. >> Dan: Yeah. >> Tell us your background and what you're doing these days. >> Dan: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Stu. I've been working with Virtualization for about 15 year now. Started with Workstation, went to ESX 2. And sort of it all went from there. I thought that was pretty cool stuff. Kept me really busy for a long time. Branched out into further data center technologies. I'm really interested in things that go in racks, and how they can help people do stuff better, faster and smarter. >> Dan: Yeah. >> I tell you, I've been working with VMware for about the same time, 15 years. Had a little bit more hair and less gray, you know, when that started, I loved some of the IBM to TV commericals where it was like, "Where did all the servers go?" Racked it all up and things like that. To watch the evolution and the ebbs and flows in this community >> Dan: Yep. >> has been pretty cool. So, how important is VMware today in your ecosystem? >> Yeah, it's critical to what we do every day. A lot of our customers are very VMware focused. Not just for the high proviso. It's all management automation that we wrap around that stuff. NSX is becoming more and more critical to what we're doing. Got a lot of complicated cloud plays happening locally. NSX is really helping us to get where we need to be where traditionally maybe it was bit of a slower, harder process. We've certainly found stuff like that is really helping us get some good winds on the board. >> Could you unpack that a little bit for us? Definitely coming into the show, I hear a lot about NSX. Lots of customers doing what I taught. Some of the ecosystem at large is like when you really get in there's some complicated pieces. Networking, security, >> Dan: That's right. >> never going to be simple? >> Dan: Right. >> So what are some of the challenges? How do we get over some of them? And what does this really deliver? >> Yeah, I think some of the biggest challenges with networking and security in the enterprise isn't the actual tech anymore it's the way that we apply the processes to that tech, the policies, the frameworks and governments, the risk, compliance assessments, all that sort of stuff. People don't necessarily understand that world inside their business. Having something like NSX come in it gives them the opportunity to reassess what they're actually trying to achieve, what's critical from an application perspective down rather than just thinking about the infrastructure and the tools they're using. It's not just about switches, routers, firewalls anymore. It's about what I'm actually trying to achieve, what really needs to talk to what, and now I can make this happen with this tool that's actually really flexible and agile, and very easy to get up and running. >> But the thing around the security aspect of it in particular, is that it's not the same sort of audience that you would normally be talking to if you're a VMware sort of person. >> Dan: That's right. It's usually handled by someone completely different. Similarly, the networking can be a little bit funny as well because the networking people are all about the hardware, and the switches, and things that plug into it. And this virtual switching idea, when I first heard NSX you're going to teach BGP to virtualization? >> I know, >> and I think that's been very interesting as well. I think we saw the last 10 years the storage and virtualization guys seem to come together reasonably well and start to cooperate on stuff. And we're finally understanding what storage is to VMware guys and vice versa. Whereas the networking stuff is still that dark art where you have to have >> Yeah. >> a certain number of letters after your name to make it work. And the security guys, again, they're a whole different beast, right? They're kind of like the DBA's of the infrastructure world. >> So, how far along in using storage as sort of an analogy. How far down that journey of getting people together and to understand each other on both sides. >> Yeah, so I think its still pretty early days. I know VMware's been very bullish about what NSX can do to transform your infrastructure. But I think there's a lot of conversations that still need to be had at a reasonably high level in organizations to get people understanding exactly what they can do with this stuff, and I think realize the potential of what they can do. Sometimes it's not actually what they need to do now, it's what they need to do three years from now. And I think a lot of businesses just aren't planning ahead that far, right? >> Dan, I'm curious your take on the keynote this morning. Pat got on stage. I thought good energy. I thought it was one of his best keynotes that he's given. >> Dan: Absolutely. >> But for your audience, kind of in your geo, digital transformation, kind of the journey to cloud. How much of that kind of hit home for you? Any critiques that you'd give. >> So, cloud's obviously a hot topic where I'm based. The VMware AWS story is getting more and more interesting. But, again, for Australia still not so much. You've got it in one geo right now. Australia is not going to be enabled for awhile. It took AWS a long time to get a presence down there. >> I think if I heard right, they said within a year by the time we come back to VMWorld next year, which I think is going to be in Vegas unfortunately again, but they said we should be across all the Amazon availability zones. >> Yeah, in which case that could be tremendously interesting. But I've got to crunch a few numbers to make sure this really works because I like the idea. It's a neat idea. It's very good for those legacy enterprises that don't really want to get away from vSphere to Shared who've got the kind of crusty applications that don't really run very well on public cloud. But they're in the middle of their transformation piece, perhaps. They're trying to get cloud-native. This is a nice stepping stone. If VMware can execute on it, makes sense financially. >> So, what are some of the financial price points that you're seeing out there? You know, we've heard over the years, VMware sometimes is everybody's yelling about it, sometimes not as much, cloud is going to be the savior Or wow, it's really expensive- >> Dan: That's right, it sort of varies. I think one of the points this morning they said, "You can have a variable cost model." And a lot of the businesses I deal with they hate that stuff. They need to know every month how much they're going to spend. >> Stu: Yeah, CFO doesn't like uncertainty, right? >> Absolutely not. Yeah, and this kind of stuff can get out of control really quickly. I'm not yet convinced unless you put the right controls, governance, framework, all that stuff on top of it. That's going to be the key thing, I think, for the success of this. >> There's a lot of talk about innovation which involves change and risk. And so, if we're trying to keep things into constrained boxes where we may not understand exactly what it's going to be, then by definition we're reducing as much risk as we can which is kind of- >> What's been fascinating with the customers I work with who are all traditional enterprises, services, those types. They've got CIOs coming in and saying, "Let's go to cloud. Everyone's in the cloud." They've sent it all up there and they go, "Oh my three-tier application actually doesn't work in this cloud. I need to bring it back. We've got those people going through those cycles already locally. Yeah, there's a lot of innovation going on at a high level. But I think some of the homework hasn't been done, to make that successful. And I think that's what people need to focus more on is an application centric, or even a business outcome centric... You know we use 2,000 applications in the enterprise but what do they all do. >> Justin: What are they for? >> What are they for? Are they just there because they've always been there? Or can we carve some of this stuff out? >> Yeah, how do softwares and service and public cloud fit into that discussion. >> Yeah. So, I think they're going to be more and more critical. I think the maturity around some of the softwares and service offerings has been really good. People are loving the offloader risk and the offload our responsibility for SAS. I think some of the problem is around, again, it's compliance, risk, people aren't necessarily backing up their Office365 stuff. They're sort of relying on Microsoft to have things in place. They're potentially not realizing some of the risk they're exposing themselves to. Not that this stuff is dodgy but it's tricky to navigate how you actually protect- >> I was talking to a security person yesterday, and they were like, "Oh, yeah, no if I just use SAS I don't need to worry about the security, right?" And I was like, "No, you need to worry about it even more." >> Dan: Yeah, yeah. >> We've seen plenty of examples of people who have put data into AWS for example, and then their S3 bucket is just open for the world to see. >> Dan: That's right. The simplicity adds a bit more mystery where it probably shouldn't. >> Yeah, doing your homework and understanding the tools that you're about to go and use is important. >> Dan: Yeah, understanding the risks and understanding some of the consequences of your actions. It's not just about reducing the floor tiles on your own premises stuff. It's about understanding what the data is actually doing, where it's going, and what it's going to mean to someone if they get ahold of that data. >> Yeah, but it's not a new situation really. Cloud's been around for over ten years now. A lot of these ideas of IT working with the business because that's what IT is about. It's not exactly a radical concept. >> It's not a massive change in what we're doing. I think some of the problem is we haven't done that very well to begin with. Now, we've just put another infrastructure construct in place and gone, "Oh, well now well work with the business on this." Unfortunately, we still aren't working with the business. You still got pockets of the business doing their own thing. It's poorly understood. IT is a cost center, a pain, a drain on the business, if you will. And it's hard for them to, I think, bridge that gap. We need to focus a bit more on making the gap between what the business is trying to achieve and what IT can do to help them. I don't think the cloud necessarily takes that conversation away. >> Yeah, unfortunately the technologies never going to be a silver bullet but I heard you say that IT still is looked at as a cost center for a lot of your environments. And I hear people maybe they're too optimistic. Not only is IT a cost center, they're working with the business. Maybe IT is driving the business. Sounds like maybe you're not there quite yet. >> So, I don't think that's happening in the big enterprises just yet. The more conservative ones are still struggling, I think, with bridging that gap between IT and business. The ones who can't see the value of what they're doing from an IT perspective, they're always going to struggle with that kind of stuff. >> How about just a general concept of digital transformation. In your area is that something, are people embracing it? I've read a great article actually by one of the networking vendors, and he said, "Look, people might not agree with digital transformation but digital disruption is definitely real." >> Absolutely. >> Stu: What are you seeing? >> If there's a way we can shoehorn a way of doing things differently into traditional business, into traditional IT companies as well, and making them understand that they're not just there to take all their money and not necessarily deliver on all of their promises. And if the business can start understanding that their is some value in IT, then I'm all for digital disruption if that's a mechanism to make that happen. Realistically though, I'm still faced with the same challenges of legacy software being out of support, and hardware that's sweating the asset, taking it a little too far. Those kind of problems are realistically what I'm still seeing every day. >> Kind of like the concept that Pat talked about in the keynote today of cyber hygiene. Just doing the basics >> Dan: That's right. >> Dan: Doing the basics. And I think some people are struggling with those basics because they've never done it or they've sort of forgotten how to do it, or they expect, magically, that their new shiny cloud will do that for them. Or their service provider and that's definitely not the case. >> Justin: Yeah. >> We're still pretty early in the show. But any of the announcements so far, anything jump out at you? Or anything that you've seen yet that you want to highlight? >> I'm excited about the VM in AWS thing. I think it's good to finally see that. The annoucement last year at VMworld US, now it's generally available. Limited but generally available. >> Yeah, it was actually announced like a month after the show last year. One of the things we were a little frustrated that there was a three letter name big company that they made an announcement with which was up on stage talking about security today but not so much their cloud offerings. >> Not so much about that stuff. Yeah, so it's been a weird, I'm not going to say it's a pivot but it's certainly a bit of a twist. >> So, you're also a VMUG leader. What are the pain points that you're hearing from people in the community? What do they look for out of the ecosystem that would make their jobs a whole lot easier? >> I think people are sometimes struggling with the complexity of the ecosystem. It's still fairly broad and diverse. And sometimes people struggle to actually navigate their way through what they need to get done. I think that's what a lot of our VMUG members are struggling with day to day. >> I guess I don't see the vendors in the ecosystem solving that problem. It tends to be the distribution, consultants and the like that will help explain that. Because the problem we have, even if I just take storage or networking, these are really complicated things. And there's not going to be one solution that fits 90% of it. So, that's why I need to understand, you said a customer with 2,000 applications, how do I manage that stack of applications? How do I deal with that? You're a consultant. How do you help people through some of these challenges? >> So, I generally try to start with what's important to people. Like what's really making the business tick? What hurt them the most when it goes down? What costs them money? And some people have a really hard time understanding how much money their burning every time an application falls over. And then we just try to make some links between the infrastructure, the application that keeps that outcome running for them. >> Yeah, one of the things I've been poking at is there's too many things that IT is doing that they suck at. And I'm not trying to poke at them. It's what we call the undifferentiated heavy lifting. Come on, I think we talk to anybody, you're no good at building a data center. Please don't do another one. >> Dan: That's right. >> Somebody else can do it. Now, I'm not saying it all goes to public cloud. Lots of options how you do that. But from the ground up and as we work our way, what drives the business? What creates value for the business? And finding those areas. Roles of the CIO is changing greatly, role of IT. >> Yeah. >> Things are going to look very different in five years than it does today. >> Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And I think people don't necessarily appreciate the value of consultants who can help them on their journey. Because it's hard. IT is hard. Enterprise is hard. And putting IT and Enterprise in the same sentence that really makes it very hard. >> Justin: Yeah, very hard. >> You got to be careful. I saw there was one of those sarcastic memes years ago. It was like, "Consultants, if you can't solve the problem at least there's lots of money to be made moving it along." >> Yeah, yeah. And redefining the problem is another fun one. >> Justin: That's always fun. >> Yeah. >> So, Dan people want to learn more about what you're doing. How do they find you? >> So, they can find me at penguinpunk.net. I've got a blog there. It's been running there for about 10 years now. You can find me on the Twitters @penguinpunk. And various other things. Come to a VMUG meeting in Brisbane if you're ever in the area. We'll buy you a beer and treat you nice. >> Stu: Excellent. Love to do that. We have yet to do theCUBE in Australia but it's definitely what we want to do. So, Dan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks, Stu. For Justin and Stu, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay for exclusive Cube coverage for three days for IBM InterConnect 2017. I'm John Furrier. My co-host, Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Ed Walsh, General Manager of Storage and Software-Defined Infrastructure at IBM. Welcome back. >> Ed: That was a mouth full wasn't it? >> Welcome back to The Cube. Welcome back to the fold at IBM. >> Thank you very much, always good. >> You're leading up a big initiative. Take a quick second to talk about what you're the general manager of scope wise, and then we'll jump right in. >> Yeah, so I run basically the storage division, which has all of our storage from mainframe to open systems, tape, software defined storage and software defined compute, but it's all under our storage portfolio. So development, sales, you know, run the PINA. >> Right, and the new innovations that are coming out, what do you have your eye on? What's your goal, you know, you got a spring in your step. What's the objective? >> So we talked probably in October, I was 90 days in. So now I'm a whopping 8 months in. I think we kind of talked about it. I kind of... my hypothesis for coming here was you know, clients are going through this big change and some of your write ups lately about the True Private cloud and how they're trying to go from where they are now to where they're trying to get to. And that confusion eats up leadership so as confusion... IBM has the right vision, but it's like clouding cognitive, as is much on PRIM. So we have the right vision to help them get through that. And we have a history of doing that. And the second one was that we have a portfolio that's pretty broad. So we almost have an embarrassment of riches on what we can do with someone when they're really trying to look to modernize environments or transform, we can help them from anything. From the biggest and baddest. But it really doesn't matter. The broad portfolio allows us to engage and bring it forward and get them to the... Whatever their path forward is we can give that vision. And then, the one thing I was really talking about is he could bring in IBM. If I could bring in IBM, the greater IBM, the True Cognitive, the analytic team, and bring that together to bear for our infrastructure clients, or inside storage itself, that would be where we'd have the trifecta taking off. So we're in the middle of that transformation. Going very well. But along the same lines I have a fantastic product line. We're going to continue, in fact we're putting more investments on that. Not only on the hardware raise, but as much on the software-defined, and going all flash just because a lot of operational benefits. But then really what we're able to do by bringing the large IBM behind us... IBM also did some interesting organizational changes in January. Arvind Krishna is now running Hybrid Cloud and research for IBM so it's bringing the girth of IBM behind what's on PRIM hybrid into the Cloud. So it allows us to play a very strategic role. >> So a couple Wikibomb buzzwords, right? The True Private Cloud, we talked about server sandwiches, really sort of instantiation of software-defined. Really the impetus is that customers on PRIM want to run the Public Cloud. With that kind of agility and automation. So what are you seeing? What is IBM delivering to support that? First of all, are you seeing that? >> So it's kind of funny, so that... I do talk about study a lot because I thought the True Private Cloud, the way you coined it, is the right way to almost just say it's not what you're thinking I'm about to say. But the study, it's everything you get in the Public Cloud and you want to bring it on PRIM. All the flexibility, all the development models, right? How you engage developers. All the financial models as well, but bring that. And then it easily extends the Hybrid Cloud. When you start going through that, every one of our clients we engage, they know we understand the value of Cloud. They're at different maturity levels of how they're using Cloud, but it's all in their vision. We do a lot of work to help people bridge. So where are you know, let's talk about where you need to get to and have some meaningful steps to get there. So the True Private Cloud resonates with them. And then what we're doing is launching. In fact we launched this week with Cisco. So we have a converged offering with Cisco called VersaStack. But what we're operating on is, how do you make a Private Cloud as agile, and has the same use cases specifically for developers or DBA's that you have on the Public Cloud? And we're bringing that to the offering set for a converged offering. So what we do around on API later... So a key use case would be to do would be, why do people go to Public Cloud? Business units like it because the developers. It's easy to use, they have true DevOps capabilities. They're able to swipe a credit card. Single line of code. Spin up an environment. Signal out a code. Spin it down. They don't have to talk to an IT guy. They don't have to wait three weeks or do a ticket system. So how do you do that on PRIM? So what we have now, in market is, imagine a API abstraction layer, that for storage allows all the orchestration and all the DevOps tools to literally do the exact same thing on PRIM. So once you set it up, it allows the IT team, it's called Spectrum Copy Data Management, allow the IT team to set up templates. But through roles based access, allow a developer or a DevOps tool like Chef or Puppet to literally infrastructures code. Single line of code, spin up a whole environment. An environment would be, let's say three or four VM's, last good snapshot, maybe Datamaster or not. Most times it's Datamast. Bring up an offense network, but literally it goes from, on PRIM I just can't get it done. It takes me two or three weeks. So that's why I go the Public Cloud for other reasons. I can not only choose where I put it, where it's the right place to do, but I can give the exact same use case on PRIM by just doing API calls and they use exactly the same tools for development that are used in the Cloud, like Chef, Puppet, Urbancode, Python scripts. >> How's the reaction been to that? Give us some anecdotal... >> So once you have that conversation, that's just one of the things we're doing to make the True Private Cloud come to life. Of course the extension to SoftLayer, in other Clouds to get the... People, all of the sudden they see a path forward. It's not as easy to... You have to explain how it works, but the fact of the matter is they don't have a lot of tools now to make... We can bring down cost, give you a little bit more efficiancy, consolidate it. But that's not really how True Private Cloud is. You need the automation. So they're responding to it well. In fact it's the number one demo on the floor. For us, as far as systems, people trying figure out actually how to do the DevOps on the PRIM. >> John: That's awesome. >> Talk more about he Cisco relationship. There's a lot of interesting things going on in the storage business. There's consolidation, and you know the whole VCE thing and then Cisco looking for partners. You guys selling off BNT, it opens up a whole new partnership potential. So how has that evolved and where do you want to take it? >> So I think, match made in heaven between us, especially in storage, and Cisco. If you look at the overall environment conversion Hipaa converts account for about a third of the storage industry, so we play well. There's no overlap between us and Cisco. It's great. We're after the exact same accounts and actually, from a... You think of the very top level of our organization all the way down, the two companies have a lot of the same cultures and to be honest we're very tight. So it allows us to have a great relationship. We've already had a good relationship. About 25 thousand joint clients, which is amazing. And then what we're doing with VersaStack specifically is we're putting in the next generation, so we have a great converged offering that has all our all flash storage, but also software-defined. But what we added is we brought in what they did with their CliQr acquisition, which is called CloudCenter, and you add that on top make it single click, deploy and application anywhere, both on PRIM in the different Clouds, and it makes it very simple for developers. We talked about the API Layer. You bring that in to DevOps environment. So we feel really strong that as far as, if you're looking to bring in a True Private Cloud probably the best answer that we could do, is what we do with VersaStack. And we just announced it this week. And also we gave a preview. It's Cisco live in Melbourne a week ago. I think it's been a good uptake. But it kind of plays to... When you know what people were trying to do, but you need to bring the automation. You got to make it self-service and that really drives, for the business units, as well as developers. That drove what we brought into VersaStack. So we brought different assets in it from Cisco and IBM to make that kind of a reality. >> John and I were talking earlier on theCUBE this week and somebody brought up, yeah the CIO, they really don't think about storage. They certainly don't want to be thinking about the media. And the conversation shifted way off... Even flash now, it's like, oh yeah, yeah we get it. But you mentioned something earlier and this is very relevent to CIO's. They want to get from point a to point b with this minimal disruption, they don't want to have to buy a boat load of services to get it done. And now you're talking about things like automation and self-service. What are the discussions like with senior IT executives and how are you helping them get from point a to point b with minimum disruption? >> So the good thing about... You think about the IBM brand. It's as much about trust and helping people through it. So people give us just a credit to say I can engage with them, get the innovation. But also we've been through the zeros So a lot of the times they're asking how are we doing it? How are we transforming our company? How are we doing it internally? And then if you jut kind of, common sense, walk them through because of the broadness of the portfolio, we don't just have this point solution and every answer is, well you buy this box, right? We're able to have that conversation and when you get that broader IBM together that's where it kind of differentiates and they love it. Now I've been to a lot of, oh I'll say, IBM friendly accounts which is great. But also, some people that have never dealt with us are eyes wide open because it's a new day. People are struggling with this big transfer, right? How do you get from now to where you want to go in Cloud is a big change. >> Those new customers, what are they getting wide-eyed about? What are they focusing on? What's the big focus? >> So we'll talk about, we'll do True Private Cloud, but really what you can do as far as data, and what we're doing around Cognitive is really telling, right? The ability to really show 'em with symbol API calls they get more... So to have a Cognitive conversation that's an industry specific conversation really gets people lit up. In the end it ends up being, okay I see the possible. Then, how do I get from here to there. And typically it doesn't start, well I'm just going to go directly that direction. It's help me with a multi-year plan to get to there, while I'm taking out costs, adding agility over time. But I would say the kind of conversations are especially with an industry lens, which is what IBM brings to it, is really telling. >> So I got to ask you about the Convergent reStructured markup because the hot trend that's in the Cloud native world is server lists. So is there a storage list version? Cause what you're basically saying with the True Private Cloud is, you're essentially doing server lists, storage lists, philosophy. Is that, I mean how do you guys rationalize this server list trend. Cause servers and storage are basically the same things in my mind these days. But, I mean, you might disagree. >> I think in general people aren't looking to the different components. They're looking for a way to operate in their environment that's more efficient. They're looking for use cases. They're also trying to have IT not be in the way of what they're trying to do in development, but actually give the right tools. So that's why, to be honest, go back to True Private Cloud, I've been using it a lot cause it really resonates with people. Is how do you get that same experience but on PRIM, cause there's different reasons to be on PRIM. >> It's like Cloud native on PRIM. You could get all the benefits of what Serverless promotes, which is here's an unlimited pool of resources. The software will just take of that for you. That's DevOps. >> And doing... >> John: On PRIM. >> And doing true DevOps, Chef, Puppet, no compromises is exactly how you do it. So you change nothing for your developers. But now you're running it on PRIM or in a Hybrid Cloud. Cause there's a lot good use cases for Hybrid Cloud even if it's born in the Cloud application. You're making a web application or iPhone application, the fact of the matter is, you might want to test it against the back end. So being able to do a Hybrid Cloud, bring this system record data there, to be able to do DevOps on what production looked like maybe last night, or a week ago is much different than the current DevOps models. >> Well it's a good strategy too. If you think about the True Private Cloud, the way you're looking at it, which I think is the right way, is a lot of the things that we look at on theCUBE, and talk about, is three areas. Product gaps, organizational gaps, and process gaps. The number one thing is organizational gaps. So when you have that True Private Cloud on PRIM, it's not a big leap to go Cloud Native Public. >> It's seamless in fact. >> John: It's totally seamless. >> And on that case that a lot of the stuff we're talking about is, we help people modernize and transform their environment. And the message is all about optimization on the traditional application environment. It's all about freeing up the resources. So... >> John: That's the ovation strategy. That's the creativity, that's the Dev element. >> And if you don't free up the key resources they can't be on the digital transformation. And without the right skill set, because they're kind of trapped in operation. So a lot of the automation things we're doing are things that, to be honest, the storage team, or the admin team will be doing. It's manual error prone, but take it away. But also you free up the team. So it kind of plays to all those. >> That must really resonate with the CIO. I mean, I would imagine CxO goes, okay I could have Cloud on PRIM and then train my organization to then start thinking Hybrid workloads as they start moving Hybrid pretty quickly. >> And here's the thing, is what do you have to change for developers? Tell me what I have to get by the developer or DBA's? And the answer is nothing. Use the exact same tools. So you know, on stage it'll literally show me how Chef or Puppet... They're not doing trouble tickets or spinning things up, down, but... Same thing with deploying applications. It's like Cloud Center application. Set up the stack and deploy either on PRIM, different architectures, both converged and non-converged or in different Clouds. And they allow you to just, one click and deploy it. And they deal with all those differences. But that's how you want to make it, you use it serverless. They don't have to worry about the infrastructure. But also we're freeing up the team. >> So Ed, I got to ask ya, on a sort of personal note, I mean I've followed your career for a long time. John and I call you the Five Tool Star. You've had the start-up experience, you've got technical chops, you did a stint at IBM, you went to MIT and came back with that big MIT brain, brought it to IBM, so pretty awesome career. By no means even close to over. What have you brought to IBM? I think I've known every GM of storage, since the first GM of storage at IBM. What specific changes have you brought and what's the vision and the direction that you want to take this organization? >> It's a great culture, great history of storage. So I guess that I would be the first outsider coming into storage. But I don't think it's any different. I've been in storage my entire career. I understand it. Some of it is optimizing their current model. The portfolio of what we're doing. Some of it is just making sure we have the right things in sales and working with channels, which one of my companies was an actual channel partner. So I think it's just the perspective of maybe a fresher look, but again we are a great team. Great portfolio. We're quietly number two in storage hardware software. Shhhhhhhh. Don't tell anyone. Cause we don't do a good job of getting the news out... But the fact of the matter is... >> Now we'll tell everyone. You say don't tell anyone, we're telling everybody. You tell us to tell everyone, we don't tell anyone. >> Together: (laughing) >> But we still get people, are you guys still doing storage? We're like, literally we're number two by revenue. And this is IDC and Gartner software hardware. So we are a player in the space. We have a lot of technology and I guess what I'm bringing is just maybe a little spice of vision and... >> Well you guys have a strategy that's unique and different but aligned with the mega trend. That, to me I think, is something that's been in the works for a while. It's been cobbled together. Dave always points it out, how the storage groups change. But the game is still the same, right? Ultimately it's about storage. Now the market conditions are changing on the organizational side. That seems to be the thing. >> Ed: Agreed. >> Well all flash is probably the thing. >> But also what you're going to start seeing is bringing Cognitive capabilities. So we're not going to call in Watson for storage, but imagine bringing Watson to storage, right? Think of all the metadata we have. Not only for support but for insight. You're going to all start doing more Cognitive data management, and not only look at metadata, but taking action on them. Using Watson to look at images, so very interesting use cases that I think only IBM can do. >> I can just envision the day where I just voice activate, Watson spin me up more servers. And provision all flash petabyte. Done. >> (giggling) Believe it or not, we can do a chat, but we have that working. >> John: (laughing) >> We're looking for applicability of that, so. >> And then Watson would tell me, well you can't right now. >> You're not authorized. (laughing) >> You got to grab the Watson for storage url. He's been grabbing url's all day on GoDaddy. (laughing) >> Ed, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on taking names and kicking butt in storage, in the strategy. True Private Cloud, a good one, love that research, again from Wikibomb. >> Yup. >> Kind of new but different, but relevant. >> Ed: Very relevant. >> Thanks so much. >> Ed: (mumbles) So thank you, thank you very much. I appreciate it. >> Okay, live coverage here at Mandalay Bay here at IBM Interconnect 2017. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay with us. More coverage coming up after this short break. (pulsing tech music)

welcome back to pre owned alive Jeff Rick here with the cube as you know we go out to the signals we we go out to the offense we extract the signal from the noise or date to hear percona live Santa Clara Convention Center the heart of Silicon Valley John had to step away so I'll be going solo on this and we're excited to to invite to the cube Lane Campbell CEO and co-founder of Blackbird welcome to the cube thank you very much so Blackbird is a new name I saw on my notes what was what was it called before well we are a merger of two companies Palomino DB has been a longtime sponsor and contributor at at Kona for about seven years it has focused on MySQL database operations and consulting dr dev was an operation shop with a DevOps focus okay and we've decided to merge together take everything up the stack build a company that could operate everything with a heavy database focus awesome so when did you complete the merger probably thirty years from now but technically we did in January first okay very good congratulations never never that fun to to complete all the other processes behind a merger absolutely good deal so we caught you I guess in between two keynotes here mmm-hmm at the show mhm so when he tell us a little bit about what you're covering earlier and what are you gonna cover in the not-too-distant future as soon as you get to your slides after we finish the interview absolutely I'm doing a melange of Amazon Web Services talks this time so I just finished scaling MySQL and Amazon Web Services or I talked about both options of Amazon's RDS and ec2 opportunities and the next session is a deep dive into RDS so the relational database service okay great so we were just at at Amazon summit last week in San Francisco we're at Amazon reinvent last year will be at Amazon some in New York City in a couple of months I think July and then of course back at reinvent in October so clearly Amazon has changed in the world that cloud service has been completely transformative and the enterprise disruptive everyone's running to to catch the Andy Jesse and the team at the show just released it just you know it's like an avalanche of feature improvements feature improvements as the breadth of services gets wider and then the depth of the services gets deeper and then I think they announced their forty third consecutive price decrease yes at the show so there's just relentless innovation both in terms of the feature set as well as the as the as the pricing pressure so how did you get involved on working on the Amazon side and what are you seeing in the marketplace with some of your customers and how is it transforming absolutely we started with Amazon when clients were going to it and it was obviously something we need to support particularly we've always been a very bespoke cost company we do make sure to support our customers but like Amazon we can't do everything so Amazon will start with a core and then they'll evolve based on customer need they'll start digging out new features new functionality and so we did the same thing and as more customers used Amazon we moved to Amazon as more customers use RDS we started using RDS and yeah at this point I would say about 75% of our customers are in some sort of cloud whether it is Amazon Google compute Rackspace cloud and even some folks who are building their own private clouds as well and realistically the own that's the way it's gonna go in a few years everything if every piece of infrastructure will be abstracted and this isn't a really exciting time to be part of the move towards that as we evolve our own maturity matrix for customers to show them where they stand on the DevOps maturity Bay matrix being in a virtualized environment where one can evolve very agile configuration management and infrastructure as code is crucial and so we have that's what we at this point we're helping a lot of our customers get to that point we're helping a lot of our customers not need operation staff and managing everything ourselves which is much easier in a virtual cloud environment and also letting people know when it's not the right choice for them so so on the Amazon side right they have the service of yours your value-add then is helping customers is it a configuration piece is it how they set it up is it what apps are they using I mean where where's your value-add sit on top of the Amazon infrastructure then they're purchasing directly from Amazon so Amazon themselves are utility that's all they want to be and they're not interested in running systems that sit on their environment and so we will help customers from a strategic view deciding which which in which a virtualized environment whether it's Amazon or something else is the right choice we will help them choose which of their architectural components should use an Amazon service versus their own service that they would run anywhere and once we do that we help people migrate to Amazon and we can run it the whole thing okay so you help them run it absolutely yes then are you guys playing an OpenStack as well we do have a few customers in OpenStack it's growing a combat side little earlier but yes absolutely so talk a little bit about when when customers are talking about making the move to the cloud and they want to use Amazon or they want to use a service like that what are some of the strategic gates you walked in through and making a decision as to whit you know what should be where what workloads should be in a public cloud what workload should be maybe on their own or behind the firewall or you know where a hybrid is more appropriate absolutely and I will say that up until recently we have predominantly worked with startups who are about in their mid level of maturity so not as much enterprise clients who might have much more hybridized environment realistically a lot of the folks that come in don't have large operations staff they don't and the staff that they do have want to be working on features right what we call development velocity and so we look for customers who recognize that and item a at this point I don't think a virtualized environment is optional anymore and more often than not unless they are an enterprise or unless they have a large commitment to an existing data center going with something like open stock doesn't make a lot of sense but that being said we do make sure with anyone that we are bringing in that we set everything up with a mitigated risk so that it is easy to get them out even though we've never had an issue with any specific provider for risk purposes it makes a lot of sense to use multiple clouds or to use an on-premise and other hybrid so then so that their startups or most of the applications that you're getting involved with their new applications that they're building as part of their startup a game or whatever one if you can give any examples so we're very much in their retail vertical and the gaming vertical we do have a few others in healthcare and you know sometimes I tease sometimes infrastructure but predominantly and most of the verticals we work with are either retail or gaming and in those environments we will either be brought in for a system that has grown past often that's already either already in Amazon but it was not architected for scale okay and we will come in and help them get to that next level okay more often than not we do have of course some green fields we're doing a large large infrastructure change right now for a new acquisition for Shutterfly okay and in that environment we're going right to RDS and using that okay so one of the one of the potential knocks on a cloud environment or infrastructures of service is is is there a point in time where the cost of rent suddenly becomes more than it would be the cost to buy we're often for speed of implementation getting started clearly renting a service is the easier and lower friction do you find that with your customers or as Amazon able to keep up in terms of pricing reductions where they can stay where they tend to stay kind of Amazon pure as opposed to hitting you know kind of this breaking point where maybe we really should put in our own infrastructure and it's getting really expensive to continue to kind of rent the service absolutely in RDS there was a there was a point where people were getting priced out of RDS which is more expensive than the instances underneath and at that point we had a lot of customers coming to us asking to move the new PI think they dropped most of their prices and RDS by 40% last week so it's amazing right so it gets a lot better some of the larger systems can be very significant but at this point you can get a managed database server that is fully redundant for about six thousand dollars a year and it's pretty impressive what we will find is we'll help customers manage cost one of the things people forget is you have a whole new component of infrastructure management in how do you whether it's using reserved instances spot instances auto scaling up and auto scaling down removing snapshots there's so many opportunities to manage costs that people forget about and we make sure that that happens as well so that people don't get runaway kraut runaway bills so to really find really fine-tune their their their instance at AWS or kind of cost optimize based on because there's a lot of choices right there's a lot of there's a lot of variables in an Amazon in a lot of Amazon purchase yes and there are absolutely tons of ways to save money it's essentially just another facet of automation becomes the cost management part of it and that's one of the most amazing things of Amazon is particularly for a customer that can leverage elasticity whether it's because of peak seasons retail during Christmas education during semesters any customer that can rely on the Dyna Missa tee of an Amazon can scale up can scale down can shift out and really pay when they need to pay or not pay when they don't okay so you've been doing this for a while from kind of a longer-term perspective right there's a lot of new entrants into the public cloud space really you know Google compute and you know Cisco just announced a billion-dollar initiative I think last week for their new public cloud you got HP cloud but sure there's a lot of clouds out there mmm but clearly it appears that anglin's got a giant lead I think Andy said it was their eighth year of the AWS summit what's your kind of perspective as a kind of a service provider looking at the market and trying to deliver value to your customers as to Amazon's position relative to everybody else kind of jumping in the game so at this point we predominantly work with either Amazon Google compute or Rackspace and that is where we focused we don't do a significant amount of Windows so we haven't really played too much with Azure at this point we are predominantly working with what our customers already have if it is completely Greenfield which it's pretty rare they'll bring in a service provider that early we would tend to focus on a combination of those two and that of course will depend on the strategy and the goal we don't want to over build something before they actually have the revenue and the business model supporting what they need there's a lot of options out there like anything it's a matter of managing risk and as a I am a CEO but I was a database administrator by trade and managing risk is core so I will not go to a new database release in its first year and I will not go to a new cloud and probably its first three to four years unless there's something extraordinarily compelling feature that just makes you be willing to accept a huge amount of risk right okay so let's shift gears a little bit and talk about we're here at Percona live shows growing I think he said it's his tenth year of the show why is this important event what's the what's the feeling you're getting here at the show from the community so I started coming to these back when they was in our Riley show when it was the O'Reilly of MySQL conference versus percona who took it over open source is a huge deal and it still is extraordinarily relevant I believe very firmly that open source technology and the access to code the access to tech and to software and the access to open source education is what's going to help us get into the next level of the technological workforce at this point I'm not sure you probably know the numbers since I know you do this more than me but even in Silicon Valley there are 300,000 Latino families who don't have access to computers and internet so any any come any organization like percona liven like MySQL that is based on open source needs to be supported because that is going to be what helps a child in Kenya solve cancer figure out cancer and get us to the next level so that's why I come out here yeah we support closed source databases too but wherever possible we're going to come support an open source product so let's shift gears again cuz I know you're passionate about diversity in tech and you've talked about some of the digital divide you know with with families and people having access to the to the tools and then of course the education and and and the focus on stem we're big fans of women in tech and diversity in tech all of us have we don't have a lot of women hosts but we all have a lot of daughters yeah we're pretty passionate about it and growing up here in the heart of the valley clearly girls need to learn how to code mom so can you talk about some of the things that you get involved with to support that effort in terms of diversity in tech absolutely one one amazing incident actually is at percona live last year they did not have a code of conduct and we had a bit of an issue and some there was a some conversations had and this year we're gonna live now has a code of conduct which helps women come out and feel like there's a clearly written statement that they will not be harassed they will not be intimidated that they are welcome and that is a huge step in and of itself and it was really an issue last year in the year 20 2013 there always is there always is it's amazing when you actually start looking at women speaking out about harassment and you know even abuse at conferences how it quickly devolves into them being attacked stalked harassed it's pretty radical so I was very happy that rakonin took that on and got that in place I was on the content committee for this conference and I was in the beginning there were only about five five proposals out of 400 from women and they were really very nice about helping me extend it and get out there and get more women presenting at the conference here which is great I'm speaking at a bright role hosted data-driven Women events in about a month and wherever I can getting out there at the ghats he just invited me to code his craft to talk about that at their meetups as well good that's he's an amazing organization for bringing women into tap good it seems to be getting more exposure so just a shot out four we've got a great women in tech playlist of women in tech that have been on the cube if you go to Silicon angle dot TV look under playlist women in tech I think we just looked before we came on there we have 97 women of all roles responsibilities seniority size of companies who've been on the cube and you'll be joining that list shortly X so we're big fans and and it's it's it is amazing in 2014 that this is still an issue but we do see more and more at these conferences that there's often you know kind of a women in tech launch track or special networking event or or thanks to really encourage two women to be not only involved but really kind of take a leadership position we saw that back with at EMC world last year with Sheryl Sandberg as well so that's that's great so what's kind of next you've been doing this a long time you've been involving this community a while what's kind of the next big hill to take in terms of the micing community well right now for us it's DevOps and I don't know if you're familiar with it but near this culture of bringing the development operations teams together as we have more infrastructure as code as we get to a point where you cannot compete if you cannot continually push code out push change out that's where we reached and with every customer we're working on we're pushing development velocity getting them to have you know the ability to push code out as fat as rapidly as they won and as safely as they want we just announced today an open-source toolkit for continuous delivery for databases that is starting with MySQL and we feel like that's going to be the next step big data of course is there we are in the middle of ramping up a cassandra team which is a very good addition in the data ecosystem to a relational system like like MySQL and the demand for it is insane so we're very excited to have just brought on our second full time experience because Andre DBA and a building that out as well so in the clients right there's a lot of huge trends right now there's there's kind of mobile first right it was to recently get the mobile first as a driver there's the DevOps culture and and agile software development you know just get stuff out in this this continual pace of improvements and bug fixes and rolling and then and then finally the data first mm-hmm which is kind of the newer trend within your clients of those three things what's really the the primary driver if you had to pick one of the three I will answer that in a way that doesn't answer your question but that happens often excellent right now I believe it's DevOps in a few years and no one will know what that is anymore it will be ubiquitous it is an opportunity right now and then it's going to be data at this point you know we're in the cloud environment and it is the next revolution this virtualized environment infrastructure as a utility just like the electrical and industrial revolutions but data really is a big data and you know how does how to get the data in right now we're in the basics how do you get all of that data in there how do you keep it available how do you manage these huge forms of data but soon it will be about the machine learning and the continued evolution of pulling insights from it and that's what we're gonna be seeing awesome Elaine thanks for coming on the cube Thank You V been here with Len Campbell the CEO and co-founder of Blackbird we're at percona live 2014 Santa Clara California you're watching the cube we go out to the events extract the signal from the noise get the smartest people that we can find in the room bring them on the cube ask them the questions you'd like to ask them so thanks for staying with us we'll be back after this short break with our next guest

bye okay welcome back everyone this is SiliconANGLE and Mookie bonds to cube our flagship program we got the advances reconsider from the noise I'm John foreach n with Dave vellante here for just a conversation Dave about what's going on oracle openworld day one of three days of live coverage here in San Francisco what's your take dick well first of all John miss you yes I had furrier withdrawals here so welcome back them first segment we've done together all day I was out at Santa Barbara last night in checking out the scene down there made it back not going to miss an Oracle OpenWorld for the world I love a work eloping world because it's like Isla Vista in Santa Barbara except it's tech people going crazy over the technology so mas coyote is draped in Red John well different in a few weeks ago at vmworld but I mean it's always great because you know Oracle has the muscle Dave as you know we always talk about every year Oracle's so you know transitioning from that telco role of extracting value from the ecosystem Oracle's making moves Larry Ellison really is a gamer he wants to make his mark on the industry he sees himself as the heir apparent to steve jobs in the end the end the historic hall fame of tech industry and he's here to win it's a game to him and I think you see oracle just in the past four years since we've been covering them being kind of a this is a throwaway game for them to like really being in the game they're making the announcements they're heavy and cloud they're making a faster more relevant timely announcements again they're a monster they're in there a huge accounts huge dollars and a rounding number on their sales spreadsheet would take a company public these days so you know those startups are doing well Oracle still has the muscle and they have huge clients and I'm going to watch and I think you know you ask me might take perform over here a consistent story from Oracle it's engineered software engineered heart with hardware it's vertical integration it's trying to develop best to breed its spending on R&D now they've basically co-op to the Big Data theme you know we hear a lot about their cloud so you know it's fun to criticize Oracle right they charge a lot a you know coops industry terms and act like they invented it on and on but here's the deal they spent a lot of money on R&D Allison's like a start-up CEO I mean he's that engage them I resisted this session talking to some executives and in the infrastructure business and they're telling me I Larry's call me every week wants to know the update on the new product and output when it's coming when it's ready you know herds the same way so you guys are intense focus on as you said winning that is all about winning it's a zero-sum game to Oracle it's the chest it's a chess board for Larry and I think you know one of the things we're seeing some news here we had our guys at the press conference mark hurd made an announcement about the human capital management software you know they're you know it's classic Oracle swiping at the competition work day has been booming of late and you know they're under pressure you know and you know workday asli the PeopleSoft guides have a huge chip on their shoulder they're winning they're doing well and Oracle's not happy about it so I mean obviously they're going to be moving very very aggressive against that and then just in all fronts the chessboard of conversion infrastructure the Sun acquisition really the ultimate cherry on top for Oracle relative to their future positioning they are betting the ranch on an apple-like strategy where containing the hardware focusing on the software and bundling in the hardware to the software as a fully enclosed system purpose-built hardening it out is ultimately their big bet David I'm telling you it will work for some companies and that lock in is a small price to pay for the functionality if they can deliver well and I think they I think Oracle can deliver you know the question is is as we're talking about with ray Wang can they deliver both on the promise of integrated systems I have no doubt Oracle can do that because they're spending a lot of money on it they got good technology people they've got good technology and and so eventually they're going to make that integration play work and they already are making Network the big question I have John is can they innovate and be best to breed at each layer of the stack that's something that's really hard to do guys like EMC and Cisco and VMware have chosen to partner to do that that's always been IBM's big challenge right i mean what's IBM number one at what product is IBM number one besides mainframes it's hard to come up with one okay then same question of Oracle what product is Oracle number one at besides database that's Oracle's challenge you know can they be best in storage can they be best in servers can they be best in applications they would argue their best in applications and I think big date is a big challenge here we heard inside the cube here day one that people don't want to pay licenses for data that's not being used and there's a big issue around the how data works how people using their computing environment it's not a monolithic environment anymore relative to the database there's new unstructured environments most of the data is not stored in relational databases why should I pay an Oracle lights of them I got virtualization I got scale-out open source these are new environments that are putting great pressure on Oracle and if you look at Mark Hurd and how he reports to the street all he talks about is our revenues licenses are up x percent barrel tins of the market well if demarcus declining and you're up what does that mean maybe this shifting to another area so Dave this is a concern that I have about Oracle is their core business metrics might not be on the right numbers yes software's growing relative to what I'm a declining market or shifting market those are the open questions we will find out this backdoor I think that well here's here's something I want to share with you so we did some wheat research and Wikibon fifty percent of the customers that we talked to in the Wikibon community said they're willing to risk lock-in to get integration and function so then and only fifteen percent said we're dogmatic about open source now over time that open source crowd as you well know is going to build up the capabilities but fifteen percent is the toehold for the start of startup crowd Oracle's working on that fat middle and that's really where they do let's talk about the dogmen the dogma for IT enterprises simply there's contract negotiations all posturing for contract negotiations almost every single CIO I talk to and we've talked to Dave have either told us publicly and privately hey at the end of the day I care about the cost structure the environment and to if there's a hardened top unlock in it doesn't it's irrelevant then and the example that we've always using the cube is you the Intel microprocessor do you really care about the proprietary software involved in an Intel processor no just gets the job done and it enables other things that's the key question that we're looking at right now in the computer industry is where is that hardened environment where being collapse elation of the complexity has been taken away to the point where it's absolutely functional that is ultimately to be the key and I think that's going to have to enable data fabric layer and then top of stack of applications I think that's a VMware strategy is a good one I think of Oracle can pull that off they could be the Intel of this cloud error well the other big battle is the organizational battle because Oracle obviously sells the dbas and application heads and everybody else in the hardware business sells to infrastructure people and let's face it the dba's and the application heads have all the juice in the marketplace so that's those guys are driving the buying decisions now as companies like VMware become more strategic they can maybe get some access to those individuals but still Oracle an essay p own that it all you do skoda you go to sa p sapphire you come to oracle openworld a lot of suits you go to emc world and you're seeing you know a lot of infrastructure people so that's a big battle that people taking on but i would if i'm a customer i would absolutely have some alternative infrastructure around wouldn't go just all red stack there might be some situations where i want to do that i guess the point I'm making is a lot of the application heads don't care if they spend more on infrastructure they don't care if they get locked in because they care about how fast the application runs how easy it is deploy how agile it is what their service experience is like that's what they care about I think ultimately it's going to come down at ability to be flexible have the application support so Oracle obviously will have the ability in most their companies to do that the question is do they have the right product mix and I think giving the customer's choice that's what we've seen with OpenStack in particular and you look at OpenStack what that's done is given this choice to the enterprise's to do whatever they want relative to having a private and public and hybrid cloud environment and that's ultimately going to help with the kind of the choice option so I mean that's kind of we've heard Oracle's portfolio or has got one of everything we heard you were in the cards so you didn't hear Thomas curing this morning but I mean you would have thought they were invent big data I mean it was a dupe connectors in-memory databases you're talking oh you know no sequel key value stores we got at all and they do actually have a lot of that hey so the portfolio is very robust they can tick the boxes they can they can play that functionality game with anybody and the real advantages they talk to the CIO now over here you've got the walk-off the marc andreessen crowd right none of my startups by Oracle hey stuff so it's those guys it's the open source crowd that ultimately is going to get leverage in the marketplace and you know John you and I have talked about this in the cube a lot ultimately long term open source wins Gary Blum was on the cube earlier CEO of now CEO president MarkLogic Dave he's been a I think 17 years of Oracle insane amount of years he's been there from the beginning he goes back to veritas as well you know he had an interesting point he said that in MarkLogic they have a half a DBA for ten dba's that are on staff for oracle that's a nine and a half labor pool reduction in cost and you're granted some of those guys might retire kind of like mainframe guys in the old days but like still you don't know about a massive amount of restricting of resources I want to get your take on the data economy type role I mean the data economy we're talking about new economics what's your take on I mean that ratio is really the kind of magnitude we're seeing relative the big data so here's my take on that is is I think that rightly so the startups are doing what Larry always does he compares his state of the art to somebody else's n minus 2 and that's what the startups are doing right there's a lot of legacy Oracle environments very easy to go in and say okay I can reduce your operating expense here's the challenge Oracle knows this and they see that threat so what Oracle's trying to do is is is cut that you know to whatever degree it can cut that and and close that gap and then you know have the cios bet on oracle because their quote unquote less risky right nobody ever get fired for bringing on IBM so the game that they have to play I heard Gary say we have a five-year lead on the competition so it's like fusion-io and EMC right EMC it lead on on emc we had packed LC on the QB said hey we're behind we're going to catch up how did they catch up they went out and they bought a company now I haven't caught up yet but they went out bought a company they started investing R&D but they're closing that gap and so that's the game that they play okay we're here inside the cube this is SiliconANGLE Yvonne's coverage of the cube stay with us we're going to be going to come back with Jeff Kelly Dave next we have any more guests coming in we're done this is a wrap for the day okay we'll be back tomorrow on Tuesday stay here SiliconANGLE guns the cue our flagship program day one wrap up here at Oracle OpenWorld yes my goal she's coming on we got a bunch of guys coming on from emc emc has 80,000 oracle customers oracle itself says it has 40,000 hardware customers so that's going to be an interesting we want having a special thanks out the qlogic for letting us stay in their booth again fourth consecutive year the legacy SiliconANGLE and CNBC are broadcasting live here at oracle openworld this is day one coverage with new Act tomorrow with the keynote in the middle of the afternoon all day coverage starting at nine at ten o'clock tomorrow morning here from the cube stay with us and see you tomorrow