(upbeat music) >> We're back at VeeamON 2022. We're here at the Aria in Las Vegas Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Bill Andrews is here. He's the president and CEO of ExaGrid, mass boy. Bill, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I hear a lot about obviously data protection, cyber resiliency, what's the big picture trends that you're seeing when you talk to customers? >> Well, I think clearly we were talking just a few minutes ago, data's growing like crazy, right This morning, I think they said it was 28% growth a year, right? So data's doubling almost just a little less than every three years. And then you get the attacks on the data which was the keynote speech this morning as well, right. All about the ransomware attacks. So we've got more and more data, and that data is more and more under attack. So I think those are the two big themes. >> So ExaGrid as a company been around for a long time. You've kind of been the steady kind of Eddy, if you will. Tell us about ExaGrid, maybe share with us some of the differentiators that you share with customers. >> Sure, so specifically, let's say in the Veeam world you're backing up your data, and you really only have two choices. You can back that up to disc. So some primary storage disc from a Dell, or a Hewlett Packard, or an NetApp or somebody, or you're going to back it up to what's called an inline deduplication appliance maybe a Dell Data Domain or an HPE StoreOnce, right? So what ExaGrid does is we've taken the best of both those but not the challenges of both those and put 'em together. So with disc, you're going to get fast backups and fast restores, but because in backup you keep weekly's, monthly's, yearly retention, the cost of this becomes exorbitant. If you go to a deduplication appliance, and let's say the Dell or the HPs, the data comes in, has to be deduplicated, compare one backup to the next to reduce that storage, which lowers the cost. So fixes that problem, but the fact that they do it inline slows the backups down dramatically. All the data is deduplicated so the restores are slow, and then the backup window keeps growing as the data grows 'cause they're all scale up technologies. >> And the restores are slow 'cause you got to rehydrate. >> You got to rehydrate every time. So what we did is we said, you got to have both. So our appliances have a front end disc cache landing zone. So you're right directed to the disc., Nothing else happens to it, whatever speed the backup app could write at that's the speed we take it in at. And then we keep the most recent backups in that landing zone ready to go. So you want to boot a VM, it's not an hour like a deduplication appliance it's a minute or two. Secondly, we then deduplicate the data into a second tier which is a repository tier, but we have all the deduplicated data for the long term retention, which gets the cost down. And on top of that, we're scale out. Every appliance has networking processor memory end disc. So if you double, triple, quadruple the data you double, triple, quadruple everything. And if the backup window is six hours at 100 terabyte it's six hours at 200 terabyte, 500 terabyte, a petabyte it doesn't matter. >> 'Cause you scale out. >> Right, and then lastly, our repository tier is non-network facing. We're the only ones in the industry with this. So that under a ransomware attack, if you get hold of a rogue server or you hack the media server, get to the backup storage whether it's disc or deduplication appliance, you can wipe out all the backup data. So you have nothing to recover from. In our case, you wipe it out, our landing zone will be wiped out. We're no different than anything else that's network facing. However, the only thing that talks to our repository tier is our object code. And we've set up security policies as to how long before you want us to delete data, let's say 10 days. So if you have an attack on Monday that data doesn't get deleted till like a week from Thursday, let's say. So you can freeze the system at any time and do restores. And then we have immutable data objects and all the other stuff. But the culmination of a non-network facing tier and the fact that we do the delayed deletes makes us the only one in the industry that can actually truly recover. And that's accelerating our growth, of course. >> Wow, great description. So that disc cache layer is a memory, it's a flash? >> It's disc, it's spinning disc. >> Spinning disc, okay. >> Yeah, no different than any other disc. >> And then the tiered is what, less expensive spinning disc? >> No, it's still the same. It's all SaaS disc 'cause you want the quality, right? So it's all SaaS, and so we use Western Digital or Seagate drives just like everybody else. The difference is that we're not doing any deduplication coming in or out of that landing zone to have fast backups and fast restores. So think of it like this, you've got disc and you say, boy it's too expensive. What I really want to do then is put maybe a deduplication appliance behind it to lower the cost or reverse it. I've got a deduplication appliance, ugh, it's too slow for backups and restores. I really want to throw this in front of it to have fast backups first. Basically, that's what we did. >> So where does the cost savings, Bill come in though, on the tier? >> The cost savings comes in the fact that we got deduplication in that repository. So only the most recent backup >> Ah okay, so I get it. >> are the duplicated data. But let's say you had 40 copies of retention. You know, 10 weekly's, 36 monthly's, a few yearly. All of that's deduplicated >> Okay, so you're deduping the stuff that's not as current. >> Right. >> Okay. >> And only a handful of us deduplicate at the layer we do. In other words, deduplication could be anywhere from two to one, up to 50 to one. I mean it's all over the place depending on the algorithm. Now it's what everybody's algorithms do. Some backup apps do two to one, some do five to one, we do 20 to one as well as much as 50 to one depending on the data types. >> Yeah, so the workload is going to largely determine the combination >> The content type, right. with the algos, right? >> Yeah, the content type. >> So the part of the environment that's behind the illogical air gap, if you will, is deduped data. >> Yes. >> So in this case, is it fair to say that you're trading a positive economic value for a little bit longer restore from that environment? >> No, because if you think about backup 95% of the customers restores are from the most recent data. >> From the disc cache. >> 95% of the time 'cause you think about why do you need fast restores? Somebody deleted a file, somebody overwrote a file. They can't go work, they can't open a file. It's encrypted, it's corrupted. That's what IT people are trying to keep users productive. When do you go for longer-term retention data? It's an SEC audit. It's a HIPAA audit. It's a legal discovery, you don't need that data right away. You have days and weeks to get that ready for that legal discovery or that audit. So we found that boundary where you keep users productive by keeping the most recent data in the disc cache landing zone, but anything that's long term. And by the way, everyone else is long term, at that point. >> Yeah, so the economics are comparable to the dedupe upfront. Are they better, obviously get the performance advance? >> So we would be a lot looped. The thing we replaced the most believe it or not is disc, we're a lot less expensive than the disc. I was meeting with some Veeam folks this morning and we were up against Cisco 3260 disc at a children's hospital. And on our quote was $500,000. The disc was 1.4 million. Just to give you an example of the savings. On a Data Domain we're typically about half the price of a Data Domain. >> Really now? >> The reason why is their front end control are so expensive. They need the fastest trip on the planet 'cause they're trying to do inline deduplication. >> Yeah, so they're chasing >> They need the fastest memory >> on the planet. >> this chips all the time. They need SSD on data to move in and out of the hash table. In order to keep up with inline, they've got to throw so much compute at it that it drives their cost up. >> But now in the case of ransomware attack, are you saying that the landing zone is still available for recovery in some circumstances? Or are you expecting that that disc landing zone would be encrypted by the attacker? >> Those are two different things. One is deletion, one is encryption. So let's do the first scenario. >> I'm talking about malicious encryption. >> Yeah, absolutely. So the first scenario is the threat actor encrypts all your primary data. What's does he go for next? The backup data. 'Cause he knows that's your belt and suspend is to not pay the ransom. If it's disc he's going to go in and put delete commands at the disc, wipe out the disc. If it's a data domain or HPE StoreOnce, it's all going to be gone 'cause it's one tier. He's going to go after our landing zone, it's going to be gone too. It's going to wipe out our landing zone. Except behind that we have the most recent backup deduplicate in the repository as well as all the other backups. So what'll happen is they'll freeze the system 'cause we weren't going to delete anything in the repository for X days 'cause you set up a policy, and then you restore the most recent backup into the landing zone or we can restore it directly to your primary storage area, right? >> Because that tier is not network facing. >> That's right. >> It's fenced off essentially. >> People call us every day of the week saying, you saved me, you saved me again. People are coming up to me here, you saved me, you saved me. >> Tell us a story about that, I mean don't give me the names but how so. >> I'll actually do a funnier story, 'cause these are the ones that our vendors like to tell. 'Cause I'm self-serving as the CEO that's good of course, a little humor. >> It's your 15 minutes of job. >> That is my 15 minutes of fame. So we had one international company who had one ExaGrid at one location, 19 Data Domains at the other locations. Ransomware attack guess what? 19 Data Domains wiped out. The one ExaGrid, the only place they could restore. So now all 20 locations of course are ExaGrids, China, Russia, Mexico, Germany, US, et cetera. They rolled us out worldwide. So it's very common for that to occur. And think about why that is, everyone who's network facing you can get to the storage. You can say all the media servers are buttoned up, but I can find a rogue server and snake my way over the storage, I can. Now, we also of course support the Veeam Data Mover. So let's talk about that since we're at a Veeam conference. We were the first company to ever integrate the Veeam Data Mover. So we were the first actually ever integration with Veeam. And so that Veeam Data Mover is a protocol that goes from Veeam to the ExaGrid, and we run it on both ends. So that's a more secure protocol 'cause it's not an open format protocol like SaaS. So with running the Veeam Data Mover we get about 30% more performance, but you do have a more secure protocol layer. So if you don't get through Veeam but you get through the protocol, boom, we've got a stronger protocol. If you make it through that somehow, or you get to it from a rogue server somewhere else we still have the repository. So we have all these layers so that you can't get at it. >> So you guys have been at this for a while, I mean decade and a half plus. And you've raised a fair amount of money but in today's terms, not really. So you've just had really strong growth, sequential growth. I understand it, and double digit growth year on year. >> Yeah, about 25% a year right now >> 25%, what's your global strategy? >> So we have sales offices in about 30 countries already. So we have three sales teams in Brazil, and three in Germany, and three in the UK, and two in France, and a lot of individual countries, Chile, Argentina, Columbia, Mexico, South Africa, Saudi, Czech Republic, Poland, Dubai, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, et cetera. We've just added two sales territories in Japan. We're adding two in India. And we're installed in over 50 countries. So we've been international all along the way. The goal of the company is we're growing nicely. We have not raised money in almost 10 years. >> So you're self-funding. You're cash positive. >> We are cash positive and self-funded and people say, how have you done that for 10 years? >> You know what's interesting is I remember, Dave Scott, Dave Scott was the CEO of 3PAR, and he told me when he came into that job, he told the VCs, they wanted to give him 30 million. He said, I need 80 million. I think he might have raised closer to a hundred which is right around what you guys have raised. But like you said, you haven't raised it in a long time. And in today's terms, that's nothing, right? >> 100 is 500 in today's terms. >> Yeah, right, exactly. And so the thing that really hurt 3PAR, they were public companies so you could see all this stuff is they couldn't expand internationally. It was just too damn expensive to set up the channels, and somehow you guys have figured that out. >> 40% of our business comes out of international. We're growing faster internationally than we are domestically. >> What was the formula there, Bill, was that just slow and steady or? >> It's a great question. >> No, so what we did, we said let's build ExaGrid like a McDonald's franchise, nobody's ever done that before in high tech. So what does that mean? That means you have to have the same product worldwide. You have to have the same spares model worldwide. You have to have the same support model worldwide. So we early on built the installation. So we do 100% of our installs remotely. 100% of our support remotely, yet we're in large enterprises. Customers racks and stacks the appliances we get on with them. We do the entire install on 30 minutes to about three hours. And we've been developing that into the product since day one. So we can remotely install anywhere in the world. We keep spares depots all over the world. We can bring 'em up really quick. Our support model is we have in theater support people. So they're in Europe, they're in APAC, they're in the US, et cetera. And we assign customers to the support people. So they deal with the same support person all the time. So everything is scalable. So right now we're going to open up India. It's the same way we've opened up every other country. Once you've got the McDonald's formula we just stamp it all over the world. >> That's amazing. >> Same pricing, same product same model, same everything. >> So what was the inspiration for that? I mean, you've done this since day one, which is what like 15, 16 years ago. Or just you do engineering or? >> No, so our whole thought was, first of all you can't survive anymore in this world without being an international company. 'Cause if you're going to go after large companies they have offices all over the world. We have companies now that have 17, 18, 20, 30 locations. And there were in every country in the world, you can't go into this business without being able to ship anywhere in the world and support it for a single customer. You're not going into Singapore because of that. You're going to Singapore because some company in Germany has offices in the U.S, Mexico Singapore and Australia. You have to be international. It's a must now. So that was the initial thing is that, our goal is to become a billion dollar company. And we're on path to do that, right. >> You can see a billion. >> Well, I can absolutely see a billion. And we're bigger than everybody thinks. Everybody guesses our revenue always guesses low. So we're bigger than you think. The reason why we don't talk about it is we don't need to. >> That's the headline for our writers, ExaGrid is a billion dollar company and nobody's know about it. >> Million dollar company. >> On its way to a billion. >> That's right. >> You're not disclosing. (Bill laughing) But that's awesome. I mean, that's a great story. I mean, you kind of are a well kept secret, aren't you? >> Well, I dunno if it's a well kept secret. You know, smaller companies never have their awareness of big companies, right? The Dells of the world are a hundred billion. IBM is 70 billion, Cisco is 60 billion. Easy to have awareness, right? If you're under a billion, I got to give a funny story then I think we got to close out here. >> Oh go ahead please. >> So there's one funny story. So I was talking to the CIO of a super large Fortune 500 company. And I said to him, "Just so who do you use?" "I use IBM Db2, and I use, Cisco routers, and I use EMC primary storage, et cetera. And I use all these big." And I said, "Would you ever switch from Db2?" "Oh no, the switching costs would kill me. I could never go to Oracle." So I said to him, "Look would you ever use like a Pure Storage, right. A couple billion dollar company." He says, "Who?" >> Huh, interesting. >> I said to him, all right so skip that. I said, "VMware, would you ever think about going with Nutanix?" "Who?" Those are billion dollar plus companies. And he was saying who? >> Public companies. >> And he was saying who? That's not uncommon when I talk to CIOs. They see the big 30 and that's it. >> Oh, that's interesting. What about your partnership with Veeam? Tell us more about that. >> Yeah, so I would actually, and I'm going to be bold when I say this 'cause I think you can ask anybody here at the conference. We're probably closer first of all, to the Veeam sales force than any company there is. You talk to any Veeam sales rep, they work closer with ExaGrid than any other. Yeah, we are very tight in the field and have been for a long time. We're integrated with the Veeam Data Boomer. We're integrated with SOBR. We're integrated with all the integrations or with the product as well. We have a lot of joint customers. We actually do a lot of selling together, where we go in as Veeam ExaGrid 'cause it's a great end to end story. Especially when we're replacing, let's say a Dell Avamar to Dell Data Domain or a Dell Network with a Dell Data Domain, very commonly Veeam ExaGrid go in together on those types of sales. So we do a lot of co-selling together. We constantly train their systems engineers around the world, every given week we're training either inside sales teams, and we've trained their customer support teams in Columbus and Prague. So we're very tight with 'em we've been tight for over a decade. >> Is your head count public? Can you share that with us? >> So we're just over 300 employees. >> Really, wow. >> We have 70 open positions, so. >> Yeah, what are you looking for? Yeah, everything, right? >> We are looking for engineers. We are looking for customer support people. We're looking for marketing people. We're looking for inside sales people, field people. And we've been hiring, as of late, major account reps that just focus on the Fortune 500. So we've separated that out now. >> When you hire engineers, I mean I think I saw you were long time ago, DG, right? Is that true? >> Yeah, way back in the '80s. >> But systems guy. >> That's how old I am. >> Right, systems guy. I mean, I remember them well Eddie Castro and company. >> Tom West. >> EMV series. >> Tom West was the hero of course. >> The EMV 4000, the EMV 20,000, right? >> When were kids, "The Soul of a New Machine" was the inspirational book but anyway, >> Yeah Tracy Kidder, it was great. >> Are you looking for systems people, what kind of talent are you looking for in engineering? >> So it's a lot of Linux programming type stuff in the product 'cause we run on a Linux space. So it's a lot of Linux programs so its people in those storage. >> Yeah, cool, Bill, hey, thanks for coming on to theCUBE. Well learned a lot, great story. >> It's a pleasure. >> That was fun. >> Congratulations. >> Thanks. >> And good luck. >> All right, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2022, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back right after this short break, stay with us. (soft beat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We're covering Red Hat Summit 2022. We're going to wrap up now, Dave Vellante, Paul Gillin. We want to introduce you to Stephanie Chan, who's our new correspondent. Stephanie, one of your first events, your very first CUBE event. So welcome. >> Thank you. >> Up from NYC. Smaller event, but intimate. You got a chance to meet some folks last night at some of the after parties. What are your overall impressions? What'd you learn this week? >> So this has been my first in-person event in over two years. And even though, like you said, is on the smaller scale, roughly around 1000 attendees, versus it's usual eight to 10,000 attendees. There's so much energy, and excitement, and openness in these events and sessions. Even before and after the sessions people have been mingling and socializing and hanging out. So, I think a lot of people appreciate these in-person events and are really excited to be here. >> Cool. So, you also sat in some of the keynotes, right? Pretty technical, right? Which is kind of new to sort of your genre, right? I mean, I know you got a financial background but, so what'd you think of the keynotes? What'd you think of the format, the theater in the round? Any impressions of that? >> So, I think there's three things that are really consistent in these Red Hat Summit keynotes. There's always a history lesson. There's always, you know, emphasis in the culture of openness. And, there's also inspirational stories about how people utilize open source. And I found a lot of those examples really compelling and interesting. For instance, people use open source in (indistinct), and even in space. So I really enjoyed, you know, learning about all these different people and stories. What about you guys? What do you think were the big takeaways and the best stories that came out of the keynotes? >> Paul, want to start? >> Clearly the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is a major rollout. They do that only about every three years. So that's a big deal to this audience. I think what they did in the area of security, with rolling out sigstore, which is a major new, I think an important new project that was sort of incubated at Red Hat. And they're trying to put in to create an open source ecosystem around that now. And the alliances. I'm usually not that much on partnerships, but the Accenture and the Microsoft partnerships do seem to be significant to the company. And, finally, the GM partnership which I think was maybe kind of the bombshell that they sort of rushed in at the last minute. But I think has the biggest potential impact on Red Hat and its partner ecosystem that is really going to anchor their edge architecture going forward. So I didn't see it so much on the product front, but the sense of Red Hat spreading its wings, and partnering with more companies, and seeing its itself as really the center of an ecosystem indicates that they are, you know, they're in a very solid position in their business. >> Yeah, and also like the pandemic has really forced us into this new normal, right? So customer demand is changing. There has been the shift to remote. There's always going to be a new normal according to Paul, and open source carries us through that. So how do you guys think Red Hat has helped its portfolio through this new normal and the shift? >> I mean, when you think of Red Hat, you think of Linux. I mean, that's where it all started. You think OpenShift which is the application development platforms. Linux is the OS. OpenShift is the application development platform for Kubernetes. And then of course, Ansible is the automation framework. And I agree with you, ecosystem is really the other piece of this. So, I mean, I think you take those three pieces and extend that into the open source community. There's a lot of innovation that's going around each of those, but ecosystems are the key. We heard from Stefanie Chiras, that fundamental, I mean, you can't do this without those gap fillers and those partnerships. And then another thing that's notable here is, you know, this was, I mean, IBM was just another brand, right? I mean, if anything it was probably a sub-brand, I mean, you didn't hear much about IBM. You certainly had no IBM presence, even though they're right across the street running Think. No Arvind present, no keynote from Arvind, no, you know, Big Blue washing. And so, I think that's a testament to Arvind himself. We heard that from Paul Cormier, he said, hey, this guy's been great, he's left us alone. And he's allowed us to continue innovating. It's good news. IBM has not polluted Red Hat. >> Yes, I think that the Red Hat was, I said at the opening, I think Red Hat is kind of the tail wagging the dog right now. And their position seems very solid in the market. Clearly the market has come to them in terms of their evangelism of open source. They've remained true to their business model. And I think that gives them credibility that, you know, a lot of other open source companies have lacked. They have stuck with the plan for over 20 years now and have really not changed it, and it's paying off. I think they're emerging as a company that you can trust to do business with. >> Now I want to throw in something else here. I thought the conversation with IDC analyst, Jim Mercer, was interesting when he said that they surveyed customers and they wanted to get the security from their platform vendor, versus having to buy these bespoke tools. And it makes a lot of sense to me. I don't think that's going to happen, right? Because you're going to have an identity specialist. You're going to have an endpoint specialist. You're going to have a threat detection specialist. And they're going to be best of breed, you know, Red Hat's never going to be all of those things. What they can do is partner with those companies through APIs, through open source integrations, they can add them in as part of the ecosystem and maybe be the steward of that. Maybe that's the answer. They're never going to be the best at all those different security disciplines. There's no way in the world, Red Hat, that's going to happen. But they could be the integration point. And that would be, that would be a simplifying layer to the equation. >> And I think it's smart. You know, they're not pretending to be an identity in access management or an anti-malware company, or even a zero trust company. They are sticking to their knitting, which is operating system and developers. Evangelizing DevSecOps, which is a good thing. And, that's what they're going to do. You know, you have to admire this company. It has never gotten outside of its swim lane. I think it's understood well really what it wants to be good at. And, you know, in the software business knowing what not to do is more important than knowing what to do. Is companies that fail are usually the ones that get overextended, this company has never overextended itself. >> What else do you want to know? >> And a term that kept popping up was multicloud, or otherwise known as metacloud. We know what the cloud is, but- >> Oh, supercloud, metacloud. >> Supercloud, yeah, here we go. We know what the cloud is but, what does metacloud mean to you guys? And why has it been so popular in these conversations? >> I'm going to boot this to Dave, because he's the expert on this. >> Well, expert or not, but I mean, again, we've coined this term supercloud. And the idea behind the supercloud or what Ashesh called metacloud, I like his name, cause it allows Web 3.0 to come into the equation. But the idea is that instead of building on each individual cloud and have compatibility with that cloud, you build a layer across clouds. So you do the hard work as a platform supplier to hide the underlying primitives and APIs from the end customer, or the end developer, they can then add value on top of that. And that abstraction layer spans on-prem, clouds, across clouds, ultimately out to the edge. And it's new, a new value layer that builds on top of the hyperscale infrastructure, or existing data center infrastructure, or emerging edge infrastructure. And the reason why that is important is because it's so damn complicated, number one. Number two, every company's becoming a software company, a technology company. They're bringing their services through digital transformation to their customers. And you've got to have a cloud to do that. You're not going to build your own data center. That's like Charles Wang says, not Charles Wang. (Paul laughing) Charles Phillips. We were just talking about CA. Charles Phillips. Friends don't let friends build data centers. So that supercloud concept, or what Ashesh calls metacloud, is this new layer that's going to be powered by ecosystems and platform companies. And I think it's real. I think it's- >> And OpenShift, OpenShift is a great, you know, key card for them or leverage for them because it is perhaps the best known Kubernetes platform. And you can see here they're really doubling down on adding features to OpenShift, security features, scalability. And they see it as potentially this metacloud, this supercloud abstraction layer. >> And what we said is, in order to have a supercloud you got to have a superpaz layer and OpenShift is that superpaz layer. >> So you had conversations with a lot of people within the past two days. Some people include companies, from Verizon, Intel, Accenture. Which conversation stood out to you the most? >> Which, I'm sorry. >> Which conversation stood out to you the most? (Paul sighs) >> The conversation with Stu Miniman was pretty interesting because we talked about culture. And really, he has a lot of credibility in that area because he's not a Red Hat. You know, he hasn't been a Red Hat forever, he's fairly new to the company. And got a sense from him that the culture there really is what they say it is. It's a culture of openness and that's, you know, that's as important as technology for a company's success. >> I mean, this was really good content. I mean, there were a lot, I mean Stefanie's awesome. Stefanie Chiras, we're talking about the ecosystem. Chris Wright, you know, digging into some of the CTO stuff. Ashesh, who coined metacloud, I love that. The whole in vehicle operating system conversation was great. The security discussion that we just had. You know, the conversations with Accenture were super thoughtful. Of course, Paul Cormier was a highlight. I think that one's going to be a well viewed interview, for sure. And, you know, I think that the customer conversations are great. Red Hat did a really good job of carrying the keynote conversations, which were abbreviated this year, to theCUBE. >> Right. >> I give 'em a lot of kudos for that. And because, theCUBE, it allows us to double click, go deeper, peel the onion a little bit, you know, all the buzz words, and cliches. But it's true. You get to clarify some of the things you heard, which were, you know, the keynotes were, were scripted, but tight. And so we had some good follow up questions. I thought it was super useful. I know I'm leaving somebody out, but- >> We're also able to interview representatives from Intel and Nvidia, which at a software conference you don't typically do. I mean, there's the assimilation, the combination of hardware and software. It's very clear that, and this came out in the keynote, that Red Hat sees hardware as matter. It matters. It's important again. And it's going to be a source of innovation in the future. That came through clearly. >> Yeah. The hardware matters theme, you know, the old days you would have an operating system and the hardware were intrinsically linked. MVS in the mainframe, VAX, VMS in the digital mini computers. DG had its own operating system. Wang had his own operating system. Prime with Prime OS. You remember these days? >> Oh my God. >> Right? (Paul laughs) And then of course Microsoft. >> And then x86, everything got abstracted. >> Right. >> Everything became x86 and now it's all atomizing again. >> Although WinTel, right? I mean, MS-DOS and Windows were intrinsically linked for many, many years with Intel x86. And it wasn't until, you know, well, and then, you know, Sun Solaris, but it wasn't until Linux kind of blew that apart. And the internet is built on the lamp stack. And of course, Linux is the fundamental foundation for Red Hat. So my point is, that the operating system and the hardware have always been very closely tied together. Whether it's security, or IO, or registries and memory management, everything controlled by the OS are very close to the hardware. And so that's why I think you've got an affinity in Red Hat to hardware. >> But Linux is breaking that bond, don't you think? >> Yes, but it still has to understand the underlying hardware. >> Right. >> You heard today, how taking advantage of Nvidia, and the AI capabilities. You're seeing that with ARM, you're seeing that with Intel. How you can optimize the operating system to take advantage of new generations of CPU, and NPU, and CPU, and PU, XPU, you know, across the board. >> Yep. >> Well, I really enjoyed this conference and it really stressed how important open source is to a lot of different industries. >> Great. Well, thanks for coming on. Paul, thank you. Great co-hosting with you. And thank you. >> Always, Dave. >> For watching theCUBE. We'll be on the road, next week we're at KubeCon in Valencia, Spain. We're at VeeamON. We got a ton of stuff going on. Check out thecube.net. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Wikibon.com. We publish there weekly, our breaking analysis series. Thanks for watching everybody. Dave Vellante, for Paul Gillin, and Stephanie Chan. Thanks to the crew. Shout out, Andrew, Alex, Sonya. Amazing job, Sonya. Steven, thanks you guys for coming out here. Mark, good job corresponding. Go to SiliconANGLE, Mark's written some great stuff. And thank you for watching. We'll see you next time. (calm music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019 Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to The Cube's live coverage here in San Francisco, California for VMworld 2019. We are here in the broadcast booth. We have two sets going on all day for three days. The last day of winding down VMworld of our coverage. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Stu Miniman is holding down on the other set. But here we are going to analyze what's happened at VMworld 2019. We've assembled the top industry analysts. My co-host Dave Vellante, Peter Burris and David Floyer with Wikibon who have been in the analyst sessions in the hallways, doing briefings, digging getting all the data. Let's analyze it. Guys welcome to theCUBE, welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thank you. >> All right so what's the analysis. VMworld 2019. >> What's the core of it? I believe that the core of it is that they're taking their centralized and data center platform and extending it. Extending it to the edge, extending it to every aspect. Extending it to multiple clouds not just AWS but a whole number of clouds. Extending it right the way down to the edge even with ARM processor capabilities, and extending the interoperability, the hybrid nature of those offerings. And trying to establish themselves as one of the core platforms for distributed hybrid processing. >> Peter what's your take? How should the business model with Pivotal, they got security in there. What's your analysis of VMworld 2019, what's happening? >> The analysis of the show is, it's, I'd say it's interesting. It's not as strong as it could've been. But let's start here, per what David said, look, these guys made a major bet three years ago that a lot of, it was like on a knife's edge, which way is going to go. And it went the right way. And we observed last year that it went the right way not just cause it was a good idea but because Gelsinger built the team that could execute. And what I would say out of David's stuff cause I think you're a little bit, you're getting ahead a little bit on some of the edge stuff and there's still a lot of work that's got to get done but I think what users should walk away from the show with is they made a bet, it turned out to be the right bet and this is a team that can execute. And the promises that they had been making they have been realizing. And that's where I say that it's kind of what's, it's almost a weird thing because in many respects VMware could be screaming from the rooftops at this point in time that they are Switzerland with teeth. They can work with everybody but do so in a way that actually does have manifest impacts on how digital businesses work. And so I think in almost a weird way VMworld 2019 was more subdued than it could have been. The industry is still looking for that thought leader that company that's going to provide that kind of central, that kind of center piece of what's going to happen. And a lot of folks don't want it to be AWS. And it's almost like VMware could have been a little bit more forceful, a little bit stronger in how they talked about the success that they're having. >> So you're saying they're a little bit humble. They could have been louder and prouder about their accomplishments. >> Or you know, sometimes I almost wondered do they really know the tiger that they're riding right now because they're a lot of enterprises out there that are truly starting to bank on these guys and their success is being increasingly tied to VMware's success. >> Peter brings up a great point, I want to get your thoughts on this because you've been digging into the numbers. I think they actually have a great team, they got all these business units they seem to be kind of getting them into formation. It's almost as if they don't want to brag too much because they got more work to do. As you mentioned the edge. >> Peter: Yes a lot of work to do. >> And I think you laid it out perfectly in terms of what they're trying to do. I think Peter you bring the reality to it but they've still got to beaver away on some things. They got work to do. What's your take on this? >> Well, so I want to pick up on something that Peter said, so Pat said the strengths lie in the differences not the similarities. There's a lot of differences between the bets the VMware is making and the bets that Amazon is making. Now, can they both payoff, yeah they probably can but we've noted the differences. Amazon doesn't talk about multicloud. Amazon says cloud security is great. Don't say it's broken, that's a bad narrative. Amazon says that they want to be or they are the platform for developers and the future of the best infrastructure in developers company. That's what VMware wants to be. So I see those two at odds. >> Well aren't they different animals though. Amazon's in the cloud business. >> They are different animals except when it comes to the large enterprises that this year have actually put stakes in the ground about how they're going to move forward with cloud. >> John: What are those stakes? >> Well, first off they're saying, where the data goes, that's where the service needs to go. They're starting to acknowledge that the relationship between data and IP is very real. They have fully acknowledged it's going to be hybrid cloud or it's going to be multicloud and that SAAS applications are going to be still, as bet with our analysis, is going to be the dominant feature of that. And I don't mean to cut you off Dave. >> Dave: No it's all right. >> But that's where the enterprise is going. The enterprise doesn't want to spend a lot of time talking about S3 and object stored. They want to talk about how the services are going to get to the data where they want the services to be. >> John: Good point. >> I think there's one other point that we should add to that what VM's capability is, is that you don't have to migrate the applications. VMware owns those applications and the cost of migration is huge. >> Peter: If the application's in VMware. >> If the applications in VMware. So they're offering ... >> John: Which many are. >> Peter: Many are. >> Many are yes. So they're offering a lower cost way of getting to the cloud if they can execute on the capabilities of putting containers into their platform and to make it a microservices platform. So if they deliver that and maintain that continuity with their existing base that is a powerful place to come from. >> Although David, I think you'd agree with this that even in the cloud today things like microservices are not really the as is position. It's definitely ahead and it's moving forward but so VMWare can show, we can get you to that cloud experience. We may lag a little bit when it comes to containers but it's going to be a few years before containers are the default way of doing things. >> Guys Pat Gelsinger, I want to get your reaction to this cause this is, you have to add some color to this because he left it just hanging out there. His last comment was, looking forward 10 years, and look back for 10 years of theCUBE coverage, he said networking, security and Kubernetes are the three waves that you need to be on. >> Networking, security, and Kubernetes. Not networking security. >> John: No, networking as a ... Networking needs to solved, security and Kubernetes. Three waves, you got to be on those waves. What does he mean by that? What do you think he means by that? Networking in terms of on premise networking. >> Well I think that, I'll start David. But I think the first thing to note is that, and Dave and I have talked about this a lot in some of the segments we've done. The cloud was miscast as a centralization trend. What the cloud really is, is a framework for how you think about distributing data, and distributing the work that's going performed against that data closer to where it's actually required and where it's actually created and consumed. And that's really how we should be thinking about the cloud, is it's a way of distributing work and distributing data to where it needs to be. That means networking is essential because, and we're starting to hear this from large users, in many respects they're wondering how their networking strategy and their cloud strategy are going to fold in and be the same strategy. On the security front, yeah you got to have end to end but how do you put a perimeter around a cloud. That's not clear. And we're thinking about going towards data security you know, data security and zero trust security but perimeter still, stuff is still very important. There's some very new technologies and interesting technologies that are trying to bring some of that perimeter stuff to that notion. Networking, security, and the last one was Kubernetes. The thing that's interesting and I could see why Pat would say that because it's very true for VMware. >> They're betting on Kubernetes. Is that another knife edge bet? >> Well no it really isn't. See, it is, maybe you could say it is but look, a virtual machine virtualizes hardware. A container platform virtualizes the operating system. And so is it possible the containers are going to end up virtualizing VMware and what does that mean for VMware? So VMware has to reach up and be a phenomenal place for containers, otherwise the value propositions going to move up and beyond them. >> And the Kubernetes has been picked because that is an open source. It means it has the potential of being a standard across multiple clouds, and offers that ability to automate and orchestrate across in a way that no other set of software can do. It's a long way to go. He's putting a bet on it and I think it's the correct bet to do there. But it's a long way to go before you will see if that's the right bet. >> What about networking and security honestly, IoT's in there. Peter mentions these use cases that requires data. The original Cloud 1.0 definition was, I'm building it out, I'm a startup. I'm going to just build my app in the cloud and I'm not delivering, the data's in the cloud. >> Peter: And all my users are going to connect to the cloud. >> Now Cloud 2.0 is really going down what you're saying so networking becomes fundamental. >> Networking becomes fundamental not just to move data around but to move code to data as well. >> Well to your point the cloud is this massively scalable distributed system. >> That's right. It is the massively distributed, scalable distributed system and the other thing that I'd say about Kubernetes, networking and security is Kubernetes is a cluster, a way of describing or thinking about application from a clustering standpoint which is inherently networking. And so Kubernetes in many respects is describing how application networking's going to look in a few years. But the other thing that's interesting about it, is because it's virtualizing that operating system, challenges associated with distribution of code, of versions, of all that other stuff about how you handle software life cycle, with Kubernetes, it's going to be that much more cloud like in the future. And I think as we go forward it would be interesting to imagine a security model that is built on top of Kubernetes that allows you to literally take elements of containers and vary those containers in just like every 36 hours so no part of your code base is older than 36 hours. Think about how much more secure that would be than what we have today. >> I'm a big fan of Kubernetes. I think it's a great bet. I don't think it's a knife edge. I think it's pretty obvious and it's either go one way or the other. The cloud guys are either going to fork it and slow it down >> They'll fork it and slow it down but it's still going to go. >> That's job number one. Job's not done so Kubernetes doesn't run. >> Let's put it this way, John, that in 10 years 80% of software is not going to be based in Kubernetes. >> John: Guys switch topics here. >> Dave: I think that's a safe bet. >> Yeah. >> Let's switch topics. I want to get analysis on VMware as a software company. Pat mentioned Nicira, which was SDN which became software-defined data center. Obviously big moves with 5G which I think is more of a telegraph of the future. Service provider narrative. Kind of sounds like going after Cisco to me. So Cisco's value proposition, again to your point about directionally correct, VMware makes these statements. Their most product direction with a demo, they show a little directions, some clarity and then they got to fill in the blanks. That's been their move. Cisco's up and running, they have a network of devices. They have UCS, ACI. Is there a collision course with VMware and Cisco? >> Pat said on theCUBE, we've got a multi billion dollar networking business. He said in the past that Cisco's a great hardware company. We want to do to networking and storage what we did to compute. I think it's no question. And then the data from ETR, the Enterprise Technology Research guys, the guys that do the panel, show that very clearly NSX is slowly negatively impacting Cisco hardware sales. So, yes, there's absolutely no question in my mind. Having said that, when you talk to customers, and I've talked to several this week and I've asked them that question. How is NSX affecting your Cisco spend. These are Cisco customers, and they say, oh we're sticking with Cisco. We're going with ACI. because that's the majority of Cisco customers to your point David, aren't going to just migrate off and throw away their Cisco gear. It's not going to happen. >> It's the same thing. They've invested a huge amount of money in doing that. It works and as long as Cisco ... >> Who's they, Cisco? >> No the customers have invested that huge amount of money in all of that infrastructure all of that way it works and they will, as long as Cisco continues to invest and continues to invest in software as well for that platform. >> If you're advising the CEO of Cisco what would your advice be to him? Get your thinking cap on, you're coming next. Hold on I want David to go. >> He's dying to jump in. >> The core that Cisco has to manage is finding solutions to multicloud and hybrid cloud issues. There has to be an end to end. They have to provide more of the data planes, more of the control planes, and more software to enable this connectivity across these different clouds. >> Can Cisco move up the stack as fast as VMware because one's a software company one is a hardware company but it's software now. >> That is the challenge that Cisco has is putting in place the people the resources and the techniques to actually drive that. >> Your thoughts, your advising the CEO. >> So before I advise the CEO I'm going to make one quick observation about the collision course. I was trying to think about this Dave. I can't think of, just off the top of my head, I can't think of a single hardware company that was driven out of business by VMware when they virtualized systems. Maybe there were some, maybe there were some that would say, oh I'm gone because of VMware. I think it made it more productive, it probably took some of the capacity out. But at the end of the day the stuff doesn't run on hamsters right. It's an interesting question. >> Sun? >> I don't think it was VMware. >> Not directly but it certainly gave a lot of tail wind to X86 [John] Linux and Intel killed Sun. >> Right, gave a big tail wind to X86. That was a different set of trends, right. It was related, your right. >> Dave: Definitely related. >> But the point it, I'm not sure that NSX is going to drive networking companies or network hardware companies out of business. >> No I didn't say they'd drive them out of business but would you not agree that VMware made the server business a lot less interesting? >> It changed the value, it changed the degree to which the hardware itself was regarded as the asset around which the IT Organization had to create it's value proposition, it's organization it's worth closing center. VMware became much more strategic than ... >> No question about it. >> Than HP, Lenovo. And Dell servers. >> We should talk about this more. >> Right now you're advising the CEO. >> So here's my advice to the CEO of Cisco. Your networking guys are killing innovation in your company. Right now the networking guys have an absolute stranglehold on how Cisco behaves, where Cisco does. We've all encountered these really great ideas bubbling up out of Cisco and they emerge and they're there for about six weeks or eight weeks or six months and then they suddenly disappear and you go and you do the forensics on the crime that was committed and it turns out that the networking hardware guys ended up rising up and affectively launching the antibodies on every new innovation virus. >> You mean internally in Cisco? >> Dave: That's a really interesting point. >> They have a Clayton Christensen innovators dilemma problem that they got to fix. >> And Chuck Robbins I think understands this and this is why he's putting so much emphasis on DevNet. Because he see's that the DevNet opportunity to create infrastructure that's programmable is a way potentially out of that innovation lock. >> If I was advising the CEO of Cisco I would kind of take the same cultural thing. I think you're right on the money on the culture. Gelsinger has a team, you point that out that's really good insight. My advice is simple. Double down on DevNet. Turn the networking guys, by the way, who have the keys to the kingdom in every single enterprise so they're running and operating enterprise networks and data centers. The network guys are the most powerful people in the companies in IT. Turn them into active coders. That's what DevNet is doing. That is totally the right move. Change the culture within your customer base, If that's not going to work internally then you know. >> But the whole of the cloud thing has brought together storage, networking and compute as a single object, a single distributed object. And one of the things that VMware has done with NSX is reflect what AWS and ITO were doing beforehand which is lowering the cost of storage very, very significantly, and putting the functionality into software as opposed to hardware. >> If I was Cisco, I would be looking hard at doing something big with Google. Because Amazon is VMware's preferred partner. I would figure out a way to get belly up to Google and figure out something bigger. It's not going to happen with Microsoft. They don't really need Cisco. Google needs someone like Cisco. >> I'm sorry from a customer engagement standpoint? >> From a customer engagement standpoint and to help Cisco's cloud relevance. Cause right now even in the multicloud world, no one even knows. What you just said David, that's exactly what Cisco's doing and nobody even knows about it. >> That's right. >> Well they could be the backbone of the Cloud 2.0. Go back in history, coaxial cables had many computers attached to them. Then you had Cat 5, Cat 3 wiring, you had hubs. Then you had subnetworks, you had internetworking. Campus building. That became the network. Cisco is the same kind of option for cloud to be the on ramp. That's what VMware wants to do. Dell wants to be the on ramp, VMware wants to be on ramp. Cisco's running the networks ... >> And another piece for Cisco, and you've said this before Peter, is security. You talk about VMware being the cloud security company, if I were Cisco those would be fighting words. Cisco is in a strong position from it networking base to be a leader in security. >> And I think you got a good point Dave. The thing I'd say John, and you guys have all heard me say this, but I'll say it again. What killed mini computers was not just the microprocessor. It was that DEC had DECnet and DG had digital whatever it was. And along came Ethernet and along came IP and along came Cisco and it flattened all those networks. Networks want to be flat. And AWS, if you start to talk about Kubernetes, all these little proprietary tweaks to Kubernetes which fundamentally is how you think about doing a programmable network, physics and everything else, technology is going to want to flatten that stuff as much as possible. And Cisco should be participating in that and they're not because their networking guys are saying, no, no, no, nobody gets into our sales organization except us networking hardware guys. And that's a problem. >> They got to go back. When VMware went back to their roots that made them stronger. Cisco's got to go back to their networks thinking it differently, I agree with you. They could be the backbone for multicloud. That's their opportunity. >> But it's got to be a flat network to do that. They've got this entrenched North, South mentality even though they see the trends. >> Okay, final summary guys, let's wrap this up. Let's go around the horn, start with Peter. Take-away's from 2019 VMworld, our 10th year theCUBE coverage. What's your thoughts? >> The machinations, two I'd say. The organizational machinations inside Dell Technologies have got a long ways to go. There's a lot more coming as Michael figures out he wants to institutionalize all this thing. But he's got two great executives. Pat Gelsinger has turned into a pretty darn good CEO. So I'd say that VMware is seeing the market good, they've got a great team, they're executing really well. They're at least putting bets where they need to but here's, I think the biggest weakness, and this came up in one of the session in the analyst thing, we all know how VMware expects things to come to VMware and how VMware is going to be effectively the manager of record, the cloud of record for all clouds. Okay good. But it's not going to be. The reality is VMware is going to emerge as an extremely important on premise and cloud technology if that's what you want to do, that allows companies to have those options about where they put stuff. But how is VMware going to express itself to other clouds? From a management standpoint, from a control plane standpoint, from a data standpoint. That's not clear, and big enterprises are going to start pushing them pretty soon to say, okay great, but we're not just going to do you. How are you going to be managed by the stuff that we want? How are you going to be a resource where we want our management points to be. >> John: Dictate terms. >> Right. >> The customers going to dictate terms. That's a great point. David Floyer you're up. >> All right, so the biggest challenge for VMware is that is making themselves successful in the public cloud. AWS owns that business. They are very, very cost effective. They are driving very, very hard, and the clash is going to be when AWS goes into the distributed side and comes into full contact with Dell and VMware in that space. So the race is on between the efficiency that they can create for this network and the efficiency that AWS can create by getting better and better at distributed computing. They will go into multicloud, they will go into. >> John: Dave your thoughts. >> I've talked a lot this week about multicloud and what I think is real and what's BS. I've talked about VMware's acquisitions. I want to change it up a little bit. When you come to these events, the big picture of how we're changing the world and we're changing society, tech for good, all that stuff, I just want to make a point for historical context. I think it's indisputable that the first 50 years of last century from the early 1900s to 1950s were far more remarkable than the last 50 years of IT. And I think sometimes we sit out here in Silicon Valley and smoke our own, you know, whatever, >> It's legal here actually. >> And how we're changing the world. And I'm not saying we're not changing the world but Pat Gelsinger said there's never been a more important time to be a technologist. Well he may be right, and I'm not saying this to disparage the statement but I'm just, again trying to provide some historical context. You're up against telephones, planes, automobiles, the electrical grid itself. So I leave you with this question, what's more impactful from a society standpoint, and from an economics standpoint, the move from automobiles to autonomous vehicles or the move from horses to cars? And I think that as an industry we have a long way to go in terms of being the most important time to be a technologist. >> I think I agree with Gelsinger. It's the most important time to be a technologist now cause more than change is required. I think if you look at the data, I think this shows all about Cloud 2.0. I think some of the things that Peter, Dave you pointed out points right to it. Customers are dictating terms and the infrastructure's evolving and the enablement of what that system looks like is going to spin in favor of the customer. And they're going to start making those changes because to change society, it's not going to come from the vendors. That's just philanthropy. It's going to come from people building applications. I think the Cloud 2.0 equation has to fill out. >> I think you're right. If in fact this is going to be the most important time for technologists, it absolutely has to come from the buyers of technology and the people applying technology not the vendor community. No doubt. >> It's a great question though Dave. Great question. >> We're going to take that question to our power panels in the studio, Palo Alto and Boston. Of course theCUBE studios. Check it out. We are here wrapping up VMworld 2019. Want to do a shout out to VMware for allowing us to be part of their ecosystem for 10 years. It's been a great run from 2010 when we had cameras that we turned and we thought they'd work, they did. The system got better every year and that's to the generous support of our ecosystem partners who sponsored theCUBE so we can create content editorially and co-create with the sponsors for the betterment of the audiences. And thanks to that we get better equipment every year. And shout out to the great team we have here. Amazing execution. Two full sets. And thanks to my co-hosts and the teams. Stu's not here, he's on the other set. Jeff Frick who's running it all. What a great team. I want to thank VMware and the entire community for 10 years. That's a sign off for theCUBE. 10 at Vmworld 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

[Music] [Applause] I'll Buena Burris and welcome to another cube conversation from our fantastic studios in beautiful palo alto california today we're going to be talking about what infrastructure can do to accelerate AI and specifically we're gonna use a relationship a burgeoning relationship between PDN and nvidia to describe what we can do to accelerate AI workloads by using higher performance smarter and more focused of infrastructure for computing now to have this conversation we've got two great guests here we've got Kurt ku kind who is the senior director of marketing at ddn and also Darren Johnson is a global director of technical marketing for enterprise and NVIDIA Kurt Gerron welcome to the cube thanks for thank you very much so let's get going on this because this is a very very important topic and I think it all starts with this notion of that there is a relationship that you guys have put forward Kurt once you describe it sure well so what we're announcing today is ddn's a3i architecture powered by Nvidia so it is a full rack level solution a reference architecture that's been fully integrated and fully tested to deliver an AI infrastructure very simply very completely so if we think about how this is gonna or why this is important AI workloads clearly have a special stress on underlying technology Darin talk to us a little bit about the nature of these workloads and why in particular things like GPUs and other technologies are so important to make them go fast absolutely and as you probably know AI is all about the data whether you're doing medical imaging whether you're doing natural language processing whatever it is it's all driven by the data the more data that you have the better results that you get but to drive that data into the GPUs you need great IO and that's why we're here today to talk about ddn and the partnership of how to bring that I owe to the GPUs on our dgx platforms so if we think about what you described a lot of small files off and randomly just riveted with nonetheless very high-profile jobs that just can't stop midstream and start over absolutely and if you think about the history of high-performance computing which is very similar to a I really I owe is just that lots of files you have to get it they're low latency high throughput and that's why ddn's probably nearly twenty years of experience working in that exact same domain is perfect because you get the parallel file system which gives you that throughput gives you that low latency just helps drive the GPU so we you'd mention HPC from 20 years of experience now it used to be that HPC you'd have scientists with a bunch of graduate students setting up some of these big honkin machines but now we're moving into the commercial domain you don't have graduate students running around you don't have very low cost high quality people you're you know a lot of administrators who nonetheless good people but a lot to learn so how does this relationship actually start making or bringing AI within reach of the commercial world exactly where this reference architecture comes in right so a customer doesn't need to start from scratch they have a design now that allows them to quickly implement AI it's something that's really easily deployable we've fully integrated this solution ddn has made changes to our parallel file system appliance to integrate directly within the DG x1 environment makes that even easier to deploy from there and extract the maximum performance out of this without having to run around and tune a bunch of knobs change a bunch of settings it's really gonna work out of the box and the you know nvidia has done more than just the DG x1 it's more than hardware you've done a lot of optimization of different of AI toolkits if Sarah I'm talking what about that Darin yeah so I mean talking about the example I use researchers in the past with HPC what we have today are data scientists data scientists understand pie tours they understand tensorflow they understand the frameworks they don't want to understand the underlying filesystem networking RDMA InfiniBand any of that they just want to be able to come in run their tensorflow get the data get the results and just turn that keep turning that whether it's a single GPU or 90 Jex's or as many dejection as you want so this solution helps bring that to customers much easier so those data scientists don't have to be system administrators so a reference architecture that makes things easier but that's more than just for some of these commercial things it's also the overall ecosystem new application providers application developers how is this going to impact the aggregate ecosystem it's growing up around the need to do AI related outcomes well I think one point that Darrin was getting to you there and one of the big effects is also as these ecosystems reach a point where they're going to need to scale right there's somewhere where ddn has tons of experience right so many customers are starting off with smaller data sets they still need the performance a parallel file system in that case is going to deliver that performance but then also as they grow right going from one GPU to 90 G X's is going to be an incredible amount of both performance scalability that they're going to need from their i/o as well as probably capacity scalability and that's another thing that we've made easy with a3i is being able to scale that environment seamlessly within a single namespace so that people don't have to deal with a lot of again tuning and turning of knobs to make this stuff work really well and drive those outcomes that they need as they're successful right so in the end it is the application that's most important to both of us right it's it's not the infrastructure it's making the discoveries faster it's processing information out in the field faster it's doing analysis of the MRI faster it's you know helping the doctors helping the anybody who's using this to really make faster decisions better decisions exactly and just to add to that I mean in automotive industry you have datasets that are from 50 to 500 petabytes and you need access to all that data all the time because you're constantly training and Retraining to create better models to create better autonomous vehicles and you need you need the performance to do that ddn helps bring that to bear and with this reference architecture simplifies it so you get the value add of nvidia gpus plus its ecosystem of software plus DD on its match made in heaven Darren Johnson Nvidia Curt Koo Kien ddn thanks very much for being on the cube thank you very much and I'm Peter burrs and once again I'd like to thank you for watching this cube conversation until next time [Music]

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to day three of Dell Technologies World, the inaugural Dell Technologies World. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our kickoff of day three, we got a little analyst roundtable, Keith Townsend is with me, Stu Miniman, Peter Burris, the co-host, tri-hosts, quad-hosts of this show, long-time Dell EMC watchers and guys, let's unpack what's going on here. We're a couple years in now, the merger between Dell and EMC. I've said all along this was inevitable because of the pressures of cloud. It's very clear that Michael Dell is taking control of this company, it's the Dell brand, Dell Technologies, Dell Technologies World, EMC is sort of fading into the past, we'll talk about that Stu, we'll talk about the culture and the implications there, but I want to start with you Keith, let's talk about the customer perspective. What are you hearing from customers? What are the challenges that they're facing? Some of the concerns they may have with Dell and some of the positives? >> So one of the challenges, customers were worried that Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, would just be another HPE too big to solve their challenges, just how do you find solutions in the company with such a large portfolio? In reality, customers are pleasantly surprised that Dell Technologies has been able to surface up solutions, and not just focus on solutions, and also partner with their existing ecosystem of vendors, which is a surprise. One of the things I challenged Michael on as a customer, was hey you know what, this deal with Nutanix, this deal with XE, what are you leaning with from a hyperconverged solution perspective? Dell has been able to walk that line extremely well, We had a Datrium customer on day one, couldn't be happier with the relationship, then we talked to a couple of folks from the product team, 62% of the client meetings this week has been about VxRail, VxRack. Talked to another Fortune 500 customer that's all in on VxRail VxRack, not just for standard workloads, for SAP HANA which is not even certified for VxRail VxRack, so customers really happy with the overall ability of Dell to bring solutions to the table. I've seen, though we still have some time to tell if they'll be able to keep that momentum as they grow, as they continue to partner, and if they can continue to find solutions to challenges. >> Keith, if I can actually just follow up on one thing there, it's very clear that Dell will streamline the portfolio. Had Michael Dell, Jeff Clark, people from the marketing organization said absolutely, and we're telegraphing to customers as soon as we've sorted everything out we're gonna communicate it. Is there any concern from the customers? Michael said, we won't leave any customer behind, but absolutely the past of what EMC had with so many storage products they couldn't figure it out, there will be a lot less of them by the time we get to next year. >> So I think one of the things that you hit on when you talk about culture, I think customers still are very happy with the EMC brand, I think Dell did a really great job of not just getting rid of the EMC brand, customers still very much trust EMC. EMC had an extremely capable support organization, there's question about whether that support, that white glove support that we've gotten in the past from EMC will exist going forward. You know, Dell got rid of EMC cold, they brought Scale IO to a hardware-only solution versus the open ecosystem, so there's questions around where the cost-cutting will impact customer operations and support, but overall customers are happy with the progression. >> Peter Burris, one of the questions that Stu asked both Michael Dell and Clark yesterday is look you've got some of your bigger hardware competitors like IBM, like HP and HPE running away from head-to-head and I think Jeff Clark said "well I don't know how you can do end-to-end without both heads." So from your standpoint, from a customer perspective, is there an advantage to that head-to-head? We certainly heard it over the years, we used to hear it from HP a lot, we used to hear it from IBM a lot, they've retreated from that, Dell's sort of banging that end-to-end drum, does it matter from a customer perspective? >> Well of course, but it matters not just for what the customer wants but also the applications required. So, look, the biggest challenge, the most obvious, best end-to-end solution, if you take a very narrow view, it's gonna be AWS, Azure, some of these others. But the question is, is all of your data going to be in that public cloud? So the fundamental engineering challenge that every enterprise is gonna have is where am I gonna put my data? Some of the data is naturally gonna go to the public cloud, some of the data is not. What Dell needs to do over the course of the next couple of years is pick up on that as aggressively as they possibly can, try to not just convince people, but to show them that their organization of their digital business increasingly is going to be defined in terms of where their data assets are located, the practical realities of what that means, and therefore what types of fundamental support are they going to have to bring to bear on it? Keith, you said something interesting about HPE. The reason why Dell was not HPE, a little bit less so on IBM, is that Dell, Dell EMC have over the past 10, 15 years have made good bets, HP did not make good bets. You want to understand the history of HP over the last 10 years and why they're not the same, it's because HP gyrated all over the place to try to buy companies that were kind of at that moment a good price, let's just go for scale as best as we can, and Dell hasn't done that. Well Michael and his team have stayed relatively close to a simple vision of what types of engagement model they want, they've delivered on that vision, and they've got the assets that they can put into play now, but they just have to convince the enterprise that the play is where do you put your data, because you're gonna put your processing close to your data, and you're not gonna put it all in one place, right customer? And that's not going to be an easy, that's going to be a very challenging set of conversations over the next few years. We think how it's gonna play out is that Dell EMC is gonna be just fine because the enterprises are not gonna want to give all of their data up, and they can't give all their data up, so we'll see what happens. >> Well Stu let's talk about that, I mean Dell's cloud strategy is pretty clear, they want to be an arms dealer to the cloud. HPE, that's really their only choice, obviously IBM owns a cloud so it's a little different there, Oracle owns its own cloud, and they have software, that's a whole different ballgame. Dell clearly is comfortable being a high-volume, lower margin supplier, throwing off cashflow, throwing off profits. What's your take on the lack of a public cloud and are there issues there? >> Yeah, well you know Peter talked a little bit end-to-end and you see what Azure and AWS are doing. One of the surprising things for me is to see pieces of the public cloud and how the Dell Technologies portfolio are fitting into it. So being we're a native US, we absolutely understood. There's actually an isilon with Google cloud, a solution that I had an interesting discussion with Manuvir Das on day one here, really explained that you know scale out architecture, really get into the cloud. IBM cloud, there's a booth for them, they're here on the expo floor, so we've seen that maturation as hybrid cloud is not that transferring state that people thought but as that pits out we know data and applications are going to live lots of places and a company like Dell needs to be able to live in many of those environments. Edge of course, IOT, a hot issue that they're talking about, but they have portfolio products that will live in many of those places, so good maturation, public cloud is not enemy number one but of course they are a little bit more toward the private cloud, they highlight a bunch that if you go all in your prices are gonna be bad, we're gonna pull it back, Keith mentioned the EMC code team kind of got killed. A bunch of them are actually over at VMware now with an enhanced team, so it's still, we're not at the steady state of where the shift from my data center to public cloud is but it is definitely matured and nuanced and Dell has a lot of good partnerships that are growing. >> Well and selling servers to tier one cloud guys is not a great business, HP exited the business, Dell's in the business but it can't be a high market, it's not a great business I mean we know that. But, you know, nonetheless there's a lot of non-tier one clouds up there. You had a point to make, Pete? >> Yeah really quickly, the thing I was gonna say is, and we've talked about this in the past, and if we think about two things about Dell's portfolio, first off if we look back at what happened with the minicomputer business, and everybody says "oh the microprocessor killed it" well that probably contributed, but what really killed the minicomputer business was TCPIP and CISCO, that's what killed the minicomputer business because before a Dell or a Deck executive or a DG executive would walk into a shop with stuff all over the shop floor and the customer would say "I want to integrate this, you know, bridge it" and CISCO said, flatten the whole thing, bring TCPIP, and all those minicomputer companies went away. There is a gem in this portfolio which is NSX, and the degree to which Vmware, NSX can in fact become that technology for flattening the cloud network, cause that, to me, that's what the next big play in this industry is gonna be. AWS is gonna have its approach, Azure is gonna have its approach, you're gonna have bunch of on-premise stuff, the question is are you gonna be able to flatten those networks and really achieve that end-to-end? And if there's one good option on the table right now in the industry, it's VMware NSX for doing that. The second thing that I would say is, and I had a couple conversations with some folks about this this morning, we're talking about end-to-end, we're talking about greater conversions, hyperconversions, etc, yet Dell is still organized by server, storage, network, and it's going to be interesting to see how that evolves over the course of the next few years as customers increasingly do want a leverage that's end-to-end, diminish the distinctions and take advantage of convergence and whether or not we see Dell have a series of inter-nexian warfares about where that ends up. Because we know Dell does not wanna be RCA, right? >> Well that's really interesting because some of near-term moves that they've made are basically to take some of that converged stuff and put it in- >> That's right. So I love that now the TCPIP and NSX completely agree with you, the one thing that Dell is definitely missing from a customer perspective is the control plane glue they want to lead with the VMware story, you know any workload any cloud, I'm not gonna take my VMware approach to Google, I'm not gonna take that to Azure. So this any workload, any cloud thing, I'm not buying. I don't think customers are buying that. HPE is leading I think with a pretty good message on offering cloud services. It's a really, really difficult problem. >> The Oncenter story, you're talking about. >> The Onecenter story. It's a very difficult problem, enterprise customers want a single solution to consume all files, they want that TCPIP set of protocols, standards- >> They want the cloud to be flat. >> They want the cloud to be flat. NSX flattens it from a networking perspective but from a controlled plane API perspective the industry is a long way before that and I don't think Dell even has any plans for it. >> So, Stu, you know well when people were talking about you know, Michael's gonna sell VMware, you were very vocal about it, "no he's not, only an idiot would think that, I mean there's no way that's gonna happen." I mean, what a gem, in the portfolio, talk about end-to-end. The other thing I wanted to bring up is if you look at Dell's business, about half is the client business, it's doing better than expected so it's throwing off more cash than expected, especially with the storage business being soft, Dell's been pretty transparent about that, well I guess it has to be, but nonetheless there's upside there, but VMware is about 10% of the revenues, it throws off half of the operating cash, so why would you get rid of that, right? It's such a strategic asset 500,000 customers, a key part of the end-to-end, and it just makes this such a more interesting business. >> Yeah I mean Dave, I know you love teasing apart this complex, the tracking stock, all the things there, one of the interesting nuggets out of the Michael Dell interview was oh he said "the tax changes really had no impact, you know that's not it." You know, people really misunderstand, they understand these finances, it's not that they're hurting for cash, they can't make cash positions. >> So with my senses it's probably a slight negative but with the tax legislation, you're right, it's basically a net neutral for these guys. It's way overblown. >> Yeah, but you know, what's changed, we knew, when Dell went private, there were a bunch of changes in-company, I knew a lot of people that left the company for different things. The EMC acquisition, it's been a lot of change in the last 18 to 24 months, it'll still be rolling out there, you know, I live right in the heart of the old EMC country and there's some changes there, who's running it, you see a lot of former Dell executives, legacy Dell executives, there's still some strong people from the EMC side but Jeff Clark, very strong engineering culture, actually the more I've gotten to know him the more he reminds me of what EMC was 10 or 15 years ago in a good way, sharp, technical, getting on it. So I think the EMC brand, by the time we come here next year will be gone, but it doesn't mean the EMC people or products like the powermac are gonna be going anywhere. >> Well let me push at that a little bit, cause one of the things that Jeff Clark is doing is he's simplifying the portfolio, and Joe did the opposite, he complexified the portfolio because he said overlaps are better than gaps. And Jeff Clark's taking a different approach, is there a concern for customers? Wow, I might be left behind. They've got to be a little bit careful with that message, don't they? >> Yeah, but I mean we've touched on it a little bit, Dave, there's still some of the core product, you know powermac comes out there, this is the legacy of b macs, still supports the mainframe, you know, there's a business for this, and they're not gonna leave their customers behind. But what we said, Dave, when they put this portfolio together they need to turn the crank a little bit to get the operating margins where they need to be, not be overlapping so much with marketing and some of these other places. So, they're going to be very smart in how they do this, they say they're going to overcommunicate to not only their customers but their partner. I've talked to a bunch of (inaudible) partners, pretty happy. You know, there were a little bit of bumps over the last 18 to 24 months as to "oh wait I had this account rep and now they brought in this overlay and then they flopped who owned it." So it's been interesting to watch some of those and- >> Well look. >> It's a people business, and some of that changed- >> At the end of the day, Dell's portfolio can all be placed in service to the customer with relevance and competency today. That's a much better problem to have than a company that has either been building a bunch of stuff that's not gonna matter or has bought a bunch of stuff that's not gonna matter. It means if they can sustain a degree of focus that allows them to pay down their debt and do the financial engineering and Tom Sweet's a stud, the CFO's a stud, it means that they can listen to customers and continue to service what the customer needs because their portfolio is easily applied to customer problems unlike a lot of other companies. That's a pretty decent position. They can pursue all of these things because the portfolio is relevant. Now, are there gonna be some challenges? Well, one of the reasons why EMC complexified the portfolio was because they had salespeople who were deeply engaged in their accounts and they used that as an advantage, and so the salespeople said "I need something" and so Dell EMC, like CISCO did for years, went off, or EMC, went off and found it. Dell still has a different channel organization and a different channel approach, much more partnership-oriented, if there's tension in the model, I don't know what you think about this, Keith If there's tension in the model it's we're going through a major transformation in the industry right now. How close do you have to be to the customer, is this going to be a partner-led transformation or are you gonna want your people handling the transformation? EMC's approach was your people led the complex portfolio. Dell's approach, simplify the portfolio, are you making the relationships more complex as a result? >> That's a great point, we touched on this with Marius, because essentially, in Marius' organization you have an overlay EMC salesforce which is used to belly-to-belly, and he said "look we're working it out" and it requires great leadership. >> It's gotta be somewhere, is it gonna be in the portfolio or the engagement model? >> And from the engagement model, just look at the Dell Technologies family themselves. When I was a EMC VMware customer, I didn't have combined meetings with EMC and VMware, two belly-to-belly relationships. When that Dell EMC merger took place, Dell came in and flexed the muscle, you know desktops, laptops, end-to-end vision, VMware became, you know, you could sense the tension in the room. I just talked to another big Dell EMC VMware customer and they'll say you know what at VMworld, Dell Technologies World, the messaging here has been incredible. You get in the real world, you talk to your Dell Technologies or Dell EMC rep, one set of products, you talk to the VMware rep, a completely different set of products. >> And then you talk to partners, and what are they saying? So where's the complexity gonna be? EMC said the complexity's gonna be in the portfolio, the engagement model is gonna be simple. Dell's saying the portfolio is gonna be more simple, but what's gonna happen to the engagement model? Because customers, this transformation stuff we're talking about is hard. >> Let's break down, we've got a couple minutes left, let's break down the competitive landscape, the horses in the track as we like to say. We obviously got AWS, you know the megatrend factor sucking up a lot of demand. Everybody says that people are coming back on prem, more people are going to the cloud. 49% growth. So that's clear, but you got traditional server competitors which really is I guess HPE and Lenovo, right? We're gonna focus on the enterprise stuff because that's kind of our wheelhouse. You've got the storage guys, you know that app seems to be back, Pure is continuing to do its thing, small in the grand scheme of 80 billion dollars. >> Their best friend will be Nutanix. >> Right, yeah right, and you got that funky relationship, you got an interesting CISCO relationship going on, so how do you describe the competitive landscape? Start with you, Stu. >> Yeah, it's a little bit complicated. Listen to what Peter was saying there, EMC was pretty cut and dry, you know. Storage, that's where we're gonna live, and everything else, we're gonna partner, even all the server companies that need to sell storage, they have great partnerships with IBM and HP and everything like that with the first one you had to partner with EMC because they were dominant in that space. Dell at the core of it, server company still so it was interesting, one of the interviews I did, it was, you know, VxRail, if you're not in hyperconverted space, if you don't own the server, you're not in the right thing. And I'm like, we got Datrium and Nutanix and all these other partners that are here in the ecosystem that are living on top of the Dell platform, so there's a little bit of that give and take, it's more coopatition than I used to see, you used to go to Dell World, they'd have that rack of OEMs with all those different vessels out there, so you know, where does Dell want to go? How do they maximize, you know, the investment that they made in the biggest merger in tech history? So it's still playing out, I hear relatively good things from the partners, and the customers at least aren't getting stuck in the middle. You know, with CISCO sometimes it was really a punch in the face and if we're not 100% on board we're not gonna let you have it and then the channel would just sort it out themselves. >> I mean AWS and the cloud, it is what it is. The VMware partnership, you know good move, gives them some near-term maybe even mid-term runway, we'll see what happens long-term. In the server business it's HBE, right? Is the main competitor. What do you guys think? >> We got IBM. >> Yeah, IBM for sure, yeah. >> The powermacs that just got announced, when that comes out the second half of this year, that goes right after CISCO UCS. Not a lot of talk about CISCO, the VxBlock business is a three to four billion dollar business between the Dell family and the CISCO family and this is gonna put them at loggerheads really soon. >> Yeah I talked to customers, they love the Dell EMC certainly, powermacs has been one of the top conversations, they can't wait to connect their powermacs to their HPE blades, that's gonna be awesome. Which is good. The other piece of that is the NetApp story. NetApp did a great job of talking about data fabric and being a data copy, I don't know if they're there yet, did a great job talking about it. Dell EMC- >> Good investments, they hired great people, so they're on that path. >> Two men in my peer community, a man and woman said NetApp's cloud story is legit, they're good. >> They're a software company. >> They're a software company. Dell EMC's cloud story, specifically around storage, you know, the isilon announcement was a partnership but you know I think customers are really looking at that again, that API is about the data and how do I move my data on-prem, off-prem, I don't know if Dell EMC has their story yet and they have the product portfolio to back it. >> So, here's what I'd say Dave. At the end of the day, there's a whole bunch of transformations and I'll try to be as succinct as I can. First off, data has to be acknowledged as an asset. Number one. That's a transition in itself. Number two. Investment in technology has to be regarded as an investment in improving the value of that data asset which means that ultimately the money in this industry is gonna follow the value of the data, that's the simplest most straightforward way of thinking about this. So, when we think about, for example, the server business, we're saying "you're not gonna put all your data up in a public cloud because the data's not gonna allow you to do that." Well, what's the difference between saying you're not going to put all your data in a public cloud and saying oh you're going to move all of your data to some server somewhere? There's, yeah it's a little bit more approximate, but it's still not, you're gonna move your data closer to more intelligent storage, more intelligent networks, and they'll go find the compute that they need. And that's not how Dell is set up today. That's just not how they're set up today. So if we think about five to ten years, we're talking about a whole bunch of processing power being moved closer and closer and closer to the data in the form of, you know, routines that are being run right there at the storage machine. We're talking about much more programmable control planes, data-driven data-first control planes, that are being in the network and defined by what the network can do, and the compute is increasingly gonna be regarded as important, not unimportant, but it's gonna be an increasingly distributed world where you can't have your cake and eat it too, you can't say don't go up to the public cloud but go up to our big honking server. There's something that doesn't quite watch there. >> Well, great analysis Peter, and to your point organizational structures really matter and I think today Dell's organization is really optimized for the continued integration, streamlining that piece, getting that right, making sure the processes are there, and then we'll see how it goes over time. Alright, thanks you guys. That was awesome. Good kickoff for day three. Okay, this is day three, you're watching theCUBE, keep it right there we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, DC, it's theCube, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its partner ecosystem. >> Welcome inside the convention center here in Washington, DC. You're looking at many of the attendees of the AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. We're coming to you live from our nation's capital. Several thousand people on hand here for this three-day event, we're here for two days. John Walls, along with John Furrier. John, good to see you again, sir. >> Sir, thank you. >> We're joined by Jay Littlepage, who is the VP of Infrastructure and Operations at Digital Globe, and Jay, thank you for being with us at theCube. >> My pleasure. >> John W: Good to have you. First off, your company, high-resolution, earth imagery satellite stuff. Out-of-this world business. >> Yep. >> Right, tell our viewers a little bit about what you do, I mean, the magnitude of, obviously, the environmental implications of that or defense, safety security, all those realms. >> Okay, well, stop me when I've said too much because I get pretty excited about this. We work for a very cool company. We've been taking earth imagery since 1999, when our first satellite went up in the sky. And, as we've increased our capabilities with our constellation, our latest satellite went up last November. We're flying, basically, a giant camera that we can fly like a drone. So, and when I say giant camera, it's about the size of a school bus, and the lens is about the size of the front of the school bus, and we can take imagery from 700 miles up in space and resolve a pixel about the size of a laptop. So, that gives us an incredible amount of capability, and the flying like a drone, besides just being really cool and geeky, we can sling the lens from basically Kansas City to here in Washington in 15 seconds and take a shot. And so, when world events happen, when an earthquake happens, you know, they're generally not scheduled events, we don't have to have the satellite right above the point where there's something going on on the ground, we can take a shot from an angle of 1,000 miles away, and with compute power and good algorithms, we can basically resolve the picture of the earth, and it looks like we're right overhead, and we're getting imagery out immediately to first responders, to governmental agencies so they can respond very quickly to a disaster happening to save lives. >> So, obviously, the ramifications are endless, almost, right? >> Yes. >> All that data, I mean, you can't even imagine the amount, talk about storage. So, that's certainly a complexity, and then, they are making it useful too all these different sectors. Without getting too simple, how do you manage that? >> Well, you know, it's a big trade-off because, ideally, if storage was free, all of our imagery in its highest consumable form would be available all the time to everybody. Each high-resolution image might be 35 gig by itself. So, you think of that long of flying a constellation, we've got 100 petabytes of imagery. That's too much, it's too expensive to have online all of the time. And so, we have to balance what's going to be relevant and useful to people versus cost. You know, a lot of the imagery goes through cycle where it's interesting until it's not, and it starts to age off. The thing about the planet, though, is we never know what's going to happen, and when something that aged off is going to be relevant again. And so, the balance for my team is really making sure we're hitting the sweet spot on there. The imagery that is relevant is readily accessible, and the imagery that's not is, in its cheapest form, fact or possible, which for us, is compressed, and it's in some sort of archival storage, which for us, now that we've used the Snowmobile, is Glacier. >> Jay, I want to ask to give your thoughts. I want you to talk about DigitalGlobe, before that, some context. This weekend, I was hanging out with my friends in Santa Cruz and kids were surfing. He's a big drone guy, he used to work for GoPro, and she used to buy the drones and, hey, how's it going with the drones. It got kind of boring, here's a great photo I created, but after a while, it just became like Google Earth, and it got boring. Kind of pointed out that he wanted more, and we got virtual reality, augmented reality, experience is coming to users. That puts imagery, place imagery, the globe, pictures, places and things is what you guys do. So, that's not going away any time soon. So, talk about your business, what you guys do, some of the things that you do, your business model, how that's changing, and how Amazon, here in the public sector, is changing that. >> Well, that's a fantastic questions, and our business is changing pretty rapidly. We have all that imagery, and it's beautiful imagery, but increasingly, there's so much of it, and so many of the use cases aren't about human eyeballs staring at pixels. They're about algorithms extracting information from the pixels. And, increasingly, from either the breadth of pixels, instead of just looking at a small area, you can look around it and see what's happening around it and use that as signal information, or you can go deep into an archive and see the same location on the planet over and over over years and see the changes that had happened in terms of time frame. So, increasingly, our market is about extracting information and extracting insights from the imagery more so than it is the imagery itself. And so that's driving an analytics business for us, and it's also driving a services business for us, which is particularly important in the public sector to actually use that for different purposes. >> You can imagine the creativity involved and developers out there watching or even thinking about using satellite imagery in conflux with other data. Remember, they're in the Web 2.0 craze earlier in the last decade. You saw mashups of API with Google Max. Oh yeah, pull a little pin, and then the mobile came. But now, you're seeing mashups go on with other data. And I've heard stats at Uber, for instance, remaps New York City every five days with all that GPS data of the cars, which are basically sensors. So, you can almost imagine the alchemy, the convergence of data. This is exciting for you, I can imagine. Won't you share with us, anecdotally or statistically what you're seeing, how this is playing out? >> Well, yes, some of our biggest commercial customers of our products now are location-based services. So, Uber's using our imagery because the size of the aperture of our lens means we have great resolution. And so, they've been consuming that and consuming our machine learning algorithms to basically understand where traffic is and where people are so that they can refine, on an ongoing basis, where the best pick-up and drop-off locations are. That really drives their business. Facebook's using the imagery to basically help build out the Internet. You know, they want to move into places on the planet where Internet doesn't exist. Well, in order to really understand that, they need to understand where to build, how to build, how many people are there, and you can actually extract all that from imagery by going in in detail and mapping roofs' shapes and roofs' sizes, and, from there, extracting pretty accurate estimates of how many people live in a particular area, and that's driving their project, which is ultimately going to drive access for... >> Intelligence in software, we look at imagery. I mean, we here at Amazon, recognition's their big product for facial recognition, among other pictures. But this is what's getting at, this notion of actually extracting that data. >> Well, you think about it. You know, once the data is available, once our imagery is available, then the sky's the limit. You know, we have a certain set of algorithms that we apply to help different industries, you know, to look at rooftops, to look at water extractions. After a hurricane, we can actually see how the coverage has changed. But, you look at a Facebook, and they're applying their own algorithms. We don't force our algorithms to be used. We provide the information, we try to provide the data. Companies can bring their own algorithms, and then, it's all about what can you learn, and then, what can you do about it, and it's amazing. >> So, here's the question. With the whole polyglot conversation, multiple languages that people speak that's translated into the tech industry, and interdisciplinary forces are in play: Data science, coding, cognitive, machine learning. So, the question is, for you, is that, okay, as this stuff comes together, do you speak DevOps? It's kind of a word, and we hear people say, is that in Russian or is that like English? DevOps is a cloud language mindset. And so, that brings up the question of, are you guys friendly to developers, and because people want to have microservices, I'm from a developer, I'm like, hey, I want those maps. How do I get them, can I buy it as a service, are they loaded on Amazon, how to I gauge with DataGlobe, as a developer or a company? >> Well, you think about what you just said and the customers I just talked about. They're not geospatial customers. You know, they're not staffed with people that are PhDs in extracting information. They're developers that are working for high-tech companies that have a problem that want to solve. >> There are already mobile apps or doing some cool database working in here. >> So, we're providing the raw imagery and the algorithms to very tried and true systems where people can plug into work benches and build artificial intelligence without necessarily being experts in that. And, as a case in point, my team is an IT team. You know, we've got a part of the organization that is all staffed with PhDs. They're the ones that are driving our global... >> John W: PhD is a service. (laughter) >> Well, kind of. I mean, if you think about it, they're driving the leading edge, for these solutions to our customers. But, I've got an IT team, and I've got this problem with all this data that we talked about earlier. Well, how am I actually going to manage that? I'm going to be pulling in all sorts of different sources of data, and I'm going to be applying machine learning using IT guys that aren't PhDs to actually do that, and I'm not going to send them to graduate school. They're going to be using standard APIs, and they're going to be applying fairly generic algorithms, and... >> So, is that your model, is it just API, is there other... >> I think the real key is the API makes it accessible, but a machine learning algorithm is only as good as its training. So, the more it's used, the more it refines itself, the better our algorithm gets. And so, that is going to be the type of thing that the IT developer, the infrastructure engineer of the future becomes, and I've already, basically, in the last couple of years, as we started this journey at AWS, 20% of my staff now, same size staff, but they're software developers now. >> So, I'll take this to the government side. We talked a lot about commercial use. But at the government side, I'm thinking about FEMA, disaster response, maybe a core of engineers, you know, bridge construction, road construction, coastline management. Are all those kind of applications that we see on the dot gov side? >> There are all things that you see that can be done on the dot gov side, but we're doing them all in the commercial environment. The USC's region for AWS, and I think that's actually a really important distinction, and it's something that I think more and more of the government agencies are starting to see. We do a lot of work for one particular government agency and have for years. But 99 point something percent of our imagery is commercial unclassified, and it's available for the purposes that our customers use it for, but they're also available for all those other customers I've talked about. And more and more of what we do, we are doing on the completely open but secure commercial environment because it's ubiquitous for our customers. Not all of our customers do that type of work. They don't need to comply with those rigid standards. It's generally where all AWS products that are released are released to, with the other environments lagging, and they probably don't want me saying that on TV, but I just did. And it's cheaper, you know, we're a commercial company that does public sector work. We have to make a profit, and the best way to do that is to put your environment in a place where if you're going to repeat an operation, like pulling an image of Glacier and build it into something that is consumable by either a human or an algorithm and put it back. If you're going to do something like that a million times, you want to do it really inexpensively. And so, that's where... (crosstalking) >> Lower prices, make things fast, that's Jeff Hayes' ethos, shipping products, that these books in the old days. Now, they're shipping code and making lower-latency systems. So, you guys are a big customer. What are the big implementation features that you have with AWS, and then, the second part of the question is, are you worried about locking. At some point, you're so big, the hours are going to be so massive, you're going to be paying so much cash, should you build your own, that's the big debate. Do you go private cloud, do you stay in the public? Thoughts on those two options? >> Well, we have both. Right now, we're running a 15-year-old system, which is where we create the imagery that comes off the satellites, and it goes into a tape archive. Last year, Reinvent... >> John F: Tape's supposed to be dead! >> Tape will die someday! It's going to die really soon, but, at the Reinvent Conference last year, AWS rolled out a semi truck. Well, the real semi truck was in our parking lot getting loaded with all those tapes, and it's sad... >> John F: Did you actually use the semi? >> We were the first customer ever, I believe, of the Snowmobile. And so, it takes a lot of time and effort to move 12,000 LTO 5 tapes loaded onto a semi and send it off. You know, that represents every image ever taken by DG in the history of our company, and it's now in AWS. So, to your second part of your question, we're pretty committed now. >> John F: Are you okay with that? >> Well, we're okay with that for a couple of reasons. One is, I'm not constraining the business. AWS is cheaper. It will be even cheaper for us as we learn how to pull all the levers and turn all the dials in this environment. But, you know, you think about that, we ran a particular job last year for a customer that consumes 750,000 compute hours in 22 days. We couldn't have done that in our data center. We would have said no. And so, I would... >> I know, I can't do, you can't do it. >> We can't do it! Or, we can do it, come back, the answer will be here in six months. So, time is of the essence in situations like that, so we're comfortable with it for our business. We're also comfortable with it because, increasingly, that's where our customers already are. We are creating something in our current environment and shipping it to Amazon anyway. >> We're going to start a movie about you, with Jim Carrey, Yes Man. (laughter) You're going to say yes to everything now with Amazon. Okay, but this is a good point. Joking aside, this is interesting because we have this debate all the time, when is the cloud prohibitive. In this case, your business model, based on that fact that variables spend that you turn up your Compute is based upon cadence of the business. >> That's exactly right. You know, the thing that's really changed for the business with this model is historically, IT has been a call center, and moving into Amazon, I manage our storage, and I pay for our storage because it's a shared asset. It's something that is for the common good. The business units and different product managers in our business now have the dial for what they spend on the Compute and everything else. So, if they want to go to market really rapidly, they can. If they want to spin it up rapidly, they can. If they want to turn it down, they can. And it's not a fixed investment. So, it allows the business philosophy that we've never had before. >> Jay, I know we're getting tight on time, but I do want to ask you one question, and I did not know that you were the first Snowmobile customers, so, that's good trivia to have on theCube and great to have you. So, while we got you here, being the first customer of AWS Snowmobile when they rolled out at Amazon Reinvent, we covered on SiliconAngle. Why did you jump on that and how was your experience been, share some color onto that whole process. >> Okay, it's been an iterative learning process for both us and for Amazon. We were sitting on all this imagery. We knew we wanted to get in AWS. We started using the Snowballs almost a year and a half ago. But moving 100 petabytes, 80 terabytes at a time, it's like using a spoon to move a haystack. So, when Amazon approached us, knowing the challenge we had about moving it all at once, I initially thought they were kidding, and I realized it was Amazon, they don't kid about things like this, and so we jumped on pretty early and worked with them on this. >> John F: So, you've got blown away like, what? >> Just like. >> What's the catch? >> Really, a truck, really? Yeah, but really. So, it's as secure as it could possibly be. We're taking out the Internet and all the different variables in that, including a lot of cost in bandwidth and strengths, and basically parking and next to our data, and, you know, it's basically a big NFS file system, and we loaded data onto it, the constraint for us being, basically that tape library with 10,000 miles of movement on the tape pads. We had to balance between loading the Snowmobile and basically responding to our regular customers. You know, we pulled 4 million images a year off that tape library. And so, loading every single image we've ever created onto the Snowmobile at the same time was a technical challenge on our side more so than Amazon's side. So, we had to find that sweet spot and then just let it run. >> John F: Now, it's operational. >> So, the Snowmobile is gone. AWS has got it. They're adjusting it right now into the West Region, and we're looking forward to being able to just go wild with that data. >> We got Snowmobiles, we got semis, we have satellites, we have it all, right? >> We have it all, yeah. >> It's massive, obviously, but impressed with what you're doing with this. So, congratulations on that front, and thank you again for being with us. >> My pleasure, thanks for having me. >> You bet, we continue our coverage here from Washington, DC, live on theCube. SiliconAngle TV continues right after this. (theCube jingle)

[Electronic Music] >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. Hello everyone. Welcome to this special presentation of theCUBE here in San Francisco, live for two days of wall-to-wall coverage for Cisco Systems inaugural developer event, called DevNet Create. The hashtag is #DevNetCreate. This is a new opportunity for Cisco, a new event. Again, inaugural event. Peter, I'd love to go through all the first-time events, because you never know if it's going to be the last event. Inaugural event, but really Cisco has a very successful DevNet developer program, all Cisco. This is a new effort to go out and talk to cloud developers in the DevOps community. This is SiliconANGLE's two days of coverage of Cisco's foray into the DevOps world. Really bringing app dynamics and all their great stuff above top of the stack together. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris. The next two days, live coverage. Peter, big story here is that Cisco is moving up the stack, because they are the leader in networking. They have been for years. We've been joking on theCUBE for many months now, plumbers are turning into machinists. Machinists are being automated away by machines. The value of the network for infrastructure and code becomes super paramount now that automation is starting to happen at the application layer, where data is being used for value purposes to create new experiences for users. I think this is an important story. Here, for Cisco Systems as they move out of the network guys, plumbers, network box guys, who have been incumbent data center presence, as well as powering the biggest, and basically the internet. This is a big story. What is your analysis? What's your take? What's your view of Cisco's DevNet Create opportunity? >> Well, I think there's three things we should be looking for over the next couple of days, John. The first one is the very, very big strategic picture is that the world wants to better understand how to program the internet. Now, if you think about it from a computer science standpoint, the internet is still a computer. And we're still trying to find those ways where we can apply any process, any data, any time, any person, anywhere. Now, there are some physical limitations of being able to do that, but the basic model for how we're going to do internet scale computing still isn't obvious. It still isn't clear. In many respects, the cloud is an approximate to that, and we'll get there, and Cisco's going to have a major role to play. On a tactical level, one of the reasons why Cisco has been so successful and remains so successful in the networking space is because of this enormous body of experts that are still using the Cisco Command Line Interface to set up routers, to do configuration of the network, to do an enormous amount of work down in the lower levels inside the pipes. Now, that group also has to be modernized along with the technology. And Cisco wants to bring those people along. And having them become full members in this whole DevOps transition is going to be really crucial, not only to them and their businesses, but also Cisco. And I think you mentioned the third one. On a very practical, reality level, Cisco needs to bring AppDynamics out to a position of, I don't want to say primacy, but certainly importance within the overall Cisco ecosystem. And so this show is going to be one of the ways to make progress on that. >> And Peter, I got to say, the research that you're doing at wikibon.com, for the folks watching, go to wikibon.com. Peter's been leading the research team there and really has some amazing research. Key stakes in the grounds of the two big waves that are happening: cloud computing, aka DevOps and other things, and the role of data, data science, whatever you want to call it. Data in cloud. Peter, the wave that's hitting, it's musical chairs. And the music stops and you're a big player like Cisco, and you don't have a play in cloud or data, you're screwed. And so it's clear to me that with the AppDynamics acquisition of Cisco, again, a foray into establishing the relationship between applications and code of the network really gives them a unique opportunity to add a lot of value and have a big seat at the table of those next two waves. >> Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, John. In fact, the research we're doing is very very compelling and starts to point to the idea that we used to have hardware as infrastructure, now we're doing, or hardware-defined infrastructure, and now everyone's in this grip of software-defined infrastructure, which is really important and will be here for quite some time. But as you start thinking about the real asset that's going to dictate how digital business works, how businesses get reconfigured, how they re-institutionalize the work that they need to do, and how infrastructure ultimately gets deployed, in many respects, it's time to start thinking in terms of data-defined infrastructure. And it's a term that we're starting to play with inside Wikibon to see how far that actually goes. But I think it's got a lot of prescriptive potency to it. That the idea is, increasingly, your digital business is going to be function of where your data is, what you can do with it, how fast, all those other things. And this notion of data as the asset that ultimately guides and shapes the characteristics of what customers want and what businesses can do is going to be come increasingly important. And this conference and the people here are absolutely part of that change. >> The reason why I like this event and why I'm here and why we're doing this small little event is that I think this is a tell sign, a canary in the coal mine of what's coming on this big wave. And I'll give you an example. I watched Cisco dominate the internet generation because they connected the networks together. They moved and created great value in connecting offices and then ultimately, inner networking, the rest is history. We are now in the next seminal moment of internet scale going cloud and data. So to me, there are two main storylines that I'm watching and I want to get your reaction to on this. One is customer-facing digital transformation. Every customer is trying to figure out how to transform, and Cisco is no- >> Peter: Every business. >> Every business is trying to figure out or Cisco's customers or potential customers have to transform and be a better business. Look no further than the Ford CEO being fired after less than five years on the job. How the hell can you transform a company in four years? You can't. Pressure, stocks down from 39%, he's ousted by Wall Street. Now, this is the pressure of the real world. Two, the notion of cloud computing and machine learning and AI, the application-specific goodness of DevOps infrastructure and code is bringing up the issue of automation. Jobs going away. So, two major threads: growth, with digital transformation or Cisco's customers. And two, the fear that what will cloud do for my job? It's the number one question asked in our crowd chats, in our conversations on theCUBE is, hey look, there's a fire going on around us. Machines are going to take over our jobs. There's going to be a further gap between the haves and have-nots. As Sarbjeet Johal just mentioned on Twitter, as I tweeted to Jas I think, but it's come up on all the crowd chats. Jobs going away as an impact, personally I think they're going to shift but that's my opinion. Your reaction. Digital transformation and automation, machine learning, these things automating away jobs. >> Well, let's start with the second one because in many respects, it's the practical test of what happens with that first question about digital transformation. First off, I agree with you. I think we'll see tasks go away and jobs reconfigure. And a better way of thinking about this is businesses have historically institutionalized the work that they perform around the assets that they regard as most important. In a very practical sense within IT, you can track the history of IT by watching how CIOs and businesses configure the work of people within IT around the assets that the businesses regard as most valuable. When a mainframe costs 50 or 70 million dollars, not surprisingly, that's what you configure around. As you move into the client-server domain, it became the PCs and the applications. >> John: And the data center. >> And the data center. Now we're moving to datas and assets and work will get re-institutionalized that as well. But data has some very specific and interesting characteristics as an asset that maybe we'll get into. But I think what it really points up is not that we're going to see people suddenly being thrown out of work. If you got knowledge and you can apply that knowledge and you can work with other people, the world is going to continue to find a place for you to make money and to add some value. So, that's not to say that this notion of being thrown out of work isn't important, is not going to have a major implication. But more likely, what we're going to see is data as an asset is going to force a rethinking of how we institutionalize work, which is going to force a rethinking of what tasks do and do not create value and what we can automate, and that's going to give people an opportunity to learn or not, and if they don't learn, yeah, maybe you are out on your own. >> We're old enough with our gray hairs to say that we've seen some waves before, and I broke into the business with a computer science degree in the late 80s. So I was on the back end of that punch card and mainframe generation. I watched people clutch on to the mainframe and the jobs just did go, they went away. And there were a few people who did maintenance and they kept their jobs and it become a political football, and people got laid off, but they got shifted. They got shifted. They got shifted to the minicomputer and then the data center. So, the same exact thing's happening and this is why I like this show. Because Cisco has to move from those plumbers, the networking guys, the guys who were the A-1 resource. Networks were the kingpins of the enterprise. They ran the show. They ran the networks. Tier 1 personnel now being commoditized. And my advice to my friends in the networking business, and this is why the show exists, you got to shift your shills to the next value proposition. That's data. By the way, it's still the internet, so I think they're going to be in good shape. If you're a networking guy, you got to go to the next network effect. That's not necessarily boxes. It's still packets. It's still policy. It's still good work. >> It's still security. So let's think about what you just said, John. That you move from a world where I perform the tasks on a particular set of Cisco boxes, to I am responsible for insuring that distributed data works. That's not subtle. I mean, it's major transformation but we are going to have an enormous need for people that can handle and deal with distributed data. I'm going to come back to something you said earlier. And that was the minicomputer revolution. You know, I've been around for a long time too. I came in just before you. What killed the minicomputer was not the microprocessor. People could easily put microprocessors into minicomputers. What killed the minicomputer was that digital had their own proprietary network. IBM had SNA down at the System/36 AS 100, et cetera. You had Prime and DG. Everybody had their own propriety network to handle what they did from a business standpoint, from a business value standpoint within the businesses. What killed the minicomputer world was TCP/IP and this company, Cisco. >> John: Yep. >> Now the question is, >> John: 3Com was involved in that so let's not-- >> What's that? 3Com was involved. >> Peter: Oh, 3Com, absolutely. >> 3Com and Cisco, the internetworking class. >> But it was this company in particular that said, "We're going to flatten all those networks, put them into TCP/IP. Here's the routers." 3Com and Banyon and a whole bunch of others were very important. Coming back to this show at this moment right now, we also see on the horizon a focus on cloud and not data. A focus on your supplier and their wants and needs and not data is going to lead to a world where intercloud connectivity and computing is going to be a major challenge. >> John: That's ironic. Intercloud is ironic because I talked to Lou Tucker 3 years ago, OpenStack Cisco CTO, and internetworking, parallel to interclouding. Now, Cisco-- >> Peter: It's even worse. It's more complex. >> Cisco canceled the interclouding initiative but if you look at where this is going, to that point, it's semantics. Multicloud is the hottest trend right now because hybrid IT, hybrid cloud is the gateway to true multicloud. And I think you're doing a lot of research on that. But let's talk about that. With TCP/IP did for internetworking, you could argue that data and cloud does for multicloud. >> Well I would say that somebody, the data becomes the determinant. The data becomes the most interesting thing to worry about. And then the question is, who's going to do that? Are Amazon and Microsoft and Google going to get together and say here's a set of cloud standards that will ensure that you have seamless end-to-end computing? Maybe? Probably not. Will OpenStack emerge out of RedHat as kind of the universal, well, it's not happening. Will Oracle be successful at saying, "Oh no, forget all that stuff. Bring it all inside oracle."? Probably not. >> John: Here's a question. Go ahead. >> This notion of end-to-end is going to be really crucial to a business, really crucial to architects, and really crucial to development. And how you handle that end-to-end is something that has to start emerging. The answers to those questions have to start emerging out of conferences like this. >> And Cisco certainly has to make this move now. Otherwise, they'll be driftwood if they don't get out >> Peter: That's right. in front of that next wave and ride this wave. But here's what's interesting. They call this the IOT Cloud Developer Conference, where application meets infrastructure. Kind of clever wording but very specific in the wording. And I want to unpack that and get your reaction. AppDynamics coalescing with Cisco's network knowledge, Okay? Because some people are like, "Oh, networking guys, how could they be DevOps guys? They're just configuring networks. They're not relevant." Here's the issue. IOT is a network issue. So you do a lot of IOT research. So, IOT, I would still classify as in that network pool of talent and domain expertise. Now, AppDynamics, which Cisco had acquired, brings the application stack to the table. So, you got the collision between AppDynamics and classic Cisco DNA into a melting pot. (laughs) This is a huge opportunity. And I wanted to get your reaction. How important is IOT, and how important is the AppDynamics component for this new vision of Cisco? >> IOT is essential. AppDynamics, they have to make it important, and that's on Cisco to make it important quite frankly. And again, that's one of the things that the show has to do. But you know it's interesting, John, as you mention that, let's unpack it even a little bit further. You said it's a networking issue and you're right. Network's clearly part of the component. I mentioned earlier, it's a distributed data issue, where the networks is a major impact on that. We might even say it's a distributed application issue. The point is, we are still in the midst of creating the language that we're going to use to describe how to approach and solve these problems. That hasn't been done yet. I mean, people say, oh yeah. Let's talk about blockchain and security. Or let's talk data gravity, or all these other concepts we're throwing around out there. We need more precision. We need more conventional agreement, consensus. There's a lot of work that this industry has to do to really address the challenges that Cisco and the people at this conference face as they try, not only to ensure their relevance looking forward, but very importantly, to solve these extremely complex problems of how we're going to dramatically expand the distribution of function and the distribution of data while at the same time increase things like near real-time. I like to say for example, John. I like to say that the edge is not a place. The edge is a time. That at the end of the day, what's most important is can you process something in the time envelope required and the place is just a way of measuring that. These are all major challenges that Wikibon research is focused on, but also folks at this conference are going to have to address if we're going to solve that next generation of business opportunities. >> That's Peter Burris, head of research at SiliconANGLE media and also general manager of Wikibon.com. Check out the research. A lot of great stuff going on. Digital transformation. The valuation of data and certainly cloud computing and the infrastructure and the impact for customers. Check it out at wikibon.com. I'm John Furrier and we're about to kick off two days of wall-to-wall coverage with Cisco as they put their foot in the water in the cloud DevOps developer community for IOT and applications. It's where applications meets infrastructure. Infrastructure is code. We'll be right back more coverage. Stay with us for two days at Cisco DevNet Create. [Electronic Music]