(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to Fal.Con 2022, CrowdStrike's big user conference. You're watching the Cube. My name is Dave Vallante. I'm here with my co-host David Nicholson. CrowdStrike is a company that was founded over 10 years ago. This is about 11 years, almost to the day. They're 2 billion company in revenue terms. They're growing at about 60% a year. They've got a path they've committed to wall street. They've got a path to $5 billion by mid decade. They got a $40 billion market cap. They're free, free cash flow positive and trying to build essentially a generational company with a very growing Tam and a modern platform. CrowdStrike has the fundamental belief that the unstoppable breach is a myth. David Nicholson, even though CSOs don't believe that, CrowdStrike is on a mission. Right? >> I didn't hear the phrase. Zero trust mentioned in the keynote >> Right. >> What was mentioned was this idea that CrowdStrike isn't simply a tool, it's a platform. And obviously it takes a platform to get to 5 billion. >> Yeah. So let's talk about the keynote. George Kurtz, the CEO came on. I thought the keynote was, was measured, but very substantive. It was not a lot of hype in there. Most security conferences, the two exceptions are this one and Reinforce, Amazon's big security conference. Steven Schmidt. The first time I was at a Reinforce said "All this narrative about security is such a bad industry" and "We're not doing a great job." And "It's so scary." That doesn't help the industry. George Kurtz sort of took a similar message. And you know what, Dave? When I think of security outside the context of IT I think of like security guards >> Right. >> Like protecting the billionaires. Right? That's a powerful, you know, positive thing. It's not really a defensive movement even though it is defensive but so that was kind of his posture there. But he talked about essentially what I call, not his words permanent changes in the, in the in the cyber defense industry, subsequent to the pandemic. Again, he didn't specifically mention the pandemic but he alluded to, you know, this new world that we live in. Fal.Con is a hundred sessions, eight tracks. And really his contention is we're in the early innings. These guys got 20,000 customers. And I think they got the potential to have hundreds of thousands. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, if I'm working with a security company I want them to be measured. I'm not looking for hype. I don't want those. I don't want those guards to be in disco shirts. I want them in black suits. So, you know, so the, the, the point about measured is is I think a positive one. I was struck by the competence of the people who were on stage today. I have seen very very large companies become kind of bureaucratic. And sometimes you don't get the best of the best up on stage. And we saw a lot of impressive folks. >> Yeah. Michael Santonis get up, but before we get to him. So, a couple points that Kurtz made he said, "digital transformation is needed to bring modern architectures to IT. And that brings modern security." And he laid out that whole sort of old way, new way very Andy Jassy-like old guard, new guard. He didn't hit on it that hard but he basically said "security is all about mitigating risk." And he mentioned that the the CSO I say CSO, he says CSO or CSO has a seat at the board. Now, many CSOs are board level participants. And then he went into the sort of four pillars of, of workload, and the areas that they focus on. So workload to them is end point, identity, and then data. They don't touch network security. That's where they partner with the likes of Cisco, >> Right. >> And Palo Alto networks. But then they went deep into identity threat protection, data, which is their observability platform from an acquisition called Humio. And then they went big time into XDR. We're going to talk about all this stuff. He said, "data is the new digital currency." Talked a lot about how they're now renaming, Humio, Log Scale. That's their Splunk killer. We're going to talk about that all week. And he talked a little bit about the single agent architecture. That is kind of the linchpin of CrowdStrike's architecture. And then Michael Santonis, the CTO came on and did a deep dive into each of those, and really went deep into XDR extended, right? Detection and response. XDR building on EDR. >> Yeah. I think the subject of XDR is something we'll be, we'll be touching on a lot. I think in the next two days. I thought the extension into observability was very, very interesting. When you look at performance metrics, where things are gathering those things in and being able to use a single agent to do so. That speaks to this idea that they are a platform and not just a tool. It's easy to say that you aspire to be a platform. I think that's a proof point. On the subject, by the way of their fundamental architecture. Over the years, there have been times when saying that your infrastructure requires an agent that would've been a deal killer. People say "No agents!" They've stuck to their guns because they know that the best way to deliver what they deliver is to have an agent in the environment. And it has proven to be the right strategy. >> Well, this is one of the things I want to explore with the technical architects that come on here today is, how do you build a lightweight agent that can do everything that you say it's going to do? Because they started out at endpoint, and then they've extended it to all these other modules, you know, identity. They're now into observability. They've got this data platform. They just announced that acquisition of another company they bought Preempt, which is their identity. They announced Responsify, responsify? Reposify, which is sort of extends the observability and gives them visualization or visibility. And I'm like, how do you take? How do you keep an agent lightweight? That's one of the things I want to better understand. And then the other is, as you get into XDR I thought Michael Santonis was pretty interesting. He had black hat last month. He did a little video, you know. >> That was great >> Man in the street, what's XDR what's XDR what's XDR. I thought the best response was, somebody said "a holistic approach to end point security." And so it's really an evolution of, of EDR. So we're going to talk about that. But, how do you keep an agent lightweight and still support all these other capabilities? That's something I really want to dig into, you know, without getting bloated. >> Yeah, Yeah. I think it's all about the TLAs, Dave. It's about the S, it's about SDKs and APIs and having an ecosystem of partners that will look at the lightweight agent and then develop around it. Again, going back to the idea of platform, it's critical. If you're trying to do it all on your own, you get bloat. If you try to be all things to all people with your agent, if you try to reverse engineer every capability that's out there, it doesn't work. >> Well that's one of the things that, again I want to explore because CrowdStrike is trying to be a generational company. In the Breaking Analysis that we published this week. One of the things I said, "In order to be a generational company you have to have a strong ecosystem." Now the ecosystem here is respectable, you know, but it's obviously not AWS class. You know, I think Snowflake is a really good example, ServiceNow. This feels to me like ServiceNow circa 2013. >> Yeah. >> And we've seen how ServiceNow has evolved. You know, Okta, bought Off Zero to give them the developer angle. We heard a little bit about a developer platform today. I want to dig into that some more. And we heard a lot about everybody hates their DLP. I want to get rid of my DLP, data loss prevention. And so, and the same thing with the SIM. One of the ETR round table, Eric Bradley, our colleague at a round table said "If it weren't for the compliance requirements, I would replace my SIM with XDR." And so that's again, another interesting topic. CrowdStrike, cloud native, lightweight agent, you know, some really interesting tuck in acquisitions. Great go-to-market, you know, not super hype just product that works and gets stuff done, you know, seems to have a really good, bright future. >> Yeah, no, I would agree. Definitely. No hype necessary. Just constant execution moving forward. It's clearly something that will be increasingly in demand. Another subject that came up that I thought was interesting, in the keynote, was this idea of security for elections, extending into the realm of misinformation and disinformation which are both very very loaded terms. It'll be very interesting to see how security works its way into that realm in the future. >> Yeah, yeah, >> Yeah. >> Yeah, his guy, Kevin Mandia, who is the CEO of Mandiant, which just got acquired. Google just closed the deal for $5.4 billion. I thought that was kind of light, by the way, I thought Mandiant was worth more than that. Still a good number, but, and Kevin, you know was the founder and, >> Great guy. >> they were self-funded. >> Yeah, yeah impressive. >> So. But I thought he was really impressive. He talked about election security in terms of hardening you know, the election infrastructure, but then, boom he went right to what I see as the biggest issue, disinformation. And so I'm sitting there asking myself, okay how do you deal with that? And what he talked about was mapping network effects and monitoring network effects, >> Right. >> to see who's pumping the disinformation and building career streams to really monitor those network effects, positive, you know, factual or non-factual network or information. Because a lot of times, you know, networks will pump factual information to build credibility. Right? >> Right. >> And get street cred, earn that trust. You know, you talk about zero trust. And then pump disinformation into the network. So they've now got a track. We'll get, we have Kevin Mandia on later with Sean Henry who's the CSO yeah, the the CSO or C S O, chief security officer of CrowdStrike >> more TLA. Well, so, you can think of it as almost the modern equivalent of the political ad where the candidate at the end says I support this ad or I stand behind whatever's in this ad. Forget about trying to define what is dis or misinformation. What is opinion versus fact. Let's have a standard for finding, for exposing where the information is coming from. So if you could see, if you're reading something and there is something that is easily de-code able that says this information is coming from a troll farm of a thousand bots and you can sort of examine the underlying ethos behind where this information is coming from. And you can take that into consideration. Personally, I'm not a believer in trying to filter stuff out. Put the garbage out there, just make sure people know where the garbage is coming from so they can make decisions about it. >> So I got a thought on that because, Kevin Mandia touched on it. Again, I want to ask about this. He said, so this whole idea of these, you know detecting the bots and monitoring the networks. Then he said, you can I think he said something that's to the effect of. "You can go on the offensive." And I'm thinking, okay, what does that mean? So for instance, you see it all the time. Anytime I see some kind of fact put out there, I got to start reading the comments and like cause I like to see both sides, you know. I'm right down the middle. And you'll go down and like 40 comments down, you're like, oh this is, this is fake. This video was edited, >> Right. >> Da, da, da, da, and then a bunch of other people. But then the bots take over and that gets buried. So, maybe going on the offensive is to your point. Go ahead and put it out there. But then the bots, the positive bots say, okay, by the way, this is fake news. This is an edited video FYI. And this is who put it out and here's the bot graph or something like that. And then you attack the bots with more bots and then now everybody can sort of of see it, you know? And it's not like you don't have to, you know email your friend and saying, "Hey dude, this is fake news." >> Right, right. >> You know, Do some research. >> Yeah. >> Put the research out there in volume is what you're saying. >> Yeah. So, it's an, it's just I thought it was an interesting segue into another area of security under the heading of election security. That is fraught with a lot of danger if done wrong, if done incorrectly, you know, you you get into the realm of opinion making. And we should be free to see information, but we also should have access to information about where the information is coming from. >> The other narrative that you hear. So, everything's down today again and I haven't checked lately, but security generally, we wrote about this in our Breaking Analysis. Security, somewhat, has held up in the stock market better than the broad tech market. Why? And the premise is, George Kurt said this on the last conference call, earnings call, that "security is non-discretionary." At the same time he did say that sales cycles are getting a little longer, but we see this as a positive for CrowdStrike. Because CrowdStrike, their mission, or one of their missions is to consolidate all these point tools. We've talked many, many times in the Cube, and in Breaking Analysis and on Silicon Angle, and on Wikibon, how the the security business use too many point tools. You know this as a former CTO. And, now you've got all these stove pipes, the number one challenge the CSOs face is lack of talent. CrowdStrike's premise is they can consolidate that with the Fal.Con platform, and have a single point of control. "Single pane of glass" to use that bromide. So, the question is, is security really non-discretionary? My answer to that is yes and no. It is to a sense, because security is the number one priority. You can't be lax on security. But at the same time the CSO doesn't have an open checkbook, >> Right. >> He or she can't just say, okay, I need this. I need that. I need this. There's other competing initiatives that have to be taken in balance. And so, we've seen in the ETR spending data, you know. By the way, everything's up relative to where it was, pre you know, right at the pandemic, right when, pandemic year everything was flat to down. Everything's up, really up last year, I don't know 8 to 10%. It was expected to be up 8% this year, let's call it 6 to 7% in 21. We were calling for 7 to 8% this year. It's back down to like, you know, 4 or 5% now. It's still healthy, but it's softer. People are being more circumspect. People aren't sure about what the fed's going to do next. Interest rates, you know, loom large. A lot of uncertainty out here. So, in that sense, I would say security is not non-discretionary. Sorry for the double negative. What's your take? >> I think it's less discretionary. >> Okay. >> Food, water, air. Non-discretionary. (David laughing) And then you move away in sort of gradations from that point. I would say that yeah, it is, it falls into the category of less-discretionary. >> Alright. >> Which is a good place to be. >> Dave Nicholson and David Vallante here. Two days of wall to wall coverage of Fal.Con 2022, CrowdStrike's big user conference. We got some great guests. Keep it right there, we'll be right back, right after this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Fal.Con 2022. My name is Dave Vallante. We're here with my co-host Dave Nicholson. On the last earnings call George Kurts made a really big emphasis on the relationship with managed service providers. CrowdStrike has announced a new service provider capability. The powered service provider program. Jason Cook is here. He is the president of cyber defense labs. He's joined by Mike Riolo. Who's the vice president of global system integrators and service providers at CrowdStrike gents. Welcome to TheCube. Good to see you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you >> Jason, tell us about cyber defense labs. What do you guys do? Give us the bumper sticker, please. >> Cyber defense labs uses the best technology in the world to put together services that help protect our clients >> Simple. Like it. What's XDR? (people laughing) >> I've not heard of that before, sorry. >> So Mike, we've seen the rise of service providers. I saw a stat, I don't know, six, seven months ago that 50% of us companies don't even have a SOC. We're talking about mid to large companies. So service providers are crucial. What's the CrowdStrike powered service provider program all about? >> Well, it's an evolution for us. We've been dealing with this market for some time. And the idea is, is like how do we expand the opportunity to stop reaches? I mean, that's what it's all about. Like how more routes to market, more partners like cyber defense labs that can really go in and bring our technology coupled with their services to power their offerings to their customers and just help us reach every end user out there, to stop reaches. >> So Jason, how do you guys differentiate? Cause I see, you know, as an analyst, I'll look back, I'll read the press releases and they'll see, okay. They just look so similar. So how do you differentiate from the competition? What do you tell customers? >> So when it comes to our selection of technology we test it, we work it, we literally put it into real world situations with our clients. And then we differentiate ourselves with expert services. It's a white glove service from us. We embed ourselves right in with our clients. That's why we call 'em our client partners. And they see us as part of their team and extension of their team. They don't have the time to play with technology and work out what's best. They don't know the time to select it or even then the expertise to use it effectively in the environment. So that's where the trust comes in with us. And then for us, likewise, we are the technology provider such as CrowdStrick, we need to know the technology works and it does what it says. >> I always ask CISOs; What's your number one challenge? And they'll say lack of talent. The only time I didn't get that answer was at... The Mongo DB CISO at reinforced. I'm like yeah, it's cause you're Mongo, I guess reinforced or AWS doesn't have the same problem, but do you... Obviously you see that problem. And you compliment that, is that a fair? >> Yeah, absolutely. Many, many companies mid-market enterprises are really struggling to find talent and then retain the talent. So for us where that's all we are about and then we are there to enable your business to do what your business does. It is just working and I think more and more so you're going to see an industry clearly CrowdStrike's going in that direction. That it's the service provider that becomes a critical element of that trusted circle. >> Does that translate into a market segment by size of organization typically or? You mentioned the ever never ending quest for talent which is critical regardless of size but what does your target market look like? >> So I, I think the biggest gap in the market frankly, is still the mid-market. Many smaller companies still are really just struggling with 'what is the problem.' At least in the mid-market, in the enterprises they really beginning to understand the problem and want to invest and lean in. And here's the irony. They now want to partner to solve the problem cause they recognize they can't do it on their own. >> So Mike, what are the critical aspects of this program? I mean, got the press release out there, but put some meat on the bone for us. >> So if you look at what we were doing to enable managed service providers to go in and, and be powered by CrowdStrike before it was in a corporate market segment it was a specific set of product from us to really enable MDR, you know, sort of that, that generation of services that a lot of customers looked at MSPs for. And what the big message about this is is we are now expanding that. We're taking it out of corporate, we're going upmarket, we're going enterprise. We can leverage partners like cyber defense labs to package our software into their offering and help them power them more than just endpoint. Right? We've had a lot of exciting announcements and probably more to come around identity, you know XDR, the new buzz, right? Like what does it mean? And in, if you look at our approach, it's a very platform centric approach and that's something that partners can monetize. That's something that partners can really help clients grow with is that it's not just about endpoint. It's more about how do I make sure that I'm in a position with a partner that allows me to grow as a market decides it's necessary. So things like identity, cloud on and on and on, that we're investing in and continuing to grow. We are making that available to the CrowdStrike powered service about our marketplace. >> So Jason, service providers historically outsourcing, okay. And it used to be a lot of; 'okay, you know, I'll take over your mess for less kind of thing.' Right? And so the pattern was you would have one of everything and then, that limited your scale. The bigger you got, you had this economies of scale. So am I hearing that, like how do you partner with CrowdStrike? Are you kind of standardizing on that platform or not necessarily cause you have to be agnostic. What's your posture on that? >> So there's a level of, you have to be technology agnostic. We pride ourselves in just using the best technology that's out there. But at the same time, very much with the Fal.Con platform they're building out and maturing in a way that's making significant risk mitigation abilities for a solution provider like us to say we'll take one of those, one of those and put our service around it because that's the best fit service to reduce the risk of this particular client. And having that flexibility for us to do that really allows us then to stay within the same sort of product suite rather than going outside when integration is still one of the biggest challenges that you have. >> So you're one of those organizations that's consolidating a bevy of point tools. Is that right? I mean, you're going through that transformation now. Have you already gone through that? What's your journey look like there? >> Oh, we help companies do that. That's how they mitigate and reduce their risk. >> Okay. But you're using tools as, as well. Are you not? So I mean, you've got to also I mean you're like an extension of those clients. >> Absolutely. So it comes down to a lot of the time do you have the right team? We have a team of experts that deliver expert services. You get to a level of skillset and experience, which goes what's just the best tool out there. And it becomes that's our insight. So one of the reasons why we like the Fal.Con product is because regardless of what the mess is, that's happening you can rapidly deploy stuff to make a difference. And then you then work out how to fix the mess which is quite a change from how traditionally things are done, which is let's analyze the problem. Let's look at options around it. And by the time you've done that time has passed and you can't afford to just allow time to pass these days. So having the right technology allows you to rapidly deploy. Of course, we use what we sell. So we are proud to say that we use a number of the Fal.Con products to protect ourselves and consolidate onto that technology as we then offer that out as a service to our clients. >> So Mike, I'm thinking about the program in general and specifically how you are implementing this program thinking about the path to bringing the customer on board. There are a finite number of strategic seats at any customer's table. So who is at the customer's table? Is it CDL saying; 'Hey, I'm going to bring in my folks from CrowdStrike to have a conversation with you.' Is it CrowdStrike saying; 'Hey, it looks like a service provider might be the best solution for you. Let's go talk to CDL.' How does that work? >> It's a great question. And I think we talk a lot about how there's a gap in people to support cyber efforts inside of companies. But we don't talk about the gap in like experts that can go in and actually sit down with CISOs, with CIOs, with CFOs. And so for us, like it's all about the flexibility. It's it's what do you need in the moment? Because at the end of the day, it comes down to the people. If Jason has a great trusted relationship, he's like; 'Hey I just need some content.' 'Help me push why we're powered by CrowdStrike in this moment.' Great, go run. If we have an opportunity where we know that cyber defense labs has a presence then we go in together, right? Like that flexibility is there. We've done a lot. When you build a program like this, like it's easy to tell the market what they need. It's easy to tell everybody, but it's also you're looking at a cultural shift and how CrowdStrike goes to market, right? Like this is all about how do we get every possible route to market to stop reaches for customers of all size. >> I would echo that. there's three ways that that's working for our two companies at the moment. Many times a lot of the relationships that we have are trusted advisor at the owner or board level of these mid-market and enterprise companies. They're looking to ask for a number of things. And one of the things that we then say is, Hey for your technology roadmap, hey we want to bring in co-present coded us, co-discuss co-strategize with you what your roadmap is. And so we often bring CrowdStrike into the conversations that cyber defense lab is having at the board level. Then on the other side, CrowdStrike obviously has a significant sales force and trusted advisors. They go in with the product and then it's apparent that the you know, the client wants way more than just the product. They say, this is great. I love it. I've made my decision, but I can't operate it effectively. And so we then get pulled in from that perspective >> You get to all the time from product companies, right? It's like, okay, now what? How do I do this? And you go, oh, I'll call somebody. So this is going to accelerate. You go to market. >> Well, and everybody looks at it like, you know how does your sales play with their sales, right? Everyone's going after the same thing. And I'm, you know, that's important, but you have to look at CrowdStrike as more than sales, right? We have an amazing threat intel group that are helping clients understand the risk factors and what bad people are trying to do to them. We can bring so many experts to the side of a cyber defense labs in, in that realm. You know, we've been doing this a long time. >> This is what's interesting to me when I think about your threat hunting, because you guys are experts and you guys are experts. But the... Correct me if I'm wrong. But the advantage I see at the CrowdStrike has is your cloud platform allows you to have such a huge observation space. You got a ton of data and you bring that to the relationship as well and then you benefit from that? >> It's two way. It's absolutely two way. CrowdStrike has a whole bunch of experts and expertise in this space. So do cyber defense labs. We call it for us because we're providing a service to multiple clients. Many of them have a global presence. We call it our global threat view. And absolutely we are exchanging real time threat telemetry data with, with our friends at CrowdStrike Which is impacting the value that we have and the ability to respond extremely quickly when something's happening to one of our clients. >> Well, I just add to that, you know if you look at all of our alliances, right? We've got solution providers, tech reliant, everything. The one thing that's really interesting about the CrowdStrike powered service provider program; it lives in alliances, It's a partnership program, but they're our customer. They have chosen to standardize on our platform, right. To help drive the best results for their customers. And so we treat them like a partner because it's not for internal use. There's unlimited aspect to it. And so as that treating like partnership we have to enable them with more than just product. Right? We want to bring the right experts. We want to bring the right, you know, vision of where the market's going the threats out there, things of that nature. And that's something that we do every day with you guys. >> And it was even expressed earlier with the keynote speech that George gave. Look there's an ecosystem of very good technologies, very good providers. And there there's that sort of friend-of-me view here. You put the best thing together for the client at the end of the day. And if we all acknowledge, which I think is the maturity of our partnership, that one plus one equals, I always say at 51 now, if you play it right, then the partner sees... That the client sees the value of the partnership. And so they want more of that. >> So it sounds like... We got to wrap, but I wonder if we could close on this. It sounds like this was happening just organically in the field. Now you've codified it. So my question to each of you is; What's your vision for the future? Where do you guys want to take this thing? >> What a wrap question right there. I love it. Honestly, like we look at it in... Look at what does it mean to be a CrowdStrike powered service provider. It is more than just the platform. It's the program in general, offering them tools to go in and do early assessments. One thing about service providers, they're in there before vendors, right? We're still a vendor at the end of the day. And so they have that relationship, like how do we enable them to leverage our platform leverage our tools, leverage our programs in order to help a client understand, like, what is your risk factor Could a breach come, things of that nature. And so it's really building in really enabling a partner like cyber defense labs to take on the full suite of programs, services, platform that we can provide to them as a customer, treated them like a partner. >> And Jason, from your perspective, bring us on if you would. >> So our partnership with CrowdStrike is really enabling cyber defense labs to increase our share of wallet, our presence in very specific market segments; The mid-market to enterprise especially around banking, financial services auto dealerships, healthcare, manufacturing, where last year we saw a significant progress there. And we think we're going to double it between this year and next year. >> Jason Cook, Mike Riolo. thanks for coming in TheCube. Great story. >> Thank you for having us >> Alright, thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Dave Vallante and Dave Nicholson will be back right after this short break from Fal.Con 22. You're watching TheCube. (soft electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to this Cube Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. We have a returning Cube alumni, Ramesh Prabagan, who is the co-founder and CEO of Prosimo.io. Great to see you, Ramesh. Thanks for coming in to our studio, and welcome to the new layout. >> Thanks for having me here, John. After a series of Zoom conversations, it's great to be live and in the flesh! >> Great to be in person. We also got a new stage for our Supercloud event, which we've been opening up to the community, looking forward to getting your perspective on that soon as well. But I want to keep the conversation really about you guys. I want to get the story down. You guys came out of stealth, Multicloud, Supercloud is right in your wheelhouse. >> Exactly. >> You got to love Supercloud. >> Yeah. As I walked in, I saw Supercloud all over the place, and it just gives you a jolt of energy. >> Well, you guys are in the middle of the action. Your company, I want you to explain this in a minute, is in the middle of this next wave. Because we had the structural change I called Cloud One. Amazon, use case, developers, no need to build a data center, all that goodness happens, higher level service of abstractions are happening, and then Azure comes in. More PaaS, and then more install base, now they're nipping at the heels. So full on hyperscale, Cap Backs growth, great for everybody. Now comes new use cases. Cloud to cloud, app to app, you see Databricks, Snowflake, MongoDB, all doing extremely well by leveraging the Cap Backs, now it's an ops problem. >> Exactly. >> Now ops and security. >> Yeah. It's speed of applications. >> How are you guys vectoring into that? Explain what you guys do. >> Absolutely. So let me take kind of the customer pain point first, right? Because it's always easier to explain that, and then we explain what is it that we do. So, it's no surprise. Applications are moving into the cloud, or people are building apps in the cloud in masses. The infrastructure that's sitting in front of these applications, cutting across networking, security, the operational piece associated with that, does not move at the same speed. The apps sometimes get upgraded two, three times a day, the infrastructure gets touched one time a week at best. And so increasingly, the cloud platform teams, the developers are all like, "Hey, why? Why? Why?" Right? "I thought things were supposed to move fast in the cloud." It doesn't. Now, if you double click on that, really, it's two reasons. One, those that won't have consistency across the stack that they hired in the data center, they bring a virtual form factor of that stack and line it up in the cloud, and before you know it, it's cost, it's operation complexity, there are multiple single panes of glass, all the fun stuff associated... >> Just to interject real quick. It is fast in the cloud if you're a developer. >> Exactly. >> So it's kind of like, hurry up, slow down, wait. >> Correct. >> So the developers are shifting left, open source is booming. Things are fine for developers right now. If you're a developer, things are good. >> But the guy sitting in front of that... >> The ops guys, they've got to deal with things like lock-in, choice, security. >> Exactly. And those are really the key challenges. We've seen some that actually said, "Hey, know what, I don't want to bring my data center stack into the cloud. Let me go cloud-native. And they start to build it up. 14 services from AWS, 15 from iGR, 14 more from GCP, even if you are in a single cloud. They just keep it to that. I need to know how to put this together. Because all these services are great, but how do I put this together. And enterprises don't have just one application, they have hundreds of these applications. So the requirements of a database is different than a service mesh, different than a serverless application, different than a web application. And before you know it, "How do I put all these things together?" And so we looked at this problem, and we said, "Okay. We subscribe to the fact that cloud-native is the way to go, right, but something needs to be there to make this simple." Right? And so, first thing that we did was bring all these cloud-native services together, we help orchestrate that, and we said, "okay, know what, Mr. Enterprise? We got you covered." Right? But now, it doesn't stop there. That's like, 10% of the value, right? What do you really need? What do you care about now? Because the apps are in the center of the universe, and who's talking to it? It's another application sitting either in the same cloud, or in a different cloud, or it's a user connecting into the application. So now, let's talk about what are the networking security operational requirements required for these apps to talk to each other, or the user to talk to the application. That's really what we focus on. >> Yeah. And I think one of the things that's driving this opportunity for you, and I want to get your reaction to this, is that the modern application movement is all about cloud-native. Okay, they're obviously doing great. Now, kind of the kumbaya moment in enterprise is that the security team and ops teams have to play ball and be friends with the developer, and vice versa. So harmony's coming there. So the little harmony. And two, the business is driving apps. IT is transforming over. This is why the Supercloud idea is interesting to Dave and I. Because when we coined that term, multi-cloud was not a market. Everyone has multiple clouds, 'cause they have Microsoft Office, that's now in the cloud, they got SQL Server, I mean it's really kind of Microsoft Cloud. >> Exactly. >> So you have a cloud. But do you have ops teams building on the stack? What about the network layer? This is where the rubber meets the road. >> Absolutely, yeah. And if you look at the challenges there, if you just focus on networking and security, right? When applications need to talk to each other, you have a whole bunch of underlying services, but somebody needs to put this thing on top. Because what you care about is "can these group of users talk to these class of applications." Or, "these group of applications, can they talk to each other," right? This whole notion of connectivity is just table stakes. Everybody just assumes it's there, right? It's the next layer up, which is, "how do I bring Zero Trust access? How do I get the observability?" And observability is not just a bunch of pretty donut chats. I have had people look to me in my previous company, the start-up, and said, "okay, give me all these nice donut chats, but so what? What do you want me to do with this?" And so you have to translate that into real actions, right? "How do I bring Zero Trust capabilities? How do I bring the observability capabilities? How do I understand cloud-native and networking and bring those things together so that you can help solve for the problem." >> It's interesting, one of the questions I had here to ask you was "what does it mean to be cloud-native, and why now?" And you brought up Zero Trust, trust and verify, these are security concepts. But if you look at what's going on at KubeKon and CNCF and Linux Foundation, software supply chain's a huge issue, where trust is the issue. They want trust there, so you got Zero Trust here. What is it? Zero Trust or trust? I mean, what's there? Is one hardware based, perimeter, networking? That kind of perimeter's dead, ton of... >> No, the whole- >> Trust or Zero Trust. >> The whole concept of Zero Trust is don't trust what is underlying, just trust what you're talking to. So if you and I talking to each other, John, you need to trust me, I need to trust you, and be able to have this conversation. >> You've been verified. >> Exactly, right? But in the application world, if you talk about two apps that are talking to each other, let's say there is a web application in one AWS region talking to a database in a different region, right? Now, do you want to make sure you are able to build that trust all the way from the application to the application? Or do you want to move the trust boundary to the two entities that are talking to each other so that irrespective of what they go on underneath the covers, you can be always sure that these two things are trusted. >> So, Ramesh, I was on LinkedIn yesterday, I wrote a comment, Dave Vallante wrote a post on Supercloud, we're talking about it, and I wrote, "Cloud as a commodity," question, and then a bunch of other stuff that we're going to talk about, and Keith Townsend jumped on that, and got on Twitter, put a poll, "Is cloud a commodity? Source: me." So, it started a big thread. And the reaction was interesting. And my point was to be provocative on "Cloud isn't commodity, but there's commodity elements." EC2 and S3, you can look at that and say, "that's commodity IaaS," but Amazon Web Services has done an amazing job for higher level services. Okay, so how does that translate into the use cases that you see that you guys are going after and solving, because it's the same kind of concept. IaaS and SaaS have to work together to solve problems, but that's in an integrated environment, say, in a native-cloud. How does that work across clouds? >> Yeah, no, you bring up a great point, John. So, let's take the simple use case, right? Let's keep the user to app thing to the side. Let us say two apps need to talk to each other, right? There are multiple ways in which you can solve this problem. You can build highways. That's what our customers call it. I'll build highways. I don't care what goes on those highways, I'll just build highways. You bring any kind of application workload on it, I just make sure that the highways are good, right? That's kind of the lowest common denominator. It's the path to least resistance. You can get stuff done, but it's not going to move the needle, right? Then you have really modern, kind of service networking, where, okay, I'm looking at every single HTTP, API, n:point, whatnot, and I'm optimizing for that. Right? Great if you know what you're doing, but, like, if you have thousands of these applications, it's not going to be really feasible to do that. And so, what we have seen customers do, actually, is employ a mixed approach, where they say, "I'm going to build these highways, the highways are going to make sure that I can go from one place to another, and maybe within regions, across clouds, whatnot, but then, I have specific requirements that my business needs, that actually needs tweaking, right? And so I'm going to tweak those things. That's why, what we call as like, full stack transit, is exactly that, right, which is, I'll build you the guts of it so that hey, you know what, if somebody screams at you, "Hey, why is my application not accessible?" You don't have that problem. It is always accessible. But then, the requirements for performance, the requirements for Zero Trust, the requirements for segmentation, and all of that are things that... >> That's a hard problem. >> That's a hard problem to solve. >> And you guys are solving that? >> Absolutely, exactly. >> So, let me throw this at you. So, okay, I get that. And by the way, that's exactly what we're seeing. Dave and I were also debating about multi-cloud as what it is. Now, the nirvana definition is, "Well, I have a workload, that's going to work the same, and just magically just shift to Azure." (Ramesh laughs) >> Like, 'cause there's better resources. >> There is no magic there. >> So, but this brings up the point of operations. Now, Databricks and Snowflake, they're building their software to run on multi-cloud seamlessly. Now they can do that, 'cause it's their application. What is the multi-cloud use case, so that's a Supercloud use case in your mind, because right now it's not yet there. What is the Supercloud use case that's going to allow this seamless management or workloads. What's your view? >> Yeah, so if you take enterprise, right? Large enterprise in particular. They invariably have some workloads that are on, let's say, if the primary cloud is AWS, there are some workloads in Azure. Maybe they have acquired a new company, maybe a start-up that uses GCP, whatnot. So they have sprinkles of workloads in other clouds. >> So that's the breed kind of thing. >> Yeah, exactly. That's not what causes anybody to wake up in the morning and say, "I need to have a Supercloud strategy." That's not the thing, right? But now, increasingly you're seeing "pick the right cloud for the appropriate workload." That is going to change quite a bit. Because I have my infrastructure heavy workloads in AWS. I have quite a bit of like, analytics and mining type of applications that are better on GCP. I have all of my package applications work well on Azure, right? How do I make sure all of this. And it's not apps of this kind. Even simple things like VDI. VDI always used to be, "I have this instance I run up" and whatnot. Now every single cloud provider is giving you their own flavor of virtual desktop. And so, how do you make sure all of these things work together, right? And once again, what we have seen customers do is they settle on one cloud as their primary, but then you always have sprinkles of workloads across all of the clouds. Now, you could also go down the path, and you're increasingly seeing this, you could go down the path of, "Hey, I'm using cloud as backbone," right? Cloud providers have invested massive amounts of dollars to make sure that the infrastructure reaches there. Literally almost to the extent that every user in a metro city is ten milliseconds from the public cloud. And so they have allowed for that. Now, you can actually use cloud backbones to get the availability, the liability and whatnot. So these are some new use cases that we have seen actually blew up in customers. I was just doing an interview, and the topic was the innovator's dilemma. And one of the panelists said, "It's not the innovator's dilemma, it's the integrator dilemma." Because if you have commodity, and you have choices on, say, backbones and whatnot for transit, the integration is the key glue now. What's your reaction to that? >> Absolutely. And we have seen, we used to spend quite a bit of time in kind of what is the day zero problem, right? Like, how do I put this together? Conversations are moved past that, because there are multiple ways in which you can do that right now, right? Conversations are moving to kind of, "this is more of an operational problem for me." It's not just operations in the form of "Hey, I need to find out where the problem is, troubleshoot it, and so forth. But I need to make like really high quality decisions." And those decisions are going to be guided by data. We have enterprise customers that acquire new companies. Or they have a new site that they open up. >> It's a mishmash. >> Yeah, exactly. It's a New York based company and they acquire a team out in Sidney, Australia, right? Does your cloud tell you today that you have new users, or new applications that are in Sidney, and naturally just extend? No, it doesn't. Somebody has to look at the macro problem, look at "Where are all my workloads?" Do a bunch of engineering to make that work, right? We took it upon ourselves to say "Hey, you know what, twenty-four hours later, you're going to get a recommendation in the platform that says, 'okay, you have new set of applications, a new set of users coming from Sidney, Australia, what have you done about it?' Click a button, and then you expand on it. >> It's kind of like how IT became the easy way to run the data center. Before IT you had to be a PhD, and roll out, I mean, you know how it was, right? So you're kind of taking that same approach. Okay, well, Ramesh, great stuff. I want to do a followup, certainly with you on this. 'Cause you're in the middle of where this wave is going, this structural change, and certainly can participate in that Supercloud conversation. But for your company, what's going on there? Give us an update, customer activity, what's it like, you guys came out of stealth, what's been the reaction, give a plug for the company, who you going to hire, take a minute to plug it. >> Oh, wonderful, thank you. So, primary use cases are really around cloud networking. How do you go within the cloud, and across clouds, and to the cloud, right? So those are really the key use cases. We go after large enterprises predominantly, but any kind of mid enterprise that is extremely cloud oriented, has lot of workloads in the cloud, equally applicable, applicable there. So we have about 60 of the Fortune 500s that we are engaged in right now. Many of them are paying customers as well. >> How are they buying, service? Is it... >> Yeah. So we provide software that actually sits inside the customer's own administrative control, delivered as a service, that they can use to go- >> So on-premise hosting or in the cloud? >> Entirely in the cloud, delivered as a service, so they didn't need to take care of the maintenance and whatnot, but they just consume it from the cloud directly, okay? And so, where we are right now is essentially, I have a branch of repeatable use cases that many customers are employing us for. So again, building highways, many different ways to build highways, at the same time take care of the micro-segmentation requirements, and then importantly, this whole NetDevOps, right? This whole NetDevOps is a cultural shift that we have seen. So if you are a network engineer, NetDevOps seems like it's a foreign term, right? But if you are an operational engineer, then NetDevOps, you know exactly what to do. So bringing all those principles together, making sure that the networking teams are empowered to essentially embrace the cloud that I created, the single biggest thing that we have done, I would say done well, is we have built very well on top of the cloud provider. So we don't go against cloud-native services. They have done that really, really well. It makes no sense to go say, "I have a better transit gateway than you." No. Hands down, an AWS transit gateway, or an Azure V1 and whatnot, are some of the best services that they have provided. But what does that mean? >> How do you build software into it? >> Exactly, right? And so how can you build a layer of software on top, so that when you attach that into the applications, right, that you can actually get the experience required, you can get the security requirements and so forth. So that's kind of where we are. We're also humbled by essentially some of the mega partners that have taken a bet on us, sometimes to the extent that, we're a 70% company, and some of the partners that we are talking to actually are quite humbling, right? >> Hey, lot more resource. >> Exactly, yeah. >> And how many rounds of financing have you done? >> So we have done two rounds of financing, we have raised about 55,000,000 in capital, again, really great set of investors backing us up, and a strong sense of conviction, on kind of where we are going. >> Do you think you're early, or not? 'Cause, that's always probably the biggest scary, I can see the smile, is that what keeps you up at night? >> So, yeah, exactly, I go through these phases internally in my head. >> The vision's right on the money, no doubt about it. >> So when you win an opportunity, and we have like, a few dozen of these, right, when you win an opportunity, you're like, "Yes, absolutely, this is where it is," right, and you go for a week and you don't win something, and you're like, "Hey man, why are we not seeing this?" Right, and so you go through these cycles, but I'll tell you with conviction, the fact that customers are moving workloads into the public cloud, not in dozens but in like, the hundreds and the thousands, essentially means that they need something like this. >> And the cloud-native wave is driving big time. >> Exactly, right. And so, when the customer as a conversation with AWS, Azure, GCP, and they are privy to all the services, and we go in after that and talk about, "How do I put this together and help you focus on your outcomes?" That mentally moves them. >> It's a day zero opportunity, and then you got headroom beyond that. >> Exactly. So that's the positive side of it, and enterprises certainly are sometimes a little cautious about when they're up new technologies and so forth. It's a natural cycle. Fortunately, again we are humbled by the fact that we have a few dozen of the pioneering customers that are using our platform. That gives you the legitimacy for a start-up. >> You got great pedigree on clients. Real quick, final question. 30 seconds. What's the pain point, for people watching, when do they call you in? What's their environment look like, what are some of the things that give the signals that you guys got to get the call? >> If you have more than, let's say five or ten VPCs in the cloud, and you have not invested in building a networking platform that gives you the connectivity, the security, the observability, and the performance requirements, you absolutely have to do that, right? Because we have seen many, many customers, it goes from 5 to 50 to 100 within a week, and so you don't want to be caught essentially in the midst of that. >> One more final final question. Since you're a seasoned entrepreneur, you've been there, done that previous times, >> Yeah, I've got scars. (laughs) >> Yes, we've all got scar tissue. We've been doing theCube for 12 years, we've seen a lot of stuff. What's the difference now in this market that's different than before? What's exciting you? What's the big change? What's, in your opinion, happening now that's really important that people should pay attention to? >> Absolutely. A lot of it is driven by one, the focus on the cloud itself, right? That's driving a sense of speed like never before. Because in the infrastructure world, yeah you do it today, oh, you do it six months from now, you had some leeway. Here, networking security teams are being yelled at almost every single day, by the cloud guy saying, "You guys are not moving fast enough, fast enough, fast enough." So that thing is different. So it helps, going to shrink the sale cycle for us. So second big one is, nobody knows, essentially, the new set of use cases that are coming about. We are seeing patterns emerge in terms of new use cases almost every single day. Some days it's like completely on the other end of the spectrum. Like, "I'm only serverless and service mesh." On the other end, it's like, "I have a package application, I'm moving it to the cloud." Right? And so, we're learning a lot as well. >> A great time for Supercloud. >> Exactly. >> Do the cloud really well, make it super, bring it to other use cases, stitch it all together, make it easy to use, reduce the complexity, it's just evolution. >> Yeah. And our goal is essentially, enterprise customers should not be focused so much on building infrastructure this way, right? They should focus on users, application services, let vendors like us worry about the nitty-gritty underneath. >> Ramesh, thank you for this conversation. It's a great Cube conversation. In the middle of all the action, Supercloud, multi-cloud, the future is going to be very much cloud-based, IaaS, SaaS, connecting environments. This is the cloud 2.0, Superclouds. And this is what people are going to be working on. I'm John Furrier with theCube, thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vallante. >> Welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. As we exited the isolation economy last year, Supercloud is a term that we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this "Breaking Analysis," we address the 10 most frequently asked questions we get around Supercloud. Okay, let's review these frequently asked questions on Supercloud that we're going to try to answer today. Look at an industry that's full of hype and buzzwords. Why the hell does anyone need a new term? Aren't hyperscalers building out Superclouds? We'll try to answer why the term Supercloud connotes something different from hyperscale clouds. And we'll talk about the problems that Superclouds solve specifically, and we'll further define the critical aspects of a Supercloud architecture. We often get asked, "Isn't this just multi-cloud?" Well, we don't think so, and we'll explain why in this "Breaking Analysis." Now, in an earlier episode, we introduced the notion of super PaaS. Well, isn't a plain vanilla PaaS already a super PaaS? Again, we don't think so, and we'll explain why. Who will actually build and who are the players currently building Superclouds? What workloads and services will run on Superclouds? And eight A or number nine, what are some examples that we can share of Supercloud? And finally, we'll answer what you can expect next from us on Supercloud. Okay, let's get started. Why do we need another buzzword? Well, late last year ahead of re:Invent, we were inspired by a post from Jerry Chen called castles in the cloud. Now, in that blog post, he introduced the idea that there were submarkets emerging in cloud that presented opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs. That the cloud wasn't going to suck the hyperscalers, weren't going to suck all the value out of the industry. And so we introduced this notion of Supercloud to describe what we saw as a value layer emerging above the hyperscalers CAPEX gift, we sometimes call it. Now, it turns out that we weren't the only ones using the term, as both Cornell and MIT, have used the phrase in somewhat similar, but different contexts. The point is, something new was happening in the AWS and other ecosystems. It was more than IS and PaaS, and wasn't just SaaS running in the cloud. It was a new architecture that integrates infrastructure, platform and software as services, to solve new problems that the cloud vendors, in our view, weren't addressing by themselves. It seemed to us that the ecosystem was pursuing opportunities across clouds that went beyond conventional implementations of multi-cloud. And we felt there was a structural change going on at the industry level. The Supercloud metaphorically was highlighting. So that's the background on why we felt a new catch phrase was warranted. Love it or hate it, it's memorable and it's what we chose. Now, to that last point about structural industry transformation. Andy Rapaport is sometimes and often credited with identifying the shift from the vertically integrated IBM mainframe era to the fragmented PC microprocesor based era in his HBR article in 1991. In fact, it was David Moschella, who at the time was an IDC analyst who first introduced the concept in 1987, four years before Rapaport's article was published. Moschella saw that it was clear that Intel, Microsoft, Seagate and others would replace the system vendors and put that forth in a graphic that looked similar to the first two on this chart. We don't have to review the shift from IBM as the center of the industry to Wintel. That's well understood. What isn't as well known or accepted is what Moschella put out in his 2018 book called "Seeing Digital" which introduced the idea of the matrix that's shown on the right hand side of this chart. Moschella posited that new services were emerging, built on top of the internet and hyperscale clouds that would integrate other innovations and would define the next era of computing. He used the term matrix, because the conceptual depiction included, not only horizontal technology rows, like the cloud and the internet, but for the first time included connected industry verticals, the columns in this chart. Moschella pointed out that, whereas historically, industry verticals had a closed value chain or stack and ecosystem of R&D and production and manufacturing and distribution. And if you were in that industry, the expertise within that vertical generally stayed within that vertical and was critical to success. But because of digital and data, for the first time, companies were able to traverse industries jump across industries and compete because data enabled them to do that. Examples, Amazon and content, payments, groceries, Apple and payments, and content and so forth. There are many examples. Data was now this unifying enabler and this marked a change in the structure of the technology landscape. And Supercloud is meant to imply more than running in hyperscale clouds. Rather, it's the combination of multiple technologies, enabled by cloud scale with new industry participants from those verticals; financial services, and healthcare, and manufacturing, energy, media, and virtually all and any industry. Kind of an extension of every company is a software company. Basically, every company now has the opportunity to build their own cloud or Supercloud. And we'll come back to that. Let's first address what's different about Superclouds relative to hyperscale clouds. Now, this one's pretty straightforward and obvious, I think. Hyperscale clouds, they're walled gardens where they want your data in their cloud and they want to keep you there. Sure, every cloud player realizes that not all data will go to their particular cloud. So they're meeting customers where their data lives with initiatives like Amazon Outposts and Azure Arc and Google Antos. But at the end of the day, the more homogeneous they can make their environments, the better control, security, costs, and performance they can deliver. The more complex the environment, the more difficult it is to deliver on their brand promises. And, of course, the less margin that's left for them to capture. Will the hyperscalers get more serious about cross cloud services? Maybe, but they have plenty of work to do within their own clouds and within enabling their own ecosystems. They have a long way to go, a lot of runway. So let's talk about specifically, what problems Superclouds solve. We've all seen the stats from IDC or Gartner or whomever, that customers on average use more than one cloud, two clouds, three clouds, five clouds, 20 clouds. And we know these clouds operate in disconnected silos for the most part. And that's a problem, because each cloud requires different skills, because the development environment is different as is the operating environment. They have different APIs, different primitives, and different management tools that are optimized for each respective hyperscale cloud. Their functions and value props don't extend to their competitors' clouds for the most part. Why would they? As a result, there's friction when moving between different clouds. It's hard to share data. It's hard to move work. It's hard to secure and govern data. It's hard to enforce organizational edicts and policies across these clouds and on-prem. Supercloud is an architecture designed to create a single environment that enables management of workloads and data across clouds in an effort to take out complexity, accelerate application development, streamline operations, and share data safely, irrespective of location. It's pretty straightforward, but non-trivial, which is why I always ask a company's CEO and executives if stock buybacks and dividends will yield as much return as building out Superclouds that solve really specific and hard problems and create differential value. Okay, let's dig a bit more into the architectural aspects of Supercloud. In other words, what are the salient attributes of Supercloud? So, first and foremost, a Supercloud runs a set of specific services designed to solve a unique problem, and it can do so in more than one cloud. Superclouds leverage the underlying cloud native tooling of a hyperscale cloud, but they're optimized for a specific objective that aligns with the problem that they're trying to solve. For example, Supercloud might be optimized for lowest cost or lowest latency or sharing data or governing or securing that data or higher performance for networking, for example. But the point is, the collection of services that is being delivered is focused on a unique value proposition that is not being delivered by the hyperscalers across clouds. A Supercloud abstracts the underlying and siloed primitives of the native PaaS layer from the hyperscale cloud, and then using its own specific platform as a service tooling, creates a common experience across clouds for developers and users. And it does so in the most efficient manner, meaning it has the metadata knowledge and management capabilities that can optimize for latency, bandwidth, or recovery or data sovereignty, or whatever unique value that Supercloud is delivering for the specific use case in their domain. And a Supercloud comprises a super PaaS capability that allows ecosystem partners through APIs to add incremental value on top of the Supercloud platform to fill gaps, accelerate features, and of course, innovate. The services can be infrastructure related, they could be application services, they could be data services, security services, user services, et cetera, designed and packaged to bring unique value to customers. Again, that hyperscalers are not delivering across clouds or on premises. Okay, so another common question we get is, "Isn't that just multi-cloud?" And what we'd say to that is yeah, "Yes, but no." You can call it multi-cloud 2.0, if you want. If you want to use, it's kind of a commonly used rubric. But as Dell's Chuck Whitten proclaimed at Dell Technologies World this year, multi-cloud, by design, is different than multi-cloud by default. Meaning, to date, multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of what we've called multi-vendor or of M&A. You buy a company and they happen to use Google cloud. And so you bring it in. And when you look at most so-called multi-cloud implementations, you see things like an on-prem stack, which is wrapped in a container and hosted on a specific cloud. Or increasingly, a technology vendor has done the work of building a cloud native version of their stack and running it on a specific cloud. But historically, it's been a unique experience within each cloud, with virtually no connection between the cloud silos. Supercloud sets out to build incremental value across clouds and above hyperscale CAPEX that goes beyond cloud compatibility within each cloud. So, if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0, that's fine, but we chose to call it Supercloud. Okay, so at this point you may be asking, "Well isn't PaaS already a version of Supercloud?" And again, we would say, "No." That Supercloud and its corresponding super PaaS layer, which is a prerequisite, gives the freedom to store, process, and manage and secure and connect islands of data across a continuum with a common experience across clouds. And the services offered are specific to that Supercloud and will vary by each offering. OpenShift, for example, can be used to construct a super PaaS, but in and of itself, isn't a super PaaS, it's generic. A super PaaS might be developed to support, for instance, ultra low latency database work. It would unlikely, again, taking the OpenShift example, it's unlikely that off the shelf OpenShift would be used to develop such a low latency, super PaaS layer for ultra low latency database work. The point is, Supercloud and its inherent super PaaS will be optimized to solve specific problems like that low latency example for distributed databases or fast backup in recovery for data protection and ransomware, or data sharing or data governance. Highly specific use cases that the Supercloud is designed to solve for. Okay, another question we often get is, "Who has a Supercloud today and who's building a Supercloud and who are the contenders?" Well, most companies that consider themselves cloud players will, we believe, be building or are building Superclouds. Here's a common ETR graphic that we like to show with net score or spending momentum on the Y axis, and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR surveys on the X axis. And we've randomly chosen a number of players that we think are in the Supercloud mix. And we've included the hyperscalers because they are enablers. Now, remember, this is a spectrum of maturity. It's a maturity model. And we've added some of those industry players that we see building Superclouds like Capital One, Goldman Sachs, Walmart. This is in deference to Moschella's observation around the matrix and the industry structural changes that are going on. This goes back to every company being a software company. And rather than pattern match and outdated SaaS model, we see new industry structures emerging where software and data and tools specific to an industry will lead the next wave of innovation and bring in new value that traditional technology companies aren't going to solve. And the hyperscalers aren't going to solve. We've talked a lot about Snowflake's data cloud as an example of Supercloud. After being at Snowflake Summit, we're more convinced than ever that they're headed in this direction. VMware is clearly going after cross cloud services, perhaps creating a new category. Basically, every large company we see either pursuing Supercloud initiatives or thinking about it. Dell showed Project Alpine at Dell Tech World. That's a Supercloud. Snowflake introducing a new application development capability based on their super PaaS, our term, of course. They don't use the phrase. Mongo, Couchbase, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Veeam, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. Yeah, all of those guys. Yes, Cisco and HPE. Even though on theCUBE at HPE Discover, Fidelma Russo said on theCUBE, she wasn't a fan of cloaking mechanisms. (Dave laughing) But then we talked to HPE's head of storage services, Omer Asad, and he's clearly headed in the direction that we would consider Supercloud. Again, those cross cloud services, of course, their emphasis is connecting as well on-prem. That single experience, which traditionally has not existed with multi-cloud or hybrid. And we're seeing the emergence of smaller companies like Aviatrix and Starburst and Clumio and others that are building versions of Superclouds that solve for a specific problem for their customers. Even ISVs like Adobe, ADP, we've talked to UiPath. They seem to be looking at new ways to go beyond the SaaS model and add value within their cloud ecosystem, specifically around data as part of their and their customer's digital transformations. So yeah, pretty much every tech vendor with any size or momentum, and new industry players are coming out of hiding and competing, building Superclouds that look a lot like Moschella's matrix, with machine intelligence and blockchains and virtual realities and gaming, all enabled by the internet and hyperscale cloud CAPEX. So it's moving fast and it's the future in our opinion. So don't get too caught up in the past or you'll be left behind. Okay, what about examples? We've given a number in the past but let's try to be a little bit more specific. Here are a few we've selected and we're going to answer the two questions in one section here. What workloads and services will run in Superclouds and what are some examples? Let's start with analytics. Our favorite example of Snowflake. It's one of the furthest along with its data cloud, in our view. It's a Supercloud optimized for data sharing and governance, and query performance, and security, and ecosystem enablement. When you do things inside of that data cloud, what we call a super data cloud. Again, our term, not theirs. You can do things that you could not do in a single cloud. You can't do this with Redshift. You can't do this with SQL server. And they're bringing new data types now with merging analytics or at least accommodate analytics and transaction type data and bringing open source tooling with things like Apache Iceberg. And so, it ticks the boxes we laid out earlier. I would say that a company like Databricks is also in that mix, doing it, coming at it from a data science perspective trying to create that consistent experience for data scientists and data engineering across clouds. Converge databases, running transaction and analytic workloads is another example. Take a look at what Couchbase is doing with Capella and how it's enabling stretching the cloud to the edge with arm based platforms and optimizing for low latency across clouds, and even out to the edge. Document database workloads, look at Mongo DB. A very developer friendly platform that where the Atlas is moving toward a Supercloud model, running document databases very, very efficiently. How about general purpose workloads? This is where VMware comes into play. Very clearly, there's a need to create a common operating environment across clouds and on-prem and out to the edge. And I say, VMware is hard at work on that, managing and moving workloads and balancing workloads, and being able to recover very quickly across clouds for everyday applications. Network routing, take a look at what Aviatrix is doing across clouds. Industry workloads, we see Capital One. It announced its cost optimization platform for Snowflake, piggybacking on Snowflake's Supercloud or super data cloud. And in our view, it's very clearly going to go after other markets. It's going to test it out with Snowflake, optimizing on AWS, and it's going to expand to other clouds as Snowflake's business and those other clouds grows. Walmart working with Microsoft to create an on-premed Azure experience that's seamless. Yes, that counts, on-prem counts. If you can create that seamless and continuous experience, identical experience from on-prem to a hyperscale cloud, we would include that as a Supercloud. We've written about what Goldman is doing. Again, connecting its on-prem data and software tooling, and other capabilities to AWS for scale. And you can bet dollars to donuts that Oracle will be building a Supercloud in healthcare with its Cerner acquisition. Supercloud is everywhere you look. So I'm sorry, naysayers, it's happening all around us. So what's next? Well, with all the industry buzz and debate about the future, John Furrier and I have decided to host an event in Palo Alto. We're motivated and inspired to further this conversation. And we welcome all points of view, positive, negative, multi-cloud, Supercloud, HyperCloud, all welcome. So theCUBE on Supercloud is coming on August 9th out of our Palo Alto studios. We'll be running a live program on the topic. We've reached out to a number of industry participants; VMware, Snowflake, Confluent, Skyhigh Security, G. Written House's new company, HashiCorp, CloudFlare. We've hit up Red Hat and we expect many of these folks will be in our studios on August 9th. And we've invited a number of industry participants as well that we're excited to have on. From industry, from financial services, from healthcare, from retail, we're inviting analysts, thought leaders, investors. We're going to have more detail in the coming weeks, but for now, if you're interested, please reach out to me or John with how you think you can advance the discussion, and we'll see if we can fit you in. So mark your calendars, stay tuned for more information. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson who handles production and manages the podcast for "Breaking Analysis." And I want to thank Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight. They help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does a lot of editing and appreciate you posting on SiliconANGLE, Rob. Thanks to all of you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search, breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Or DM me @DVallante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. And please, do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. We'll be at AWS NYC summit next Tuesday, July 12th. So if you're there, please do stop by and say hello to theCUBE. It's at the Javits Center. This is Dave Vallante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (slow music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2022. We're here at the Aria in Las Vegas. This is day two, Dave Vallante with David Nicholson. You know with theCUBE, we talked about the cloud a lot and the company that started the cloud, AWS. Jeanna James is here. She's the Global Alliance Manager at AWS and a data protection expert. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE again. >> Thanks so much for having me, Dave. It's great to be here in person with everyone. >> Yes, you know, we've done a few events live more than a handful. Thanks a lot to AWS. We've done a number. We did the DC Summits. Of course, re:Invent was huge out here last year. That was right in between the sort of variant Omicron hitting. And it was a great, great show. We thought, okay, now we're back. And of course we're kind of back, but we're here and it's good to have you. So Veeam, AWS, I mean, they certainly embrace the cloud. What's your relationship there? >> Yeah, so Veeam is definitely a strong partner with AWS. And as you know, AWS is really a, you know, we have so many different services, and our customers and our partners are looking at how can I leverage those services and how do I back this up, right? Whether they're running things on premises and they want to put a copy of the data into Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Infrequent Access or Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive, all of these different technologies, you know Veeam supports them to get a copy from on-prem into AWS. But then the great thing is, you know, it's nice to have a copy of your data in the cloud but you might want to be able to do something with it once it gets there, right? So Veeam supports things like Amazon EC2 and Amazon EKS and EKS Anywhere. So those customers can actually recover their data directly into Amazon EC2 and EKS Anywhere. >> So we, of course, talked a lot about ransomware and that's important in that context of what you just mentioned. What are you seeing with the customers when you talk to them about ransomware? What are they asking AWS to do? Maybe we could start unpacking that a bit. >> Yeah, ransomware is definitely a huge topic today. We're constantly having that conversation. And, you know, five years ago there was a big malware attack that was called the NotPetya virus. And at that time it was based on Petya which was a ransomware virus, and it was designed to go in and, you know, lock in the data but it also went after the backup data, right? So it hold all of that data hostage so that people couldn't recover. Well, NotPetya was based on that but it was worse because it was the seek and destroy virus. So with the ransomware, you can pay a fee and get your data back. But with this NotPetya, it just went in, it propagated itself. It started installing on servers and laptops, anything it could touch and just deleting everything. And at that time, I actually happened to be in the hospital. So hospitals, all types of companies got hit by this attack. And my father had been rushed to the emergency room. I happened to be there. So I saw live what really was happening. And honestly, these network guys were running around shutting down laptops, taking them away from doctors and nurses, shutting off desktops. Putting like taping on pictures that said, do not turn on, right? And then, the nurses and staff were having to kind of take notes. And it was just, it was a mess, it was bad. >> Putting masks on the laptops essentially. >> Yeah, so just-- >> Disinfecting them or trying to. Wow, unplugging things from the network. >> Yes, because, you know, and that attack really demonstrated why you really need a copy of the data in the cloud or somewhere besides tape, right? So what happened at that time is if you lose 10 servers or something, you might be able to recover from tape, but if you lose a hundred or a thousand servers and all of your laptops, all in hours, literally a matter of hours, that is a big event, it's going to take time to recover. And so, you know, if you put a copy of the backup data in Amazon S3 and you can turn on that S3 Object Lock for immutability, you're able to recover in the cloud. >> So, can we go back to this hospital story? 'Cause that takes us inside the disaster potential. So they shut everything down, basically shut down the network so they could figure out what's going on and then fence it off, I presume. So you got, wow, so what happened? First of all, did they have to go manual, I mean? >> They had to do everything manually. It was really a different experience. >> Going back to the 1970s, I mean. >> It was, and they didn't know really how to do it, right? So they basically had kind of yellow notepads and they would take notes. Well, then let's say the doctor took notes, well, then the nurse couldn't read the notes. And even over the PA, you know, there was an announcement and it was pretty funny. Don't send down lab work request with just the last name. We need to know the first name, the last name, and the date of birth. There are multiple Joneses in this hospital so yeah (giggles). >> This is going to sound weird. But so when I was a kid, when you worked retail, if there was a charge for, you know, let's say $5.74 and, you know, they gave you, you know, amount of money, you would give them, you know, the penny back, count up in your head that's 75, give them a quarter and then give them the change. Today, of course, it works differently. The computer tells you, how much change to give. It's like they didn't know what to do. They didn't know how to do it manually 'cause they never had the manual process. >> That's exactly right. Some of the nurses and doctors had never done it manually. >> Wow, okay, so then technically they have to figure out what happened so that takes some time. However they do that. That's kind of not your job, right? I dunno if you can help with that or not. Maybe Amazon has some tooling to do that, probably does. And then you've got to recover from somewhere, not tape ideally. That's like the last resort. You put it on a Chevy Truck, Chevy Truck Access Method called CTAM, ship it in. That takes days, right? If you're lucky. So what's the ideal recovery. I presume it's a local copy somewhere. >> So the ideal-- >> It's fenced. >> In that particular situation, right? They had to really air gap so they couldn't even recover on those servers and things like that-- >> Because everything was infected on on-prem. >> Because everything was just continuing to propagate. So ideally you would have a copy of your data in AWS and you would turn on Object Lock which is the immutability, very simple check mark in Veeam to enable that. And that then you would be able to kick off your restores in Amazon EC2, and start running your business so. >> Yeah, this ties into the discussion of the ransomware survey where, you know, NotPetya was not seeking to extort money, it was seeking to just simply arrive and destroy. In the ransomware survey, some percentage of clients who paid ransom, never got their data back anyway. >> Oh my. >> So you almost have to go into this treating-- >> Huge percentage. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Like a third. >> Yeah, when you combine the ones where there was no request for ransom, you know, for any extorted funds, and then the ones where people paid but got nothing back. I know Maersk Line, the shipping company is a well studied example of what happened with NotPetya. And it's kind of chilling because what you describe, people running around shutting down laptops because they're seeing all of their peers' screens go black. >> Yes, that's exactly what's happening. >> And then you're done. So that end point is done at that point. >> So we've seen this, I always say there are these milestones in attacks. I mean, Stuxnet proved what a nation state could do and others learned from that, NotPetya, now SolarWinds. And people are freaking out about that because it's like maybe we haven't seen the last of that 'cause that was highly stealth, not a lot of, you know, Russian language in the malware. They would delete a lot of the malware. So very highly sophisticated island hopping, self forming malware. So who knows what's next? We don't know. And so you're saying the ideal is to have an air gap that's physically separate. maybe you can have one locally as well, we've heard about that too, and then you recover from that. What are you seeing in terms of your customers recovering from that? Is it taking minutes, hours, days? >> So that really de depends on the customers SLAs, right? And so with AWS, we offer multiple tiers of storage classes that provide different SLA recovery times, right? So if you're okay with data taking longer to recovery, you can use something like Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive. But if it's mission critical data, you probably want to put it in Amazon S3 and turn on that Object Lock for immutability sake. So nothing can be overwritten or deleted. And that way you can kick off your recoveries directly in AWS. >> One of the demos today that we saw, the recovery was exceedingly fast with a very small data loss so that's obviously a higher level SLA. You got to get what you pay for. A lot of businesses need that. I think it was like, I didn't think it was, they said four minutes data loss which is good. I'm glad they didn't say zero data loss 'cause there's really no such thing. So you've got experience, Jeanna, in the data protection business. How have you seen data protection evolve in the last decade and where do you see it going? Because let's face it, I mean when AWS started, okay, it had S3, 15 years ago, 16 years ago, whatever it was. Now, it's got all these tools as you mentioned. So you've learned, you've innovated along with your customers. You listened to your customers. That's your whole thing, customer obsession. >> That's right. >> What are they telling you? What do you see as the future? >> Definitely, we see more and more containerization. So you'll see with the Kasten by Veeam product, right? The ability to protect Amazon EKS, and Amazon EKS Anywhere, we see customers really want to take advantage of the ability to containerize and not have to do as much management, right? So much of what we call undifferentiated heavy lifting, right? So I think you'll see continued innovation in the area of containerization, you know, serverless computing. Obviously with AWS, we have a lot going on with artificial intelligence and machine learning. And, you know, the backup partners, they really have a unique capability in that they do touch a lot of data, right? So I think in the future, you know, things around artificial intelligence and machine learning and data analytics, all of those things could certainly be very applicable for folks like Veeam. >> Yeah, you know, we give a lot of, we acknowledge that backup is different from recovery but we often fall prey to making the mistake of saying, oh, well your data is available in X number of minutes. Well, that's great. What's it available to? So let's say I have backed up to S3 and it's immutable. By the way my wife keeps calling me and saying she wants mutability for me. (Jeanna laughs) I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. But now I've got my backup in S3, begs the question, okay, well, now what do I do with it? Well, guess what you mentioned EC2. >> That's right. >> The ability exists to create a restore environment so that not only is the data available but the services are actually online and available-- >> That's right-- >> Which is what you want with EKS and Kasten. >> So if the customer is running, you know, Kubernetes, they're able to recover as well. So yes, definitely, I see more and more services like that where customers are able to recover their environment. It might be more than just a server, right? So things are changing. It's not just one, two, three, it's the whole environment. >> So speaking of the future, one of the last physical theCUBE interviews that Andy Jassy did with us. John Furrier and myself, we were asking about the edge and he had a great quote. He said, "Oh yeah, we look at the data center as just another edge node." I thought that was good classic Andy Jassy depositioning. And so it was brilliant. But nonetheless, we've talked a little bit about the edge. I was interviewing Verizon last week, and they told me they're putting outposts everywhere, like leaning in big time. And I was saying, okay, but outpost, you know, what can you do with outpost today? Oh, you can run RDS. And, you know, there's a few ecosystem partners that support it, and he's like, oh no, we're going to push Amazon. So what are you seeing at the edge in terms of data protection? Are customers giving you any feedback at this point? >> Definitely, so edge is a big deal, right? Because some workloads require that low latency, and things like outpost allow the customers to take advantage of the same API sets that they love in, you know, AWS today, like S3, right? For example. So they're able to deploy an outpost and meet some of those specific guidelines that they might have around compliance or, you know, various regulations, and then have that same consistent operational stance whether they're on-prem or in AWS. So we see that as well as the Snowball devices, you know, they're being really hardened so they can run in areas that don't have connected, you know, interfaces to the internet, right? So you've got them running in like ships or, you know, airplanes, or a field somewhere out in nowhere of this field, right? So lots of interesting things going on there. And then of course with IoT and the internet of things and so many different devices out there, we just see a lot of change in the industry and how data is being collected, how data's being created so a lot of excitement. >> Well, so the partners are key for outposts obviously 'cause you can't do it all yourself. It's almost, okay, Amazon now in a data center or an edge node. It's like me skating. It's like, hmm, I'm kind of out of my element there but I think you're learning, right? So, but partners are key to be able to support that model. >> Yes, definitely our partners are key, Veeam, of course, supports the outpost. They support the Snowball Edge devices. They do a lot. Again, they pay attention to their customers, right? Their customers are moving more and more workloads into AWS. So what do they do? They start to support those workloads, right? Because the customers also want that consistent, like we say, the consistent APIs with AWS. Well, they also want the consistent data protection strategy with Veeam. >> Well, the cloud is expanding. It's no longer just a bunch of remote services somewhere out there in the cloud. It's going to data centers. It's going out to the edge. It's going to local zones. You guys just announced a bunch of new local zones. I'm sure there are a lot of outposts in there, expanding your regions. Super cloud is forming right before our eyes. Jeanna, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you. It's been great to be here. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's coverage. This is day two. We're going all day here, myself, Dave Nicholson, cohost. Check out siliconangle.com. For all the news, thecube.net, wikibon.com. We'll be right back right after this short break. (bright upbeat music)

(light music playing) >> Welcome back to VEEAMON 2022 in Las Vegas. We're at the Aria. This is theCUBE and we're covering two days of VEEAMON. We've done a number of VEEAMONs before, we did Miami, we did New Orleans, we did Chicago and we're, we're happy to be back live after two years of virtual VEEAMONs. I'm Dave Vellante. My co-host is David Nicholson. Eric Herzog is here. You think he's, Eric's been on theCUBE, I think more than any other guest, including Pat Gelsinger, who at one point was the number one guest. Eric Herzog, CMO of INFINIDAT great to see you again. >> Great, Dave, thank you. Love to be on theCUBE. And of course notice my Hawaiian shirt, except I now am supporting an INFINIDAT badge on it. (Dave laughs) Look at that. >> Is that part of the shirt or is that a clip-on? >> Ah, you know, one of those clip-ons but you know, it looks good. Looks good. >> Hey man, what are you doing at VEEAMON? I mean, you guys started this journey into data protection several years ago. I remember we were actually at one of their competitors' events when you first released it, but tell us what's going on with Veeam. >> So we do a ton of stuff with Veeam. We do custom integration. We got some integration on the snapshotting side, but we do everything and we have a purpose built backup appliance known as InfiniGuard. It works with Veeam. We also actually have some customers who use our regular primary storage device as a backup target. The InfiniGuard product will do the data reduction, the dedupe compression, et cetera. The standard product does not, it's just a standard high performance array. We will compress the data, but we have customers that do it either way. We have a couple customers that started with the InfiniBox and then transitioned to the InfiniGuard, realizing that why would you put it on regular storage? Why not go to something that's customized for it? So we do that. We do stuff in the field with them. We've been at all the VEEAMONs since the, since like, I think the second one was the first one we came to. We're doing the virtual one as well as the live one. So we've got a little booth inside, but we're also doing the virtual one today as well. So really strong work with Veeam, particularly at the field level with the sales guys and in the channel. >> So when INFINIDAT does something, you guys go hardcore, high end, fast recovery, you just, you know, reliable, that's kind of your brand. Do you see this movement into data protection as kind of an adjacency to your existing markets? Is it a land and expand strategy? Can you kind of explain the strategy there. >> Ah, so it's actually for us a little bit of a hybrid. So we have several accounts that started with InfiniBox and now have gone with the InfiniGuard. So they start with primary storage and go with secondary storage/modern data protection. But we also have, in fact, we just got a large PO from a Fortune 50, who was buying the InfiniGuard first and now is buying our InfiniBox. >> Both ways. Okay. >> All flash array. And, but they started with backup first and then moved to, so we've got them moving both directions. And of course, now that we have a full portfolio, our original product, the InfiniBox, which was a hybrid array, outperformed probably 80 to 85% of the all flash arrays, 'cause the way we use DRAM. And what's so known as our mural cash technology. So we could do very well, but there is about, you know, 15, 20% of the workloads we could not outperform the competition. So then we had an all flash array and purpose built backup. So we can do, you know, what I'll say is standard enterprise storage, high performance enterprise storage. And then of course, modern data protection with our partnerships such as what we do with Veeam and we've incorporated across the entire portfolio, intense cyber resilience technology. >> Why does the world, Eric, need another purpose built backup appliance? What do you guys bring that is filling a gap in the marketplace? >> Well, the first thing we brought was much higher performance. So when you look at the other purpose built backup appliances, it's been about our ability to have incredibly high performance. The second area has been CapEx and OpEx reduction. So for example, we have a cloud service provider who happens to be in South Africa. They had 14 purpose built backup appliances from someone else, seven in one data center and seven in another. Now they have two InfiniGuards, one in each data center handling all of their backup. You know, they're selling backup as a service. They happen to be using Veeam as well as one other backup company. So if you're the cloud provider from their perspective, they just dramatically reduce their CapEx and OpEx. And of course they've made it easier for them. So that's been a good story for us, that ability to consolidation, whether it be on primary storage or secondary storage. We have a very strong play with cloud providers, particularly those meeting them in small that have to compete with the hyperscalers right. They don't have the engineering of Amazon or Google, right? They can't compete with what the Azure guys have got, but because the way both the InfiniGuard and the InfiniBox work, they could dramatically consolidate workloads. We probably got 30 or 40 midsize and actually several members of the top 10 telcos use us. And when they do their clouds, both their internal cloud, but actually the clouds that are actually running the transmissions and the traffic, it actually runs on InfiniBox. One of them has close to 200 petabytes of InfiniBox and InfiniBox, all flash technology running one of the largest telcos on the planet in a cloud configuration. So all that's been very powerful for us in driving revenue. >> So phrases of the week have been air gap, logical air gap, immutable. Where does InfiniGuard fit into that universe? And what's the profile of the customer that's going to choose InfiniGuard as the target where they're immutable, Write Once Read Many, data is going to live. >> So we did, we announced our InfiniSafe technology first on the InfiniGuard, which actually earlier this year. So we have what I call the four legs of the stool of cyber resilience. One is immutable snapshots, but that's only part of it. Second is logical air gapping, and we can do both local and remote and we can provide and combine local with remote. So for example, what that air gap does is separate the management plane from the actual data plane. Okay. So in this case, the Veeam data backup sets. So the management cannot touch that immutable, can't change it, can't delete it. can't edit it. So management is separated once you start and say, I want to do an immutable snap of two petabytes of Veeam backup dataset. Then we just do that. And the air gap does it, but then you could take the local air gap because as you know, from inception to the end of an attack can be close to 300 days, which means there could be a fire. There could be a tornado, there could be a hurricane, there could be an earthquake. And in the primary data center, So you might as well have that air gap just as you would do- do a remote for disaster recovery and business continuity. Then we have the ability to create a fenced forensic environment to evaluate those backup data sets. And we can do that actually on the same device. That is the purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at the architectural, these are public from our competitors, including the guys that are in sort of Hopkinton/Austin, Texas. You can see that they show a minimum of two physical devices. And in many cases, a third, we can do that with one. So not only do we get the fence forensic environment, just like they do, but we do it with reduction, both CapEx and OpEx. Purpose built backup is very high performance. And then the last thing is our ability to recover. So some people talk about rapid recovery, I would say, they dunno what they're talking about. So when we launched the InfiniGuard with InfiniSafe, we did a live demo, 1.5 petabytes, a Veeam backup dataset. We recovered it in 12 minutes. So once you've identified and that's on the InfiniGuard. On the InfiniBox, once you've identified a good copy of data to do the recovery where you're free of malware ransomware, we can do the recovery in three to five seconds. >> Okay. >> So really, really quick. Actually want to double click on something because people talk about immutable copies, immutable snapshots in particular, what have the actual advances been? I mean, is this simply a setting that maybe we didn't set for retention at some time in the past, or if you had to engineer something net new into a system so to provide that logical air gap. >> So what's net new is the air gapping part. Immutable snapshots have been around, you know, before we were on screen, you talked about WORM, Write Once Read Many. Well, since I'm almost 70 years old, I actually know what that means. When you're 30 or 40 or 50, you probably don't even know what a WORM is. Okay. And the real use of immutable snapshots, it was to replace WORM which was an optical technology. And what was the primary usage? Regulatory and compliance, healthcare, finance and publicly traded companies that were worried about. The SEC or the EU or the Japanese finance ministry coming down on them because they're out of compliance and regulatory. That was the original use of immutable snap. Then people were, well, wait a second. Malware ransomware could attack me. And if I got something that's not changeable, that makes it tougher. So the real magic of immutability was now creating the air gap part. Immutability has been around, I'd say 25 years. I mean, WORMs sort of died back when I was at Mac store the first time. So that was 1990-ish is when WORMs sort of fell away. And there have been immutable snapshots from most of the major storage vendors, as well as a lot of the small vendors ever since they came out, it's kind of like a checkbox item because again, regulatory and compliance, you're going to sell to healthcare, finance, public trade. If you don't have the immutable snapshot, then they don't have their compliance and regulatory for SEC or tax purposes, right? With they ever end up in an audit, you got to produce data. And no one's using a WORM drive anymore to my knowledge. >> I remember the first storage conference I ever went to was in Monterey. It had me in the early 1980s, 84 maybe. And it was a optical disc drive conference. The Jim Porter of optical. >> Yep. (laughs) >> I forget what the guy's name was. And I remember somebody coming up to me, I think it was like Bob Payton rest his soul, super smart strategy guy said, this is never going to happen because of the cost and that's what it was. And now you've got that capability on flash, you know, hard disk, et cetera. >> Right. >> So the four pillars, immutability, the air gap, both local and remote, the fence forensics and the recovery speed. Right? >> Right. Pick up is one thing. Recovery is everything. Those are the four pillars, right? >> Those are the four things. >> And your contention is that those four things together differentiate you from the competition. You mentioned, you know, the big competition, but how unique is this in the marketplace, those capabilities and how difficult is it to replicate? >> So first of all, if someone really puts their engineering hat to it, it's not that hard to replicate. It takes a while. Particularly if you're doing an enterprise, for example, our solutions all have a hundred percent availability guarantee. That's hard to do. Most guys have seven nines. >> That's hard. >> We really will guarantee a hundred percent availability. We offer an SLA that's included when you buy. We don't charge extra for it. It's like if you want it, like you just get it. Second thing is really making sure on the recovery side is the hardest part, particularly on a purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at other people and you delve into their public material, press releases, white paper, support documentation. No one's talking about. Yeah, we can take a 1.5 petabyte Veeam backup data set and make it available in 12 minutes and 12 seconds, which was the exact time that we did on our live demo when we launched the product in February of 2022. No one's talking that. On primary storage, you're hearing some of the vendors such as my old employer that also who, also starts with an "I", talk about a recovery time of two to three hours once you have a known good copy. On primary storage, once we have a known good copy, we're talking three to five seconds for that copy to be available. So that's just sort of the power of the snapshot technology, how we manage our metadata and what we've done, which previous to cyber resiliency, we were known for our replication capability and our snapshot capability from an enterprise class data store. That's what people said. INFINIDAT really knows how to do the replication snapshot. I remember our founder was one of the technical founders of EMC for a product known as the Symmetric, which then became the DMAX, the VMAX and is now is the PowerMax. That was invented by the guy who founded INFINIDAT. So that team has the real chops at enterprise high-end storage to the global fortune 2000. And what are the key feature checkbox items they need that's in both the InfiniBox and also in the InfiniGuard. >> So the business case for cyber resiliency is changing. As Dave said, we've had a big dose last several months, you know, couple years actually, of the importance of cyber resiliency, given all the ransomware tax, et cetera. But it sounds like the business case is shifting really focused on avoiding that risk, avoiding that downtime time versus the cost. The cost is always important. I mean, you got a consolidation play here, right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Dedupe, does dedupe come into play? >> So on the InfiniGuard we do both dedupe and compression. On the InfiniBox we only do compression. So we do have data reduction. It depends on which product you're using from a Veeam perspective. Most of that now is with the InfiniGuard. So you get the block level dedupe and you get compression. And if you can do both, depending on the data set, we do both. >> How does that affect recovery time? >> Yeah, good question. >> So it doesn't affect recovery times. >> Explain why. >> So first of all, when you're doing a backup data set, the final final recovery, you recovered the backup data set, whether it's Veeam or one of their competitors, you actually make it available to the backup administrator to do a full restore of a backup data set. Okay. So in that case, we get it ready and expose it to the Veeam admin or some other backup admin. And then they launch the Veeam software or the other software and do a restore. Okay. So it's really a two step process on the secondary storage model and actually three. First identifying a known good backup copy. Second then we recover, which is again 12, 13 minutes. And then the backup admin's got to do a, you know, a restore of the backup 'cause it's backup data set in the format of backup, which is different from every backup vendor. So we support that. We get it ready to go. And then whether it's a Veeam backup administrator and quite honestly, from our perspective, most of our customers in the global fortune 2000, 25% of the fortune 50 use INIFINIDAT products. 25% and we're a tiny company. So we must have some magic fairy dust that appeals to the biggest companies on the planet. But most of our customers in that area and actually say probably in the fortune 500 actually use two to three different backup packages. So we can support all those on a single InfiniGuard or multiples depending on how big their backup data sets. Our biggest InfiniGuard is 50 petabytes counting the data reduction technology. So we get that ready. On the InfiniBox, the recovery really is, you know, a couple of seconds and in that case, it's primary data in block format. So we just make that available. So on the InfiniBox, the recovery is once, well two. Identifying a known good copy, first step, then just doing recovery and it's available 'cause it's blocked data. >> And that recovery doesn't include movement of a whole bunch of data. It's essentially realignment of pointers to where the good data is. >> Right. >> Now in the InfiniBox as well as in InfiniGuard. >> No, it would be, So in the case of that, in the case of the InfiniGuard, it's a full recovery of a backup data set. >> Okay. >> So the backup software just launches and it sees, >> Okay. >> your backup one of Veeam and just starts doing a restore with the Veeam restoration technology. Okay? >> Okay. >> In the case of the block, as long as the physical InfiniBox, if that was the primary storage and then filter box is not damaged when you make it available, it's available right away to the apps. Now, if you had an issue with the app side or the physical server side, and now you're pointing new apps and you had to reload stuff on that side, you have to point it at that InfiniBox which has the data. And then you got to wait for the servers and the SAP or Oracle or Mongo, Cassandra to recognize, oh, this is my primary storage. So it depends on the physical configuration on the server side and the application perspective, how bad were the apps damaged? So let's take malware. Malware is even worse because you either destroying data or messing, playing with the app so that the app is now corrupted as well as the data is corrupted. So then it's going to take longer the block data's ready, the SAP workload. And if the SAP somehow was compromised, which is a malware thing, not a ransomware thing, they got to reload a good copy of SAP before it can see the data 'cause the malware attacked the application as well as the data. Ransomware doesn't do that. It just holds it for ransom and it encrypts. >> So this is exactly what we're talking about. When we talk about operational recovery and automation, Eric is addressing the reality that it doesn't just end at the line above some arbitrary storage box, you know, reaching up real recovery, reaches up into the application space and it's complicated. >> That's when you're actually recovered. >> Right. >> When the application- >> Well, think of it like a disaster. >> Okay. >> Yes, right. >> I'll knock on woods since I was born and still live in California. Dave too. Let's assume there's a massive earthquake in the bay area in LA. >> Let's not. >> Okay. Let's yes, but hypothetically and the data center's cat five. It doesn't matter what they're, they're all toast. Okay. Couple weeks later it's modern. You know, people figure out what to do and certain buildings don't fall down 'cause of the way earthquake standards are in California now. So there's data available. They move into temporary space. Okay. Data's sitting there in the Colorado data center and they could do a restore. Well, they can't do a restore. How many service did they need? Had they reloaded all of the application software to do a restoration. What happened to the people? If no one got injured, like in the 1989 earthquake in California, very few people got injured yet cost billions of dollars. But everyone was watching this San Francisco giants played in Oakland, >> I remember >> so no one was on the road. >> Al Michael's. >> Epic moment. >> Imagine it's in the middle of commute time in LA and San Francisco, hundreds of thousands of people. What if it's your data center team? Right? So there's a whole bunch around disaster recovery and business country that have nothing to do with the storage, the people, what your process. So I would argue that malware ransomware is a disaster and it's exactly the same thing. You know, you got the known good copy. You've got okay. You're sure that the SAP and Oracle, especially on the malware side, weren't compromised. On the ransomware side, you don't have to worry about that. And those things, you got to take a look at just as if it, I would argue malware and ransomware is a disaster and you need to have a process just like you would. If there was an earthquake, a fire or a flood in the data center, you need a similar process. That's slightly different, but the same thing, servers, people, software, the data itself. And when you have that all mapped out, that's how you do successful malware ransomeware recovery. It's a different type of disaster. >> It's absolutely a disaster. It comes down to business continuity and be able to transact business with as little disruption as possible. We heard today from the keynotes and then Jason Buffington came on about the preponderance of ransomware. Okay. We know that. But then the interesting stat was the percentage of customers that paid the ransom about a third weren't able to recover. And so 'cause you kind of had this feeling of all right, well, you know, see it on, you know, CNBC, should you pay the ransom or not? You know, pay the ransom. Okay. You'll get back. But no, it's not the case. You won't necessarily get back. So, you know, Veeam stated, Hey, our goal is to sort of eliminate that problem. Are you- You feel like you guys in a partnership can actually achieve that. >> Yes. >> So, and you have customers that have actually avoided, you know, been hit and were able to- >> We have people who won't publicly say they've been hit, but the way they talk about what they did, like in a meeting, they were hit and they were very thankful. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> And so that's been very good. I- >> So we got proof. >> Yes, we absolutely have proof. And quite honestly, with the recent legislation in the United States, malware and ransomware actually now is also regulatory and compliance. >> Yeah. >> Because the new law states mid-March that whether it's Herzog's bar and grill to bank of America or any large foreign company doing business in the US, you have to report to the United States federal government, any attack, same with the county school district with any local government, any agency, the federal government, as well as every company from the tiniest to the largest in the world that does, they're supposed to report it 'cause the government is trying to figure out how to fight it. Just the way if you don't report burglary, how they catch the burglars. >> Does your solution simplify testing in any way or reduce the risk of testing? >> Well, because the recovery is so rapid, we recommend that people do this on a regular basis. So for example, because the recovery is so quick, you can recover in 12 minutes while we do not practice, let's say once a month or once every couple weeks. And guess what? It also allows you to build a repository of known good copies. Remember when you get ransomeware, no one's going to come say, Hey, I'm Mr. Rans. I'm going to steal your stuff. It's all done surreptitiously. They're all James Bond on the sly who doesn't say "By the way, I'm James Bond". They are truly underneath the radar. And they're very slowly encrypting that data set. So guess what? Your primary data and your backup data that you don't want to be attacked can be attacked. So it's really about finding a known good copy. So if you're doing this on a regular basis, you can get an index of known good copies. >> Right. >> And then, you know, oh, I can go back to last Tuesday and you know that that's good. Otherwise you're literally testing Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday to try to find a known good copy, which delays the recovery process 'cause you really do have to test. They make sure it's good. >> If you increase that frequency, You're going to protect yourself. That's why I got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBEs. Great to see you. >> Great. Thank you very much. I'll be wearing a different Hawaiian shirt next to. >> All right. That sounds good. >> All right, Eric Herzog, Eric Herzog on theCUBE, Dave Vallante for David Nicholson. We'll be right back at VEEAMON 2022. Right after this short break. (light music playing)

>> theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone. Happy afternoon. Welcome back to theCUBE. This is Lisa Martin with Dave Vallante. We are on day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World live from Las Vegas with about 7,000- 8,000 people here. It's been a great two and a half days. Lots of people are still here. We're going to be talking more about Dell Services. I got a couple of guys from Dell Technologies joining us next. Please welcome Patrick Mooney, Senior Vice President of Services Product Management at Dell and Satish Iyer, Vice President of Emerging Services at Dell. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. Good evening. Great to be here to you. >> Happy to be here. >> So isn't it great to be back in person? >> So great. >> Those hallway conversations you just can't replicate it for video conferencing, right? >> Yeah. >> Priceless. >> It is priceless, I agree. Patrick, let's start with you. Talk to us about from a customer's perspective. What are some of the key services they've been looking for the last couple of years particularly, and how has Dell changed its strategic direction to deliver? >> Great question. Customers want outcomes and services are at the heart of outcomes. So when we look at customers transforming we're continually transforming and modernizing what we do and everything we're doing is centered around making it easy to buy, easy to consume and just centered around the customer. >> What are people looking for these days, Satish? I mean, what's the top three or four priorities. And we know cyber's up there. The cloud. One is when customers are consuming cloud, now there is more and more what we call as customers are looking for full stack solutions. So they start with giving me the best infrastructure on the platforms. Now they're saying, "I'm going to use those infrastructure to drive X, Y, and Z. "Now Mr. Dell, can you come and gimme those tags? "So I don't need to worry about anything "and I can actually consume it in the cloud like way." That's been massive for us. >> So, how do you guys respond to that? I mean, things in our little business things change so fast. And we can, but we're little. We can move fast. Customers are saying, okay, pandemic forced match to digital and now we got to figure it out. And now we got to modernize our HQ. How are you able to keep up? How are you changing your strategy as your customers pull you in different directions? What's going on inside the organization to enable that? >> Yeah. I think the key is that we meet customers where they are and help them plot out where they want to be. And then bring them along that journey. And we've really spent a lot of time developing four practices to help get there. One's around data and applications another around multi-cloud, another around workforce and another around security and resiliency. And no matter where they want to be, whether they want to do it themselves. They want us to help them do it or they want us to do it for them, we're there for them and we'll help them get where they want to be. >> Do you have like formal customer councils or how do you actually, especially the last couple years staying engaged with those customers? >> Absolutely. We're always talking to customers. It is critical to the model and we got a lot of ideas and customers have a lot of ideas and we want to vet those and talk through them. So no matter what point we're at in our product development cycle, we're always talking with customers, "Hey, do we hear you right? "Is this the value you're looking for?" And as we're developing it, can you help us test it? And so on. And we do that through regular conversations, field testing, customer insight councils, and it just feels so great to be having face to face conversations again as well. >> What is- >> Oh, go ahead. >> I was going to say, what are some of the things that you've heard face to face this week in terms of the direction, what Dell Services is delivering? >> Well, one big one for sure is that remote workforce is here to stay. And in our workforce pillar we spent a lot of time around how do we make it easy for customers to manage a remote workforce? It's a big challenge. So we've recently we announced here at Dell World, Lifecycle Hub Services where we it's a managed service where we're helping customers manage their entire device lifecycle around their PC. So imagine this you have a new hire joint or somebody leaves, how do you get 'em that PC? Have it ready? Let Dell take care of all the logistics, we'll we'll store it. We'll configure it. We'll send it to 'em we'll take the old machines back, we'll kit it for 'em anything that's needed and fully integrated it from the customer system into our system. So it's all automated. >> Okay. And all the patching, et cetera, >> Everything. Okay. So you got four pillars, data and apps multi-cloud, workforce and resiliency. What you just described, the automation, does IP and what's the IP portfolio look like? How does it map into those four pillars? >> Sure, you want to take that? >> Sure, so obviously when you look at growth areas and services, it's absolutely important for us to develop sustainable IP. If you look at one of the areas where we have invested and we are growing is cloud managed services platform. So Dell is unique in terms of managing our customer services. We actually do full lifecycle management of the customers. So we invested quite a bit of, I would say time and energy and engineering efforts to basically solve problems in engineered way. So the customer cloud managed services platform allows us to actually bring both, you talked about apex before to our other colleagues. So it allows us to both bring apex services to our customers and also allows us to bring non apex services in terms of fully managed to our customers. >> So multi-cloud must be a rich opportunity's probably almost infinite. There's a lot of gaps there for IP development. What are you seeing and hearing from customer with regard to those gaps? >> So one of the key areas when you talk about multi-cloud is we talk to customers about is the solution things we talked about. So we launched, we announced three solutions one we already launched. And the two of them will be announced is customers want that end-to-end outcome, right? 'Cause they are saying, well we are currently where we started today. We announced cyber security as a service. As you guys know, within the current geopolitical climate, cyber attacks are common, ransomware is common. So, and this is something which we are doing today to customers. What customers want is the simplicity of offering. They're like, you can help us with cyber security when something happens I have an insurance policy, so I can actually go I know where my data sets are. I can record from it, but can you streamline it for me? I don't want all the headaches. Can you make sure that it's easily consumable and Dell can take care of everything for me. And we are also investing on other LED solutions like machine learning, high performance compute. And we are also looking at vertical areas. So our customers, especially in telco, Edge and enterprise applications. So we are looking at those as a full stack offerings so that we can actually educate and take our customers on the journey on our MacCloud platforms. >> I going to talk about Dell Services as a facilitator of multi-cloud Chuck Whitton was on stage, He was here yesterday talking about multi-cloud is here by default. Well, Dell wants to change that to multi-cloud by design. How can Dell Services be a facilitator of that transformation that customers in telco or whatever industry have going from, We've got it by default to now it's actually by design, facilitating that? >> Yeah. I'll jump in and let you take it, we have a a robust consulting practice which can help you come in and understand where you're at and where you want to be and design that future. So that it's not, as you said by default, it's absolutely multi-cloud by design. Anything you want to add? >> Yeah. I mean, look again Dell has been doing multi-cloud for a long time. We just didn't call it multi-cloud. I would probably say 2014, 2015, Dell's been there. We know our customers have a choice. We want to operationalize. We want to help our customers run workloads wherever they want to run. Now, we have a term for it. We have a dedicated way of talking about it. And again, more automation more IP development, more software. And again, taking a lot of the people part away from services and driving more innovation, more IPs where we are going to be able to differentiate. >> So you're a large and pretty sophisticated services organization. We've talked about some of your IP. You now bring that to your customers. What are some of the adoption barriers that they have? How are you addressing those, in terms of taking your IP and your ideas? And you probably say, "Hey, we got this, you can apply this". What are they not ready for? That you sort of advise them, okay you got to do, these are some maybe, some out scope things that you haven't talked about or thought about. >> Yeah. I mean, I'll take one. And I know Patrick will probably touch on, I would say two big ones. I can think about the one is data. One is on security, right? I'll give you the data use case. So data has gravity, right? When customers think about, multi-cloud think about solution, think about these services. It's not easy to take petabytes and terabytes of data and shift all over the place. It's very, very expensive. So a lot of their cloud strategy really hinges on where the data is, and how they're going to optimize those data for the outcomes they want to decide. And that's something a lot of our customers initially don't think about it as we actually go and talk to them about this specific use case and application that actually becomes forefront of the discussion. >> Yeah. On the security front, customers are just overwhelmed with the number of options in a very fragmented, extremely important space. So we've tried to make that very easy for them with our managed detection and response services, bringing the best of the industry and Dell Services together to give them a one stop shop managed service, let us watch for you so that you can run your business. And when we detect something, we'll advise you and help you respond. >> What's the tooling like there. I mean, you have, do you have your preferred tooling? Are the customers saying, well we got to use this vendor or that vendor, how do you manage all that complex? >> Of course we have our preferred tooling and we partner greatly with secure works to do it as well as some other company, but that said what's important to us with the service is that a customer meets specific, they're green in five different categories. And if they're green in those categories, then we're good to help them. And if they don't know how to do that, then we'll come in and do a security assessment to help them get there. And just taking what's very complicated and making it easy. >> On the security front. We've been talking about the cyber skills gap, massive skills gap that's been around for years. How is Dell Services facilitator of organizations being able to close that gap? >> Sure. In a few ways, one, we can just do it for you, right? Two, if you want to do it yourself, we can supplement you with security residents to help you manage through the complexity and cross train while as part of your staff. And then three, we have our Dell Education Services where we can come in and train you as well. So lots of different options on how you want to do it. >> Yeah. >> No matter what you choose, we're here for you. (panelists laughing) >> That people option's important. I mean, people being the biggest threat factor that there is, right. >> Absolutely. >> For sure. >> That's probably one of the hardest ones to augment. >> Yeah. I mean, that's the reason why when you look at cyber security customers, want somebody else to manage it because you don't want the same folks making the same mistake on an insurance policy. So they're like Dell, you manage it for me. So I don't have the same actor is doing same things. So I have somebody managing my data but somebody managing my record option. So in case something goes wrong I know it's a different handset different people who are much more relaxed when things go back >> That's always nice to have somebody that's relaxed in a crisis. >> Absolutely. And I think I'll take that in my personal life too. Guys thank you for joining Dave and me talking about what's new with Dell Services the modernization that you're undergoing and how your customers are really helping to evolve this strategy. We appreciate your insight. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you so much for your time. Great seeing you. >> Right. Likewise for Dave Vallante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. This is day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World, live from Las Vegas, stick around Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (bright music)

>> theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of day one of Dell Technologies World 2022 Live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. They're excited I dunno if you heard that. A group behind me very excited to be here. Lisa Martin, Dave Vallante. We're very pleased to welcome Jules Johnston, the SVP of channel from Equinix. Jules, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >> And those people back there are very excited if you heard that. Big applause going went live. So the vibe here is fantastic for the first live Dell Technologies World since 2019, a lot of people here, this expo hall is packed, lot of momentum here but there's also a lot of momentum at Equinix. Talk to us about what's going on. >> Well, you know, so many exciting things for Equinix and, you know, in this partnership of Dell, it sort of gives us a chance to share that with partners here throughout the conference. So we are very excited, as you said about, and we just, we named to the Fortune 500 this year, 77 quarters of growth consecutively but underpinning that is having made huge investments in what is the world's largest footprint of global data centers, 240 of them on six continents in 66 markets, but then interconnecting them so they have the connections that Dell customers need to the clouds, they have the connections that they need to all of the future SaaS providers. So that foresight to put together that interconnection network across our footprint, has set us on the path we're on today which we're very grateful to be at in and really the things that are happening with Equinix and Dell together couldn't be more of the moment. >> Talk to me about that. The last two years, the moments of the last two years have been very challenging. >> They have been. >> For everyone. How has the partnership evolved in that time? >> Well, you know, we at together, Dell and Equinix what we're doing is really helping our shared interface customers navigate the complexities of their digital transformation and digital transformation is hard, it's not of one and done and it's not an overnight solution and so what we are doing is partnering with Dell to think about putting a dedicated Dell IT stack in an Equinix data center, to give customers that sovereign adjacency so that they can have that security proximate to our all the clouds and everything else they need to participate in the ecosystem and then pairing that with, you know these interconnected enterprises. So Dell and we are helping customers then be able to have some of their solution OnPrem, some of their solution in the cloud, access public clouds and use that collectively to define what we're calling the intelligent edge together and that intelligent edge means so many different things to customers, but it is really our honor to work together with Dell to help each customer define that for themselves. >> Eqiuinix's an amazing company, like you said, I didn't realize it was that many consecutive quarters but it's a 60 billion plus market cap. If you look at the stock chart it'll blow your mind, really incredibly successful and part of the reason is funny, you know, 10, 15 years ago people thought, well, oh, 10 years ago anyway, the cloud is going to hurt companies like Equinix. It was exact opposite and that's because, you know Charles Phillips used to joke, friends don't let friends build data centers. >> Yes. >> Right? And it's not a good use of capital for most companies unless you're in the data center business. Now, of course you have some of your own as a service offerings. >> We do. >> What's the overlap with Dell? How do they compliment each other? >> It's a good question because, you know, and we get that are you and Dell in fact competitors? And no we see them as wholly complimentary and in fact, we're working with Dell to bring to market things like something we call PowerEdge which involves their servers and PowerStore which involves their storage and then VxRail which is really the hyperconverged infrastructure and those are a few first of a series of offerings we expect to bring to market with Dell and if you think about metal and it's Equinix Metal that people sometimes think is a competitor, but what metal does for customers is it really allows them to advance have the equipment placed in our data center so that they can access that capacity and according to spikes or needs that they have. That equipment in our data centers that's there for them to avail themselves to that capacity is most often Dell equipment. So we are really doing and executing that bare metal as a service together. >> What are some of the things that you're hearing from your partner community in terms of the partnership with Dell? Are partners must be excited the momentum there. What's going on in the partner community? >> So, you know, that's what near and dear to my heart since that's what I'm responsible for Equinix's global partnerships, and they are very excited about what we're doing with Dell and to be honest with you, all of our top partners are also top partners of Dell so it makes sense that we bring it together. So, you know, big categories of partners like the world's largest global network service providers, some of whom are here and who we'll meet with the AT&T, Orange Business Services, those folks in addition to the world's largest global systems integrators, Kyndryl, Deloitte, Accenture, Wipro all, DXC, all of these are partners that Dell and we will meet with together to further our, what we call power three that together we're better because as much as Dell and Equinix are delivering, the customers most often don't have the experience they need to execute it without a partner so they are relying on those partners to take what we are doing and make it their own and so if they're excited about it, it's a big opportunity for them from a revenue services and an opportunity for them to step into a next level trusted advisor status so partners are excited and we're going to be spending a lot of time with them the next few days. >> Do you see Equinix, you know, 'cause these partnerships are not bespoke partnerships, it's an ecosystem that's organic and evolving and growing. Are you a dot connector in a way? Can it be a flywheel effect in your ecosystem? >> Well, so our ecosystems that we provide wide range of those from high frequency trading to connected cars, to the internet, things many and content providers that we are, we do see it as our role to, you know, the 10,000 and growing customers that are in our 240 data centers on six continents that provide those ecosystems, it is our mission to continue to grow that and enrich it because that does differentiate us greatly from another data center provider and it's the combination of the ecosystem that you find and the people you can connect to at Equinix and then also the leverage of our fabric in order to be able to access your future needs. >> And there's a lot of technology underneath these, it's that first layer one I guess if you will of the data center, right? And so a lot of your customers or your partners customers, they just don't want to be in that business as we were saying before, I mean it's just too expensive, the power requirements are going through the roof so you got to be really good at managing power. >> You do. In fact, you know, so first of all, you're right, it's extremely difficult for them to also be able to make that kind of commitment to keep a data center they would manage themselves at the level that Equinix is able to invest so it's very difficult for people to do it themselves but even show, another point you mentioned actually about the power is near and dear to our hearts because Equinix is super committed to sustainability and so we've made a commitment to wholly renewable energy and it's something that we talk a lot about how we also help partners like Dell meet their initiatives or partners like AT&T meet their connected climate goals. So we are actually using that and coming together with Dell on that story, so that, and then helping to amplify that with our partners. >> And that's, how do you do that? That's putting data centers where you can cool with ambient air or is it being near the Columbia River? What's your strategy in that regard? >> It's sustainable. I have to be honest to you. I would be out of my depth if I didn't say. >> This is at high level. >> So we are deploying some of the latest technologies about that and then experts. People who, you know who all they do is really help us to reduce the carbon footprint and be able to offset that, be able to use solar, be able to use wind, be able to take advantage of that and then also to navigate what's available when you're in 240 locations on six continents it's not the same options to reduce your power consumption and your burden are different in Africa as we just discovered with our main one acquisition than they are in India or than they are in other parts of the world. So it is for us a journey and we've been assembling a lot of the talent to do that. >> But you're so large now, even a small percentage improvement can really move the needle. >> And I think because we are the largest, it is incumbent upon us to really set the standard and be committed to it and we do see other people following which is a good thing for all of us. >> Well how important is that in your partnership conversations that partners have that same focus and commitment on ESG that Equinix has? >> Partners care a lot about it but customers ask us both all the time. I mean, we increasingly see a portion of an RFP or a scope of work asking, before I decide to go with Equinix and Dell, tell me how you're going to impact the environment, tell me about your commitment and so we are committed to it but customers are demanding it too. >> So it's com-- >> Where do you. Go ahead please. >> Oh I was just going to say, it's coming from the voice of the customer which EquinIx is listening to we know Dell is listening to it as well. >> I'm sorry one more time? >> That the sustainability of the ESG demand is coming from the customers you were saying? >> It both, like I mean, we want to do the right thing and we've made commitments to it but our customers are holding us accountable to it and, you know, sustainability is now a board level priority. It is for us and it is for companies like Dell and it is for our partners and customers. >> It really is. I mean, it's up there with security. >> It is. >> In terms of the board level conversation. Where do you want to see the partner ecosystem in the next, let's call it three to five years? In your business you can look out that far. >> Well, you know, I think that they, our partners, and that I mean Dell's and our mutual partners, you know, we've been listening to customers with Dell to deliver a flexible set of options for how customers would consume Equinix and Dell so our partners are going to be integrating a variety of those in order to meet the customer where they are in that journey, whether they want to buy Apex as a service, whether they want to buy Equinix Metal, whether they want to have a partner put together bespoke do it yourself combination with other services. I mean, the customers are going to demand a choice of options. I think partners are going to embrace multiple versions of that so that they can, you know, to meet the customer where they are and take them. >> Well that's incredibly important these days to meet the customer where they are. The customers have a lot of choice. >> It is. >> But everything that we're all doing is for the customer ultimately at the end of the day. >> Yes, it is and, you know, the customers are getting savvier but we are all still early in this journey, as far as the edge, you know, I mean, I think we're all still grappling that. For right now we like to say that as customers are looking to define that, the footprint that we offer together with Dell gives them an awfully robust set of choices for now and then we want to continue to invest and expand to be wherever they need us. >> Well that's the thing about your business, it's optionality. I mean, the cloud has a lot of stuff but you can't get everything you want in the cloud. >> You can. >> And you can put anything in your data center, that's IT. >> You can, but you may not know what you need yet and so that's one of the things we spend a lot of time having our solutions architects and our sales people together with Dell talk about future proofing, their strategy. So future proofing, that combination of OnPrem and in an Equinix data center and maybe some public and future proofing, leveraging our fabric so that they might elect different SaaS space services or cloud-based services a year to five years from now than the year you're even thinking about today and they may expand their edge over time because they may sort of see that at the customer end point. Today most businesses are still sort of using a footprint like ours as their edge, but that could change and so we want to be there when it does. >> Yeah, that's a great point because you don't want to necessarily have to rip it out every couple of years if you can have an architecture that can grow. Yeah sure, you might want to upgrade it. >> Well, and that's one of the most appealing things about services like metal, where they also, they do sort of prevent that sort of rip and replace but they also help people navigate the supply chain shortages that are going on right now. So you know, this has been a trying two years for supply chain shortages, and being able to take advantage of Dell equipment already staged at an Equinix data center and partners can then bring their customers a quicker immediate response. >> Have you also seen this, you mentioned the supply chain shortages, some of the many challenges that we've experienced in the last few years, how much of a factor has the great resignation been? The labor shortages, the cybersecurity skills gap, on folks coming to Equinix saying help, we don't have the resources here to do this ourselves? >> We have been fortunate to to be... If you're asking about how the reservation has affected us as a company. >> No your customers. >> Oh our customers it has. >> Yes. >> Oh, okay. >> Yes. >> So it is a challenge for them but it's an opportunity for our partners. So what I see there is it's been challenging for customers to hold onto that talent but partners are filling that gap and we've at Equinix have been fortunate to hold onto a lot of our best and brightest and so we put them together with our partners and we try to help customers fill those gaps. >> Well that's the most important thing, filling those gaps. >> You ever been inside one of these ultra modern data centers? >> I have not, not yet. >> It's pretty cool, isn't it? I mean-- >> Have you ever had a tour of one? >> I've never had a tour of an Equinix data center, but I've seen some modern data centers that will blow your mind. >> Well I mean, they come with all the requisite, bio metrics and man traps and all of the sort bells and whistles that are actually the first layer of physical security, but then once you get into the data center then we have sort of, we get into the virtual and the digital security that you would expect. So it's-- >> Yeah, it's good and you know, it's not like you drive by the data center and there's a big sign that says here's the data center, it is kind of, they're trying to stay a little hidden and then it's, getting in it's like getting into fork knots. It's probably harder but then, it's like this giant clean room, right? It's amazingly clean and just huge. It'll blow your mind. >> Inside these data centers, all the world's networks come together and peer, and then we have inside the most direct RomReps to the cloud so you would expect. There's a lot of wires and pipes running very neatly through a very secure, clean-- >> Cooling systems and power systems and it's just. >> Pristine environment for sure. >> Amazing engineering. >> It is. >> So I need a tour. >> You should. Do you let people tour your data centers? >> Well I will bring both of you on a tour. >> Awesome. >> Be my guests. >> I would love to. Yeah, great. >> It sounds fantastic. >> We'd love to. >> So last couple-- >> We'll bring a camera. (both laugh) Oh, no, not allowed. >> Not today. No phones, no phones sequester. >> So what are some of the things that you're excited about seeing and hearing the next couple of days as this is the first time we we've all gotten to be together in so long? >> So well, you know, we are excited about the conversations that we're going to have power of three that I was talking about. So you know, we really pride ourselves on sort of having that combination add up to more to benefit the customer and so this will be sort of a coming out party of sorts for Equinix and Dell will meet with, you know almost 20 different global partners that are really important to both of us so I am most excited about those conversations and about the education I'm going to get on the ways they're thinking about integrating it differently because that is good choice for the market, that is good choice for the customer set so for the enterprises out there so that's what I'm most excited about. >> Awesome, sounds like tremendous opportunity, lots going on this week, but thank you for coming on Jules talking about-- >> Oh, my pleasure >> An hour of Equinix and Dell better together, the way that your channel partner, your program is growing and of course the momentum of the company. Can't wait to see what happens next year. >> Thank you. Thank you, we will aim to deliver and thank you again for having us. >> Thanks Jules. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vallante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's Live Coverage day one Dell Technologies World Live from Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're now going to go into the customer panel. And we'd like to welcome Angelo Fausti, who's software engineer at the Vera C Rubin Observatory, and Caleb Maclachlan, who's senior spacecraft operations software engineer at Loft Orbital. Guys, thanks for joining us. You don't want to miss folks, this interview. Caleb, let's start with you. You work for an extremely cool company. You're launching satellites into space. Cause doing that is highly complex and not a cheap endeavor. Tell us about Loft Orbital and what you guys do to attack that problem? >> Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having me here, by the way. So Loft Orbital is a company that's a series B startup now. And our mission basically is to provide rapid access to space for all kinds of customers. Historically, if you want to fly something in space, do something in space, it's extremely expensive. You need to book a launch, build a bus, hire a team to operate it, have big software teams, and then eventually worry about a lot of very specialized engineering. And what we're trying to do is, change that from a super specialized problem that has an extremely high barrier of access to a infrastructure problem. So that it's almost as simple as deploying a VM in AWS or GCP, as getting your programs, your mission deployed on orbit, with access to different sensors, cameras, radios, stuff like that. So that's kind of our mission. And just to give a really brief example of the kind of customer that we can serve. There's a really cool company called Totum labs, who is working on building an IoT constellation, for Internet of Things. Basically being able to get telemetry from all over the world. They're the first company to demonstrate indoor IoT, which means you have this little modem inside a container. A container that you track from anywhere on the world as it's going across the ocean. So it's really little. And they've been able to stay small startup that's focused on their product, which is that super crazy, complicated, cool radio, while we handle the whole space segment for them, which just, before Loft was really impossible. So that's our mission is, providing space infrastructure as a service. We are kind of groundbreaking in this area, and we're serving a huge variety of customers with all kinds of different missions, and obviously, generating a ton of data in space that we've got to handle. >> Yeah, so amazing, Caleb, what you guys do. I know you were lured to the skies very early in your career, but how did you kind of land in this business? >> Yeah, so I guess just a little bit about me. For some people, they don't necessarily know what they want to do, early in their life. For me, I was five years old and I knew, I want to be in the space industry. So I started in the Air Force, but have stayed in the space industry my whole career and been a part of, this is the fifth space startup that I've been a part of, actually. So I've kind of started out in satellites, did spend some time in working in the launch industry on rockets. Now I'm here back in satellites. And honestly, this is the most exciting of the different space startups that I've been a part of. So, always been passionate about space and basically writing software for operating in space for basically extending how we write software into orbit. >> Super interesting. Okay, Angelo. Let's talk about the Rubin Observatory Vera C. Rubin, famous woman scientists, Galaxy guru, Now you guys, the observatory are up, way up high, you're going to get a good look at the southern sky. I know COVID slowed you guys down a bit. But no doubt you continue to code away on the software. I know you're getting close. You got to be super excited. Give us the update on the observatory and your role. >> All right. So yeah, Rubin is state of the art observatory that is in construction on a remote mountain in Chile. And with Rubin we'll conduct the large survey of space and time. We are going to observe the sky with eight meter optical telescope and take 1000 pictures every night with 3.2 gigapixel camera. And we're going to do that for 10 years, which is the duration of the survey. The goal is to produce an unprecedented data set. Which is going to be about .5 exabytes of image data. And from these images will detect and measure the properties of billions of astronomical objects. We are also building a science platform that's hosted on Google Cloud, so that the scientists and the public can explore this data to make discoveries. >> Yeah, amazing project. Now, you aren't a Doctor of Philosophy. So you probably spent some time thinking about what's out there. And then you went on to earn a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics. So this is something that you've been working on for the better part of your career, isn't it? >> Yeah, that's right. About 15 years. I studied physics in college, then I got a PhD in astronomy. And I worked for about five years in another project, the Dark Energy survey before joining Rubin in 2015. >> Yeah, impressive. So it seems like both your organizations are looking at space from two different angles. One thing you guys both have in common, of course, is software. And you both use InfluxDB as part of your data infrastructure. How did you discover InfluxDB, get into it? How do you use the platform? Maybe Caleb, you can start. >> Yeah, absolutely. So the first company that I extensively used InfluxDB in was a launch startup called Astra. And we were in the process of designing our first generation rocket there and testing the engines, pumps. Everything that goes into a rocket. And when I joined the company, our data story was not very mature. We were collecting a bunch of data in LabVIEW. And engineers were taking that over to MATLAB to process it. And at first, that's the way that a lot of engineers and scientists are used to working. And at first that was, like, people weren't entirely sure that, that needed to change. But it's something, the nice thing about InfluxDB is that, it's so easy to deploy. So our software engineering team was able to get it deployed and up and running very quickly and then quickly also backport all of the data that we've collected thus far into Influx. And what was amazing to see and it's kind of the super cool moment with Influx is, when we hooked that up to Grafana, Grafana, is the visualization platform we use with influx, because it works really well with it. There was like this aha moment of our engineers who are used to this post process kind of method for dealing with their data, where they could just almost instantly, easily discover data that they hadn't been able to see before. And take the manual processes that they would run after a test and just throw those all in Influx and have live data as tests were coming. And I saw them implementing crazy rocket equation type stuff in Influx and it just was totally game changing for how we tested. And things that previously it would be like run a test, then wait an hour for the engineers to crunch the data and then we run another test with some changed parameters or a changed startup sequence or something like that, became, by the time the test is over, the engineers know what the next step is, because they have this just like instant game changing access to data. So since that experience, basically everywhere I've gone, every company since then, I've been promoting InfluxDB and using it and spinning it up and quickly showing people how simple and easy it is. >> Yeah, thank you. So Angelo, I was explaining in my open that, you know you could add a column in a traditional RDBMS and do time series. But with the volume of data that you're talking about in the example that Caleb just gave, you have to have a purpose built time series database. Where did you first learn about InfluxDB? >> Yeah, correct. So I worked with the data management team and my first project was the record metrics that measure the performance of our software. The software that we use to process the data. So I started implementing that in our relational database. But then I realized that in fact, I was dealing with time series data. And I should really use a solution built for that. And then I started looking at time series databases and I found InfluxDB, that was back in 2018. Then I got involved in another project. To record telemetry data from the telescope itself. It's very challenging because you have so many subsystems and sensors, producing data. And with that data, the goal is to look at the telescope harder in real time so we can make decisions and make sure that everything's doing the right thing. And another use for InfluxDB that I'm also interested, is the visits database. If you think about the observations, we are moving the telescope all the time and pointing to specific directions in the sky and taking pictures every 30 seconds. So that itself is a time series. And every point in the time series, we call that visit. So we want to record the metadata about those visits in InfluxDB. That time series is going to be 10 years long, with about 1000 points every night. It's actually not too much data compared to the other problems. It's really just the different time scale. So yeah, we have plans on continuing using InfluxDB and finding new applications in the project. >> Yeah and the speed with which you can actually get high quality images. Angelo, my understanding is, you use InfluxDB, as you said, you're monitoring the telescope hardware and the software. And just say, some of the scientific data as well. The telescope at the Rubin Observatory is like, no pun intended, I guess, the star of the show. And I believe, I read that it's going to be the first of the next gen telescopes to come online. It's got this massive field of view, like three orders of magnitude times the Hubble's widest camera view, which is amazing. That's like 40 moons in an image, and amazingly fast as well. What else can you tell us about the telescope? >> Yeah, so it's really a challenging project, from the point of view of engineering. This telescope, it has to move really fast. And it also has to carry the primary mirror, which is an eight meter piece of glass, it's very heavy. And it has to carry a camera, which is about the size of a small car. And this whole structure weighs about 300 pounds. For that to work, the telescope needs to be very compact and stiff. And one thing that's amazing about its design is that the telescope, this 300 tons structure, it sits on a tiny film of oil, which has the diameter of human hair, in that brings an almost zero friction interface. In fact, a few people can move this enormous structure with only their hands. As you said, another aspect that makes this telescope unique is the optical design. It's a wide field telescope. So each image has, in diameter, the size of about seven full moons. And with that we can map the entire sky in only three days. And of course, during operations, everything's controlled by software, and it's automatic. There's a very complex piece of software called the scheduler, which is responsible for moving the telescope and the camera. Which will record the 15 terabytes of data every night. >> And Angelo, all this data lands in InfluxDB, correct? And what are you doing with all that data? >> Yeah, actually not. So we're using InfluxDB to record engineering data and metadata about the observations, like telemetry events and the commands from the telescope. That's a much smaller data set compared to the images. But it is still challenging because you have some high frequency data that the system needs to keep up and we need to store this data and have it around for the lifetime of the project. >> Hm. So at the mountain, we keep the data for 30 days. So the observers, they use Influx and InfluxDB instance, running there to analyze the data. But we also replicate the data to another instance running at the US data facility, where we have more computational resources and so more people can look at the data without interfering with the observations. Yeah, I have to say that InfluxDB has been really instrumental for us, and especially at this phase of the project where we are testing and integrating the different pieces of hardware. And it's not just the database, right. It's the whole platform. So I like to give this example, when we are doing this kind of task, it's hard to know in advance which dashboards and visualizations you're going to need, right. So what you really need is a data exploration tool. And with tools like chronograph, for example, having the ability to query and create dashboards on the fly was really a game changer for us. So astronomers, they typically are not software engineers, but they are the ones that know better than anyone, what needs to be monitored. And so they use chronograph and they can create the dashboards and the visualizations that they need. >> Got it. Thank you. Okay, Caleb, let's bring you back in. Tell us more about, you got these dishwasher size satellites are kind of using a multi tenant model. I think it's genius. But tell us about the satellites themselves. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we have in space, some satellites already. That, as you said, are like dishwasher, mini fridge kind of size. And we're working on a bunch more that are a variety of sizes from shoe box to I guess, a few times larger than what we have today. And it is, we do shoot to have, effectively something like a multi tenant model where we will buy a bus off the shelf, the bus is, what you can kind of think of as the core piece of the satellite, almost like a motherboard or something. Where it's providing the power, it has the solar panels, it has some radios attached to it, it handles the altitude control, basically steers the spacecraft in orbit. And then we build, also in house, what we call our payload hub, which is has all any customer payloads attached, and our own kind of edge processing sort of capabilities built into it. And so we integrate that, we launch it, and those things, because they're in low Earth orbit, they're orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes. That's seven kilometers per second, which is several times faster than a speeding bullet. So we've got, we have one of the unique challenges of operating spacecraft in lower Earth orbit is that generally you can't talk to them all the time. So we're managing these things through very brief windows of time. Where we get to talk to them through our ground sites, either in Antarctica or in the North Pole region. So we'll see them for 10 minutes, and then we won't see them for the next 90 minutes as they zip around the Earth collecting data. So one of the challenges that exists for a company like ours is, that's a lot of, you have to be able to make real time decisions operationally, in those short windows that can sometimes be critical to the health and safety of the spacecraft. And it could be possible that we put ourselves into a low power state in the previous orbit or something potentially dangerous to the satellite can occur. And so as an operator, you need to very quickly process that data coming in. And not just the the live data, but also the massive amounts of data that were collected in, what we call the back orbit, which is the time that we couldn't see the spacecraft. >> We got it. So talk more about how you use InfluxDB to make sense of this data from all those tech that you're launching into space. >> Yeah, so we basically, previously we started off, when I joined the company, storing all of that, as Angelo did, in a regular relational database. And we found that it was so slow, and the size of our data would balloon over the course of a couple of days to the point where we weren't able to even store all of the data that we were getting. So we migrated to InfluxDB to store our time series telemetry from the spacecraft. So that thing's like power level voltage, currents counts, whatever metadata we need to monitor about the spacecraft, we now store that in InfluxDB. And that has, you know, now we can actually easily store the entire volume of data for the mission life so far, without having to worry about the size bloating to an unmanageable amount. And we can also seamlessly query large chunks of data, like if I need to see, for example, as an operator, I might want to see how my battery state of charge is evolving over the course of the year, I can have a plot in an Influx that loads that in a fraction of a second for a year's worth of data, because it does, you know, intelligent. I can intelligently group the data by citing time interval. So it's been extremely powerful for us to access the data. And as time has gone on, we've gradually migrated more and more of our operating data into Influx. So not only do we store the basic telemetry about the bus and our payload hub, but we're also storing data for our customers, that our customers are generating on board about things like you know, one example of a customer that's doing something pretty cool. They have a computer on our satellite, which they can reprogram themselves to do some AI enabled edge compute type capability in space. And so they're sending us some metrics about the status of their workloads, in addition to the basics, like the temperature of their payload, their computer or whatever else. And we're delivering that data to them through Influx in a Grafana dashboard that they can plot where they can see, not only has this pipeline succeeded or failed, but also where was the spacecraft when this occurred? What was the voltage being supplied to their payload? Whatever they need to see, it's all right there for them. Because we're aggregating all that data in InfluxDB. >> That's awesome. You're measuring everything. Let's talk a little bit about, we throw this term around a lot, data driven. A lot of companies say, Oh, yes, we're data driven. But you guys really are. I mean, you got data at the core. Caleb, what does that what does that mean to you? >> Yeah, so you know, I think, the clearest example of when I saw this, be like totally game changing is, what I mentioned before it, at Astra, were our engineers feedback loop went from a lot of, kind of slow researching, digging into the data to like an instant, instantaneous, almost, Seeing the data, making decisions based on it immediately, rather than having to wait for some processing. And that's something that I've also seen echoed in my current role. But to give another practical example, as I said, we have a huge amount of data that comes down every orbit, and we need to be able to ingest all that data almost instantaneously and provide it to the operator in near real time. About a second worth of latency is all that's acceptable for us to react to. To see what is coming down from the spacecraft and building that pipeline is challenging, from a software engineering standpoint. Our primary language is Python, which isn't necessarily that fast. So what we've done is started, in the in the goal being data driven, is publish metrics on individual, how individual pieces of our data processing pipeline, are performing into Influx as well. And we do that in production as well as in dev. So we have kind of a production monitoring flow. And what that has done is, allow us to make intelligent decisions on our software development roadmap. Where it makes the most sense for us to focus our development efforts in terms of improving our software efficiency, just because we have that visibility into where the real problems are. At sometimes we've found ourselves, before we started doing this, kind of chasing rabbits that weren't necessarily the real root cause of issues that we were seeing. But now, that we're being a bit more data driven, there, we are being much more effective in where we're spending our resources and our time, which is especially critical to us as we scaled from supporting a couple of satellites to supporting many, many satellites at once. >> So you reduce those dead ends. Maybe Angela, you could talk about what sort of data driven means to you and your team? >> Yeah, I would say that having real time visibility, to the telemetry data and metrics is crucial for us. We need to make sure that the images that we collect, with the telescope have good quality and that they are within the specifications to meet our science goals. And so if they are not, we want to know that as soon as possible, and then start fixing problems. >> Yeah, so I mean, you think about these big science use cases, Angelo. They are extremely high precision, you have to have a lot of granularity, very tight tolerances. How does that play into your time series data strategy? >> Yeah, so one of the subsystems that produce the high volume and high rates is the structure that supports the telescope's primary mirror. So on that structure, we have hundreds of actuators that compensate the shape of the mirror for the formations. That's part of our active updated system. So that's really real time. And we have to record this high data rates, and we have requirements to handle data that are a few 100 hertz. So we can easily configure our database with milliseconds precision, that's for telemetry data. But for events, sometimes we have events that are very close to each other and then we need to configure database with higher precision. >> um hm For example, micro seconds. >> Yeah, so Caleb, what are your event intervals like? >> So I would say that, as of today on the spacecraft, the event, the level of timing that we deal with probably tops out at about 20 hertz, 20 measurements per second on things like our gyroscopes. But I think the core point here of the ability to have high precision data is extremely important for these kinds of scientific applications. And I'll give you an example, from when I worked on the rockets at Astra. There, our baseline data rate that we would ingest data during a test is 500 hertz, so 500 samples per second. And in some cases, we would actually need to ingest much higher rate data. Even up to like 1.5 kilohertz. So extremely, extremely high precision data there, where timing really matters a lot. And, I can, one of the really powerful things about Influx is the fact that it can handle this, that's one of the reasons we chose it. Because there's times when we're looking at the results of firing, where you're zooming in. I've talked earlier about how on my current job, we often zoom out to look at a year's worth of data. You're zooming in, to where your screen is preoccupied by a tiny fraction of a second. And you need to see, same thing, as Angelo just said, not just the actual telemetry, which is coming in at a high rate, but the events that are coming out of our controllers. So that can be something like, hey, I opened this valve at exactly this time. And that goes, we want to have that at micro or even nanosecond precision, so that we know, okay, we saw a spike in chamber pressure at this exact moment, was that before or after this valve open? That kind of visibility is critical in these kinds of scientific applications and absolutely game changing, to be able to see that in near real time. And with a really easy way for engineers to be able to visualize this data themselves without having to wait for us software engineers to go build it for them. >> Can the scientists do self serve? Or do you have to design and build all the analytics and queries for scientists? >> I think that's absolutely from my perspective, that's absolutely one of the best things about Influx, and what I've seen be game changing is that, generally, I'd say anyone can learn to use Influx. And honestly, most of our users might not even know they're using Influx. Because the interface that we expose to them is Grafana, which is generic graphing, open source graphing library that is very similar to Influx zone chronograph. >> Sure. >> And what it does is, it provides this, almost, it's a very intuitive UI for building your query. So you choose a measurement, and it shows a drop down of available measurements, and then you choose the particular field you want to look at. And again, that's a drop down. So it's really easy for our users to discover it. And there's kind of point and click options for doing math, aggregations. You can even do like, perfect kind of predictions all within Grafana. The Grafana user interface, which is really just a wrapper around the API's and functionality that Influx provides. So yes, absolutely, that's been the most powerful thing about it, is that it gets us out of the way, us software engineers, who may not know quite as much as the scientists and engineers that are closer to the interesting math. And they build these crazy dashboards that I'm just like, wow, I had no idea you could do that. I had no idea that, that is something that you would want to see. And absolutely, that's the most empowering piece. >> Yeah, putting data in the hands of those who have the context, the domain experts is key. Angelo is it the same situation for you? Is it self serve? >> Yeah, correct. As I mentioned before, we have the astronomers making their own dashboards, because they know exactly what they need to visualize. And I have an example just from last week. We had an engineer at the observatory that was building a dashboard to monitor the cooling system of the entire building. And he was familiar with InfluxQL, which was the primarily query language in version one of InfluxDB. And he had, that was really a challenge because he had all the data spread at multiple InfluxDB measurements. And he was like doing one query for each measurement and was not able to produce what he needed. And then, but that's the perfect use case for Flux, which is the new data scripting language that Influx data developed and introduced as the main language in version two. And so with Flux, he was able to combine data from multiple measurements and summarize this data in a nice table. So yeah, having more flexible and powerful language, also allows you to make better a visualization. >> So Angelo, where would you be without time series database, that technology generally, may be specifically InfluxDB, as one of the leading platforms. Would you be able to do this? >> Yeah, it's hard to imagine, doing what we are doing without InfluxDB. And I don't know, perhaps it would be just a matter of time to rediscover InfluxDB. >> Yeah. How about you Caleb? >> Yeah, I mean, it's all about using the right tool for the job. I think for us, when I joined the company, we weren't using InfluxDB and we were dealing with serious issues of the database growing to a an incredible size, extremely quickly. And being unable to, like even querying short periods of data, was taking on the order of seconds, which is just not possible for operations. So time series database is, if you're dealing with large volumes of time series data, Time series database is the right tool for the job and Influx is a great one for it. So, yeah, it's absolutely required to use for this kind of data, there is not really any other option. >> Guys, this has been really informative. It's pretty exciting to see, how the edge is mountain tops, lower Earth orbits. Space is the ultimate edge. Isn't it. I wonder if you could two questions to wrap here. What comes next for you guys? And is there something that you're really excited about? That you're working on. Caleb, may be you could go first and than Angelo you could bring us home. >> Yeah absolutely, So basically, what's next for Loft Orbital is more, more satellites a greater push towards infrastructure and really making, our mission is to make space simple for our customers and for everyone. And we're scaling the company like crazy now, making that happen. It's extremely exciting and extremely exciting time to be in this company and to be in this industry as a whole. Because there are so many interesting applications out there. So many cool ways of leveraging space that people are taking advantage of and with companies like SpaceX, now rapidly lowering cost of launch. It's just a really exciting place to be in. And we're launching more satellites. We're scaling up for some constellations and our ground system has to be improved to match. So there is a lot of improvements that we are working on to really scale up our control systems to be best in class and make it capable of handling such large workloads. So, yeah. What's next for us is just really 10X ing what we are doing. And that's extremely exciting. >> And anything else you are excited about? Maybe something personal? Maybe, you know, the titbit you want to share. Are you guys hiring? >> We're absolutely hiring. So, we've positions all over the company. So we need software engineers. We need people who do more aerospace specific stuff. So absolutely, I'd encourage anyone to check out the Loft Orbital website, if this is at all interesting. Personal wise, I don't have any interesting personal things that are data related. But my current hobby is sea kayaking, so I'm working on becoming a sea kayaking instructor. So if anyone likes to go sea kayaking out in the San Francisco Bay area, hopefully I'll see you out there. >> Love it. All right, Angelo, bring us home. >> Yeah. So what's next for us is, we're getting this telescope working and collecting data and when that's happened, it's going to be just a delish of data coming out of this camera. And handling all that data, is going to be a really challenging. Yeah, I wonder I might not be here for that I'm looking for it, like for next year we have an important milestone, which is our commissioning camera, which is a simplified version of the full camera, is going to be on sky and so most of the system has to be working by then. >> Any cool hobbies that you are working on or any side project? >> Yeah, actually, during the pandemic I started gardening. And I live here in Two Sun, Arizona. It gets really challenging during the summer because of the lack of water, right. And so, we have an automatic irrigation system at the farm and I'm trying to develop a small system to monitor the irrigation and make sure that our plants have enough water to survive. >> Nice. All right guys, with that we're going to end it. Thank you so much. Really fascinating and thanks to InfluxDB for making this possible. Really ground breaking stuff, enabling value at the edge, in the cloud and of course beyond, at the space. Really transformational work, that you guys are doing. So congratulations and I really appreciate the broader community. I can't wait to see what comes next from this entire eco system. Now in the moment, I'll be back to wrap up. This is Dave Vallante. And you are watching The cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. (upbeat music)

(gentle upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase Open Cloud Innovations. This is season two episode one of an ongoing series covering setting status from the AWS ecosystem. Talking about innovation, here it's open source for this theme. We do this every episode, we pick a theme and have a lot of fun talking to the leaders in the industry and the hottest startups. I'm your host John Furrier here with Lisa Martin in our Palo Alto studios. Lisa great series, great to see you again. >> Good to see you too. Great series, always such spirited conversations with very empowered and enlightened individuals. >> I love the episodic nature of these events, we get more stories out there than ever before. They're the hottest startups in the AWS ecosystem, which is dominating the cloud sector. And there's a lot of them really changing the game on cloud native and the enablement, the stories that are coming out here are pretty compelling, not just from startups they're actually penetrating the enterprise and the buyers are changing their architectures, and it's just really fun to catch the wave here. >> They are, and one of the things too about the open source community is these companies embracing that and how that's opening up their entry to your point into the enterprise. I was talking with several customers, companies who were talking about the 70% of their pipeline comes from the open source community. That's using the premium version of the technology. So, it's really been a very smart, strategic way into the enterprise. >> Yeah, and I love the format too. We get the keynote we're doing now, opening keynote, some great guests. We have Sir John on from AWS started program, he is the global startups lead. We got Swami coming on and then closing keynote with Deepak Singh. Who's really grown in the Amazon organization from containers now, compute services, which now span how modern applications are being built. And I think the big trend that we're seeing that these startups are riding on that big wave is cloud natives driving the modern architecture for software development, not just startups, but existing, large ISV and software companies are rearchitecting and the customers who buy their products and services in the cloud are rearchitecting too. So, it's a whole new growth wave coming in, the modern era of cloud some say, and it's exciting a small startup could be the next big name tomorrow. >> One of the things that kind of was a theme throughout the conversations that I had with these different guests was from a modern application security perspective is, security is key, but it's not just about shifting lab. It's about doing so empowering the developers. They don't have to be security experts. They need to have a developer brain and a security heart, and how those two organizations within companies can work better together, more collaboratively, but ultimately empowering those developers, which goes a long way. >> Well, for the folks who are watching this, the format is very simple. We have a keynote, editorial keynote speakers come in, and then we're going to have a bunch of companies who are going to present their story and their showcase. We've interviewed them, myself, you Dave Vallante and Dave Nicholson from theCUBE team. They're going to tell their stories and between the companies and the AWS heroes, 14 companies are represented and some of them new business models and Deepak Singh who leads the AWS team, he's going to have the closing keynote. He talks about the new changing business model in open source, not just the tech, which has a lot of tech, but how companies are being started around the new business models around open source. It's really, really amazing. >> I bet, and does he see any specific verticals that are taking off? >> Well, he's seeing the contribution from big companies like AWS and the Facebook's of the world and large companies, Netflix, Intuit, all contributing content to the open source and then startups forming around them. So Netflix does some great work. They donated to open source and next thing you know a small group of people get together entrepreneurs, they form a company and they create a platform around it with unification and scale. So, the cloud is enabling this new super application environment, superclouds as we call them, that's emerging and this new supercloud and super applications are scaling data-driven machine learning and AI that's the new formula for success. >> The new formula for success also has to have that velocity that developers expect, but also that the consumerization of tech has kind of driven all of us to expect things very quickly. >> Well, we're going to bring in Serge Shevchenko, AWS Global Startup program into the program. Serge is our partner. He is the leader at AWS who has been working on this program Serge, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, likewise, John, thank you for having me very excited to be here. >> We've been working together on collaborating on this for over a year. Again, season two of this new innovative program, which is a combination of CUBE Media partnership, and AWS getting the stories out. And this has been a real success because there's a real hunger to discover content. And then in the marketplace, as these new solutions coming from startups are the next big thing coming. So, you're starting to see this going on. So I have to ask you, first and foremost, what's the AWS startup showcase about. Can you explain in your terms, your team's vision behind it, and why those startup focus? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know John, we curated the AWS Startup Showcase really to bring meaningful and oftentimes educational content to our customers and partners highlighting innovative solutions within these themes and ultimately to help customers find the best solutions for their use cases, which is a combination of AWS and our partners. And really from pre-seed to IPO, John, the world's most innovative startups build on AWS. From leadership downward, very intentional about cultivating vigorous AWS community and since 2019 at re:Invent at the launch of the AWS Global Startup program, we've helped hundreds of startups accelerate their growth through product development support, go to market and co-sell programs. >> So Serge question for you on the theme of today, John mentioned our showcases having themes. Today's theme is going to cover open source software. Talk to us about how Amazon thinks about opensource. >> Sure, absolutely. And I'll just touch on it briefly, but I'm very excited for the keynote at the end of today, that will be delivered by Deepak the VP of compute services at AWS. We here at Amazon believe in open source. In fact, Amazon contributes to open source in multiple ways, whether that's through directly contributing to third-party project, repos or significant code contributions to Kubernetes, Rust and other projects. And all the way down to leadership participation in organizations such as the CNCF. And supporting of dozens of ISV myself over the years, I've seen explosive growth when it comes to open source adoption. I mean, look at projects like Checkov, within 12 months of launching their open source project, they had about a million users. And another great example is Falco within, under a decade actually they've had about 37 million downloads and that's about 300% increase since it's become an incubating project in the CNCF. So, very exciting things that we're seeing here at AWS. >> So explosive growth, lot of content. What do you hope that our viewers and our guests are going to be able to get out of today? >> Yeah, great question, Lisa. I really hope that today's event will help customers understand why AWS is the best place for them to run open source, commercial and which partner solutions will help them along their journey. I think that today the lineup through the partner solutions and Deepak at the end with the ending keynote is going to present a very valuable narrative for customers and startups in selecting where and which projects to run on AWS. >> That's great stuff Serge would love to have you on and again, I want to just say really congratulate your team and we enjoy working with them. We think this showcase does a great service for the community. It's kind of open source in its own way if I can co contributing working on out there, but you're really getting the voices out at scale. We've got companies like Armory, Kubecost, Sysdig, Tidelift, Codefresh. I mean, these are some of the companies that are changing the game. We even had Patreon a customer and one of the partners sneak with security, all the big names in the startup scene. Plus AWS Deepak saying Swami is going to be on the AWS Heroes. I mean really at scale and this is really a great. So, thank you so much for participating and enabling all of this. >> No, thank you to theCUBE. You've been a great partner in this whole process, very excited for today. >> Thanks Serge really appreciate it. Lisa, what a great segment that was kicking off the event. We've got a great lineup coming up. We've got the keynote, final keynote fireside chat with Deepak Singh a big name at AWS, but Serge in the startup showcase really innovative. >> Very innovative and in a short time period, he talked about the launch of this at re:Invent 2019. They've helped hundreds of startups. We've had over 50 I think on the showcase in the last year or so John. So we really gotten to cover a lot of great customers, a lot of great stories, a lot of great content coming out of theCUBE. >> I love the openness of it. I love the scale, the storytelling. I love the collaboration, a great model, Lisa, great to work with you. We also Dave Vallante and Dave Nicholson interview. They're not here, but let's kick off the show. Let's get started with our next guest Swami. The leader at AWS Swami just got promoted to VP of the database, but also he ran machine learning and AI at AWS. He is a leader. He's the author of the original DynamoDB paper, which is celebrating its 10th year anniversary really impacted distributed computing and open source. Swami's introduced many opensource aspects of products within AWS and has been a leader in the engineering side for many, many years at AWS, from an intern to now an executive. Swami, great to see you. Thanks for coming on our AWS startup showcase. Thanks for spending the time with us. >> My pleasure, thanks again, John. Thanks for having me. >> I wanted to just, if you don't mind asking about the database market over the past 10 to 20 years cloud and application development as you see, has changed a lot. You've been involved in so many product launches over the years. Cloud and machine learning are the biggest waves happening to your point to what you're doing now. Software is under the covers it's powering it all infrastructure is code. Open source has been a big part of it and it continues to grow and change. Deepak Singh from AWS talks about the business model transformation of how like Netflix donates to the open source. Then a company starts around it and creates more growth. Machine learnings and all the open source conversations around automation as developers and builders, like software as cloud and machine learning become the key pistons in the engine. This is a big wave, what's your view on this? How how has cloud scale and data impacting the software market? >> I mean, that's a broad question. So I'm going to break it down to kind of give some of the back data. So now how we are thinking about it first, I'd say when it comes to the open source, I'll start off by saying first the longevity and by ability of open sources are very important to our customers and that is why we have been a significant contributor and supporter of these communities. I mean, there are several efforts in open source, even internally by actually open sourcing some of our key Amazon technologies like Firecracker or BottleRocket or our CDK to help advance the industry. For example, CDK itself provides some really powerful way to build and configure cloud services as well. And we also contribute to a lot of different open source projects that are existing ones, open telemetries and Linux, Java, Redis and Kubernetes, Grafana and Kafka and Robotics Operating System and Hadoop, Leucine and so forth. So, I think, I can go on and on, but even now I'd say the database and observability space say machine learning we have always started with embracing open source in a big material way. If you see, even in deep learning framework, we championed MX Linux and some of the core components and we open sourced our auto ML technology auto Glue on, and also be open sourced and collaborated with partners like Facebook Meta on Fighter showing some major components and there, and then we are open search Edge Compiler. So, I would say the number one thing is, I mean, we are actually are very, very excited to partner with broader community on problems that really mattered to the customers and actually ensure that they are able to get amazing benefit of this. >> And I see machine learning is a huge thing. If you look at how cloud group and when you had DynamoDB paper, when you wrote it, that that was the beginning of, I call the cloud surge. It was the beginning of not just being a resource versus building a data center, certainly a great alternative. Every startup did it. That's history phase one inning and a half, first half inning. Then it became a large scale. Machine learning feels like the same way now. You feel like you're seeing a lot of people using it. A lot of people are playing around with it. It's evolving. It's been around as a science, but combined with cloud scale, this is a big thing. What should people who are in the enterprise think about how should they think about machine learning? How has some of your top customers thought about machine learning as they refactor their applications? What are some of the things that you can share from your experience and journey here? >> I mean, one of the key things I'd say just to set some context on scale and numbers. More than one and a half million customers use our database analytics or ML services end-to-end. Part of which machine learning services and capabilities are easily used by more than a hundred thousand customers at a really good scale. However, I still think in Amazon, we tend to use the phrase, "It's day one in the age of internet," even though it's an, or the phrase, "Now, but it's a golden one," but I would say in the world of machine learning, yes it's day one but I also think we just woke up and we haven't even had a cup of coffee yet. That's really that early, so. And, but when you it's interesting, you've compared it to where cloud was like 10, 12 years ago. That's early days when I used to talk to engineering leaders who are running their own data center and then we talked about cloud and various disruptive technologies. I still used to get a sense about like why cloud and basic and whatnot at that time, Whereas now with machine learning though almost every CIO, CEO, all of them never asked me why machine learning. Instead, the number one question, I get is, how do I get started with it? What are the best use cases? which is great, and this is where I always tell them one of the learnings that we actually learned in Amazon. So again, a few years ago, probably seven or eight years ago, and Amazon itself realized as a company, the impact of what machine learning could do in terms of changing how we actually run our business and what it means to provide better customer experience optimize our supply chain and so far we realized that the we need to help our builders learn machine learning and the help even our business leaders understand the power of machine learning. So we did two things. One, we actually, from a bottom-up level, we built what I call as machine learning university, which is run in my team. It's literally stocked with professors and teachers who offer curriculum to builders so that they get educated on machine learning. And now from a top-down level we also, in our yearly planning process, we call it the operational planning process where we write Amazon style narratives six pages and then answer FAQ's. We asked everyone to answer one question around, like how do you plan to leverage machine learning in your business? And typically when someone says, I really don't play into our, it does not apply. It's usually it doesn't go well. So we kind of politely encourage them to do better and come back with a better answer. This kind of dynamic on top-down and bottom-up, changed the conversation and we started seeing more and more measurable growth. And these are some of the things you're starting to see more and more among our customers too. They see the business benefit, but this is where to address the talent gap. We also made machine learning university curriculum actually now open source and freely available. And we launched SageMaker Studio Lab, which is a no cost, no set up SageMaker notebook service for educating learner profiles and all the students as well. And we are excited to also announce AIMLE scholarship for underrepresented students as well. So, so much more we can do well. >> Well, congratulations on the DynamoDB paper. That's the 10 year anniversary, which is a revolutionary product, changed the game that did change the world and that a huge impact. And now as machine learning goes to the next level, the next intern out there is at school with machine learning. They're going to be writing that next paper, your advice to them real quick. >> My biggest advice is, always, I encourage all the builders to always dream big, and don't be hesitant to speak your mind as long as you have the right conviction saying you're addressing a real customer problem. So when you feel like you have an amazing solution to address a customer problem, take the time to articulate your thoughts better, and then feel free to speak up and communicate to the folks you're working with. And I'm sure any company that nurtures good talent and knows how to hire and develop the best they will be willing to listen and then you will be able to have an amazing impact in the industry. >> Swami, great to know you're CUBE alumni love our conversations from intern on the paper of DynamoDB to the technical leader at AWS and database analyst machine learning, congratulations on all your success and continue innovating on behalf of the customers and the industry. Thanks for spending the time here on theCUBE and our program, appreciate it. >> Thanks again, John. Really appreciate it. >> Okay, now let's kick off our program. That ends the keynote track here on the AWS startup showcase. Season two, episode one, enjoy the program and don't miss the closing keynote with Deepak Singh. He goes into great detail on the changing business models, all the exciting open source innovation. (gentle bright music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Cisco is a company at the crossroads. It's transitioning from a high margin hardware business to a software subscription-based model, which also should be high margin through both organic moves and targeted acquisitions. It's doing so in the context of massive macro shifts to digital in the cloud. We believe Cisco's dominant position in networking combined with a large market opportunity and a strong track record of earning customer trust, put the company in a good position to capitalize on cloud momentum. However, there are clear challenges ahead for Cisco, not the least of which is the growing complexity of its portfolio, a large legacy business, and the mandate to maintain its higher profitability profile as it transitions into a new business model. Hello and welcome to this week's Wiki-bond cube insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we welcome in Zeus Kerravala, who's the founder and principal analyst at ZK Research, long time Cisco watcher who together with me crafted the premise of today's session. Zeus, great to see you welcome to the program. >> Thanks Dave. It's always a pleasure to be with you guys. >> Okay, here's what we're going to talk about today, set the agenda. The catalyst for this session, Zeus and I attended Cisco's financial analyst day. We received a day and a half of firehose presentations, drill downs, interactions, Q and A with Cisco execs and one key customer. So we're going to share our takeaways from these sessions and add our additional thoughts. Now, in particular, we're going to talk about Cisco's TAM, its transformation to a subscription-based model, and how we see that evolving. As always, we're going to bring in some ETR spending data for context and get Zeus' take on what that tells us. And we'll end with a summary of Cisco's cloud strategy and outlook for how it could win in the cloud. So let's talk about Cisco's sort of structure and TAM opportunities. First, Zeus, Cisco has four main lines of business where it's organized it's executives around sort of four product areas. And it's got a large service component as well. Network equipment, SP routing, data center, collaboration that security, and as I say services, that's not necessarily how it's going to market, but that's kind of the way it organizes its ELT, its executive leadership team. >> Yeah, the in fact, the ELT has been organized around those products, as you said. It used to report to the street three product segments, infrastructure platforms, which was by far the biggest, it was all their networking equipment, then applications, and then security. Now it's moved to five new segments, secure agile networks, hybrid work, end to end security, internet for the future and optimized app experiences. And I think what Cisco's trying to do is align their, the way they report along the lines of the way customers buy. 'Cause I think before, you know, they had a very simplistic model before. It was just infrastructure, apps, and security. The ELT is organized around product roadmap and the product innovation, but that's not necessarily the way customers purchase things and so, purchase things so I think they've tried to change things a little bit there. When you look at those segments though, you know, by, it's interesting. They're all big, right? So, by far the biggest distilled networking, which is almost a hundred billion dollar TAM as they reported and they have it growing a about a 9% CAGR as reported by other analyst firms. And when you think about how mature networking is Dave, the fact that that's still growing at high single digit CAGR is still pretty remarkable. So I think that's one of those things that, you know, watchers of Cisco historically have been calling for the network to be commoditized for decades. For as long as I've been watching Cisco, we've been, people have been waiting for the network to be commoditized. My thesis has always been, if you can drive enough innovation into things, you can stave off commoditization and that's what they've done. But that's really the anchor for them to sell all their other products, some of which are higher margin, some which are a little bit sore, but they're all good high margin businesses to your point. >> Awesome. We're going to dig into that. So, so they flattened the organization when Geckler left. You've got Todd Nightingale, Jonathan Davidson, Liz Centoni, and Jeetu Patel who we heard from and we'll make some comments on what we heard from them. One of the big takeaways at the financial analysts meeting was on the TAM, as you just mentioned. Liz Centoni who also is heavily involved in strategy and the CFO Scott Herren, showed this slide, which speaks to the company's TAM and the organizational structure that you were just talking about. So the big message was that Cisco has got a large and growing market, you know, no shortage of available market. Somewhere between eight and 900 billion, depending on which of the slides you pull out of the deck. And ironically Zeus, when you look at the current markets number here on the right hand side of this slide, 260 billion, it just about matches the company's market cap. Maybe an interesting coincidence, but at any rate, what was your takeaway from this data? >> Well, I think, you know, the big takeaway from the data is there's still a lot of room ahead for Cisco to grow, right? Again, this is a, it's a company that I think most people would put in the camp of legacy IT vendor, just because of how long they've been around. But they have done a very good job of staving off innovation. And part of that is just these markets that they play in continue to grow and they continue to have challenges that they can solve. I think one of the things Cisco has done though, since the arrival of Chuck Robbins, is they don't fight these trends anymore, Dave. I know prior to Chuck's arrival, they really fought the tide of software defined networking and you know, trends like that, and even cloud to some extent. And I remember one of the first meetings I had with Chuck, I asked him about that and he said that Cisco will never do that again. That under his watch, if customers are going through a market transition, Cisco wants to lead them through it, not try and hold them back. And I think for that reason, they're able to look at, all of those trends and try and take a leadership position in them, even though you might look at some of those and feel that some of them might be detrimental to Cisco's business in the short term. So something like software defined WANs, which you would throw into secure agile networks, certainly doesn't, may not carry the same kind of RPOs and margins with it that their traditional routers did, but ultimately customers are going to buy it and Cisco would like to be the ones to sell it to them. >> You know, you bring up a great point. This industry is littered, there's a graveyard of executives who fought the trend. Many people, some people remember Ken Olson of Digital Equipment Corporation. "Unix is snake oil," is what he said. IBM mainframe guys said, "PCs are a toy." And of course the history, they were the wrong side of history. The other big takeaway was the shift to software in subscription. They really made a big point of this. Here's a chart Cisco showed a couple of times to make the point that it's one of the largest software companies in the world. You know, in the top 10. They also made the point that Chuck Robbins, when he joined in 2015, and since that time, it's nearly 4x'ed it's subscription software revenue, and roughly doubled its software sales. And it now has an RPO, remaining performance obligations, that exceeds 30 billion. And it's committing to grow its subscription business in the forward-looking statements by 15 to 17% CAGR through 25, which would imply about a doubling of these, the blue lines. Zeus, it's unclear if that forward-looking forecast is just software. I presume it includes some services, but as Herren pointed out, over time, these services will be bundled into the product revenue, same way SAS companies do it. But the point is Cisco is committed, like many of their peers, to moving to an ARR model. But please, share your thoughts on Cisco's move to software subscriptions and how you see the future of consumption-based pricing. >> Yeah, this has been a big shift for Cisco, obviously. It's one that's highly disruptive. It's one that I know gave their partners a lot of angst for a long time because when you sell things upfront, you get a big check for selling that, right? And when you sell things in a subscription model, you get a much smaller check for a number of months over the period of the contract. It also changes the way you deal with the customer. When you sell a one-time product, you basically wipe your hands. You come back in three or four years and say, "it's time to upgrade." When you sell a subscription, now, the one thing that I've tried to talk to Cisco and its partners about is customers don't renew things they don't use. And so it becomes incumbent on the partner, it becomes incumbent upon Cisco to make sure that things that the customer is subscribing to, that they do use. And so Cisco's had to create a customer success organization. They've had to help their partners create those customer success organizations. So it's really changed the model. And Cisco not only made the shift, they've done it faster than they actually had originally forecast. So during the financial analyst day, they actually touted their execution on software, noting that it hit it's 30% revenue as percent of total target well before it was supposed to, it's actually exceeded its targets. And now it's looking to increase that to, it actually raised its guidance in this area a little bit by a few percentage points, looking out over the next few years. And so it's moved to the subscription model, Dave, the thing that you brought up, which I do see as somewhat of a challenge is the shift to consumption-based pricing. So subscription is one thing in that I write you a check every month for the same amount. When I go to the consumption-based pricing, that's easy to do for cloud services, things like WebEx or Duo or, you know, CloudLock, some of the security products. That that shift should be relatively simple. If customers want to buy it that way. It's unclear as to how you do that when you're selling on-prem equipment with the software add-on to it because in that case, you have to put metering technology in to understand how much they're using. You have to have a minimum baseline to start with. They've done it in some respects. The old HCS product that they sold, the Telcos, actually was sold with a minimum commit and then they tacked on a utilization on top of that. So maybe they move into that kind of model. But I know it's something that they've, they get asked about a lot. I know they're still thinking about it, but it's something that I believe is coming and it's going to come pretty fast. >> I want to pick up on that because I think, you know, they made the point that we're one of the top 10 software companies in the world. It's very difficult for hardware companies to make the transition to software. You know, HP couldn't do it. >> Well, no one's done it. >> Well, IBM has kind of done it, but they really struggle. It's kind of this mishmash of tooling and software products that aren't really well-integrated. But, I would say this, everybody now, Cisco, Dell, HPE with GreenLake, Lenovo, pretty much all the traditional hardware players are trying to move to an as a service model or at least for a portion of their business. HPE's all in, Dell transitioning. And for the most part, I would make the following observation. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this. They're pretty much following a SAS like model, which in my view is outdated and kind of flawed from a customer standpoint. All these guys say, "Hey, we're doing this because "this is what the customers want." I think the cloud is really a true consumption based model. And if you look at modern SAS companies, a lot of the startups, they're moving to a consumption based model. You see that with Snowflake, you see that with Stripe. Now they will offer incentives. But most of the traditional enterprise players, they're saying, "Okay, pay us upfront, "commit to some base level. "If you go over it, you know, "we'll charge you for it. "If you go under it, you're still going to pay "for that base level." So it's not true consumption base. It's not really necessarily the customer's best interest. So that's, I think there's some learnings there that are going to have to play out. >> Yeah, the reason customers are shying away from that SAS type model, I think during the pandemic, the one thing we learned, Dave, is that the business will ebb and flow greatly from month to month sometimes. And I was talking with somebody that worked for one of the big hotel chains, and she was telling me that what their CRM providers, she wouldn't tell me who it was, except said it rhymed with Shmalesforce, that their utilization of it went from, you know, from a nice steady level to spiking really high when customers started calling in to cancel hotel rooms. And then it dropped down to almost nothing as we went through that period of stay at home. And now it's risen back up. And so for her, she wanted to move to a consumption-based model because what happens otherwise is you wind up buying for peak utilization, your software subscriptions go largely underutilized the majority of the year, and you wind up paying, you know, a lot more than you need to. If you go to more of a true consumption model, it's harder to model out from a financial perspective 'cause there's a lot of ebbs and flows in the business, but over a longer period of time, it's more cost-effective, right? And so the, again, what the pandemic taught us was we don't really know what we're going to need from a consumption standpoint, you know, nevermind a year from now, maybe even six months from now. And consumption just creates a lot more flexibility and agility. You can scale up, you can scale down. You can bring in users, you can take out users, you can add consultants, things like that. And it just, it's much more aligned with the way businesses are run today. >> Yeah, churn is a silent killer of a software company. And so there's retention is the key here. So again, I think there's lots of learning. Let's put Cisco into context with some of its peers. So this chart we developed compares five companies to Cisco. Core Dell, meaning Dell, without VMware. VMware, HPE, IBM, we've put an AWS, and then Cisco as, IBM, AWS and Cisco is the integrated plays. So the chart shows the latest quarterly revenue multiplied by four to get a run rate, a three-year growth outlook, gross margin percentage, market cap, and revenue multiple. And the key points here are that one, Cisco has got a pretty awesome business model. It's got 60% gross margin, strong operating margins, not shown here, but in the mid twenties, 25%. It's got a higher growth rate than most of its peers. And as such, a much better, multiple than say, for instance, Core Dell gets 33 cents on the revenue dollar. HPE is double that. IBM's below two X. Cisco's revenue multiple rivals VMware, which is a pure software company. Now in a large part that's because VMware stock took a hit recently, but still the point is obvious. Cisco's got a great business. Now for context, we've added AWS, which blows away any company on this chart. We've inferred a market cap of nearly 600 billion, which frankly is conservative at a 10 X revenue multiple given it's inferred margins and growth rate. Now Zeus, if AWS were a separate company, it could have a market cap that approached 800 billion in my view. But what does this data tell you? >> Well, it just tells me that Cisco continues to be a very well-run company that has staved off commoditization, despite the calling for it for years. And I think the big lesson, and I've talked to financial analysts about this over the years, is that if, I don't really believe anything in this world is a commodity, Dave. I think even when Cisco went to the server market, if you remember back then, they created a new way of handling memory management. They were getting well above average margins for service, albeit less than Cisco's network margins, but still above average for server margins. And so I think if you can continue to innovate, you will see the margin stay where they are. You will see customers continue to buy and refresh. And I think one of the challenges Cisco's had in the past, and this is where the subscription business will help, is getting customers to stay with the latest and greatest. Prior to this refresh of network equipment, some of the stuff that I've seen in the fields, 10, 15 years old, once you move to that sell me a box and then tack on the subscription revenue that you pay month by month, you do drive more consistent refresh. Think about the way you just handle your own mobile phone. If you had to go pay, you know, a thousand dollars every three years, you might not do it at that three-year cycle. If you pay 40 bucks a month, every time there's a new phone, you're going to take it, right? So I think Cisco is able to drive greater, better refresh, keep their customers current, keep the features in there. And we've seen that with a lot of the new products. The new Cat 9,000, some of the new service provider products, the new wifi products, they've all done very well. In fact, they've all outpaced their previous generation products as far as growth rate goes. And so I think that is a testament to the way they've run the business. But I do think when people bucket Cisco in with HP and Dell, and I understand why they do, their businesses were similar at one time, it's really not a true comparison anymore. I think Cisco has completely changed their business and they're not trying to commoditize markets, they're trying to drive innovation and keep the margins up, where I think HP and Dell tend to really compete on price versus innovation. >> Well, and we are going to get to this point about the tailwinds and headwinds and cloud, and how Cisco to do it. But, to your point about, you know, the cell phone analogy. To the extent that Cisco can make that seamless for customers could hide that underlying complexity, that's going to be critical for the cloud. Now, but before we get there, I want to talk about one of the reasons why Cisco such a high multiple, and has been able to preserve its margins, to your point, not being commoditized. And it's been able to grow both organically, but also has a strong history of M and A. It's this chart shows a dominant position in core networking. So this shows, so ETR data within the Fortune 500. It plots companies in the ETR taxonomy in two dimensions, net score on the vertical axis, which is a measure of spending velocity, and market share on the horizontal axis, which is a measure of presence in the survey. It's not like IDC market share, it's mentioned market share if you will. The point is Cisco is far and away the most pervasive player in the market, it's generally held its dominant position. Although, it's been under pressure in the last few years in core networking, but it retains or maintains a very respectable net score and consistently performs well for such a large company. Zeus, anything you'd add with respect to Cisco's core networking business? >> Yeah, it's maintained a dominant network position historically. I think part of because it drives good products, but also because the competitive landscape, historically has been pretty weak, right? We saw companies like 3Com and Nortel who aren't around anymore. It'll be interesting to see moving forward now that companies like VMware are involved in networking. AWS is interested in networking. Arista is a much stronger company. You know, Juniper bought Mist and is in better position. Even Extreme Networks who most people thought was dead a few years ago has made a number of acquisitions and is now a billion dollar company. So while Cisco has done a great job of execution, they've done a great job on the innovation side, their competitive landscape, looking out over the next five years, I think is going to be more difficult than it has been over the previous five years. And largely, Dave, I think that's good for Cisco. I think whenever Cisco's pressed a little bit from competition, they tend to step on the innovation gas a little bit more. And I look back and even just the transition when VMware bought Nicira, that got Cisco's SDN business into gear, like nothing else could have, right? So competition for that company, they always seem to respond well to it. >> So, let's break down Cisco's net score a little bit. Explain why the company has been able to hold its spending momentum despite its large size. This will give you a little insight to the survey. So this chart shows the granular components of net score. The lime green is new adoptions to Cisco. The forest green is spending more than 6%. The gray is flat plus or minus 5%. The pink is spending drops by more than 5%. And the red is we're chucking the platform, we're getting off. And Cisco's overall net score here is 25%, which for a company of its size speaks to the relationships that it has with customers. It's of course got a fat middle in the gray area, like all sort of large established companies. But very low defections as well, it's got low new adoptions. But very respectable. So that is background, Zeus. Let's look at spending momentum over time across Cisco's portfolio. So this chart shows Cisco's net score by that methodology within the ETR taxonomy for Cisco over three survey periods. And what jumps out is Meraki on the left, very strong. Virtualization business, its core networking, analytics and security, all showing upward momentum. AppD is a little bit concerning, but that could be related to Cisco's sort of pivot to full stack observability. So maybe AppD is being bundled there. Although some practitioners have cited to us some concerns in that space. And then WebEx at the end of the chart, it's showing some relative strength, but not that high. Zeus, maybe you could comment on Meraki and any other takeaways across the portfolio. >> Yeah, Meraki has proven to be an excellent acquisition for Cisco. In fact, you might, I think it's arguable to say it's its best acquisition in history going all the way back to camp Kalpana and Grand Junction, the ones that brought up catalyst switches. So, in fact, I think Meraki's revenue might be larger than security now. So, that shows you the momentum it has. I think one of the lessons it brought to Cisco was that simpler is better, sometimes. I think when they first bought Meraki, the way Meraki's deployed, it's very easy to set up. There's a lot of engineering work though that goes into making a product simple to use. And I think a lot of Cisco engineers historically looked at Meraki as, that's a little bit of a toy. It's meant for small businesses, things like that, but it's not for enterprise. But, Rocky's done a nice job of expanding the portfolio, of leveraging the cloud for analytics and showing you a lot of things that you wouldn't necessarily get from traditional networking equipment. And one of the things that I was really delighted to see was when they put Todd Nightingale in charge of all the networking business, because that showed to me that Chuck Robbins understood that the things Meraki were doing were right and they infuse a little bit of Meraki into the rest of the company. You know, that's certainly a good thing. The other areas that you showed on the chart, not really a surprise, Dave. When you think of the shift hybrid work and you think of the, some of the other transitions going on, I think you would expect to see the server business in decline, the storage business, you know, maybe in a little bit of decline, just because people aren't building out data centers. Where the other ones are related more to hybrid working, hybrid cloud, things like that. So it is what you would expect. The WebEx one was interesting too, because it did show somewhat of a dip and then a rise. And I think that's indicative of what we've seen in the collaboration space since the pandemic came about. Companies like Zoom and RingCentral really got a lot of the headlines. Again, when you, the comment I made on competition, Cisco got caught a little bit flat-footed, they've caught up in features and now they really stepped on the gas there. Chuck joked that he gave the WebEx team a bit of a blank check to go do what it had to do. And I don't think that was a joke. I think he actually did that because they've added more features into WebEx in the last year then I think they did the previous five years before that. >> Well, let's just drill into video conferencing real quick here, if we could. Here's that two dimensional view, again, showing net score against market share or pervasiveness of mentions, and you can see Microsoft Teams in the upper right. I mean, it's off the chart, literally. Zoom's well ahead of Cisco in terms of, you know, mentions presence. And that could be a spate of freemium, you know, but it's basically a three horse race in this game. And Cisco, I don't think is trying to take Zoom head on, rather it seems to be making WebEx a core part of its broader collaboration agenda. But Zeus, maybe you could comment. >> Well, it's all coming together, right? So, it's hard to decouple calling from video from meetings. All of the vendors, including Teams, are going after the hybrid work experience. And if you believe the future is hybrid and not just work from home, then Cisco does have a pretty interesting advantage because it's the only one that makes its own end points, where Teams and Zoom doesn't. And so that end to end experience it can deliver. The Microsoft Teams one's interesting because that product, frankly, when you talk to users, it doesn't have a great user score, like as far as user satisfaction goes, but the one thing Microsoft has done a very good job of is bundling it in to the Office365 licenses, making it very easy for IT to deploy. Zoom is a little bit in the middle where they've appealed to the users. They've done a better job of appealing to IT, but there is a, there is a battleground now going on where video's not just video. It includes calling, includes meetings, includes room systems now, and I think this hybrid work friend is going to change the way we think about these meeting tools. >> Now we'd be remiss if we didn't spend a moment talking about security as a key part of Cisco's business. And we have a graphic on this same kind of X, Y. And it's been, we've seen several quarters of growth. Although, the last quarter security growth was in the low single digits, but Cisco is a major player in security. And this X, Y graph shows, they've got both a large presence and a solid spending momentum. Not nearly as much momentum as Okta or Zscaler or a CrowdStrike and some of the smaller companies, but they're, these guys are on a rocket ship, but others that we featured in these episodes, but much more than respectable for Cisco. And security is critical to the strategy. It's a big part of the subscriber base. And the last thing, Zeus, I'll say about Cisco made the point in analyst day, that this market is crowded. You can see that in this chart. And their goal is to simplify this picture and make it easier for customers to secure their data and apps. But that's not easy, Zeus. What are your thoughts on Cisco's security opportunities? >> Yeah, I've been waiting for Cisco go to break up in security a little more than it has. I do think, I was talking with a CSO the other day, Dave, that said to me he's starting to understand that you don't have to have best of breed everywhere to have best in class threat protection. In fact, there's a lot of buyers now will tell you that if you try and have best of breed everywhere, it actually creates a negative when it comes to threat protection because keeping all the policies and things up to date is very, very difficult. And so the industry is moving more to a platform model, right? Now, the challenge for Cisco is how do you get that, the customer to think of the network as part of the platform? Because while the platform model, I think, is starting to gain traction, FloridaNet, Palo Alto, even McAfee, companies like that also have their own version of a security platform. And if you look at the financial performance of companies like FloridaNet and Palo Alto over the past, you know, over the past couple of years, they've been through the roof, right? And so I think an interesting and unique challenge for Cisco is can they convince the security buyer that the network is as important a part of that platform as any other component? If they can do that, I think they can break away from the pack. If not, then they'll stay mixed in with those, you know, Palo, FloridaNet, Checkpoint, and, you know, and Cisco, in that mix. But I do think that may present their single biggest needle moving opportunity just because of how big the security TAM is, and the fact that there is no de facto leader in security today. If they could gain the same kind of position in security as they have a networking, who, I mean, that would move the needle like no other market would. >> Yeah, it's really interesting that they're coming at security, obviously from a position of networking strength. You've got, to your point, you've got best of breed, Okta in identity, you got CrowdStrike in endpoint, Zscaler in cloud security. They're all growing like crazy. And you got Cisco and you know, Palo Alto, CSOs tell us they want to work with Palo Alto because they're the thought leader and they're obviously a major player here. You mentioned FloridaNet, there's a zillion others. We could talk all day about security. But let's bring it back to cloud. We've talked about a number of the piece in Cisco's portfolio, and we haven't really spent any time on full stack observability, which is a big push for Cisco with AppD, Intersight and the ThousandEyes acquisition. And that plays into this equation. But my take, Zeus, is Cisco has a number of cloud knobs that it can turn, it sells core networking equipment to hyperscalers. It can be the abstraction layer to connect on-prem to the cloud and hybrid and across clouds. And it's in a good position with Telcos too, to go after the 5G. But let's use this chart to talk about Cisco's cloud prospects. It's an ETR cut of the cloud customer spending. So we cut it by cloud customers. And they're are, I don't know, 800 or so in the survey. And then looking at various companies performance within that cut. So these are companies that compete, or in the case of HashiCorp, partner with Cisco at some level. Let me just set this up and get your take. So the insert on the chart by the way shows the raw data that positions each dot, the net score and the shared n, i.e. the number of accounts in the survey that responded. The key points, first of all, Azure and AWS, dominant players in cloud. GCP is a distant third. We've reported on that a lot. Not only are these two companies big, they have spending momentum on their platforms. They're growing, they are on that flywheel. Second point, VMware and Cisco are very prominent. They have huge customer bases. And while they're often on a collision course, there's lots of room in cloud for multiple players. When we plotted some other Cisco properties like AppD and Meraki, which as we said, is strong. And then for context, we've placed Dell, HPE, Aruba, IBM and Oracle. And also VMware cloud and AWS, which is notable on its elevation. And as I say, we've added HashiCorp because they're critical partner of Cisco and it's a multi-cloud play. Okay, Zeus, there's the setup. What does Cisco have to do to make the cloud a tailwind? Let's talk about strategy, tailwinds, headwinds, competition, and bottom line it for us. >> Yeah, well, I do think, well, I talked about security being the biggest needle mover for Cisco, I think its biggest challenge is convincing Wall Street in particular, that the cloud is a tailwind. I think if you look at the companies with the really high multiples to their stock, Dave, they're all ones where they're viewed as, they go along with the cloud ride, Right? So the, if you can associate yourself with the cloud and then people believe that the cloud is going to, more cloud equals more business, that obviously creates a better multiple because the cloud has almost infinite potential ahead of it. Now with respect to Cisco, I do think cloud has presented somewhat of a double-edged sword for Cisco. I don't believe the current consumption model for cloud is really a tailwind for Cisco, not really a headwind, but it doesn't really change Cisco's business. But I do think the very definition of cloud is changing before our eyes, Dave. And it's shifting away from centralized clouds. If you think of the way customers bought cloud before, it might have used AWS, it might've used Azure, but it really, that's not really multi-cloud, it's just multiple clouds in which I put things in these centralized resources. It's shifting more to this concept of distributed cloud in which a single application can be built using resources from your private cloud, for AWS, from Azure, from Edge locations, all the cloud providers have built their portfolios to support this concept of distributed cloud and what becomes important there, is a highly agile dynamic network. And in that case with distributed cloud, that is a tailwind for Cisco because now the network is that resource that ties all those distributed cloud components together. Now the network itself has to change. It needs to become a lot more agile and microservices and container friendly itself so I can spin up resources and, you know, in an Edge location, as fast as I can on-prem and things like that. But I do think it creates another wave of innovation and networking, and in that case, I think it does act as a tailwind for Cisco, aside from just the work it's done with the web scalers, you know, those types of companies. So, but I do think that Cisco needs to rethink its delivery model on network services somewhat to take advantage of that. >> At the analyst meeting, Cisco made the point that it does sell to the hyperscalers. It talked about the top six hyperscalers. You know, you had mentioned to me, maybe IBM and Oracle were in there. I always talk about four hyperscalers and only four, but that's fine. Here's my question. Practitioners have told me, buyers have told me, the more money and more workloads I put in the cloud, the less I spend with Cisco. Now, even though that might be Cisco gear powering those clouds, do you see that as a potential threat in that they don't own that relationship anymore and value will confer to the cloud players? >> Yeah, that's, I've heard that too. And I don't, I believe that's true when it comes to general purpose compute. You're probably not buying as many UCS servers and things like that because you are putting them in the cloud. But I do think you do need a refresh the network. I think the network becomes a very important role, plays a very important role there. The variant, the really interesting trend will be, what is your WAM look like? Do you have thousands of workers scattered all over the place, or do you just have a few centralized locations? So I think also, you know, Cisco will wind up providing connectivity within the cloud. If you think of the transition we've seen in other industries, Dave, as far as cloud goes, you think of, you know, F5, a company like that. People thought that AWS would commoditize F5's business because AWS provides their own load balancers, right? But what AWS provides is a very basic, very basic functionality and then use F5's virtual edition or a cloud edition for a lot of the advanced capabilities. And I think you'll see the same thing with the cloud that customers will start buying versions of Cisco that go in the cloud to drive a lot of those advanced capabilities that only Cisco delivers. And so I think you wind up buying more Cisco over time, although the per unit price of what you buy might be a little bit lower. If that makes sense here. >> It does, I think it makes a lot of sense and that fits into the cloud model. You know, you bring up a good point, the conversation with the customer was Rakuten. And that individual was essentially sharing with us, somebody was asking, one of the analysts was asking, "Well, what about the cloud guys? "Aren't they going to really threaten the whole Telco "industry and disrupt it?" And his point was, "Look at, this stuff is not trivial." So to your point, you know, maybe they'll provide some basic functionality. Kind of like they do in a lot of different areas. Data protection is another good example. Security is another good example. Where there's plenty of room for partners, competitors, of on-prem players to add value. And I've always said, "Look, the opportunity "is the cloud players spend 100 billion dollars a year "on CapEx." It's a gift to companies like Cisco who can build an abstraction layer that connects on-prem, cloud for hybrid, across clouds, out to the edge, and really be that layer that is that layer that takes advantage of cloud native, but also delivers that experience, I don't want to use the word seamlessly, but that experience across those clouds as the cloud expands. And that's fundamentally Cisco's cloud strategy, isn't it? >> Oh yeah. And I think people have underestimated over the years, how hard it is to build good networking products. Anybody can go get some silicon and build a product to connect two things together. The question is, can you do it at scale? Can you do it securely? And lots of companies have tried to commoditize networking, you know, White Boxes was looked at as the existential threat to Cisco. Huawei was looked at as the big threat to Cisco. And all of those have kind of come and gone because building high quality network equipment that scales is tough. And it's tougher than most people realize. And your other point on the cloud providers as well, they will provide a basic level of functionality. You know, AWS network equipment doesn't work in Azure. And Azure stuff doesn't work in Google, and Google doesn't work in AWS. And so you do need a third party to come in and act as almost the cloud middleware that can connect all those things together with a consistent set of policies. And that's what Cisco does really well. They did that, you know back when they were founded with routing protocols and you can think this is just an extension of what they're doing just up at the cloud layer. >> Excellent. Okay, Zeus, we're going to leave it there. Thanks to my guest today, Zeus Kerravala. Great analysis as always. Would love to have you back. Check out ZKresearch.com to reach him. Thank you again. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Now, remember I publish each week on Wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. All these episodes are available as podcasts, just search "Braking Analysis" podcast, and you can connect on Twitter at DVallante or email me David.Vallante@siliconangle.com. Thanks for the comments on LinkedIn. Check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vallante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Be well and we'll see you next time. (light music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back here in theCUBE, this is day three of our coverage right here in the middle of all the action of Cloud City at Mobile World Congress. This is the hit of the entire show in Barcelona, not only in person, but out on the interwebs virtually, this is a hybrid event. This is back to real life, and theCUBE is here. I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante and DR is here, Danielle Royston. >> Totally. >> Welcome back to theCUBE for the fourth time now at the anchor desk, coming back, we love you. >> Well, it's been a busy day, it's been a busy week. It's been an awesome week. >> John: Feeling good? >> Oh my God. >> You made the call. >> I've made the call. >> You did on your podcast what, months ago. >> Yeah, right? >> You made the call. >> Made the call. >> You're on the right side of history. >> Right, and people were like, it's going to be canceled. COVID won't be handled, blahbity blah. >> She's crazy. >> Nope, I was just crazy, I'm okay with that, right? >> Crazy good. >> Right, I'm like I'm forward looking in a lot of ways. And we were looking towards June and we're like, I think this is going to be the first event back. >> You know, the crazy ones commercial that Apple ran is one of the best commercials of all time. You can't ignore the crazy ones in a good way. You can't ignore what you're doing. And I think to me, what I'm so excited about is cause we've been covering cloud we're cloud bigots, we love the cloud, public cloud. We've been on that train from day one. But when you hear the interviews we did here in theCUBE and interviews that we talked about with the top people, Google, Amazon Web Services. We're talking about the top people, both technology leaders like Bill Vass and the people who run the telecom verticals like Alfonzo, Adolfo, I mean, Hernandez. We had Google's top networking executive, we had their industry leader and the telecom, Microsoft and the Silicon all are validating, and it's like, surround sound to what you're saying here, and it cannot be ignored. >> I mean, we are coming to a big moment in Telco, right? And I mean, I've been saying it's coming. I called 2021, the year of Public Cloud and Telco. It helped that Erickson bailed. So thank you, Erickson people. >> It was a gift. >> It was a gift. >> It was. >> It really was a gift. And it was not just for me, but I think also for the vendors in the booth, I mean, we have a Cloud City army, right? Here we go, let's start marching, and it's awesome. >> He reminds me of that baseball player that took a break, cause he had a hangover and, Cal Ripkin. >> Cal Ripkin? >> Yeah, what was that guy's name? >> Did that really happen? >> Yeah, he took a break and uh- >> New guy stepped in. >> Yeah, and so well, not Cal Ripkin. >> No, no, so before, you want to know, who was it, Lou Gehrig? >> Lou Gehrig, yeah, Lou Gehrig. >> Right, so, Lou Gehrig was nobody, and we can't remember the guy's name, nobody knows the guy's name, what was that guy's name? Nobody knows, oh, there's Lou Gehrig, he got hurt. He sat out and Lou Gehrig replaced him and never hear of him again. >> Danielle: Love it, I'll take that. >> Never, never missed a game for his entire career. So again, this is what Erickson did, they just okay, take a break. >> Yeah, but I mean, it's been great again. I had a great day yesterday, my keynote was delivered. Things are going well with the booth, we had Jon Bon Jovi. I mean, that was just epic and it was acoustic and it was right after lockdown. I think everyone was really excited to be there. But I was talking to a vendor that said we'd been able to accomplish in three days, what normally it would take three years from a sales funnel perspective. I mean, that's big and that's not me. That's not my organization. That's other organizations that are benefiting from this energy. Oh, it's awesome. >> The post isolation economy has become a living metaphor for transformation, and I've been trying to sort of grok and put the pieces together as to how this thing progresses in my interview with Portal One in particular really brought it into focus for me, anyway, I'd love to get your thoughts. One of the things we haven't talked much about is public policy, and I think about all the time, all the discussion in the United States about infrastructure, this is critical infrastructure, right? And the spectrum is a country like South Africa saying, come on in, we want to open up. We want to innovate, to me, that's the model for these tier two and tier three Telcos that are just going to disrupt the big guys, whereas, maybe China's maybe on the other end of the spectrum, very controlling, but it's the former that is going to adopt the cloud sooner, and it's going to completely transform the next decade. >> Yeah, I think this is a great technology for a smaller challenge or CSP that still is a large successful company to challenge the incumbents that are, they are dinosaurs too, they move a little bit slow, and maybe if you're a little bit faster, quicker dinosaur you'll survive longer, maybe you'll be able to transform and, and a public cloud enables that. And I think, you know I'm playing the long game here, right? Is public cloud already for every Telco in every corner of the world, no. And there's a couple of things that are barriers to that. We don't really talk about the downsides, and so maybe we sort of wrap up with- there are challenges and acknowledge there are challenges, you know, in some cases their data regulations and issues, right? And you can't right? There's not a hyperscaler in your country, right? And so you're having a little bit of challenges, but you trend this out over 10 years and then pace it with the hyperscalers that are building new data centers. They're each at 25 plus each, you know, plus or minus a few, right? They're marching along, and you trend this out over 10 years, I think one of two things happened, your data regulations are eased or a hyperscaler appears in a place you can use it, and those points converge and hopefully the software's there, and that's my effort and (claps) yeah. >> Dave: You know what's an interesting trend, DR and John, that is maybe a harbinger to this, is you just mentioned something. If the hyperscalers might not have a presence in, in a country, you know what they're doing? And our data shows this, I do that weekly series breaking analysis and the data Openstack was popping up. Like where does OpenStack come from, well, guess what, when you cut the data, it was Telcos using open source to build clouds in regions where there was no hyperscalers. >> It's a gap filler. >> Yeah, it's a gap filler, it's a bandaid. >> But I think this is where, like. outpost is such a great idea, right? Like getting outposts, and I think Microsoft has the ability to do this as well, Google less so, right? They're not providing the staff, they're doing Anthos. So you're still managing this, the rack, but they're giving you the ability to tap into their services. But I was talking to a CTO in Bolivia. He was like, we have data privacy issues in our country. There's no hyperscaler, not sure Bolivia is like next on the list for AWS, right? But he's like, I'm going to build my own public cloud. And I'm like why would you do that when you can just use outposts? And then when your data regulations release, where they get to Bolivia, you can switch and you're on the stack, and you're ready to go. I think that's what you should do. You should totally do that. >> John: Yeah, one of the things that's come up on here in the interviews, in theCUBE and here, the show is that there are risk takers and innovators and there's operators. And this has been the consistent theme around, yeah, the on-premises world you mentioned this regulation reasons, and or some workflows just have to be on premise for security reasons, whatever, that's the corner case. But the operating model of the technology architecture is shifted. And that reality, I don't think is debatable, so I find it, I got to ask you this because I'm really curious. I know you get a lot of people staring at ya, oh the public cloud's just a hosting, but why aren't people getting this architectural shift? I mean, you mentioned outpost and wavelength, which Amazon has, is a game changer. It's Amazon cloud at the hub. >> Yeah, at the edge. >> Okay, that's a low latency, again, low-hanging fruit applications, real buys, whatnot. I mean, that's an architectural dot that's been connected. Why are people getting it. >> In our industry, I think it is a lot of not invented here syndrome, right? And that's a very sort of nineties thought and I have been advocating stand on the shoulders of the greatest technologists in the world, right, and you know, there's, there is a geopolitical US thing, I think we lived through a presidency that had a sort of nationalistic approach and a lot of those conversations pop up, but I've also looked to these guys and I'm like, you're still, you still have your Huawei kit installed. And there's concerns with that too. So, and you picked it because of cost, and it's really hard to switch off of, so give me a break with your public cloud USA stuff, right? You can use it, you're just making excuses, you're just afraid. What are you afraid of, the HR implications? Let's talk about that, right? And the minute I take it there, conversation changes. >> Yeah, I talked to Teresa Carlson when she was running the public sector at AWS, she's now president of Splunk. I call her a Renaissance woman. She's been a great leader and public sector for this weird little pocket of AWS where it's a guess a sales division, but it's still its own company. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And she's, did the CIA deal, the DOD, and the public sector partnerships are now private, a lot more private relationships, So it's not like just governments, you mentioned government and national security, and these things, you started to see the ecosystem not, not just be about companies, >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Government and private sector. So this whole vibe of the telecom being regulated, unregulated, unbundled is an interesting kind of theory. What's your thoughts and reactions to this, kind of this, melting pot of ecosystem change and evolution? >> Danielle: Yeah, I mean. I think there's a very nationalistic approach by the Telcos, right? They sort of think about the countries that they operate in. There's a couple of groups that go across multiple countries, but can there be a global Telco? Can that happen, right? Just like we say, you were saying it earlier, Netflix, right? You can say Netflix, UK. Right, and so can we have a global Telco, right. That is challenging on a lot of different levels. But think about that in a public cloud start to enable that idea, right? Elon Musk is going to get to Mars. You need a planetary level Telco. And I can, I think that day is, I mean, I don't think it's tomorrow, but I think that's like 10, 20 years away. >> Dave: You're done, we're going to see it start this decade, it's already starting. We're going to see the fruits of that dividend. >> Danielle: Yeah, it's crazy. >> I've got to ask you, you're a student of the industry and you get so much experience, it's great to have you on theCUBE and chat about, riff about these things, but, the classic who's ready for disruption question comes up, and I think there's no doubt that the Telcos as an industry has been slow moving and the role and the importance has changed. People need the need to have the internet access they need to access. >> Yeah. >> So, and you've got the edge, now applications are now running on it, since the iPhone 14 years ago, as you pointed out, people now are interested in how packets move. That's fast whether it's a doctor or an emergency worker or someone. >> Danielle: What we have done in 2020 without the internet and broadband and our mobile phones, I mean? >> You know, I think about 1920 when the Spanish flu pandemic hit a hundred years ago, those guys did not have mobile phones and they must have been bored, right? I mean, what are you going to do, right? And so, yeah I think last year really moved a lot of thinking forward in this respect, so. >> Yeah, it's always like that, that animal out in the Serengeti that gets taken down, you know, by the cheetah or the lion. How do know when someone is going to be disrupted What's the, what's the tell sign in your mind, you look at the Telco landscape. What is someone waiting to be disrupted or replaced like? >> You know what they're ostriches, how do you say that word, right? They stick their head in the sand. Like I don't want to talk about it, la la la, I don't want to, I don't want to think about it. You know, they bring up all these like roadblocks, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to come visit you in another six months to a year, and let's see what happens when the guys that are moving fast that are open-minded to this, and it's, I mean, when you start to use the public cloud, you don't, like, turn it on overnight. You start experimenting, right? You start, you take an application that is non-threatening. You have, I mean, these guys are running thousands of apps inside their data centers. Pick some boring ones, pick some old ones that no one likes, and move that to the public cloud, play with it. Right, I'm not talking about moving a whole network overnight tomorrow. You got to learn, you have no, I mean, very little talent in the Telco that know how to program against the AWS stack. Start hiring, start doing it, and you're going to start to learn about the compensation, and I used to do compensation, right? I spent a lot of time in HR, right? The compensation points and structures, they compare AWS and Google, versus a Telco. Do you want Telco stock? Do you want Google stock? >> Dave: Right, where do you want to go? >> Right, right? like that's going to challenge the HR organization in terms of compensate. How do we compensate our people when they're learning these new valuable skills? >> When you think about disruption, you know, the master or the professor of disruption, Clay Christensen, one of the best lectures he ever gave was who at Cambridge, and he gave a lecture on the steel industry, and he was describing it, it was like four layers of value in the steel industry, the value chain, it started with rebar, like the lowest end, right? >> Danielle: Yeah yeah. >> And the Telco's actually the opposite, so that, you know, when, when the international companies came in, they went after rebar, and the higher end steel companies said, nah, let them have it, that's the low margin stuff. And then eventually, uh, when they got up to the high end. >> Danielle: It was over, yeah. >> The Telcos are the opposite. They're like, the, you know, in the, in the conductivity and they're hanging on to that because it's so big, but all the high value stuff, it's already gone to the, over the top players, right. >> It's being eaten away, and I'm like, what is going to wake you guys up to realize those are your competitors, that's where the battle is, right? >> John: That's really where the value is. >> The battle of the bastards, you're there by yourself, like "Game of Thrones" and they're coming at you. >> John: You need a dragon. >> What are you doing about it? >> John: I need a dragon to compete in this market. Riding a dragon would be a good strategy. >> I know, I was just watching. Cause I have a podcast, I have a podcast called "Telco In 20" and we always put like little nuggets in the show notes, I personally reviewed them, I was just reviewing the one for the keynote that we're putting out, and I had a dragon in my keynote, right? It was a really great moment, it was really fun to do, but there's, I don't know if you guys are "Game of Thrones" fans. >> Yeah. >> Sure. >> Right, but there's a great moment when Daenerys gets her dragons, the baby dragons, and she takes over the Unsullied Army, right? And it's just this, right? Like all of a sudden the tables turn in an instant where she has nothing, and she's like on her quest, right. I'm on a quest. >> Dave: Comes out of the fire. >> Right, comes out of the fire, the unburnt, right? She has her dragons, right? She has them hatch. She takes over the Unsullied Army, right? Slaves, it starts her march, right? And I'm like, we're putting that clip into the show notes because I think that's where we are. I think I've hatched some dragons, right? The Cloud City army, let's go, let's go take on Telco. >> John: Well, I mean, this to me. >> Easy. >> It definitely have made, made it happen because I heard many people talking about cloud, this is turning into a cloud show. The question is, when does this going to be a cloud show? That's just Cloud City, it's a big section of the show. I mean, all the big players are behind it. >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> Amazon Web Services, Google Azure, Ecosystem, startups, thinking differently, but everyone's agreeing why aren't we doing this? >> I think, like I said, I mean, people are like, you're such a visionary, and how did, why do you think this will work, I'm like, it's worked in every other industry. Am I really that visionary, and like, these are the three best tech companies in the world, like, are, are you kidding me? And so I think we've shown the momentum here. I think we're looking forward to 2022, you know? And that we see 2022, you got to start planning this the minute we get back, right? Like I wouldn't recommend doing this in a hundred days again, that was a very painful, but you know, February, I was, there's a sign inside NWC, February 28th. Right, we're talking seven months. You got to get going now. >> John: Let's get on the phone. >> With Telco, I mean, I think you're right on. I mean, you know, remember Skype, in the early days, right? >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> It wasn't regional. It was just, plug into the internet. >> Danielle: It was just Skype, it was just WhatsApp. >> Well this is a great location, if you can get a shot guys of the people behind us, I don't know if you can, if you're watching check out the scene here, It's winding down, a lot of people having happy hour. Now this is a social construct here at Cloud City, not only is it chock full of information, reporting that we're doing and getting all the data and with the presentations on the main stage, with Adam and the studio and the team, this is a place where people are meeting and there's deals being done face to face, intimate relationships, the best of the best are here, they make the trek. So there's been a successful formula. Of course theCUBE is in the middle of all the action, which we love, we're psyched to be back. I want to thank you personally, while we have you on stage here. >> I want to thank you guys, and the crew, the crew has been amazing, turning out videos on short order. We have all these crews in different cities, it's, our own show has been virtual. You know, Adam's in Bristol, right? We're here, this was an experiment, we talked about this a hundred days ago, 90 days ago. Could we get theCUBE there, do the show but also theCUBE. >> You are a visionary, you said made for TV hybrid event with your team, produce television shows, theCUBE, we're digital, we love you guys, great alignment, but it's magical because the content doesn't end here, the show might end, they might break down the beautiful plants and the exhibits, but the community is going to continue, the content and the conversations. >> Yeah. >> So, we were looking forward to it and- >> I'm super glad, super glad we did this. >> Awesome, well, any final moments that you would like to share in the last two minutes we have, favorite moments, observations, funny things that have happened to you, weird things that have happened to you, share something that people might not know, or a favorite moment? >> I think, I don't know that people know, we have a 3D printer in the coffee shops, and so you can upload any picture and they're 3d printing, coffee art, right? So I've been seeing lots of social posts around people uploading their, their logos and things like that. I think Jon Bon Jovi, he was super thankful to be back. He thanked me personally two different times of like, I'm just glad to be out in front of people. And I think just even just the people walking around, thank you for being brave, thank you for coming back. You've helped Barcelona and we're happy to be together. Even if it is with masks, it's hard to do business with masks on, everyone's happy and psyched. >> John: Well the one thing that people cannot do relative to you is they cannot ignore you. You are making a great big wave. >> Danielle: I shout pretty loud, It's kind of hard to ignore me. >> You're making a great big wave, you're on the right side, we believe, of history, public cloud is driving the bus down main street of Cloud City, and if people don't get out of the way, they will be under the bus. >> I'm, like I said, in my keynote, it's go time let's do it. >> Okay. Thank you so much for all your attention and mission behind the cloud and the success. >> Danielle: We'll do it again. We're going to do it again soon. >> After Togi's a hundred million dollar investment, you're the CEO of Togi that, let's follow that progress, and of course, Telco DR, Danielle Royston, the digital revolution. Thanks for coming on with you. >> Thank you guys, it was super fun. >> This is theCUBE I'm John Furrier with Dave Vallante, we're going to send it back to Adam in the studio. Thanks, the team here. >> Woo! (audience applauding) >> I want to thank the team, everyone here, Adam is great, Chloe. >> Great working with you guys. >> Awesome, and what a great crew. >> So great. >> Thank you everybody. That's it for theCUBE, here on the last day, Wednesday of theCUBE, stay tuned for tomorrow more action on the main stage, here in Cloud City. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube conversation. >> Hi everybody. Welcome to theCUBE, this is Dave Vellante, and we're here to talk about a very important topic around de-risking infrastructure with business continuity. This is critical, especially in the era of COVID. And with me, to really explore this issue is Dr. Rico, who's the vice president office of the CTO at INFINIDAT Doc. Good to see you. >> Good to see you again, Dave. >> And Ken Steinhardt, is also here as a field CTO at INFINIDAT and I got to tell the audience, Doc, you're also the chairman of the Mass Motorcycles Association. You're a very cool guy. You're a pilot, you're a firearms instructor, all about safety, and Ken and Doc you're both musicians, right? Doc, I think he played the drums, and Ken, I know when we first met, you're a music guy, so wow. Surrounded by talent so, thank you so much for coming on. >> Glad to be here. Great to see you. >> For the other thing too is that you guys are long time storage industry experts. I've known you both for many, many years. INFINIDAT deep engineering expertise of course, everybody knows about Moshay, he created the most successful product in the history of the storage industry. And we're going to talk about the importance of data, especially in this era of COVID, and how mission criticality has really become more and more important. So, I want to start Doc with you and this notion of business continuity. How are you thinking about, and INFINIDAT thinking about business continuity in this isolation era? >> Well, that's a really great question Dave, because it has changed quite a bit. And as you said, we've known each other a long time, all the way back to when I still had hair, that was how long ago it was. But, business continuity is something that every business constantly looks at throughout their evolution. And it's one of these things where certain applications are typically more mission critical than others. And lately, what we've seen is this genre of a lights out data center that has become absolutely critical operating a business today. People can't just be on site anymore. People need to be working remotely, and that includes data center personnel and in many respects. So, this whole concept of business continuity now encompasses not only the operation equipment that's on premises, or sometimes even off premises, but it also encompasses applications that people need access to that they may not have thought of mission critical before, because working from home was a convenience or working remotely was a convenience, not a requirement for that business. >> You, Ken, I know you talked to a lot of CIOs. I was sitting at a CIO round table with my friends down at ETR recently, and one of the CIO said, when COVID hit, we realized that our business quote unquote business continuity plans were just way too narrowly focused on DR. What do you see from the IT community? >> It's funny because I literally was on a CIO round table with the West Coast this morning. And there were a couple of interesting comments that really stuck out to me from some of the people there. One was commenting of just reaffirming, what Doc said, how much people are working from home now. They said, traditionally they'd had traditional offices and they've just recently hired in this company about 250 people. He said, all of them are going to be remote workers and their normal from here on out, for the next 150 they're looking to hire is just that business as usual will be remote work. And one of the other CIOs chimed in with a quote that really stuck out to me. He said, "Remote work requires always on infrastructure in this day and age." And it's just a whole new way of having to make sure that businesses are operational and their workers can do what they're supposed to do. >> Well, so let's stay on that. I mean, ransomware's on everybody's mind. I mean, all you have to do is look at the stock market, you see, what's happened with Zoom, it's exploded. All the end point securities, identity access management security companies are going crazy, because (chuckles) people are now so vulnerable. So, they're more exposed to ransomware, Ken, what do we really need to know about ransomware? First, the smart company, smart organization is the one that is prepared and assumes the worst. Which means don't think it can't happen to you, especially when you look at a couple of the more public examples in the last couple of years in particular. So, it means you must take steps to protect yourself, particularly for the sake of your company, your business, your employees, your shareholders, your customers, everyone else. And that means deploying technology that assumes that if the worst case scenario could happen to you, how do you make sure that you have taken the steps that you can avoid the worst possible scenarios that could happen? >> Well, you know, Doc, lot of times when you have this discussion on ransomware, people say, well, should I pay the ransom? And sometimes people say, well, yeah, maybe it should go. You hope you never get there, right? (chuckles) >> Right, you absolutely hope you never get there. There is such horrible examples of paying ransom that just don't work. Just look at the Somalia pirates as an example, right? It doesn't stop them at all, but, take a look at what the potential impact is, not the potential impact to your business and your employees, but the potential impact to society. A couple of years ago with Sony, was very notorious case. More recently, a couple of months ago, Garmin. As you mentioned, I'm a pilot, but I was very worried as what reservoir, a lot of people in the aircraft and in aviation industry. What's going to happen not only with our private information, the account information, but what's going to happen with avionics updates? If Garmin didn't have a fallback plan, a way to recover, then what was going to happen? And I'm sure they were going through the process and the thoughts of, should we pay this year? How else do we get out of this? But, fortunately they had a very good plan in place and it only took them a couple of days to restore back to normal operations. Arguably as far as avionics goes, they were lucky in the sense that this happened to them right in the middle of an update cycle, which is 28 day cycle. But the fact that it only took them a couple of days, congratulations to them. I'm sure that with even better plans and a little bit of extra effort, it could have been a matter of hours instead of days. >> Well, let's come back to business continuity. Ken, do you feel as though businesses are not prepared based on the conversation we were having earlier? >> Some are, some aren't. It will be getting into that, I think in a little bit more detail as well, but historically, organizations I think have focused far too much just on traditional disaster recovery, usually with things like some of the technologies that have been around a long while like backup, and onto often having focused towards the technologies that really do keep the business running without human intervention if something were to ever go wrong. >> So, Doc, anything you'd add to that? I mean, what's the state of business continuity from your perspective? Are people having to really starting to accelerate a journey because of this COVID? >> I absolutely think they're accelerating a journey. They're also looking now at, this concept of multiple active sites. The concept of active sites is not something new, it's something that dates back a couple of decades and a lot of the financial industry. When they were struck, they were looking at some very significant changes in their operational paradigm because they realized that the system is going down and is only a small percentage of the problem that people impact is far worse. The operational procedures, the human intervention. So, what they would do is typically build out multiple sites and rotate the applications between them. What they really haven't done yet, at least not on a broad scale and certainly not in the U.S and some cases in Europe, they started this journey, having applications running simultaneously in multiple sites accessing the same data sets. It's not a brand new concept, but it's something that has improved significantly. The technologies have improved significantly over the course of the past decade. And with the introduction of our active backend solution, a couple of years ago, even brought it to an entirely new level. >> The people aspect that Doc mentioned is so critical. And that's certainly been one of the key lessons learned when real disasters have occurred is that the systems have to be, if you really want to keep your business operating making an assumption that people are going to have depending upon the nature of the disaster. Very different priorities and one of them is not, Gee, do I keep these ITs systems running or not? They're going to be worried about their co-workers, their families, other things, et cetera. So, the ultimate has to be systems that are capable of continuing the operation of the business in the face of a site failure, a metropolitan area failure or whatever it takes without the requirement necessarily for human intervention. >> So, I want to get into active-active. But before we do, I wonder if we could do a little sort of data protection one on one, a back up, a replication, you got snapshots, Doc, what do we need to know about each in the context of this discussion? >> I think the important thing to look at when you think about the different types of technologies and say you apply the solutions is that some of them apply to specific equipment failures, and some of them apply to data failure. And I separate equipment from data in the sense that data can be corrupted in some shape or form. It can be through malicious attack, like ransomware as an example, only one example, other types of malware can play a factor as well, or it can be incidental. Somebody pressing the wrong button, it can be an operational procedure, perhaps another system failure that causes a change in the data or corruption in the data that makes it essentially unusable. So, whenever we're looking at this, we have to start with what is the recovery point objective. The RPO that's where most people start with. And in the RPO, in essence, if you think of time zero, right now, it's where the failure occurs. Walk backwards. How far back can I go and still sustain my business? Now, there may be other procedural things you can do to catch up as close to that RPO and zero as you can, but each of these technologies that we're talking about give you a different RPOs, like rewinding a tape back to a point in time. So, that's the first place to start. >> Okay. So, let's bring up that slide actually. I actually liked this as the fireball slide I call it, but this is how people measure sort of the business impact, if you will, RPO and RTO. And what I like about this is in this digital world, it's kind of a cliche, but everything's getting more intense. People want, they don't want to lose data when you ask a customer, how much data are you willing to lose? They say none. >> None. >> And you say, well, how much are you willing to pay? So, Ken, I wonder if you could sort of describe that tension and that dynamic that's really underscored in this slide. >> Yeah. Oh, yeah, you hit it on the head David. It's the traditional trade off between RPO, RTO and cost. As Doc described with RPO, the objective would be to get as close to zero data loss as you could possibly get, with RTO which measures the time associated with how long will it take you to get back to your acceptable level of RPO. That is a time factor where for every minute or second, that goes by that you're not in business, that's the extension of the RTO. And historically, the closer you get as you approach zero RPO and zero RTO, usually the greater the cost goes up. And it's always been the eternal trade off, is a great analogy. It's sort of like if you want to buy a car. RPO equates for the quality of the solution, RTO is time or speed and cost is cost. If you buy a car, if it's good and it's fast, it won't be cheap. If it's good, and it's cheap, it won't be fast. And if it's fast, and it's cheap, it won't be good. So, usually that's the kind of tradeoff we will have to deal with there. And, the factors that will impact that, as Doc alluded to can be many. There's many aspects that you have to consider in terms of what is the service level that the business requires, and do we have solutions in place that can actually give us what is the real service level of the business requires if something were to go bad. >> Because, customers have gone through, unnatural acts, and Doc before you were kind of describing what some people would refer to as, as a three site, data centers and all kinds of things that people will do, but that brings us to active-active, Doc, what is active-active? >> Yeah, let me interject a point there, and then I'll get to your question about active-active. First is the question I can raise about service level, that's absolutely critical. And business may have different service levels for different applications. >> Dave: Right. >> And you never really know what that is. For example, I was working with a university a few years back, you normally think, well, universities is where they worried about, they're worried about their grading systems. Everybody's always worried about their financial systems. This particular university was worried about their golf course reservations system. (laughs) And their number one mission critical application, and I'm sure there was a little chunk tongue and cheek there as well, was the golf course reservation system because that directly impacted, there were alumni and had a direct correlation to the incoming donations for the following year. So, you never know what's going to be mission critical. Closer to home working very recently, there's a great case study from Aultman Hospital on a website. One of the things that they did, which I thought was absolutely astounding, was they took advantage of our offer to loan them free storage for a while, leveraging some of the COD that they're passing on demand that they weren't using. One of the reasons that they wanted this extra capacity was so that they can make telepresence available to their patients to visit with their families. At a time when families can't go into the hospital visit, when people are ill, what a great comfort to their family. So, this is a great way to look at it. When you think about these different service levels now, and you think about the different types of replication technologies that are available. Look at the multisite, what is multisite really doing for you? Multisite is giving you some level of synchronous replication so that you have an RPO of zero recovery point objective. It still may not be an RTO or zero, but it will be darn close to it. But more importantly, it's giving you an additional site to really maintain that RPO of zero in case the disaster radius, the blast area, the impact zone is even further away. Now, this isn't going to prevent any type of malicious intent, it's not going to prevent the ransomware case, and things like that, but it'll certainly prevent the catastrophic failure of the data center. What does active-active do? Well, active-active now, gives you the read write capability. And now our multisite implementation by the way, leverages our active-active. So, gives you the ability now to have the simultaneously running instance of an application in multiple data centers, reading and writing from the same dataset. And what that gives you, is not only an RPO of zero, but an RTO of zero, because now you can have an application in another data center stand in and take over for it. Naturally, the application needs to be able to do that. There are a lot of applications that are capable of it. The Oracle parallel server or rack technology, gives you that capability. There are other types of clustering technologies that will fail almost instantaneously, that will give you that capability. So, that's where really active-active comes into play. >> Yeah, makes sense for me. When I started the industry, the VAX clusters were sort of the now thing, right? >> Yup. >> (indistinct) (Dave chuckles) >> All right. So, what are you seeing in the marketplace? Are you seeing... What's the adoption look like? Are there any differences that you see by region? What can you tell us there? >> Yeah, it's interesting. Some of the first organizations that obviously jumped on to active-active type solutions, were those where there were in particularly, in things like financial services, some compliance requirements or financial incentives or motivation to make sure that the business was always operational. And it's interesting because there was a study that was done all the way back in 2003, by Roper, that asked business executives and IT executives the same questions relative to their perceptions of their companies or organizations ability to meet RPO or RTO service level agreements. >> Right. And we have some data on this that I want to bring up. So, this is the RPO data but please carry on. >> Ken: Exactly, and so they asked questions that really were about RPO or RTO. Hey, if a disaster hit, would you lose data and how much? And what the data showed was that the business executives and IT executives in Europe, were actually pretty much on the same page. They both said, yeah, we probably would lose some data or a reasonable amounts associated with it. But what was a little frightening, was there appeared to be a chasm of disconnect between the business executives, from the IT executives in the U.S. And what it showed was that the IT executives were on the same page as the European IT executives and the business executives from Europe, saying that, yeah, we'd probably lose some data. But it showed that very few of the business executives thought that they would. And then similarly, when they were asked the question about RTO, how long would it take? In terms of days, hours, et cetera, for your full operation to be back in operational and granted they were talking in 2003 terms back then, which was a little longer than where the technology can now address it now. There was, again, this consistency between the IT executives in both continents and countries, as well as the European business executives, but again, a disconnect where the business executives in the U.S thought, oh, no, we'll be fine. We'll have everything back in a couple of days or less than, it won't be an issue. In my opinion, in looking at that data, when it first came out, my impression was, well, now I understand why a lot of business continuity projects don't get approved because the IT people know that they need it, but the business executives have, if I could be so bold, an unrealistically optimistic view of their ability to achieve RPO and RTO, I'll give you a great example. There was a major high tech company around that timeframe that actually had a major outage in their email system. And email was not perceived to be at the time, ultra mission critical application for them. I know it seems strange in this day and age, but back then it was considered sort of an afterthought and they had a four hour SLA in case something went down where, hey, if we're down for four hours, we get it back and four hours, we're fine. And so, IT thought, they were doing a great job, 'cause they got it back in less than four. It was about three point something. And it turned out that the real impact of the business was so overwhelming, they had to completely overhaul the IT infrastructure that they've put in place to deliver that. So, it's an interesting issue, and it's the kind of thing where, as a result, I believe that as we sit here today in 2020, the disconnect in the U.S still exists. If you look across Europe, you tend to find a lot of deployments of active-active. The first country that probably did a ton of it was Germany, and then, lot of the other European countries did as well. For a multitude of reasons, you tend to see a lot of active-active deployments in Europe, but you don't see anywhere near as many as if I could be so bold, we probably should be seeing in the U.S, and I believe a major contributing factor to that is that there is still this disconnect, between business executives having a false sense of security that is unfounded by the infrastructures that they have in place. And if they were to ask their IT people, and maybe that's a good idea for them to talk more, they'd probably find that they're more exposed than they ever realized. >> Right. And of course in Europe, you've got, much tighter proximity, and you're up against borders of a 200 mile or a 200 kilometer roll, governments have tried to impose here, really can't be imposed in a lot of cases. Okay. Let's get into what you guys are doing here in the space. So, Doc, how do you approach ensuring access to mission critical data? What's INFINIDAT's angle? >> Yeah, I think it's several different layers that need to be applied here. The first INFINIDAT angle starts with the fact that our storage is a hundred percent data availability guarantee. It's simple enough. It's triple redundant architecture, seven nines reliability design, which equates to 3.16 seconds per year of downtime, which is less than a scuzzy time (laughs) I bet you know. Let's start with just, right, forget the nonsense, the system's are a hundred percent available guaranteed. We put some teeth behind that, and that's a great way to start. It's not necessarily going to fundamentally protect your data from site outages and network outages and server outages and things like that, so, let's be fed up and can go to in active-active infrastructure. And now you can take the system and put it either elsewhere behind a firewall on the same data center floor, or in a metropolitan area. Wherever you need it to be, separate power zones, separate networks zones, make it even more available. And then if you really want to go that next level of protection because you're worried about regional outages and things of that nature, multisite replication. But now it's up the ante even further. Let's look at the malicious intent, let's look at the data corruption. Let's look at all of the other possibilities of things that can happen to your data. So, implement snapshotting technology, in this snapshot technology, and InfiniBox is essentially free. There's no cost for the software, there is no performance impact because it's part of metadata updates that are happening all the time anyway. So, there's zero additional overhead of that. There's no additional, there's no copying of data going on with a snapshot, so there's no additional cost penalty associated with it. And you can snapshot this frequently for a Snapshot any of your data frequently to protect against data corruption. And if you're worried about some sort of malicious aspect, that's going to engage and perhaps gain access to the snapshots, we have immutable technology, and that is also free. It's there, it doesn't cost you anything other than the time it takes for the administrator to determine what the policy is. And now that can not be modified. It can't be deleted, it can't be modified, it can't be updated, can't be written to your inside whatever the polyp the defined policy is. So, now you're protected, you're a hundred percent availability, increase data hundred percent availability with active-active, and then increase your RPO capability with dissonance and protect yourself against data corruption with immutable snapshots. Or some combination of standard snapshots and immutable snapshots. >> Yeah, so, I was going to ask Ken, if this is a cost effective approach, but, I mean, it's free, it comes in the stack. >> That is the key word, and you both just said it. Standard and included functionality all based on that great snapshot technology, which was the foundation for it that Doc described. Active-active, standard and included, the ability to go to a third site for disaster recovery at the industry's lowest asynchronous RPO with a remote site. Standard and included, immutable snaps, standard and included. So, compared to traditional views of what most people had back to our illustrious triangle earlier of RPO versus RTO versus cost, you're still going to have the additional cost of media and remote site for protecting your data, obviously, but in terms of software license costs, we're making it simpler, we're making it easier, we're making it standard and included, and we're just making it so much more readily available for organizations to be able to achieve superior RTO and RPO at a cost point that maybe certainly is a little bit higher than just having that single system that Doc alluded to, it's still a hundred percent available, but it's way below what the expectations of this industry have been over the last 20 years. >> Yeah, which is double, triple, I mean easily. Well, can I understand you for a second. You've worked for a lot of different storage companies, Doc you as well, but how different is this? How unique is this? >> There are surprisingly few vendors that can offer true zero RPO at two zero RTO. There's really only a handful. We're one of them. And by handful, I mean about three in the industry, including ourselves, and where I think we differentiate is fundamentally to a lot of those points we just mentioned. The software standard and included so we're not going to charge you extra for it. It's going to be relatively simple to deploy and integrate a stock alluded to earlier with server cluster software and the key components that people would use there in terms of databases and in terms of operating systems. And it's fundamentally going to be able to offer not just that zero RPO, zero RTO active-active environment, but if you do, and when you do need to go to a third site at distance for the true disaster recovery, if you ever lost a metropolitan area, we're going to be able to do it at an RPO that is lower than anything else on the market. >> Doc, are there complexities associated with doing this at petabyte scale? I mean, you guys make a big deal out of that, and you're clearly excited about it, but, is it extra hard to do at that kind of volume at scale? >> I'm going to give you two answers, and say, yes, it's incredibly difficult to do, but then I'm going to say it's incredibly easy for the customer to do because we've made it easy. There a lot of ramifications to doing things at petabyte scale. There's the size of the caching cables that you don't have to worry about. There's the numbers of things that need to be checked, and counter checked and constantly crosscheck for validity. There's also the scale of things that happen like silent data corruption that need to be factored in. All of those things are being done by InfiniBox, on a constant basis with no impact to the customer, no impact to the administrator, no impact to the running application. And I think that's a frankly, another differentiator as well. Ken and I have some common history as well. (chuckles) Used to constantly talk about internally, what happens as things get larger, systems slow down. That simply doesn't happen with InfiniBox. And that's why service providers use us as well. Cloud service providers managed service providers are some of our biggest customers. Because they know they can have these large scale systems running with all these different workloads, all these different functions, be they snapshots, clones, whatever they are, with no impact and very easy and rapid to deploy. >> Yeah, I set up top, you got to be storage hardos to make this stuff work. (laughs) It's very complicated and we've seen it for years and years. Last question. Again, huge changes in the last 150 days where people are just really tuned in to things like digital transformation, I talked about security, business resiliency, business continuity. Where... I'll start with you Ken, how should users be thinking about this? What steps should they be taking like now? >> What a great question. And back to sort of where we started, because of the nature of how things have changed, more applications are mission critical than they've ever been before. And providing, and always on infrastructure to make sure that you can give your users and your customers and your business, the opportunity to stay alive in the face of just about anything that could happen has never been more important in the history of this industry. >> Doc, I'll give you the final word, you can pile on that. >> I think Ken summed it up really well, but I'm going to take a different twist on it. It's all about de-risking, and a lot of the CIOs and CTOs of companies that I've been talking to over the course of the past couple of months, have basically said, hey, my digital transformation initiatives are on hold right now because I've got to keep the lights on, I've got to keep my business running. In some cases, maybe I've had to sadly pare down my staff, but I've got, remote workers have got to worry about. So, find a partner that's going to de-risk your infrastructure for you. Take a look at some of the things that we've announced in the past few months as well. We'll take a lot of that risk way, not only from the availability perspective, but we're going to take the risk away from a cost perspective. If you want to talk about INFINIDAT, don't worry about things like, how am I going to migrate over to it? We're going to do that for you. We're going to work with you, we're going to come up with a plan, we're going to make as much of it non-disruptive as we can, and we're going to assume the cost of doing it. We're going to take away all the risk of availability. We just talked about all of that. We're going to give you guarantees, that are a hundred percent availability. We'll help you architect the right solution for you and we'll protect you moving forward. You might need some flex area of capacity as you work through some of these new applications and new initiatives, so, you've got to be willing to take the risk away with our elastic pricing models. Use the storage when you need it, return it when you don't, and you don't have to pay for it anymore. We'll make it that simple for you. We'll give you that cloud operating paradigm on premises, and by the way, no egress costs. (Dave laughs) >> Well, this is a hard problem for people because they've had to do the work from home pivot, IT people, specifically, I mean, they've had to spend to shore up that infrastructure and of course, organizations just saying, well, we're going to pull from other places, but, look, if you're not digital today, you're not being able to transact business. And so, you can't relax your business continuity plans, in fact, you have to evolve them. Guys, thanks very much for sharing your perspectives and insights on this whole notion of de-risking infrastructure with business continuity. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Dave, is always a pleasure. Thank you. >> Cheers, and thank you everybody for watching, this is Dave Vallante for theCube, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> (vocalizing) >> Narrator: From theCube studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCube. Covering IBM Think, brought to you by IBM. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vallante and this is our continuing coverage of Think 2020, the digital event experience. This is the post-thing, the sort of halo effect, the afterthoughts, and joining me is Rob Thomas, he's back. The Senior Vice president of Cloud and Data Platform. Rob, thanks for taking some time to debrief on Think. >> Absolutely Dave, great to be here, good to see you again. >> Yeah, so you have a great event, you guys put it together in record time. I want to talk about sort of your innovation agenda. I mean, you are at the heart of innovation. You're talking cloud, data, AI, really the pillars of innovation, I could probably add in edge to extend the cloud. But I wonder if you could talk about your vision for the innovation agenda and how you're bringing that to customers. I mean, we heard from PayPal, you talked about Royal Bank of Scotland, Credit Mutual, a number of customer examples. How are you bringing innovation forward with the customer? >> I wouldn't describe innovation, maybe I'd give it two different categories. One is, I think the classic term would be consumerization, and you're innovating by making interiorized technology really easy to use. That's why we built out a huge design capability, it's why we've been able to get products like Watson Assistant to get companies live in 24 hours. That's the consumerization aspect, just making enterprise products really easy to use. The second aspect is even harder, which is, how do you tap into an institution like IBM Research, where we're doing fundamental invention. So, one of our now strengths in the last couple of months was around taking technology out of IBM Debater, project Debater, the AI system that could debate humans and then putting that into enterprised products. And, you saw companies like PayPal that are using Watson Assistant and now they have access to that kind of language capability. There's only two aspects here, there's the consumerization and then there's about fundamental technology that really changes how businesses can operate. >> I mean, the point you made about speed and implementation in your key note was critical, I mean really, within 24 hours, very important during this pandemic. Talk about automation, you know, you would think by now right, everything's automation. But, now you're seeing a real boom in automation and it really is driven by AI, all this data, so there's seems to be a next wave, almost a renaissance, if you will, in automation. >> There is and I think automation, when people hear first of the term, it's sometimes a scary term. Because people are like hey, is this going to take my job? Gain a lot of momentum for automation is a difficult, repetitive tasks that nobody really wanted to do in the first place. Whether it's things like data matching, containerizing an application. All these are really hard things and the output's great, but nobody really wants to do that work, they just want the outcome. And, as we've started to demonstrate different use cases for automation that are in that realm, a lot of momentum has taken off, that we're seeing. >> I want to come back to this idea of consumerization and simplification. I mean, when you think about what's been happening over the last several years. And, you and I have talked about this a lot, AI for consumer versus AI for business and enterprise. And really, one of the challenges for the encumbrance, if you will, is to really become data driven, put data at the core and apply machine intelligence to that, just to that data. Now the good news is, they don't have to invent all this stuff, because guys like you are doing that and talk about how you're making that simple. I mean, cloud packs is an example of that, simplification, but talk about how customers are going to be able to tap into AI without having to be AI inventors. >> Well, the classic AI problem actually is a data problem, and the classic data problem is data slide over, which is a company has got a lot of data but it's spread across a hundred or a thousand or tens of thousands different repositories or locations. Our strategy when we say a hybrid cloud is about how do we unify those data storage. So, it's called PaaS, on red hat open shift. We do a lot of things like data virtualization, really high performance. So, we take what is thousands of different data sources and we have that packed like a single fluid item. So then, when you're training models, you can train your models in one place and connect to all your data. That is the big change that's happening and that's how you take something like hybrid cloud, and it actually starts to impact your data architecture. And once you're doing that, then AI becomes a lot easier, because the biggest AI challenge that I described is, where's the data? Is the data in a usable form? >> A lot of times in this industry, you know, we go whale hunting, there are a lot of big companies out there, a lot of times they take priority. You know, at the same time though, a lot of the innovations are coming from companies, you know, we've never even heard of that could be multi-billion dollar companies by the end of the decade. So, how can, you know, small companies and mid-sized companies tap into this trend? Is it just for the big whales or could the small guys participate? >> The thing that's pretty amazing about modern cloud and data technology, I'll call it, is it's accessible to companies of any size. When we talked about, you know, the hundred or so clients that have adopted Watson Assistant since COVID-19 started, many of those are very small institutions with no IT staff or very limited IT staff. Though, we're making this technology very accessible. when you look at something like data, now a small company may not have a hundred different repositories, which is fine, but what they do have is they do want to make better predictions, they do want to automate, they do want to optimize the business processes that they're running in their business. And, the way that we've transformed our model consumption base starting small, it's really making technology available to, you know, from anywhere from the local deli to the Fortune 50 Company. >> So, last question is, What are your big takeaways from Think? I would ask that question normally when we're in a live event. It's a little different with the digital event, but there are still takeaways. What was your reaction and what do to leave people with? >> Even as we get back to doing physical events, which I'm positive will happen at some point. What we learned is there is something great about an immersive digital experience. So, I think the future of events is probably higher than this. Meaning, a big digital experience, to complement the physical experience. That's one big takeaway because the reaction was so positive to the content and how people could access it. Second one is the, all the labs that we did. So, for developers, builders, those were at capacity, meaning we didn't even take any more. So, there's definitively a thirst in the market for developing new applications, developing new data products, developing new security products. That's clear just by the attendance that we saw, that's exciting. Now, I'd say third, that is that AI is now moving into the mainstream, that was clear from the customer examples, whether it was with Tansa or UPS or PayPal that I mentioned before, that was talking with me. AI is becoming accessible to every company, that's pretty exciting. >> Well, the world is hybrid, oh you know the lab, the point you're making about labs is really important. I've talked to a number of individuals saying, "Hey I'm using this time to update my skills. I'm working longer hours, maybe different times of the day, but I'm going to skill up." And you know, the point about AI, 37 years ago, when I started in this business AI was all the buzz and it didn't happen. It's real this time and I'm really excited Rob, that you're at the heart of all this innovation, so really, I appreciate you taking the time. And, best of luck, stay safe, and hopefully we'll see you face to face. >> Offscreen Man: Sure. >> Thanks Dave, same to you and the whole team at theCube, take care. >> Thank you Rob, and thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante for theCube and our coverage of IBM Think 2020, the digital event experience and the post-event. We'll see you next time. (music)

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube. Covering IFS World Conference 2019. Brought to you by IFS. >> Welcome back to Boston everybody you're watching theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day one of the IFS World Conference. I'm Dave Vallante with my co-host Paul Gillen. Melissa Di Donato is here, she's the CEO of SUSE and Jon Roskill is the CEO of Acumatica. Folks, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you so much. >> So you guys had the power panel today? Talking about digital transformation. I got a question for all of you. What's the difference between a business and a digital business? Melissa, I'll give you first crack. >> Before a regular old business and a digital business? Everyone's digital these days, aren't they? I was interviewing the, one of the leaders in Expedia and I said, "Are you a travel company "or are you a digital company? "Like where do you lead with?" And she said to me, "No no, we're a travel company "but we use digital." So it seems like the more and more we think about what the future means how we service our customers, customers being at the core everyone's a digital business. The way you service, the way you communicate the way you support. So whether you're a business or none you're always got to be a digital business. >> You better be a digital business and so-- >> I'm going to take a slightly different tact on that which is, we talk about digital and analog businesses and analog businesses are ones that are data silos they have a lot of systems, so they think they're digital but they're disconnected. And, you know, part of a transformation is connecting all the systems together and getting them to work like one. >> But I think the confict other common thread is data, right? A digital business maybe puts data at the core and that's how they get competitive advantage but, I want to ask you guys about your respective businesses. So SUSE, obviously you compete with the big whale RedHat, you know, the big news last year IBM $34 billion. How did that or will that in your view affect your business? >> It's already affecting our business. We've seen a big big uptake in interest in SUSE and what we're doing. You know, they say that a big part of the install based customers that RedHat and IBM currently have are unhappy about the decision to be acquired by IBM. Whether they're in conflict because we're a very big heavily channel business, right? So a lot of the channel partners are not quite happy about having one of their closest competitors now be, you know, part of the inner circle if you will. And other customers are just not happy. I mean, RedHat had fast innovation, fast pace and thought leadership and now all of a sudden they're going to be buried inside of a large conglomerate and they're not happy about that. So when we look at what's been happening for us particularly since March, we became an independent company now one of the world's largest independent open source company in the world. Since IBM has been taking over from RedHat. And, you know, big big uptake. Since March we became independent we've been getting a lot of questioning. "Where are we, where are we going, what are we doing?" And, " Hey, you know, I haven't heard about SUSE a while "what are you doing now?" So it's been really good news for us really, really good news. >> I mean, we're huge fans of RedHat. We do a lot of their events and-- >> Melissa: I'm a huge fan myself. >> But I tell you, I mean, we know from first hand IBM has this nasty habit of buying companies tripling the price. Now they say they're going to leave RedHat alone, we'll see. >> Yeah, like they said they'd leave Lotus alone and all the others. >> SPSS, you saw that, Ustream, you know one of our platforms. >> What's your view, how do you think it's going to go? >> I don't think it's about cloud I think it's about services and I think that's the piece that we don't really have great visibility on. Can IBM kind of jam OpenShift into its customers you know, businesses without them even really knowing it and that's the near-term cash flow play that they're trying to, you know, effect. >> Yeah, but it's not working for them, isn't though? Because when you look at the install base 90% of their business it's been Linux open source environment and OpenShift is a tag-along. I don't know if that's a real enabler for the future rather than, you know, an afterthought from the past. >> Well, for $34 billion it better be. >> I want to ask you about the cost of shifting because historically, you know if you were IBM, you were stuck with IBM forever. What is involved in customers moving from RedHat to SUSE presumably you're doing some of those migrations style. >> We are, we are doing them more and more in fact, we're even offering migration services ourself in some applications. It depends on the application layer. >> How simple is that? >> It depends on the application. So, we've got some telco companies is very very complex 24/7, you know, high pays, big fat enterprise applications around billing, for example. They're harder to move. >> A lot of custom code. >> A lot of custom code, really deep, really rich they need, you know, constant operation because it's billing, right? Big, fat transactions, those are a little bit more complex than say, the other applications are. Nonetheless, there is a migration path and in fact, we're one of the only open source companies in the world that provides support for not just SUSE, but actually for RedHat. So, if you're a RedHat, for or a well customer that want to get off an unsupported version of RedHat you can come over to SUSE. We'll not just support your RedHat system but actually come up with a migration plan to get you into a supported version of SUSE. >> If it's a package set of apps and you have to freeze the code it's actually not that bad-- >> It's not that bad, no. >> To migrate. All right, Jon I got to ask you, so help us understand Acumatica and IFS and the relationship you're like sister companies, you both the ERP providers. How do you work together or? >> Yeah, so we're both owned by a private equity firm called EQT. IFS is generally focused on $500 million and above company so more enterprise and we're focused on core mid-market. So say, $20 million to $500 million. And so very complementary in that way. IFS is largely direct selling we're a 100% through channels. IFS is stronger in Europe, we're stronger in North America and so they see these as very complementary assets and rather than to, perhaps what's going on with the IBM, RedHat discussion here. Slam these big things together and screw them up they're trying to actually keep us independent. So they put us in a holding company but we're trying to leverage much of each other's goodness as we can. >> Is there a migration path? I mean, for customers who reach the top end of your market can they smoothly get to IFS? >> Yeah, it's not going to be like a smooth you know, turn a switch and go. But it absolutely is a migration option for customers and we do have a set of customers that are outgrowing us you know, we have a number of customers now over a billion dollars running on Acumatica and you know, for a company, we've got one that we're actually talking to about this right now operating in 41 countries global, they need 24/7 support we're not the right company to be running their ERP system. >> On your panel today guys you were talking about, a lot about digital transformations kind of lessons learned. What are the big mistakes you see companies making and kind of what's your roadmap for success? >> I think doing too much too fast. Everyone talks about the digital innovation digital transformation. It's really a business transformation with digital being the underpinning the push forward that carries the business forward, right? And I think that we make too many mistakes with regards to doing too much, too fast, too soon, that's one. Doing and adopting technology for technology's sake. "Oh, it's ML, it's AI." And everyone loves these big buzz words, right? All the code words for what technology is? So they tend to bring it on but they don't really know the outcome. Really really important at SUSE were absolutely obsessed with our customers and during a digital transformation if you remain absolutely sick of anything about your customer at the core of every decision you make and everything you do. Particularly with regards to digital transformation you want to make sure that business outcome is focused on them. Having a clear roadmap with milestones along the journey is really important and ensuring it's really collaborative. We talked this morning about digital natives you know, we're all young, aren't we? Me in particular, but, you know I think the younger generation of digital natives think a little bit differently perhaps than we were originally thinking when we were their age. You know, I depend on that thinking I depend on that integration of that thought leadership infused into companies to help really reach customers in different ways. Our customers are buying differently our customers have different expectations they have different deliverables they require and they expect to be supported in different way. And those digital natives, that young talent can really aid in that delivery of good thought leadership for our businesses. >> So Jon, we're seeing IT spending at the macro slow down a little bit. You know, a lot of different factors going on it's not a disaster, it's not falling off the cliff but definitely pre-2018 levels and one of the theories is that you had this kind of spray-and-pray kind of like Melissa was say, deal was going too fast trying everything and now we're seeing more of a narrow focus on things that are going to give a return. Do you see that happening out there? >> Yeah, definitely some, I mean people are looking for returns even in what's been a really vibrant economy but, you know, I agree with Melissa's point there's a lot of ready, shoot, aim projects out there and, you know, the biggest thing I see is the ones that aren't, the fail that aren't the ones that aren't led by the leadership. They're sort of given off to some side team often the IT team and said, "Go lead digital transformation of the company." And digital transformation you know, Melissa said this morning it's business transformation. You've got to bring the business part of it to the table and you've got to think about, it's got to be led by the CEO or the entire senior leadership team has to be on board and if not, it's not going to be successful. >> So, pragmatism would say, okay, you get some quick hits get some wins and then you got kind of the, you know, Bezos, Michael Dell mindset go big or go home, so what's your philosophy? Moonshots or, you know, quick hits? >> I always think starting you know, you've got to understand your team's capabilities. So starting is something that you can get a gauge of that you know, particularly if you're new and you're walking into an organization, you know. Melissa, I don't know how long you've been in your role now? >> Melissa: 65 days. >> Right, so there you go. So it's probably a good person to ask what, you know, what you're finding out there but I think, you know, getting a gauge of what your resources are. I mean, one of the things you see around here is there are, you know, dozens of partner firms that are, or can be brought into, you know supplement the resources you have in your own team. So being thoughtful in that is part of the approach. And then having a roadmap for what you're trying to do. Like we talked this morning about a customer that Linda had been talking about. Have been working on for six or seven years, right? And you're saying, for an enterprise a very large enterprise company taking six or seven years to turn the battleship maybe isn't that long. >> Okay, so you got the sister company going on. Do you have a commercial relationship with IFS or you just here as kind of an outside speaker and a thought leader? >> I'm here as an outside speaker thought leader. There is talk that perhaps we can you know, work together in the future we're trying to work that out right now. >> I want to ask you about open source business models. We still see companies sort of struggling to come up with, not profitable but, you know, insanely profitable business models based on open source software. What do you see coming out of all this? Is there a model that you think is going to work in the long term? >> I think the future is open source for sure and this is coming from a person who spent 25 years in proprietary software having worked for the larger piece here in vendors. 100% of my life has been dedicated to proprietary software. So whilst that's true I came at SUSE and the open source environment in a very different way as a customer running my proprietary applications on open source Linux based systems. So I come with a little bit different of a, you know, of an approach I would say. The future's open source for sure the way that we collaborate, the innovation the borderless means of which we deliver you know, leadership within our business is much much different than proprietary software. You would think as well that, you know the wall that we hide behind an open source being able to access software anywhere in a community and be able to provide thought leadership masks and hides who the developers and engineers are and instead exacerbates the thought leadership that comes out of them. So it provides for a naturally inclusive and diverse environment which leads to really good business results. We all know the importance of diversity and inclusion. I think there is definitely a place for open source in the world it's a matter providing it in such a way that creates business value that does enable and foster that growth of the community because nothing is better than having two or three or four or five million developers hacking away at my software to deliver better business value to my customers. The commercial side is going to be around the support, right? The enterprise customers would want to know that when bump goes in the night I've got someone I can pay to support my systems. And that's really what SUSE is about protecting our install base. Ensuring that we get them live, all the time every day and keep them running frictionlessly across their IT department. >> Now there's another model, the so-called open core model that holds that, the future is actually proprietary on top of an open base. So are you saying that you don't think that's a good model? >> I don't know, jury's out. Next time that you come to our event which is going to be in March, in Dublin. We're doing our SUSECON conference. Leave that question for me and I'll have an answer for you. I'm pontificating. >> Well I did and-- >> It's a date. The 12th of March. >> It's certainly working for Amazon. I mean, you know, Amazon's criticized for bogarting open source but Redshift is built on open source I think Aurora is built on open source. They're obviously making a lot of money. Your open core model failed for cloud era. Hortonworks was pure, Hortonworks had a model like, you know, you guys and RedHat and that didn't work and now that was kind of profitless prosperity of Hadoop and maybe that was sort of an over head-- >> I think our model, the future's open-source no question. It's just what level of open source within the sack do we keep proprietary or not, it's the case maybe, right? Do we allow open source in the bottom or the top or do we put some proprietary components on top to preserve and protect like an umbrella the core of which is open source. I don't know, we're thinking about that right now. We're trynna think what our future looks like. What the model should look like in the future for the industry. How can we service our customers best. At the end of the day, it's satisfying customer needs and solving business problems. If that's going to be, pure open source or open source with a little bit of proprietary to service the customer best that's what we're all going to be after, aren't we? >> So, there's no question that the innovation model is open source. I mean, I don't think that's a debate, the hard part is. Okay, how do you make money? A bit of open source for you guys. I mean, are you using open source technologies presumable you are, everybody is but-- >> So we're very open API's, who joined three years ago. We joined openapi.org. And so we've been one of the the leading ERP companies in the industry on publishing open API's and then we do a lot of customization work with our community and all of that's going on in GitHub. And so it's all open source, it's all out there for people who want it. Not everybody wants to be messing around in the core of a transaction engine and that's where you get into you know, the sort of the core argument of, you know which pieces should be people modifying? Do you want people in the kernel? Maybe, maybe not. And, you know, this is not my area of expertise so I'll defer to Melissa. Having people would be able to extend things in an open source model. Having people be able to find a library of customizations and components that can extend Acumatica, that's obviously a good thing. >> I mean, I think you hit on it with developers. I mean, that to me is the key lever. I mean, if I were a VM where I'd hire you know, 1000, 2000 open source software developers and say, "Go build next-generation apps and tools "and give it away." And then I'd say, "Okay, Michael Dell make you a hardware "run better in our software." That's a business model, you can make a lot of money-- >> 100% and we're, you know, we're going to be very acquisitive right now, we're looking for our future, right? We're looking to make a mark right now and where do we go next? How can we help predict the outcome next step in the marketplace when it pertains to, you know, the core of applications and the delivery mechanism in which we want to offer. The ease of being able to get thousands of mainframe customers with complex enterprise applications. Let's say, for example to the cloud. And a part of that is going to be the developer network. I mean, that's a really really big important segment for us and we're looking at companies. Who can we acquire? What's the business outcome? And what the developer networks look like. >> So Cloud and Edge, here got to be two huge opportunities for you, right? Again, it's all about developers. I think that's the right strategy at the Edge. You see a lot of Edge activity where somebody trying to throw a box at the Edge with the top down, in a traditional IT model. It's really the devs up, where I think-- >> It is, it is the dev ups, you're exactly right. Exactly right. >> Yeah, I mean, Edge is fascinating. That's going to be amazing what happens in the next 10 years and we don't even know, but we ship a construction edition we've got a customer that we're working with that's instrumenting all of their construction machinery on something like a thousand construction sites and feeding the sensor data into a Acumatica and so it's a way to keep track of all the machines and what's going on with them. You know, obviously shipping logistics the opportunity to start putting things like, you know, RFID tags on everything an instrument to all of that, out at the Edge. And then the issue is you get this huge amount of data and how do you process that and get the intelligence out of it and make the right decisions. >> Well, how do you? When data is plentiful, insights, you know, aren't is-- >> Yeah, well I think that's where the machine learning breakthroughs are going to happen. I mean, we've built out a team in the last three years on machine learning, all the guys who've been talking about Amazon, Microsoft, Google are all putting out machine learning engines that companies can pick up and start building models around. So we're doing one's around, you know inventory, logistics, shipping. We just release one on expense reports. You know, that really is where the innovation is happening right now. >> Okay, so you're not an inventor of AI you're going to take those technologies apply 'em to your business. >> Yeah, we don't want to be the engine builder we want to be the guys that are building the models and putting the insight for the industry on top that's our job. >> All right Melissa, we'll give you the final word and IFS World 2019, I think, is this your first one? >> It's my first one, yeah-- >> We say bumper sticker say when your truck's are pulling away or-- (laughs) >> A bumper sticker would say, "When you think about the future of open source "think about SUSE." (laughing) >> Dave: I love it. >> I'd say in the event, I mean, I'm super-impressed I think it's the group that's here is great the customers are really enthused and you know, I have zero bias so I'm just giving you my perspective. >> Yeah, I mean the ecosystem is robust here, I have to say. I think they said 400 partners and I was pleasantly surprised when I was walking around last-- >> This is your second one, isn't it? >> It's theCubes second one, my first. >> Oh your first, all right, well done. And so what do you think? Coming back? >> I would love to come back. Especially overseas, I know you guys do a bunch of stuff over seas. >> There you go, he wants to travel. >> Dublin in March? >> March the 12th. >> Dublin is a good place for sure so you're doing at the big conference? >> Yep, the big conference center and it's-- >> That is a great venue. >> And not just because the green thing but it's actually because (laughs). >> No, that's a really nice venue, it's modern It's got, I think three or four floors. >> It does, yeah yeah, we're looking forward to it. >> And then evening events at the, you know, the Guinness Storehouse. >> There you go. >> Exactly right. So we'll look forward to hosting you there. >> All right, great, see you there. >> We'll come with our tough questions for you. (laughing) >> Thanks you guys, I really appreciate your time. >> Thanks very much. >> Thank you for watching but right back, right after this short break you're watching theCube from IFS World in Boston be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Bought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here at Vmworld 2019, San Francisco, California. We're in Moscone North Lobby. I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Dave Vellante. Dave, 10 years of covering VMworld. This is our 10th year. Pat, you've been on every year since 2010. We have photos. >> That's sort of scary. >> You had a goatee back then. (Pat laughs) We've heard your rap going way back. Welcome back, good to see you. >> Oh man, scary. You guys probably got some dirt on me. Boy, I better be careful. >> John: Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on this evening. >> Oh, always a pleasure to be on with you guys, love it. >> Don't end up as driftwood. Security is a do over. We're going to talk about all that. >> We're going to spend the entire segment just talking about Pat Gelsinger's predictions. We'll recycle some of them, but let's get into the core news here, VMworld. You've done such an amazing job. We've given you a lot of props on theCUBE over the years, but still continuing, even in the market climate that's swinging up and down right now, VMware still producing great results. The team is executing. Their transition since October 2016 when you kind of made that move, cloud is it, clear vision, a lot's been falling into place. Pivotal has dropped on your lap, and you got the engineering stuff coming out on top of vSphere and a bunch of other things. Great stuff, I mean, you must be geeking out. >> Well, thank you. At the US gymnastics finals, Simone Biles did a triple double. First time ever in competition. And I think of our last week as a triple double, right, two major acquisitions, an earnings call, and now VMworld and all the announcements as part of it. It's like wow. >> John: You stick the landing, you stick the landing. >> That's right, we did yesterday morning. We stuck the landing and Ray did that today as well. So super proud of the team in bringing these across the line. And I think certainly meeting with many of the customers and the partners here everybody's sort of going wow. And I was excited about VMware before I got here. Now I'm just euphoric, and it's really-- >> I'm told Ray did an exceptional job. I'm going to talk to him later today on theCUBE. Today in his keynote he was great. He repeated the messages over and over again, but he nailed the tech piece. I got to ask you, as the engine of VMware is continuing to be put together and expand it's like a new turbo engine gets pulled in here. There's a lot of really good engineering going on. What are you most excited about? How would you describe all the action going on? If someone says, "Pat, what's the underlying engine here?" What's being built? What's going to be the outcome of all this? >> Well, I think it sort of boils down to, right, these two phrases that you heard from me yesterday. We're going to engineer for good, the tech for good stuff, we're going to do good engineering. And doing both of those is just okay. And you sort of say, "Hmm, we got vSAN," right? We're not being able to optimize the performance because big blocks, little blocks, latency, buffer size, all this other kind of stuff, so now we're doing Magna, right? And when you see that demonstration there, it's like we're going to do it automatically for you to be a fine-grain optimizing your storage. Wow, that's pretty cool, and it's intelligence, right? It's sort of saying, "Wow, this is really cool." So let's go automatically produce an understanding of the underlying network, understand what's going on, give you the rules that we recommend, and allow you to simulate them, which is super cool, right? Within minutes, we will give the network engineer more understanding of what's really going on in our applications, and then allow them to see it in real time and then apply it. Every one of these, and it's just 10 or 15 tremendous engineers who are doing these little innovations that are fundamentally changing the industries that they're in, in addition to the big stuff. It's just thrilling. >> Dave did a survey before coming into VMworld with customers with a panel. 41% said they're not going to change their spending habits with VMware so creating the-- >> Dave: They said they're going to increase-- >> Increase. >> In the second half, only 7% said they're going to decrease. >> So great customer loyalty, and remember, VMware's moving so fast and transit. Customers aren't moving as fast as you guys are, and you've talked about that before. What are you hearing from customers as they look at it and say, "Wow, is it too much new stuff?" 'Cause they want to continue to operate, but they also want to enable the developer piece. Because remember, DevOps means dev and ops. You guys got the ops piece down. You're adding stuff to it. There's always concerns there making sure it's smooth and you guys work on that. The dev piece becomes super critical. That's where Amazon really shined with public cloud. So hybrid cloud's here. What is the DevOps equation for hybrid? I mean Kubernetes is a good start. Where do you see it going? >> Yeah, and that's really the center. To me, that is the most important news of VMworld this year is the entire Tanzu message, the coming together of Pivotal, the coming together of Pacific, coming together with Mission Control, so really leveraging VMware in the run layer, leveraging Pivotal in the build, and Heptio in the manage, right, and those coming together into Tanzu. I think that's the most important thing that we're doing. And I think for operators, which is really the center of our audience here at VMworld, they've always struggled with those crazy developers. They do this cool new stuff. It's not operational, it's not secure. But in bringing those together, the magic formula for that is Kubernetes. And that's why we're making these big bets. The move with Pivotal, obviously the Heptio guys, I mean Joe Beda and Craig, they're just the rock stars of that community because they really are solving in an industry-consensual standard way. That's really the magic of Kubernetes. This ain't a VMware thing, this is an industry thing. >> Is Kubernetes the technology enabler? I mean, TCP/IP was that in the old networking days. It enabled a lot of shifts in the industry. You were part of that wave. Is Kubernetes that disruptive enabler? >> Yeah, I really see it as one of those key transition points in the industry. And as I sort of joked, if my name was Scott, and we were 20 years ago, I'd be banging the table calling it Java. And Java defined enterprise software development for two decades. By the way, Scott's my neighbor. He's down the hill, so I look down on Mr. McNealy. I always sort of like that. (everybody laughs) >> He looks up to you. >> But it changed how people did enterprise software development for the last two decades. And Kubernetes has that same kind of transformative effect, but maybe even more important, it's not just development but also operations. And I think that's what we're uniquely bringing together with Project Pacific, really being able to bridge those two worlds together. And if we deliver on this, I think the next decade or two will be the center of innovation for us, how we bridge those two roles together and really give developers what they need and make it operator friendly out of the box, cross the history to the future. This is pretty powerful. >> So that does lead to the big question. You just mentioned developers. And when you look out the VMworld audience, it's not comprised of huge developers. I know you're thinking about this, so what's your plan to attract those developers? You're giving them platform now, and the technologies. but those builders, what are you going to do for them? Is it build community, more events, more training? What's the plan there? >> Yeah, and I'd say I think about it in a couple of different context. One is if we were here six years ago, and you would have asked me about open source, right? I mean, VMware's reputation in the open source community wasn't good, right? We hired Dirk, we started to build momentum, make contributions. One of the litmus tests for Joe and Craig on Heptio, 'cause remember, a lot of people could have bought Heptio. Because some was who's going to be the buyer, but also will they be a willing seller. And their litmus test was are you really serious about open source, right? Are you really committed to the open source, Kubernetes tree and development and cloud-native computing foundation? Are you really there? 'Cause they were also looking do I want to be bought by you? Do I want to be part of the VMware family? And we passed the test. That's why Heptio's part of the team. Clearly, this has been central to Pivotal and their views. So we have to be open-source credible. We also have to be developer credible, and those two are tightly linked. And that's why we noted on stage Pivotal, particularly the Java community, is three-plus million developers. Bitnami is two million-ish developers. We now have high volume connections to the developer community, and you're going to see us show up in dramatically more profound ways at places like Kubicon and SpringOne is coming up, just start to be in the developer spaces. And ultimately, you got to do stuff that they care about. At the end of the day, winning developers has nothing to do with great marketing, even though that's important. You have to do great code, right, and bring them value to their development assignments. And we think with the assets that we're lining up, that's why we did Pivotal, Bitnami, Heptio, some of our organic things, Dirk's leadership here. I believe that a year or two from now VMware could be seen as the most developer and open source enterprise company in the industry. And that's the goal that I'm on. >> Well, I have an idea for you. Allocate 1,000 engineers to open source and start having them build new applications, new workloads, give it away to the open source community, and then sell your products and services to them. That would get you in fast. >> Well, by the way, we now have hundreds of engineers who are committed to open source, who their full-time job is open source contributions. So I'm not to 1,000 yet, but I'm now several hundred that their day job, night job, weekend job is open source contribution. So we're becoming very credible, and as you heard me say in the keynote, we are now top three contributor to Kubernetes. This is big, and some areas like the networking area we're clearly the leader in a number of the key networking open source technologies, and you'll see us do more of those kind of projects. >> One of the things you mentioned, I mean you mentioned about open source six years ago, you might have rolled your eyes, or you might not have had an opinion on it 'cause the timing of where VMware was. But one thing you've been banging the drum on since 2012 is hybrid cloud. And so you see certain things early. You see those waves. That's what you're known for, in my opinion. You're really good about it. You see blockchain as a great wave, but as a headline I'm reading on Fortune it says, "VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, "Bitcoin is bad for humanity." >> Sold all my bitcoin (laughs). >> Okay, so now are you implying then, and blockchain is a lot of open source components there. It's evolving, you've a lot of blockchain projects. So is that an indictment on the unregulated currency market or is it the underlying infrastructure? And are you excited about blockchain as an underlying? Is it one of those hybrid cloud moments for you, or is it more of we'll see how it develops? What's your thoughts? And explain the bitcoin comment too. >> Yeah, the idea of distributed ledger technology, immutable distributed trust, I've said I think of that and blockchain as the underlying technology as almost like public private key encryption, right? If we go back 40 years before RSA or Vashumi and Ari, it's that important. This is breakthrough, innovative technology in how you do distributed secure trust. That's powerful, so we are huge believers, strongly committed to blockchain and distributed leverager technology. Now, why do I make my comments like I do on bitcoin? So bitcoin, as it's implemented, and implementation of blockchain and distributed ledger, I assert is bad. It's bad for two reasons. One is it's an environmental crisis, right? A single ledger, if you and I transacted a penny, right, I would consume enough energy to power your house for half a day. I mean, it's incredible, and I mean, that's why you have these crazy bitfarms being built and people finding GPUs. >> So you think from a sustainability standpoint. >> Absolutely. >> That's where you came from. >> Climate sustainability, right, this is a terrible implementation of blockchain. Secondly, the way it's also done as well in this totally unregulated environment, almost all of its uses are for illicit and criminal purposes. That's who's trading in bitcoin as well. So its purpose is almost all illicit, right, and it's environmental crisis. I say bad. Now, I'm not saying that blockchain is bad. I think this is revolutionizing. >> I want to make sure we clarify that because obviously unregulated outside the United States has been a big problem. We see it in the SEC crackdown, and results are-- >> Studies have shown over 95% of the use of bitcoin is criminal, so say bad. Let's go make it good, and that's what I mean these two phrases, do good engineering, and engineer for good. How do we make blockchain, and this is part of the reason, we had just announced on Sunday a partnership with Australian Stock Exchange and Data Asset, that they're leveraging the VMware distributed ledger technology, right, as part of their go-forward strategy for the stock exchange of Australia. Well, that's good, right? We're making it suitable for enterprises, meeting the regulatory requirements and-- >> John: Are you happy with the progress of where the blockchain is for you guys? >> Absolutely, and we're order-plus magnitude better in terms of performance and energy consumption. So yeah, and we're just getting started. >> And it's consensus-based, which is great. A quick question for you on multicloud. So hybrid cloud you said in 2012, I challenged you on it, and you've been banging the drum since 2012. It's a couple years into it, and hybrid cloud is pretty much standard. People see it, recognize it as the cloud 2.0. Multicloud is all the buzz and all the rage. I hear it everywhere. What does it actually mean is a different debate, so I want to get your thoughts on defining what multicloud is and is it going to have that same gestation period of the same kind of years? 'Cause if it's seven years to get or six years to get hybrid cloud mainstream, is multicloud going to have a similar trajectory? >> Yeah, so let's try to be very crisp with the definition. Multicloud is simply that. Customers using multiple clouds for different business purposes. And what we said is is that we're going to help them manage. That's the center point of cloud health, right? Help customers manage, cost optimize, secure in a multicloud environment where the underlying infrastructure is dissimilar, not compatible, right? And in that sense, you sort of say you can have consistent operations if we do our job well with cloud health, but you're not going to have consistent infrastructure, meaning I can't VMotion between these things, I can't have higher these things. So that's the multicloud. Now a proper subset of multicloud is hybrid cloud. And hybrid cloud is where you have both consistent operations and consistent infrastructure. And that's when we can do things like you saw on the demo today, right? We're running a VMware stack on Azure. We're moving Azure running workloads in real time, right, without stunning them, pausing them, to an Amazon VMC instead of moving workloads from Amazon VMC onto an Azure instance. That's the hybrid cloud, and that's the power at work, from private data centers to multiple different targets in the public cloud where you can be optimizing the location of work nodes based on the proper business requirements. And that might be governance. That might be performance. It might be latency. It might be the time of the day of the week when you have capacity available, right? And that's really what we're saying. Consistent operations and consistent infrastructure, proper subset of multicloud. >> I have a question on something you said yesterday. You said, "Strength lies in differences not similarities." True, I buy that. There's a number of difference between you and your preferred public cloud partner. AWS doesn't use the term multicloud. They say you shouldn't say security's not broken. And there are a number. You want to be the best infrastructure and developer software company. They want to be that platform. They want to be the security cloud, on and on and on. So I see this impending collision course, maybe not tomorrow, but what are your thoughts on the differences and the good or bad that does for the industry? >> Yeah, well, we appreciate Amazon, the investments that we're making. We've both bet big with each other, and they've been a great partner. And in fact, I'm going to talk to Andy before the end of the week, update some of the announcements and some of the things. Great partner, we have regular cadence of our activities with each other. And as we said, they're our preferred public cloud partner. And with it, it's preferred in two senses. It's a go to market and how we position that, but it's also an R&D statement, right? This is where we're doing a lot of core engineering, and that will flow into private cloud embodiments, flow into our other public cloud and our cloud-verified partners. But that's the point of the arrow in terms of the innovations, the go to market, and the R&D aspects of the partnership. And I expect we're going to be here five years from now and we're going to have this conversation, and I'm going to answer it exactly the same way. >> That'll be our CUBE's 15th anniversary, and so we'll be excited for that. It's our 10 year, so I want to last question put you on the spot, looking back over 10 years, pick the moments that you think were key inflection points. What were key notable good things that happened, bad things that happened, or things that didn't happen, right? And then going forward 10 years, you laid out a few of them with Kubernetes. Just past 10 years, could be CUBE memories, but in VMware's world, you were at EMC first, then became CEO, a lot's changed. Paul Maritz laid out the original vision. And where we are today, what's your key moments? >> Yeah, well, I think if you go all the way back, obviously, hey when the first WSX, right, people could run Linux and Windows on their client. Wow, right? The first VMotion, right, oh my gosh, and that sort of ushered in ESX. Obviously the transition from Diane to Paul, the public offering, boy, that was a pretty tumultuous time. And from Paul to Pat was very much we lay it out pretty much this any cloud vision, and that model, it was formative and we're sort of bringing it together. It was get rid of some assets, bring together, so sort of that transition was challenging for the company. But then we've started to sort of systematically say build from the core. What do we have? What do we need as we started to build these layers in the concentric circles? The Nicira acquisition, boom, that was the shot that changed the world of networking. And obviously, that doesn't change quickly, but we have a multibillion dollar networking business, Avi Networks, VeloCloud, we're building that set of assets. >> Software-defined data centers. The Core engine, that was a key point. >> Dave: That was a total game changer. >> You cannot build a software-defined data center if you don't address the networking. It's just that simple, and that's why I was so passionate about that. Obviously, the HCI move with vSAN. Joe Tucci was so pissed off at me, right? (everybody laugh) What are you doing? It's operative. It's part of the ingredients of the data center, Joe. I got to do it, wait. >> John: Just being a software company. >> Yeah, yeah, right, so that was a pretty tense moment. The period of the Dell EMC merger, a tough period, right, as well, and just where the company's going to go. And within a week, right, I'm going to be fired. I'm going to be spun out, right? I'm going to be the new CEO of Dell, right? I mean, it was going to be HP. >> John: All the rumor. >> Stock is 40, obviously the Amazon moment, when we did that partnership. vCloud Air, hey, we had the right idea. We didn't implement it properly, and then we did it right with the Amazon partnership, and that just changed the cloud industry. And I think we're going to look at today, this week, and the moves with Heptio, Kubernetes, Pivotal, those pieces coming together, and to this audience Project Pacific, right, it's just like okay, wow, everyone of them will become Kubernetes enabled. 20,000 selfies with Joe Beda, right, have now been ushered because it is that game changing, we believe. This is the biggest free architecture of the Core platform in a decade, so. >> My favorite quote from you was if you're not out on that next wave, you're driftwood. You said that on the QA, I forget which year it was. >> And mine's security's the do over. (Pat laughs) >> You're doing it over, you're doing it, Mr. Gelsinger. >> Next 10 years, what's the big wave everyone should be on? What's the wave that you identify? You've seen many waves, you've created waves, you've been part of waves. What's the wave for the next 10 years that people should pay attention to, that they need to be on? >> Well, if they're not on the networking wave, get on it, right? They got to be on this multicloud hybrid wave. Could it be louder? The Kubernetes one is the one, right? That's the one I'm going to put at the front of the list. And this move in security, I am just passionate about this, and as I've said to my team, if this is the last thing I do in my career is I want to change security. We just not are satisfying our customers. They shouldn't put more stuff on our platforms if they can't-- >> John: National defense issues, huge problems. >> It was just terrible. And I said if it kills me, right, I'm going to get this done. And they says, "It might kill you, Pat." >> Mount Kilimanjaro right there. Pat, thank you for all your commentary, and great look back 10 years. You've been one of our favorite guests coming on theCUBE, bringing A game, you're bringing the tech chops, the historian aspect, also you're running one of the most valuable open source companies in the cloud. (Pat and John laugh) >> Love you guys, thanks so much. >> Thanks, Pat. Pat Gelsinger here inside theCUBE. Our 10th year, VM's looking good off the tee right now, middle of the fairway, as they say, for the next 10 years. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vallante, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)