(soft techno upbeat music) >> Hi there. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is Dave Villante with Paul Gillon. Reinvent day one and a half. We started last night, Monday, theCUBE after dark. Now we're going wall to wall. Today. Today was of course the big keynote, Adam Selipsky, kind of the baton now handing, you know, last year when he did his keynote, he was very new. He was sort of still getting his feet wet and finding his guru swing. Settling in a little bit more this year, learning a lot more, getting deeper into the tech, but of course, sharing the love with other leaders like Peter DeSantis. Tomorrow's going to be Swamy in the keynote. Adrian Cockcroft is here. Former AWS, former network Netflix CTO, currently an analyst. You got your own firm now. You're out there. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, thanks. >> We heard you on at Super Cloud, you gave some really good insights there back in August. So now as an outsider, you come in obviously, you got to be impressed with the size and the ecosystem and the energy. Of course. What were your thoughts on, you know what you've seen so far, today's keynotes, last night Peter DeSantis, what stood out to you? >> Yeah, I think it's great to be back at Reinvent again. We're kind of pretty much back to where we were before the pandemic sort of shut it down. This is a little, it's almost as big as the, the largest one that we had before. And everyone's turned up. It just feels like we're back. So that's really good to see. And it's a slightly different style. I think there were was more sort of video production things happening. I think in this keynote, more storytelling. I'm not sure it really all stitched together very well. Right. Some of the stories like, how does that follow that? So there were a few things there and some of there were spelling mistakes on the slides, you know that ELT instead of ETL and they spelled ZFS wrong and something. So it just seemed like there was, I'm not quite sure just maybe a few things were sort of rushed at the last minute. >> Not really AWS like, was it? It's kind of remind the Patriots Paul, you know Bill Belichick's teams are fumbling all over the place. >> That's right. That's right. >> Part of it may be, I mean the sort of the market. They have a leader in marketing right now but they're going to have a CMO. So that's sort of maybe as lack of a single threaded leader for this thing. Everything's being shared around a bit more. So maybe, I mean, it's all fixable and it's mine. This is minor stuff. I'm just sort of looking at it and going there's a few things that looked like they were not quite as good as they could have been in the way it was put together. Right? >> But I mean, you're taking a, you know a year of not doing Reinvent. Yeah. Being isolated. You know, we've certainly seen it with theCUBE. It's like, okay, it's not like riding a bike. You know, things that, you know you got to kind of relearn the muscle memories. It's more like golf than is bicycle riding. >> Well I've done AWS keynotes myself. And they are pretty much scrambled. It looks nice, but there's a lot of scrambling leading up to when it actually goes. Right? And sometimes you can, you sometimes see a little kind of the edges of that, and sometimes it's much more polished. But you know, overall it's pretty good. I think Peter DeSantis keynote yesterday was a lot of really good meat there. There was some nice presentations, and some great announcements there. And today I was, I thought I was a little disappointed with some of the, I thought they could have been more. I think the way Andy Jesse did it, he crammed more announcements into his keynote, and Adam seems to be taking sort of a bit more of a measured approach. There were a few things he picked up on and then I'm expecting more to be spread throughout the rest of the day. >> This was more poetic. Right? He took the universe as the analogy for data, the ocean for security. Right? The Antarctic was sort of. >> Yeah. It looked pretty, >> yeah. >> But I'm not sure that was like, we're not here really to watch nature videos >> As analysts and journalists, You're like, come on. >> Yeah, >> Give it the meat >> That was kind the thing, yeah, >> It has always been the AWS has always been Reinvent has always been a shock at our approach. 100, 150 announcements. And they're really, that kind of pressure seems to be off them now. Their position at the top of the market seems to be unshakeable. There's no clear competition that's creeping up behind them. So how does that affect the messaging you think that AWS brings to market when it doesn't really have to prove that it's a leader anymore? It can go after maybe more of the niche markets or fix the stuff that's a little broken more fine tuning than grandiose statements. >> I think so AWS for a long time was so far out that they basically said, "We don't think about the competition, we are listen to the customers." And that was always the statement that works as long as you're always in the lead, right? Because you are introducing the new idea to the customer. Nobody else got there first. So that was the case. But in a few areas they aren't leading. Right? You could argue in machine learning, not necessarily leading in sustainability. They're not leading and they don't want to talk about some of these areas and-- >> Database. I mean arguably, >> They're pretty strong there, but the areas when you are behind, it's like they kind of know how to play offense. But when you're playing defense, it's a different set of game. You're playing a different game and it's hard to be good at both. I think and I'm not sure that they're really used to following somebody into a market and making a success of that. So there's something, it's a little harder. Do you see what I mean? >> I get opinion on this. So when I say database, David Foyer was two years ago, predicted AWS is going to have to converge somehow. They have no choice. And they sort of touched on that today, right? Eliminating ETL, that's one thing. But Aurora to Redshift. >> Yeah. >> You know, end to end. I'm not sure it's totally, they're fully end to end >> That's a really good, that is an excellent piece of work, because there's a lot of work that it eliminates. There's are clear pain points, but then you've got sort of the competing thing, is like the MongoDB and it's like, it's just a way with one database keeps it simple. >> Snowflake, >> Or you've got on Snowflake maybe you've got all these 20 different things you're trying to integrate at AWS, but it's kind of like you have a bag of Lego bricks. It's my favorite analogy, right? You want a toy for Christmas, you want a toy formula one racing car since that seems to be the theme, right? >> Okay. Do you want the fully built model that you can play with right now? Or do you want the Lego version that you have to spend three days building. Right? And AWS is the Lego technique thing. You have to spend some time building it, but once you've built it, you can evolve it, and you'll still be playing those are still good bricks years later. Whereas that prebuilt to probably broken gathering dust, right? So there's something about having an vulnerable architecture which is harder to get into, but more durable in the long term. And so AWS tends to play the long game in many ways. And that's one of the elements that they do that and that's good, but it makes it hard to consume for enterprise buyers that are used to getting it with a bow on top. And here's the solution. You know? >> And Paul, that was always Andy Chassy's answer to when we would ask him, you know, all these primitives you're going to make it simpler. You see the primitives give us the advantage to turn on a dime in the marketplace. And that's true. >> Yeah. So you're saying, you know, you take all these things together and you wrap it up, and you put a snowflake on top, and now you've got a simple thing or a Mongo or Mongo atlas or whatever. So you've got these layered platforms now which are making it simpler to consume, but now you're kind of, you know, you're all stuck in that ecosystem, you know, so it's like what layer of abstractions do you want to tie yourself to, right? >> The data bricks coming at it from more of an open source approach. But it's similar. >> We're seeing Amazon direct more into vertical markets. They spotlighted what Goldman Sachs is doing on their platform. They've got a variety of platforms that are supposedly targeted custom built for vertical markets. How do successful do you see that play being? Is this something that the customers you think are looking for, a fully integrated Amazon solution? >> I think so. There's usually if you look at, you know the MongoDB or data stacks, or the other sort of or elastic, you know, they've got the specific solution with the people that really are developing the core technology, there's open source equivalent version. The AWS is running, and it's usually maybe they've got a price advantage or it's, you know there's some data integration in there or it's somehow easier to integrate but it's not stopping those companies from growing. And what it's doing is it's endorsing that platform. So if you look at the collection of databases that have been around over the last few years, now you've got basically Elastic Mongo and Cassandra, you know the data stacks as being endorsed by the cloud vendors. These are winners. They're going to be around for a very long time. You can build yourself on that architecture. But what happened to Couch base and you know, a few of the other ones, you know, they don't really fit. Like how you going to bait? If you are now becoming an also ran, because you didn't get cloned by the cloud vendor. So the customers are going is that a safe place to be, right? >> But isn't it, don't they want to encourage those partners though in the name of building the marketplace ecosystem? >> Yeah. >> This is huge. >> But certainly the platform, yeah, the platform encourages people to do more. And there's always room around the edge. But the mainstream customers like that really like spending the good money, are looking for something that's got a long term life to it. Right? They're looking for a long commitment to that technology and that it's going to be invested in and grow. And the fact that the cloud providers are adopting and particularly AWS is adopting some of these technologies means that is a very long term commitment. You can base, you know, you can bet your future architecture on that for a decade probably. >> So they have to pick winners. >> Yeah. So it's sort of picking winners. And then if you're the open source company that's now got AWS turning up, you have to then leverage it and use that as a way to grow the market. And I think Mongo have done an excellent job of that. I mean, they're top level sponsors of Reinvent, and they're out there messaging that and doing a good job of showing people how to layer on top of AWS and make it a win-win both sides. >> So ever since we've been in the business, you hear the narrative hardware's going to die. It's just, you know, it's commodity and there's some truth to that. But hardware's actually driving good gross margins for the Cisco's of the world. Storage companies have always made good margins. Servers maybe not so much, 'cause Intel sucked all the margin out of it. But let's face it, AWS makes most of its money. We know on compute, it's got 25 plus percent operating margins depending on the seasonality there. What do you think happens long term to the infrastructure layer discussion? Okay, commodity cloud, you know, we talk about super cloud. Do you think that AWS, and the other cloud vendors that infrastructure, IS gets commoditized and they have to go up market or you see that continuing I mean history would say that still good margins in hardware. What are your thoughts on that? >> It's not commoditizing, it's becoming more specific. We've got all these accelerators and custom chips now, and this is something, this almost goes back. I mean, I was with some micro systems 20,30 years ago and we developed our own chips and HP developed their own chips and SGI mips, right? We were like, the architectures were all squabbling of who had the best processor chips and it took years to get chips that worked. Now if you make a chip and it doesn't work immediately, you screwed up somewhere right? It's become the technology of building these immensely complicated powerful chips that has become commoditized. So the cost of building a custom chip, is now getting to the point where Apple and Amazon, your Apple laptop has got full custom chips your phone, your iPhone, whatever and you're getting Google making custom chips and we've got Nvidia now getting into CPUs as well as GPUs. So we're seeing that the ability to build a custom chip, is becoming something that everyone is leveraging. And the cost of doing that is coming down to startups are doing it. So we're going to see many, many more, much more innovation I think, and this is like Intel and AMD are, you know they've got the compatibility legacy, but of the most powerful, most interesting new things I think are going to be custom. And we're seeing that with Graviton three particular in the three E that was announced last night with like 30, 40% whatever it was, more performance for HPC workloads. And that's, you know, the HPC market is going to have to deal with cloud. I mean they are starting to, and I was at Supercomputing a few weeks ago and they are tiptoeing around the edge of cloud, but those supercomputers are water cold. They are monsters. I mean you go around supercomputing, there are plumbing vendors on the booth. >> Of course. Yeah. >> Right? And they're highly concentrated systems, and that's really the only difference, is like, is it water cooler or echo? The rest of the technology stack is pretty much off the shelf stuff with a few tweets software. >> You point about, you know, the chips and what AWS is doing. The Annapurna acquisition. >> Yeah. >> They're on a dramatically different curve now. I think it comes down to, again, David Floyd's premise, really comes down to volume. The arm wafer volumes are 10 x those of X 86, volume always wins. And the economics of semis. >> That kind of got us there. But now there's also a risk five coming along if you, in terms of licensing is becoming one of the bottlenecks. Like if the cost of building a chip is really low, then it comes down to licensing costs and do you want to pay the arm license And the risk five is an open source chip set which some people are starting to use for things. So your dis controller may have a risk five in it, for example, nowadays, those kinds of things. So I think that's kind of the the dynamic that's playing out. There's a lot of innovation in hardware to come in the next few years. There's a thing called CXL compute express link which is going to be really interesting. I think that's probably two years out, before we start seeing it for real. But it lets you put glue together entire rack in a very flexible way. So just, and that's the entire industry coming together around a single standard, the whole industry except for Amazon, in fact just about. >> Well, but maybe I think eventually they'll get there. Don't use system on a chip CXL. >> I have no idea whether I have no knowledge about whether going to do anything CXL. >> Presuming I'm not trying to tap anything confidential. It just makes sense that they would do a system on chip. It makes sense that they would do something like CXL. Why not adopt the standard, if it's going to be as the cost. >> Yeah. And so that was one of the things out of zip computing. The other thing is the low latency networking with the elastic fabric adapter EFA and the extensions to that that were announced last night. They doubled the throughput. So you get twice the capacity on the nitro chip. And then the other thing was this, this is a bit technical, but this scalable datagram protocol that they've got which basically says, if I want to send a message, a packet from one machine to another machine, instead of sending it over one wire, I consider it over 16 wires in parallel. And I will just flood the network with all the packets and they can arrive in any order. This is why it isn't done normally. TCP is in order, the packets come in order they're supposed to, but this is fully flooding them around with its own fast retry and then they get reassembled at the other end. So they're not just using this now for HPC workloads. They've turned it on for TCP for just without any change to your application. If you are trying to move a large piece of data between two machines, and you're just pushing it down a network, a single connection, it takes it from five gigabits per second to 25 gigabits per second. A five x speed up, with a protocol tweak that's run by the Nitro, this is super interesting. >> Probably want to get all that AIML that stuff is going on. >> Well, the AIML stuff is leveraging it underneath, but this is for everybody. Like you're just copying data around, right? And you're limited, "Hey this is going to get there five times faster, pushing a big enough chunk of data around." So this is turning on gradually as the nitro five comes out, and you have to enable it at the instance level. But it's a super interesting announcement from last night. >> So the bottom line bumper sticker on commoditization is what? >> I don't think so. I mean what's the APIs? Your arm compatible, your Intel X 86 compatible or your maybe risk five one day compatible in the cloud. And those are the APIs, right? That's the commodity level. And the software is now, the software ecosystem is super portable across those as we're seeing with Apple moving from Intel to it's really not an issue, right? The software and the tooling is all there to do that. But underneath that, we're going to see an arms race between the top providers as they all try and develop faster chips for doing more specific things. We've got cranium for training, that instance has they announced it last year with 800 gigabits going out of a single instance, 800 gigabits or no, but this year they doubled it. Yeah. So 1.6 terabytes out of a single machine, right? That's insane, right? But what you're doing is you're putting together hundreds or thousands of those to solve the big machine learning training problems. These super, these enormous clusters that they're being formed for doing these massive problems. And there is a market now, for these incredibly large supercomputer clusters built for doing AI. That's all bandwidth limited. >> And you think about the timeframe from design to tape out. >> Yeah. >> Is just getting compressed It's relative. >> It is. >> Six is going the other way >> The tooling is all there. Yeah. >> Fantastic. Adrian, always a pleasure to have you on. Thanks so much. >> Yeah. >> Really appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Thank you Paul. >> Cheers. All right. Keep it right there everybody. Don't forget, go to thecube.net, you'll see all these videos. Go to siliconangle.com, We've got features with Adam Selipsky, we got my breaking analysis, we have another feature with MongoDB's, Dev Ittycheria, Ali Ghodsi, as well Frank Sluman tomorrow. So check that out. Keep it right there. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech, right back. (soft techno upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> Hello everybody, welcome back to Boston. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Inforce 2022. We're here at the convention center in Boston where theCUBE got started in May of 2010. I'm really excited. Lena Smart is here, she's the chief information security officer at MongoDB rocket ship company We covered MongoDB World earlier this year, June, down in New York. Lena, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're very welcome, I enjoyed your keynote yesterday. You had a big audience, I mean, this is a big deal. >> Yeah. >> This is the cloud security conference, AWS, putting its mark in the sand back in 2019. Of course, a couple of years of virtual, now back in Boston. You talked in your keynote about security, how it used to be an afterthought, used to be the responsibility of a small group of people. >> Yeah. >> You know, it used to be a bolt on. >> Yep. >> That's changed dramatically and that change has really accelerated through the pandemic. >> Yep. >> Just describe that change from your perspective. >> So when I started at MongoDB about three and a half years ago, we had a very strong security program, but it wasn't under one person. So I was their first CISO that they employed. And I brought together people who were already doing security and we employed people from outside the company as well. The person that I employed as my deputy is actually a third time returnee, I guess? So he's worked for, MongoDB be twice before, his name is Chris Sandalo, and having someone of that stature in the company is really helpful to build the security culture that I wanted. That's why I really wanted Chris to come back. He's technically brilliant, but he also knew all the people who'd been there for a while and having that person as a trusted second in command really, really helped me grow the team very quickly. I've already got a reputation as a strong female leader. He had a reputation as a strong technical leader. So us combined is like indestructible, we we're a great team. >> Is your scope of responsibility, obviously you're protecting Mongo, >> Yeah. >> How much of your role extends into the product? >> So we have a product security team that report into Sahir Azam, our chief product officer. I think you even spoke to him. >> Yeah, he's amazing. >> He's awesome, isn't he? He's just fabulous. And so his team, they've got security experts on our product side who are really kind of the customer facing. I'm also to a certain extent customer facing, but the product folks are the absolute experts. They will listen to what our customers need, what they want, and together we can then work out and translate that. I'm also responsible for governance risk and compliance. So there's a large portion of our customers that give us input via that program too. So there's a lot of avenues to allow us to facilitate change in the security field. And I think that's really important. We have to listen to what our customers want, but also internally. You know, what our internal groups need as well to help them grow. >> I remember last year, Re:invent 2021, I was watching a talk on security. It was the, I forget his name, but it was the individual who responsible for data center security. And one of the things he said was, you know, look it's not at the end of the day, the technology's important but it's not the technology. It's how you apply the tools and the practices and the culture- >> Right. That you build in the organization that will ultimately determine how successful you are at decreasing the ROI for the bad guys. >> Yes. >> Let's put it that way. So talk about the challenges of building that culture, how you go about that, and how you sustain that cultural aspect. >> So, I think having the security champion program, so that's just, it's like one of my babies, that and helping underrepresented groups in MongoDB kind of get on in the tech world are both really important to me. And so the security champion program is purely voluntary. We have over a hundred members. And these are people, there's no bar to join. You don't have to be technical. If you're an executive assistant who wants to learn more about security, like my assistant does, you're more than welcome. Up to, we actually people grade themselves, when they join us, we give them a little tick box. Like five is, I walk in security water. One is, I can spell security but I'd like to learn more. Mixing those groups together has been game changing for us. We now have over a hundred people who volunteer their time, with their supervisors permission, they help us with their phishing campaigns, testing AWS tool sets, testing things like queryable encryption. I mean, we have people who have such an in-depth knowledge in other areas of the business that I could never learn, no matter how much time I had. And so to have them- And we have people from product as security champions as well, and security, and legal, and HR, and every department is recognized. And I think almost every geographical location is also recognized. So just to have that scope and depth of people with long tenure in the company, technically brilliant, really want to understand how they can apply the cultural values that we live with each day to make our security program stronger. As I say, that's been a game changer for us. We use it as a feeder program. So we've had five people transfer from other departments into the security and GRC teams through this Champions program. >> Makes a lot of sense. You take somebody who walks on water in security, mix them with somebody who really doesn't know a lot about it but wants to learn and then can ask really basic questions, and then the experts can actually understand better how to communicate. >> Absolutely. >> To that you know that 101 level. >> It's absolutely true. Like my mom lives in her iPad. She worships her iPad. Unfortunately she thinks everything on it is true. And so for me to try and dumb it down, and she's not a dumb person, but for me to try and dumb down the message of most of it's rubbish, mom, Facebook is made up. It's just people telling stories. For me to try and get that over to- So she's a one, and I might be a five, that's hard. That's really hard. And so that's what we're doing in the office as well. It's like, if you can explain to my mother how not everything on the internet is true, we're golden. >> My mom, rest her soul, when she first got a- we got her a Macintosh, this was years and years and years ago, and we were trying to train her over the phone, and said, mom, just grab the mouse. And she's like, I don't like mice. (Lena laughs) There you go. I know, I know, Lena, what that's like. Years ago, it was early last decade, we started to think about, wow, security really has to become a board level item. >> Yeah. >> And it really wasn't- 2010, you know, for certain companies. But really, and so I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Robert Gates, who was the defense secretary. >> Yes. >> We had this conversation, and he sits on a number, or sat on a number of boards, probably still does, but he was adamant. Oh, absolutely. Here's how you know, here. This is the criticality. Now it's totally changed. >> Right. >> I mean, it's now a board level item. But how do you communicate to the C-Suite, the board? How often do you do that? What do you recommend is the right regime? And I know there's not any perfect- there's got to be situational, but how do you approach it? >> So I am extremely lucky. We have a very technical board. Our chairman of the board is Tom Killalea. You know, Amazon alum, I mean, just genius. And he, and the rest of the board, it's not like a normal board. Like I actually have the meeting on this coming Monday. So this weekend will be me reading as much stuff as I possibly can, trying to work out what questions they're going to ask me. And it's never a gotcha kind of thing. I've been at board meetings before where you almost feel personally attacked and that's not a good thing. Where, at MongoDB, you can see they genuinely want us to grow and mature. And so I actually meet with our board four times a year, just for security. So we set up our own security meeting just with board members who are specifically interested in security, which is all of them. And so this is actually off cadence. So I actually get their attention for at least an hour once a quarter, which is almost unheard of. And we actually use the AWS memo format. People have a chance to comment and read prior to the meeting. So they know what we're going to talk about and we know what their concerns are. And so you're not going in like, oh my gosh, what what's going to happen for this hour? We come prepared. We have statistics. We can show them where we're growing. We can show them where we need more growth and maturity. And I think having that level of just development of programs, but also the ear of the board has has helped me mature my role 10 times. And then also we have the chance to ask them, well what are your other CISOs doing? You know, they're members of other boards. So I can say to Dave, for example, you know, what's so-and-so doing at Datadog? Or Tom Killelea, what's the CISO of Capital One doing? And they help me make a lot of those connections as well. I mean, the CISO world is small and me being a female in the world with a Scottish accent, I'm probably more memorable than most. So it's like, oh yeah, that's the Irish girl. Yeah. She's Scottish, thank you. But they remember me and I can use that. And so just having all those mentors from the board level down, and obviously Dev is a huge, huge fan of security and GRC. It's no longer that box ticking exercise that I used to feel security was, you know, if you heated your SOC2 type two in FinTech, oh, you were good to go. You know, if you did a HERC set for the power industry. All right, right. You know, we can move on now. It's not that anymore. >> Right. It's every single day. >> Yeah. Of course. Dev is Dev at the Chario. Dev spelled D E V. I spell Dave differently. My Dave. But, Lena, it sounds like you present a combination of metrics, so, the board, you feel like that's appropriate to dig into the metrics. But also I'm presuming you're talking strategy, potentially, you know, gaps- >> Road roadmaps, the whole nine yards. Yep. >> What's the, you know, I look at the budget scenario. At the macro level, CIOs have told us, they came into the year saying, hey we're going to grow spending at the macro, around eight percent, eight and a half percent. That's dialed down a little bit post Ukraine and the whole recession and Fed tightening. So now they're down maybe around six percent. So not dramatically lower, but still. And they tell us security is still the number one priority. >> Yes. >> That's been the case for many, many quarters, and actually years, but you don't have an unlimited budget. >> Sure >> Right. It's not like, oh, here is an open checkbook. >> Right. >> Lena, so, how does Mongo balance that with the other priorities in the organization, obviously, you know, you got to spend money on product, you got to spend money and go to market. What's the climate like now, is it, you know continuing on in 2022 despite some of the macro concerns? Is it maybe tapping the brakes? What's the general sentiment? >> We would never tap the breaks. I mean, this is something that's- So my other half works in the finance industry still. So we have, you know, interesting discussions when it comes to geopolitics and financial politics and you know, Dev, the chairman of the board, all very technical people, get that security is going to be taken advantage of if we're seeing to be tapping the brakes. So it does kind of worry me when I hear other people are saying, oh, we're, you know, we're cutting back our budget. We are not. That being said, you also have to be fiscally responsible. I'm Scottish, we're cheap, really frugal with money. And so I always tell my team: treat this money as if it's your own. As if it's my money. And so when we're buying tool sets, I want to make sure that I'm talking to the CISO, or the CISO of the company that's supplying it, and saying are you giving me the really the best value? You know, how can we maybe even partner with you as a database platform? How could we partner with you, X company, to, you know, maybe we'll give you credits on our platform. If you look to moving to us and then we could have a partnership, and I mean, that's how some of this stuff builds, and so I've been pretty good at doing that. I enjoy doing that. But then also just in terms of being fiscally responsible, yeah, I get it. There's CISOs who have every tool that's out there because it's shiny and it's new and they know the board is never going to say no, but at some point, people will get wise to that and be like, I think we need a new CISO. So it's not like we're going to stop spending it. So we're going to get someone who actually knows how to budget and get us what the best value for money. And so that's always been my view is we're always going to be financed. We're always going to be financed well. But I need to keep showing that value for money. And we do that every board meeting, every Monday when I meet with my boss. I mean, I report to the CFO but I've got a dotted line to the CTO. So I'm, you know, I'm one of the few people at this level that's got my feet in both camps. You know budgets are talked at Dev's level. So, you know, it's really important that we get the spend right. >> And that value is essentially, as I was kind of alluding to before, it's decreasing the value equation for the hackers, for the adversary. >> Hopefully, yes. >> Right? Who's the- of course they're increasingly sophisticated. I want to ask you about your relationship with AWS in this context. It feels like, when I look around here, I think back to 2019, there was a lot of talk about the shared responsibility model. >> Yes. >> You know, AWS likes to educate people and back then it was like, okay, hey, by the way, you know you got to, you know, configure the S3 bucket properly. And then, oh, by the way, there's more than just, it's not just binary. >> Right, right. >> There's other factors involved. The application access and identity and things like that, et cetera, et cetera. So that was all kind of cool. But I feel like the cloud is becoming the first line of defense for the CISO but because of the shared responsibility model, CISO is now the second line of defense >> Yes. Does that change your role? Does it make it less complicated in a way? Maybe, you know, more complicated because you now got to get your DevSecOps team? The developers are now much more involved in security? How is that shifting, specifically in the context of your relationship with AWS? >> It's honestly not been that much of a shift. I mean, these guys are very proactive when it comes to where we are from the security standpoint. They listen to their customers as much as we do. So when we sit down with them, when I meet with Steve Schmidt or CJ or you know, our account manager, its not a conversation that's a surprise to me when I tell them this is what we need. They're like, yep, we're on that already. And so I think that relationship has been very proactive rather than reactive. And then in terms of MongoDB, as a tech company, security is always at the forefront. So it's not been a huge lift for me. It's really just been my time that I've taken to understand where DevSecOps is coming from. And you know, how far are we shifting left? Are we actually shifting right now? It's like, you know, get the balance, right? You can't be too much to one side. But I think in terms of where we're teaching the developers, you know, we are a company by developers for developers. So, we get it, we understand where they're coming from, and we try and be as proactive as AWS is. >> When you obviously the SolarWinds hack was a a major mile- I think in security, there's always something in the headlines- >> Yes. But when you think of things like, you know, Stuxnet, you know, Log4J, obviously Solarwinds and the whole supply chain infiltration and the bill of materials. As I said before, the adversary is extremely capable and sophisticated and you know, much more automated. It's always been automated attacks, but you know island hopping and infiltrating and self-forming malware and really sophisticated techniques. >> Yep. >> How are you thinking about that supply chain, bill of materials from inside Mongo and ultimately externally to your customers? >> So you've picked on my third favorite topic to talk about. So I came from the power industry before, so I've got a lot of experience with critical infrastructure. And that was really, I think, where a lot of the supply chain management rules and regulations came from. If you're building a turbine and the steel's coming from China, we would send people to China to make sure that the steel we were buying was the steel we were using. And so that became the H bomb. The hardware bill of materials, bad name. But, you know, we remember what it stood for. And then fast forward: President Biden's executive order. SBOs front and center, cloud first front and center. It's like, this is perfect. And so I was actually- I actually moderated a panel earlier this year at Homeland Security Week in DC, where we had a sneak CISA, So Dr. Allen Friedman from CISA, and also Patrick Weir from OWASP for the framework, CISA for the framework as well, and just the general guidance, and Snake for the front end. That was where my head was going. And MongoDB is the back-end database. And what we've done is we've taken our work with Snake and we now have a proof of concept for SBOs. And so I'm now trying to kind of package that, if you like, as a program and get the word out that SBOs shouldn't be something to be afraid of. If you want to do business with the government you're going to have to create one. We are offering a secure repository to store that data, the government could have access to that repository and see that data. So there's one source of truth. And so I think SBOs is going to be really interesting. I know that, you know, some of my peers are like, oh, it's just another box to tick. And I think it's more than that. I definitely- I've just, there's something percolating in the back of my mind that this is going to be big and we're going to be able to use it to hopefully not stop things like another Log4j, there's always going to be another Log4j, we know that. we don't know everything, the unknown unknown, but at least if we're prepared to go find stuff quicker than we were then before Log4j, I think having SBOs on hand, having that one source of truth, that one repository, I think is going to make it so much easier to find those things. >> Last question, what's the CISO's number one challenge? Either yours or the CISO, generally. >> Keeping up with the fire hose that is security. Like, what do you pick tomorrow? And if you pick the wrong thing, what's the impact? So that's why I'm always networking and talking to my peers. And, you know, we're sometimes like meerkats, you know. there's meerkats, you see like this, it's like, what do we talk about? But there's always something to talk about. And you just have to learn and keep learning. >> Last question, part B. As a hot technology company, that's, you know, rising star, you know not withstanding the tech lash and the stock market- >> Yeah. >> But Mongo's growing, you know, wonderfully. Do you find it easier to attract talent? Like many CISOs will say, you know, lack of talent is my biggest, biggest challenge. Do you find that that's not the challenge for you? >> Not at all. I think on two fronts, one, we have the champions program. So we've got a whole internal ecosystem who love working there. So the minute one of my jobs goes on the board, they get first dibs at it. So they'd already phoning their friends. So we've got, you know, there's ripple effects out from over a hundred people internally. You know, I think just having that, that's been a game changer. >> I was so looking forward to interviewing you, Lena, thanks so much for coming. >> Thank you, this was a pleasure. >> It was really great to have you. >> Thank you so much. Thank you. >> You're really welcome. All right, keep it right there. This is Dave Villante for theCUBE. We'll be right back at AWS Re:inforce22 right after this short break.

(upbeat music) >> Good morning. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Snowflake Summit 22, live from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, here with Dave Villante. We are at Caesar's Forum, having lots of great conversations. As I mentioned, this is just the start of day two, a tremendous amount of content yesterday. I'm coming at you today. Two guests join us from Slalom, now, we've got Chris Samuels, Principal Machine Learning, and Bethany Mudd, Senior Director, Experience Design. Welcome to theCube, guys. >> Hi, thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> So, Slalom and Snowflake, over 200 joint customers, over 1,800 plus engagements, lots of synergies there, partnership. We're here today to talk about intelligent products. Talk to us about what- how do you define intelligent products, and then kind of break that down? >> Yeah, I can, I can start with the simple version, right? So, when we think about intelligent products, what they're doing, is they're doing more than they were explicitly programmed to do. So, instead of having a developer write all of these rules and have, "If this, then that," right, we're using data, and real time insights to make products that are more performing and improving over time. >> Chris: Yeah, it's really bringing together an ecosystem of a series of things to have integrated capabilities working together that themselves offer constant improvement, better understanding, better flexibility, and better usability, for everyone involved. >> Lisa: And there are four pillars of intelligent products that let's walk through those: technology, intelligence, experiences, and operations. >> Sure. So for technology, like most modern data architectures, it has sort of a data component and it has a modern cloud platform, but here, the key is is sort of things being disconnected, things being self contained, and decoupled, such that there's better integration time, better iteration time, more cross use, and more extensibility and scalability with the cloud native portion of that. >> And the intelligence piece? >> The intelligence piece is the data that's been processed by machine learning algorithms, or by predictive analytics that provides sort of the most valuable, or more- most insightful inferences, or conclusions. So, by bringing together again, the tech and the intelligence, that's, you know, sort of the, two of the pillars that begin to move forward that enable sort of the other two pillars, which are- >> Experiences and operations. >> Yeah. >> Perfect. >> And if we think about those, all of the technology, all of the intelligence in the world, doesn't mean anything if it doesn't actually work for people. Without use, there is no value. So, as we're designing these products, we want to make sure that they're supporting people. As we're automating, there are still people accountable for those tasks. There are still impacts to people in the real world. So, we want to make sure that we're doing that intentionally. So, we're building the greater good. >> Yeah. And from the operations perspective, it's you can think of traditional DevOps becoming MLOps, where there's an overall platform and a framework in place to manage not only the software components of it, but the overall workflow, and the data flow, and the model life cycle such that we have tools and people from different backgrounds and different teams developing and maintaining this than you would previously see with something like product engineering. >> Dave: Can you guys walk us through an example of how you work with a customer? I'm envisioning, you know, meeting with a lot of yellow stickies, and prioritization, and I don't know if that's how it works, but take us through like the start and the sequence. >> You have my heart, I am a workshop lover. Anytime you have the scratch off, like, lottery stickers on something, you know it's a good one. But, as we think about our approach, we typically start with either a discovery or mobilized phase. We're really, we're starting by gathering context, and really understanding the business, the client, the users, and that full path the value. Who are all the teams that are going to have to come together and start working together to deliver this intelligent product? And once we've got that context, we can start solutioning and ideating on that. But, really it comes down to making sure that we've earned the right, and we've got the smarts to move into the space intelligently. >> Yeah, and, truly, it's the intelligent product itself is sort of tied to the use case. The business knows what the most- what is potentially the most valuable here. And so, so by communicating and working and co-creating with the business, we can define then, okay, here are the use cases and here are where machine learning and the overall intelligent product can maybe add more disruptive value than others. By saying, let's pretend that, you know, maybe your ML model or your predictive analytics is like a dial that we could turn up to 11. Which one of those dials turning turned up to 11 could add the most value or disruption to your business? And therefore, you know, how can we prioritize and then work toward that pie-in-the-sky goal. >> Okay. So the client comes and says, "This is the outcome we want." Okay, and then you help them. You gather the right people, sort of extract all the little, you know, pieces of knowledge, and then help them prioritize so they can focus. And then what? >> Yeah. So, from there we're going to take the approach that seeing is solving. We want to make sure that we get the right voices in the room, and we've got the right alignment. So, we're going to map out everything. We're going to diagram what that experience is going to look like, how technology's going to play into it, all of the roles and actors involved. We're going to draw a map of the ecosystem that everyone can understand, whether you're in marketing, or the IT sort of area, once again, so we can get crisp on that outcome and how we're going to deliver it. And, from there, we start building out that roadmap and backlog, and we deliver iteratively. So, by not thinking of things as getting to the final product after a three year push, we really want to shrink those build, measure, and learn loops. So, we're getting all of that feedback and we're listening and evolving and growing the same way that our products are. >> Yeah. Something like an intelligent product is is pretty heady. So it's a pretty heavy concept to talk about. And so, the question becomes, "What is the outcome that ultimately needs to be achieved?" And then, who, from where in the business across the different potentially business product lines or business departments needs to be brought together? What data needs to be brought together? Such that the people can understand how they themselves can shape. The stakeholders can, how the product itself can be shaped. And therefore, what is the ultimate outcome, collectively, for everybody involved? 'Cause while your data might be fueling, you know, finances or someone else's intelligence and that kind of thing, bringing it all together allows for a more seamless product that might benefit more of the overall structure of the organization. >> Can you talk a little bit about how Slalom and Snowflake are enabling, like a customer example? A customer to take that data, flex that muscle, and create intelligent products that delight and surprise their customers? >> Chris: Yeah, so here's a great story. We worked to co-create with Kawasaki Heavy Industries. So, we created an intelligent product with them to enable safer rail travel, more preventative, more efficient, preventative maintenance, and a more efficient and real time track status feedback to the rail operators. So, in this case, we brought, yeah, the intelligent product itself was, "Okay, how do you create a better rail monitoring service?" And while that itself was the primary driver of the data, multiple other parts of the organization are using sort of the intelligent product as part of their now daily routine, whether it's from the preventative maintenance perspective, or it's from route usage, route prediction. Or, indeed, helping KHI move forward into making trains a more software centered set of products in the future. >> So, taking that example, I would imagine when you running- like I'm going to call that a project. I hope that's okay. So, when I'm running a project, that I would imagine that sometimes you run into, "Oh, wow. Okay." To really be successful at this, the company- project versus whole house. The company doesn't have the right data architecture, the right skills or the right, you know, data team. Now, is it as simple as, oh yeah, just put it all into Snowflake? I doubt it. So how do you, do you encounter that often? How do you deal with that? >> Bethany: It's a journey. So, I think it's really about making sure we're meeting clients where they are. And I think that's something that we actually do pretty well. So, as we think about delivery co-creation, and co-delivering is a huge part of our model. So, we want to make sure that we have the client teams, with us. So, as we start thinking about intelligent products, it can be incorporating a small feature, with subscription based services. It doesn't have to be creating your own model and sort of going deep. It really does come down to like what value do you want to get out of this? Right? >> Yeah. It is important that it is a journey, right? So, it doesn't have to be okay, there's a big bang applied to you and your company's tech industry or tech ecosystem. You can just start by saying, "Okay, how will I bring my data together at a data lake? How do I see across my different pillars of excellence in my own business?" And then, "How do I manage, potentially, this in an overall MLOps platform such that it can be sustainable and gather more insights and improve itself with time, and therefore be more impactful to the ultimate users of the tool?" 'Cause again, as Bethany said that without use, these things are just tools on the shelf somewhere that have little value. >> So, it's a journey, as you both said, completely agree with that. It's a journey that's getting faster and faster. Because, I mean, we've seen so much acceleration in the last couple of the years, the consumer demands have massively changed. >> Bethany: Absolutely. >> In every industry, how do Slalom and Snowflake come together to help businesses define the journey, but also accelerate it, so that they can stay ahead or get ahead of the competition? >> Yeah. So, one thing I think is interesting about the technology field right now is I feel like we're at the point where it's not the technology or the tools that's limiting us or, you know, constraining what we can build, it's our imaginations. Right? And, when I think about intelligent products and all of the things that are capable, that you can achieve with AI and ML, that's not widely known. There's so much tech jargon. And, we put all of those statistical words on it, and you know the things you don't know. And, instead, really, what we're doing is we're providing different ways to learn and grow. So, I think if we can demystify and humanize some of that language, I really would love to see all of these companies better understand the crayons and the tools in their toolbox. >> Speaking from a creative perspective, I love it. >> No, And I'll do the tech nerd bit. So, there is- you're right. There is a portion where you need to bring data together, and tech together, and that kind of thing. So, something like Snowflake is a great enabler for how to actually bring the data of multiple parts of an organization together into, you know, a data warehouse, or a data lake, and then be able to manage that sort of in an MLOps platform, particularly with some of the press that Snowflake has put out this week. Things becoming more Python-native, allowing for more ML experimentation, and some more native insights on the platform, rather than going off Snowflake platform to do some of that kind of thing. Makes Snowflake an incredibly valuable portion of the data management and of the tech and of the engineering of the overall product. >> So, I agree, Bethany, lack of imagination sometimes is the barrier we get so down into the weeds, but there's also lack of skills, as mentioned the organizational, you know, structural issues, politics, you know, whatever it is, you know, specific agendas, how do you guys help with that? Can, will you bring in, you know, resources to help and fill gaps? >> Yeah, so we will bring in a cross-disciplinary team of experts. So, you will see an experienced designer, as well as your ML architects, as well as other technical architects, and what we call solution owners, because we want to make sure that we've got a lot of perspectives, so we can see that problem from a lot of different angles. The other thing that we're bringing in is a repeatable process, a repeatable engineering methodology, which, when you zoom out, and you look at it, it doesn't seem like that big of a deal. But, what we're doing, is we're training against it. We're building tools, we're building templates, we're re-imagining what our deliverables look like for intelligent products, just so, we're not only speeding up the development and getting to those outcomes faster, but we're also continuing to grow and we can gift those things to our clients, and help support them as well. >> And not only that, what we do at Slalom is we want to think about transition from the beginning. And so, by having all the stakeholders in the room from the earliest point, both the business stakeholders, the technical stakeholders, if they have data scientists, if they have engineers, who's going to be taking this and maintaining this intelligent product long after we're gone, because again, we will transition, and someone else will be taking over the maintenance of this team. One, they will understand, you know, early from beginning the path that it is on, and be more capable of maintaining this, and two, understand sort of the ethical concerns behind, okay, here's how parts of your system affect this other parts of the system. And, you know, sometimes ML gets some bad press because it's misapplied, or there are concerns, or models or data are used outside of context. And there's some, you know, there are potentially some ill effects to be had. By bringing those people together much earlier, it allows for the business to truly understand and the stakeholders to ask the questions that they- that need to be continually asked to evaluate, is this the right thing to do? How do I, how does my part affect the whole? And, how do I have an overall impact that is in a positive way and is something, you know, truly being done most effectively. >> So, that's that knowledge transfer. I hesitate to even say that because it makes it sound so black and white, because you're co-creating here. But, essentially, you're, you know, to use the the cliche, you're teaching them how to fish. Not, you know, going to ongoing, you know, do the fishing for them, so. >> Lisa: That thought diversity is so critical, as is the internal alignment. Last question for you guys, before we wrap here, where can customers go to get started? Do they engage Slalom, Snowflake? Can they do both? >> Chris: You definitely can. We can come through. I mean, we're fortunate that snowflake has blessed us with the title of partner of the year again for the fifth time. >> Lisa: Congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you. We are incredibly humbled in that. So, we would do a lot of work with Snowflake. You could certainly come to Slalom, any one of our local markets, or build or emerge. We'll definitely work together. We'll figure out what the right team is. We'll have lots and lots of conversations, because it is most important for you as a set of business stakeholders to define what is right for you and what you need. >> Yeah. Good stuff, you guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me, talking about intelligent products, what they are, how you co-design them, and the impact that data can make with customers if they really bring the right minds together and get creative. We appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us guys. Yeah. >> All right. For Dave Villante, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage, day two, Snowflake Summit 22, from Las Vegas. We'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everybody to VeeamON 2021 you're watching theCUBE. My name is Dave Villante. You know in 2020 cyber adversaries they seize the opportunity to really up their game and target workers from home and digital supply chains. It's become increasingly clear to observers that we're entering a new era of cyber threats where infiltrating companies via so-called Island Hopping and stealthily living off the land meaning they're using your own tools and infrastructure to steal your data. So they're not signaling with new tools that they're in there. It's becoming the norm for sophisticated hacks. Moreover, these well-funded and really sophisticated criminals and nation States are aggressively retaliating against incident responses. In other words, when you go to fix the problem they're not leaving the premises they're rather they're tightening the vice on victims by holding your data ransom and threatening to release previously ex filtrated and brand damaging information to the public. What a climate in which we live today. And with me to talk about these concerning trends and what you can do about it as Gil Vega, the CISO of Veeam Gil great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you, Dave. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah. So, you know, you're hearing my intro. It's probably understating the threat. You are a Veeam's first CISO. So how do you see the landscape right now? >> That's right. Yeah. And I've been with the company for just over a year now, but my background is in financial services and spent a lot of time managing cybersecurity programs at the classified level in Washington DC. So I've gleaned a lot of scar tissue from lots of sophisticated attacks and responses. But today I think what we're seeing is really a one-upmanship by a sophisticated potentially nation state sponsored adversaries, this idea of imprisoning your data and charging you to release it is it's quite frightening. And as we've seen in the news recently it can have devastating impacts not only for the economy, but for businesses. Look at the gas lines in the Northeast right now because of the quality of a pipeline, a ransomware attack. I just, the government just released an executive order this morning, that hopes to address some of the some of the nation's unpreparedness for these sophisticated attacks. And I think it's time. And I think everyone's excited about the opportunity to really apply a whole of government approach, to helping critical infrastructure to helping and partnering with private sector and imposing some risks, frankly, on some of the folks that are engaged in attacking our country. >> A number of years ago, I often tell this story. I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert Gates the former Defense Secretary. And it was a while ago we were talking about cyber and he sits on a number of boards. And we were talking about how it's a board level issue. And, and we're talking about cyber crime and the like and nation States. And I said, well, wait, cyber warfare, even. And I said, "But don't we have the best cyber tech. I mean, can't we go on the offense?" And he goes, "Yeah, we do. And we can, but we have more to lose." And to your point about critical infrastructure, it's not just like, okay, we have the most powerful weapons. It's really we have the most valuable infrastructure and a lot to lose. So it's really a tricky game. And this notion of having to be stealthy in your incident response is relatively new. Isn't it? >> It is. It is. And you know, there are, you mentioned that and I was surprised you mentioned because a lot of people really don't talk about it as you're going into your response your adversaries are watching or watching your every move. You have to assume in these days of perpetual state of compromise in your environments, which means that your adversaries have access to your environment to the point that they're watching your incident responders communicate with one another and they're countering your moves. So it's sort of a perverse spin on the old mutually assured destruction paradigm that you mentioned the United States has the world's largest economy. And quite frankly the world's most vulnerable, critical infrastructure. And I would concur with Director Gates or Secretary Gates rather it is assessment that we've got to be awfully careful and measured in our approach to imposing risks. I think the government has worked for many years on defining red lines. And I think this latest attack on the colonial pipeline affecting the economy and people's lives and potentially putting people's lives at risk is towing also the close to that red line. And I'm interested to see where this goes. I'm interested to see if this triggers even a, you know a new phase of cyber warfare, retaliation, you know proactive defense by the National Security Community of the United States government. Be interesting to see how this plays out. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right though. You've got this sort of asymmetric dynamic now which is unique for the United States as soon as strongest defense in the world. And I wanted to get it to ransomware a bit. And specifically this notion of ransomware as a service it's really concerning where criminals can actually outsource the hack as a service and the bad guys will set up, you know, on the dark web they'll have, you know, help desks and phone lines. They'll do the negotiations. I mean, this is a really concerning trend. And obviously Veeam plays a role here. I'm wondering as a, as a SecOps pro what should we be doing about this? >> Yeah, you mentioned ransomware as a service, whereas RWS it's an incredibly pernicious problem perpetrated by sophisticated folks who may or may not have nation state support or alliances. I think at a minimum certain governments are looking the other way as it relates to these criminal activities. But with ransomware as a service, you're essentially having very sophisticated folks create very complex ransomware code and distributed to people who are willing to pay for it. And oftentimes take a part of the ransom as their payment. The, issue with obviously ransomware is you know the age old question, are you going to pay a ransom or are you not going to pay a ransom? The FBI says, don't do it. It only encourages additional attacks. The Treasury Department put out some guidance earlier earlier in the year, advising companies that they could be subject to civil or criminal penalties. If they pay a ransom and the ransom goes to a sanction density. So there's danger on all sides. >> Wow okay. But so, and then the other thing is this infiltrating via digital supply chains I call it Island Hopping and the like, we saw that with the solar winds hack and the scary part is, you know different malware is coming in and self forming and creating different signatures. Not only is it very difficult to detect, but remediating, you know, one, you know combined self formed malware it doesn't necessarily take care of the others. And so, you know, you've got this sort of organic virus, like thing, you know, create mutating and that's something that's certainly relatively new to me in terms of its prevalence your thoughts on that and how to do it. >> Yeah, exactly right. You know, the advent of the polymorphic code that changes the implementation of advanced artificial intelligence and some of this malware is making our job increasingly difficult which is why I believe firmly. You've got to focus on the fundamentals and I think the best answers for protecting against sophisticated polymorphic code is,are found in the NIST cybersecurity framework. And I encourage everyone to really take a close look at implementing that cybersecurity framework across their environments, much like we've done here, here at Veeam implementing technologies around Zero Trust again assuming a perpetual state of compromise and not trusting any transaction in your environment is the key to combating this kind of attack. >> Well, and you know, as you mentioned, Zero Trust Zero Trust used to be a buzzword. Now it's like become a mandate. And you know, it's funny. I mean, in a way I feel like the crypto guys I know there's a lot of fraud in crypto, but but anybody who's ever traded crypto it's like getting into Fort Knox. I mean, you got to know your customer and you've got to do a little transaction. I mean, it's really quite sophisticated in terms of the how they are applying cybersecurity and you know, most even your bank isn't that intense. And so those kinds of practices, even though they're a bit of a pain in the neck, I mean it's worth the extra effort. I wonder if you could talk about some of the best practices that you're seeing how you're advising your clients in your ecosystem and the role that Veeam can play in helping here. >> Yeah, absolutely. As I mentioned so many recommendations and I think the thing to remember here so we don't overwhelm our small and medium sized businesses that have limited resources in this area is to remind them that it's a journey, right? It's not a destination that they can continually improve and focus on the fundamentals. As I mentioned, things like multi-factor authentication you know, a higher level topic might be micro-segmentation breaking up your environment into manageable components that you can monitor a real time. Real time monitoring is one of the key components to implementing Zero Trust architecture and knowing exactly what good looks like in your environment in a situation where you've got real-time monitoring you can detect the anomalies, the things that shouldn't be happening in your environment and to spin up your response teams, to focus and better understand what that is. I've always been a proponent of identity and access management controls and a key focus. We've heard it in this industry for 25 years is enforcing the concept of least privilege, making sure that your privileged users have access to the things they need and only the things that they need. And then of course, data immutability making sure that your data is stored in backups that verifiably has not been changed. And I think this is where Veeam comes into the equation where our products provide a lot of these very easily configured ransomware protections around data and your ability to the ability to instantly back up things like Office 365 emails, you know support for AWS and Azure. Your data can be quickly restored in the event that an attacker is able to in prison that with encryption and ransom demands. >> Well, and so you've certainly seen in the CISOs that I've talked to that they've had to obviously shift their priorities, thanks to the force march to digital, thanks to COVID, but Identity access management, end point security cloud security kind of overnight, you know, Zero Trust. We talked about that and you could see that in some of these, you know, high flying security stocks, Okta Zscaler, CrowdStrike, they exploded. And so what's in these many of these changes seem to be permanent sort of you're I guess, deeper down in the stack if you will, but you, you compliment these toolings with obviously the data protection approach the ransomware, the cloud data protection, air gaps, immutability. Maybe you could talk about how you fit in with the broader, you know, spate of tools. I mean, your, my eyes bleed when you look at all the security companies that are out there. >> Yeah for sure. You know, I'm just going to take it right back to the NIST cybersecurity framework and the five domains that you really need to focus on. Identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover, you know and until recently security practitioners and companies have really focused on on the protect, identify and protect, right and defend rather where they're focused on building, you know, moats and castles and making sure that they've got this, you know hard exterior to defend against attacks. I think there's been a shift over the past couple of years where companies have recognized that the focus needs to be on and respond and recover activities, right? Assuming that people are going to breach or near breach, your entities is a safe way to think about this and building up capabilities to detect those breaches and respond effectively to those breaches are what's key in implementing a successful cybersecurity program where Veeam fits into this since with our suite of products that that can help you through the recovery process, right? That last domain of the NIST cybersecurity framework it'll allow you to instantaneously. As I mentioned before, restore data in the event of a catastrophic breach. And I think it provides companies with the assurances that while they're protecting and building those Zero Trust components into their environments to protect against these pernicious and well-resourced adversaries there's the opportunity for them to recover very quickly using the VM suite of tools? >> Well, I see, I think there's an interesting dynamic here. You're pointing out Gil. There's not no longer is it that, you know, build a moat the Queen's leaving her castle. I always say, you know there is no hardened perimeter anymore. And so you've seen, you know, the shift obviously from hardware based firewalls and you I mentioned those other companies that are doing great but to me, it's all about these layers and response is a big in recovery is a huge part of that. So I'm seeing increasingly companies like Veeam is a critical part of that, that security cyber data protection, you know, ecosystem. I mean, to me it's just as important as the frontline pieces of even identity. And so you see those markets exploding. I think it's, there's a latent value that's building in companies like Veeam that are a key part of those that data protection layer you think about you know, defense strategies. It's not just you, the frontline it's maybe it's airstrikes, maybe it's, you know, C etcetera. And I see that this market is actually a huge opportunity for for organizations like yours. >> I think you're right. And I think the proof is in, you know in the pudding, in terms of how this company has grown and what we've delivered in version 11 of our suite, including, you know features like continuous data protection, we talked about that reliable ransomware protection support for AWS S3 Glacier and Azure archive the expanded incident recovery, and then support for disaster recovery and backup as a service. You know, what I found most interesting in my year here at Veeam is just how much our administrators the administrators in our company and our customers companies that are managing backups absolutely love our products that ease of use the instant backup capabilities and the support they receive from Veeam. It's almost cultish in terms of how our customers are using these products to defend themselves in today's pretty intense cyber threat environment. >> Well, and you talked about the NIST framework, and again big part of that is recovery, because we talked about earlier about, do you pay the ransom or not? Well, to the extent that I can actually recover from having all my data encrypted then I've got obviously a lot more leverage and in many ways, I mean, let's face it. We all know that it's not a matter of if it's, when you get infiltrated. And so to the extent that I can actually have systems that allow me to recover, I'm now in a much much stronger position in many respects, you know and CISOs again, will tell you this that's where we're shifting our investments >> Right. And you've got to do all of them. It's not just there's no silver bullet, but but that seems to me to be just a a misunderstood and undervalued part of the equation. And I think there's tremendous upside there for companies like yours. >> I think you're right. I think what I'll just add to that is the power of immutability, right? Just verifiably ensuring that your data has not changed because oftentimes you'll have attackers in these low and slow live off the land types of attacks change your data and affect its integrity with the Veeam suite of tools. You're able to provide for immutable or unchanged verifiable data and your backup strategy which is really the first step to recovery after a significant event. >> And that's key because a lot of times the hackers would go right after the backup Corpus you know, they'll sometimes start there is that all the data, you know, but if you can make that immutable and again, it, you know there's best practices there too, because, you know if you're not paying the cloud service for that immutability, if you stop paying then you lose that. So you have to be very careful about, you know how you know, who has access to that and you know what the policies are there, but again, you know you can put in, you know so a lot of this, as you know, is people in process. It's not just tech, so I'll give you the last word. I know you got to jump, but really appreciate.. >> Yeah, sure. >> You know, the only, the only thing that we didn't mention is user awareness and education. I think that is sort of the umbrella key focus principle for any successful cybersecurity program making sure your people understand, you know how to deal with phishing emails. You know, ransomware is a huge threat of our time at 90% of ransomware malware is delivered by phishing. So prepare your workforce to deal with phishing emails. And I think you'll save yourself quite a few headaches. >> It's great advice. I'm glad you mentioned that because because bad user behavior or maybe uninformed user behaviors is the more fair way to say it. It will trump good security every time. Gil, thanks so much for coming to the CUBE and and keep fighting the fight. Best of luck going forward. >> Great. Thank you, Dave. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Villante for the CUBEs continuous coverage VeeamON 2021, the virtual edition. We will be right back. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation vibrator this is Dave Volante and welcome to this special cube conversation as you know I've been running a CXO series now for several weeks really trying to understand how leaders are dealing and coping with the Cova 19 crisis today we want to switch gears a little bit and talk not only about how leadership has sort of navigated through this crisis but also start to imagine what it's going to look like coming out of it I'm going to introduce you to a company that have been talking about now for the last well six to nine months company called octave as you know from my previous breaking analysis this is a company that not only is in the security business they really kind of made their mark with identification management but also really there's a data angle normally when you think about security you thinking about auto security it means that less user flexibility it means less value from the user standpoint what what octa has done really successfully is bring together both endpoint security as well as that data angle and so the company is about six hundred million dollars in revenue they've got an eighteen billion dollar valuation which you know may sound kind of rich at 30 X a revenue multiple but as I've reported the company is growing very rapidly I've talked about the you know the rule of 40 octa is really a rule of 50 type of company you know by that definition they're with me here to talk about the product side of things as dia jolly who's the chief product officer yeah thanks so much for coming on the cube I hope you're doing okay how are things out in California things are going well good to meet you as well Dave I hope you're doing well as well yeah we're hanging in there you know the studios are rocking the cube you know continues our daily reporting I want to start with your role you're relatively new to octa you've got a really interesting background particularly understanding endpoints you're at Google Google home of Google Nest you spent some time you know worrying about looking after Xbox do you a good understanding of what's going on in the marketplace but talk about your your role and how specifically you're bringing that to enterprise sure so I drove about this I I say that I've done every kind of known product management imaginable the man at this point I'm done both Hardware Don software so dealt a lot with endpoints as you talked about that a lot with sass dealt with consumer dealt with enterprise and all over the place completely different sizes so after really my role as a chief product officer is to be able to understand and what our customers need right and what are the challenges they're facing and not just the challenges they're facing today but also what are the challenges that they'll face tomorrow that they don't even know about and then help build products to be able to overcome that both with our engineering teams as well as with our sales engineering team so that we can take it to market now my background is unique because I've seen so many identity being used in so many different ways across so many different use cases whether it's enterprise or its consumer and that given that we covered both sides spectrum I can bring that to bear yes so what I've reported previously is that that you guys kind of made your mark with with identification management but in terms of both workforce but also customer identification management which has been I think allowed you to be very very successful I want to bring up a chart and share something that I've I've shared a lot of data with our audience previously some guys if you bring that up so this is data from enterprise Technology Research our data partner and for those who follow this program you know we we generally talk in in two metrics a net score which is a measure of spending momentum and and also market share which really isn't real market share but it's it's pervasiveness in the survey and what you can see here is the latest April survey from over 1200 CIOs and IT practitioners and we're isolating on an octa and and we brought it back to July 15 survey you see a couple of points here I want to make one is it something to the right this is pervasiveness or market share so octa in the market is doing very very well it's why the valuation is so high what's driving the growth and then you can see in the green a 55% net net score very very strong it's one of the leaders in security but as I said it's more than than that so dia from a product standpoint what is powering this momentum sure so as you well know the world is working from home what after does is it provides Identity Management that allows you to connect to any technology and by any technology it primarily means technology technology that's not just on premise like your applications on-premise old-school applications or into software that's on premise but it also means technology that's in the clouds of SAS applications application infrastructure that's in the cloud etc and on the other hand it also allows companies to deploy applications where they can connect to their customers online so as more and more of the world moves to work from home you need to be able to securely and seamlessly allow your employees your partners to be able to connect from their home and to be able to do their work and that's the foundation that we provide now if you look at if you we've heard a lot in the press about companies like zoom slack people that provide online collaboration and their usage has gone up we're seeing similar trends across both octa as well as the entire security industry in general right and if you look at information recently since over to started phishing attacks have increased by six hundred and sixty seven percent and what we've seen in response is one of our products which is multi-factor authentication we've experienced in eighty percent growth in usage so really as Corvette has pushed forward there was a trend for people to be able to work remotely for people to be able to access cloud apps and but as ubered has suddenly poured gas on the fire for that we're seeing our customers reaching out to us a lot more needing more support and just the level of awareness and the level of interest raising let's talk about some of the trends that you guys see in the marketplace and like to better understand how that informs your product or you know roadmap and decisions you know obviously this cloud you guys have made a really good mark in the cloud space you know with both your your operating model your pricing model the modern stack the other is a reference that upfront which data talked a lot about digital transformation digital us data course the third is purity related to trust we've talked a lot on the cube about how the perimeter is there is no particular anymore the Queen is left her castle and so what are the big trends that you see the big waves that that you're riding and how does that inform your product directly sure so a few different things I think number one if you think about the way I've phrase this is or the way I think about it is the following any big technological trend you see today right whether it's the move the cloud whether it's mobile whether it's artificial intelligence intelligence you think about the neural nets etc or it's a personalized consumer experience all of that fundamentally depends on identity so the most important the so from a from being an identity provider the most important thing for us is to be able to build something that is flexible enough that is broad enough that it is able to span multiple uses right so we've taken from a product perspective that means we can follow two philosophies we can either the try and go solve each of these pain points one by one or we can actually try to build a platform that is more open that's more extensible and that's more flexible so that we can solve many of these use cases right and not only can we solve it because there's it extensible our customers can customize it they can build on top of it our partners can build on top of it so that's one thing that's one product philosophy that we hold dear and so we have the Octagon cloud which is a platform which provides both workforce identity as well as customer identity using the same underlying components the same multi-factor authentication we use for workforce we package up as an SDK so that our customer identity customers that's number one the second thing is you rightfully mention is data you can't really secure identity without data so we have very we have a lot of data across our customers we know when the users logging in we know what device they're logging in front we know the security posture on the device we know where they're logging in from we know their different behaviors were apps they go into or during wartime of the day etc so being able to harness all this data to say hey and apply ml model squared to say hey is the user secure or not is a very very core foundation of our product so for example we have what we call risk-based authentication you can not only do things like hey this user seems to be logging on from a location they've never logged on from but you could even do things like well you may not want to stop the user they may be traveling so instead of just asking them for a for a password you ask them for a multi-factor right so that's the other piece of it and in many ways data and security and usability are three legs of a triangle the more data you have the more you can allow a user you more security you can provide a user without creating more friction so it's sometimes helpful for the audience to understand a company in a edit Avant act in the landscape so the obvious platform out there is Active Directory now Microsoft with Azure Active Directory you know really you know trying to and and that's really been on their platforms but with api's you know Microsoft has got a thumbs in every pie how does octave differentiate from some of the other traditional platforms that are out there and and what gives you confidence that it and you can continue to do so going forward post kovat that's it that's a fantastic question Dave um so I think we divide if you think about our competitors on the workforce side we've got Microsoft and a couple of other competitors and on the customer Identity side really it's a bill versus buy story right most companies customer identity internally so let's take workforce first Microsoft is the dominant player there they've got Active Directory they've now got Azure Active Directory and from a Microsoft perspective I think Microsoft is always been great at building products or building technology that interconnected run the world is going to more there's more and more technology proliferation in the world and the way we differentiate is by becoming a neutral and independent platform so whether you're on a Microsoft stack whether you're on a Google stack whether you're on an amazon stack we are able to connect with you deeply we connect just as well with all 365 as they connect with Salesforce as we connect with AWS right and that has been our core philosophy and not only is that a philosophy for other when other vendors it's a philosophy for ourselves as well we have multi-factor authentication so do many other providers like duo if you want to use ours great if you don't want to use ours with our platform who use the one that's best for your technology and I think what we've always believed in from a product perspective is this independence this neutrality this ability to plug-and-play any technology you want into a platform to be able to do what you want and the technology that's best for your business's need so what's interesting what you said about the sort of make versus buy that's particularly relevant for the customer identification management because let's say you know I'm buying from Amazon I've got Amazon they know who I am but if I understand it correctly customers now are able to look across brands maybe cohort selling maybe make specific offers analyze the data that's an advantage that you bring that maybe do it yourself doesn't Frank maybe talk about that a little bit sure so really if you think about if you think about a bill versus buying even ten years ago life used to be relatively simple maybe 15 years ago you had a website you as your username your the password you weren't really using you don't have multiple channels you didn't have multiple devices as prevalent you didn't have multiple apps in a lot of cases connected to each other right and in that in that day and age password was fairly secure you weren't doing a lot of personalization with the user data or had a lot of sensitive user data so building a custom identity solution having your customer managing your customers identity yourself was fairly easy now it's becoming more and more hard number one I just talked about the phishing attacks they're an equal number of attacks on the customer identity side right so how do you actually secure this identity how do you actually use things like multi-factor authentication how do you keep up with all the latest in multi-factor authentication touch ID face ID etcetera and that's one the second thing we provide is scale for a number of companies we also provide the ability to scale dramatically which scaling identity and being being able to authenticate someone and keep someone authenticated in real time is actually a very big channel challenge as you get to more and more scale and then the last thing that you mentioned is this ability we provide a single view of the user which is super super powerful because now if you think about one of our customers Albertsons they have multiple different apps there are multiple different digital experiences and he don't have a siloed view of their customer across all these experiences here one identity for your customer that customer uses that one identity to log on to all your digital experiences across all channels and we're able to bring that data back together so if Albertsons wants to say hey somebody shot a in or bought something in one particular app but I know people that buy this particular object like something else that's available in another app they can give a promotion for it or they can give a discomfort that's so that makes a lot of sense I went into the PR platform get our data partner and I looked at which industries are really showing moment so remember this survey focus was run right in the heart of the the Cova 19 pandemic from from mid-march the mid April so it's a good of good current data point and there were four that stood out large companies healthcare and pharma telco which is courses this work-from-home thing and then consumer the example that you just gave from Albertsons is really you know sort of around that consumer there are a lot of industries that obviously been hit airlines restaurants hospitality but but these four really stood out as growth areas despite the kovat 19 pandemic I want to ask you about octane you just got it had your big user conference anything product specific that came out of that that our audience should know about I mean I'm an interested in access gateway I know that wasn't necessarily a new announcement but Cloud Gateway what were the highlights of some of those things from a product stamp yeah of course so we did we did made a very difficult decision to pivot octane virtually and we did this because a number of our customers are given what they're facing with the Kovach pandemic wanted to hear more around news around what our product launches are how they could use this with cetera and really I'd say there are three key product launches that I want to highlight here we had a number of different announcements and it was a very successful conference but the three that are the most relevant here one is we've always talked about being a platform and we've set this for the past four or five years I think and but over the last your and going into the next couple of years we're investing very very heavily in making our platform even more powerful even more extensible even more customizable and so that it can go across the scenarios you described right which is whether you're on Prem with Auto access gateway or you're in the cloud or in some kind of hybrid environment or you using some mix-and-match or work from home people in the office etc so really what we did this year over the last year was deepen our platform footprint and we started releasing the four components available in a platform which we call platform services so we have six components and we were directories that is customizable and and flexible so you can build your own emails except for N equals four users adds information related to them we have an integration platform that we've made available at a deep level where where our customers can use SDKs tools etc to be able to integrate with octa in a platform which we've talked a lot about and then we released three new platform services and one was what we call arc identity engine we had released we talked about this last year and this year we talked about it last year from a customer identity perspective this year we brought her into our workforce identity but also what that does is it allows you a lot more flexibility for situations like we're in right it allows you flexibility to define security policies at the parabola it so you could decide hey for my email I don't want my customers to have to use a multi-factor authentication for but for Salesforce I would definitely want them to use a multi-factor authentication if they're not in the office and it also allows you to have a lot more flexible factor recovery so for example if you forgot your password one of the biggest pain points of co-ed has been the number of helpdesk costs have been rising through the roof the phone calls are ringing nonstop right and one of the biggest reasons for helpdesk are says oh I can't login I got locked out either lost a factor or L forgot my password it helps with that um so that's one set of announcements the second set of announcements was we launched a brand new devices platform and personally this is my personal favorite but really what the devices platform allows you to do is the feature in it that we launched is called Fast Pass and what phosphorous allows you to do is it actually takes phosphorous to the next level it allows you to basically use logging into your device and us understanding the posture of the device and all the user context around you to be able to log you directly dr. then I imagine if you're on a Mac or a iOS device or an Android or a Windows device just being able to face match into your iOS or being able to touch ID into your Windows hello and you're automatically logged into lockdown right that is that and and the way we do that is we have this client on across all these operating systems that can really understand the security posture of the device it can understand of the device is managed if it's safe if it's jailbroken if it's unmanaged it can also connect with multiple signals on the device so if you have an EDR and MDM vendor we can ingest those signals and what they think of the risk we can also ingest signals directly from apps if apps things like um G suite and Salesforce actually track user behavior to determine risk they can pass those signals to us and then we can make a decision on hey we should allow the user to authenticate directly into octa because they've authenticated their device which we can make a decision that says no let's provider let's ask them to step up with a multi-factor authentication or we can say no this is too risky let's deny access and all of this is configurable by the IT admin they can decide the risk levels they're comfortable with they can decide the different risk levels by different apps so that was another major announcement and then and as a product person you rarely ever get the chance to actually increase security and usability at one time which is why it's my favorite you increase both security and usability together now the last one was action was a workflows engine we call it workflows lifecycle management and we it's really we launched a graphical no cord user interface identity is so important so many business processes for our customers there's so many business processes built an identity for example if someone joins her company you usually either have a script that allows them access to the applications they need to or you actually have an IT admin sitting in there trying to manually provide access or when they leave right what workflow lifecycle management or lifecycle management workflows allows you to do is it actually allows you to provide it actually provides you the no core graphical user interface where you can build all these flows so now you don't need someone that knows coding you can even have a business unit so for example I for me in the product for the product org I can have someone say hey building a business process similar it's something you would build in sort of like an iPad and allow everyone that comes in to be able to have access to fig mom because we use pigma a lot right those are the kinds of things you can do and it's super powerful and it takes the ability of our already existing lifecycle management product to the next level well thank you for that that's that summary dear so I want to kind of close with I mean those of you have been following the cube for a while there I think there's some similarities between octa and and and service now that obviously obvious differences but we started following you know ServiceNow pre-ipo is less than a hundred million dollar company and we've seen that company build out as a platform company and that's really what octa is doing here we're talking about a total available market that's yeah probably north of 50 billion so the the question I have he is you know what Frederic and pod started 11 years ago playing on the dynamics coming out of the financial crisis that got us to where we are today now you've got the challenge of you've achieved reached escape velocity now you've got this you know massive growth opportunity in front of you how do you see the product portfolio evolving expanding and I'm also interested in postcode with 19 you know no whiteboards no face-to-face contact not at least not for a while and how you're kind of managing through that but but how can we expect the product portfolio to expand over time what can you share with us so one of the given how pervasive identity has become and given how not just broad but at the same time deep it is there are multiple different places or product portfolio >> and a number of different places were thinking about right so one is you mentioned today we play in workforce identity and customer identity but we haven't even begun to talk about how we might play in consumer right one of the one of the biggest perk matter is consumers and consumers protecting their own identity so often an employee is not using their identity to lock the seals ports and you have an attack on a company and offered an employee actually logging into their Gmail their personal Gmail or their personal or some personal website that bank and they get and their credential get compromised in their fluency impossible so the more protective the more directly consumers the more we indirectly protect both enterprises from work from an employer as well as a customer perspective howdy we're an enterprise company so it doesn't mean that we are going to go direct to consumer there are ways to make employees more secure by what the director calls were so that's one the second thing is managing identities I think we've as the number of applications as the number of technologies are proliferate managing and an employee's life cycle who that governing that the life cycle is not administering etc is also fully stock also becoming very very challenging it was all well and good we'll never can ask and you were on that that's not true anymore an average company uses I think close to 200 applications and then if you broaden back to other resources like infrastructure there's a lot lock more so how do you actually build automated systems that based on the employee status based on their rule based on the project they're on provides them the right access for the right amount of time the third thing you mentioned is and you should pass on this initially but this is the there's this concept of zero security right and the perimeters disappeared how do you provide security so if you look at the industry at large today there are tons of different security vendors trying to provide security at each point if you talk to any see-saw out there it's really really hard to cobble all of this together and one of the things we were trying to do is we're trying to figure out how with our partners we can build a silly end-to-end solution for n - n zero trust for our customers so that's that's another area that the of the product portfolio we're pushing and then finally with the whole digital transformation and customer identity yes more and more companies want their customers to go back online yes more and more customers convenience of being able to interact online with Billy if you think about it the world has changed dramatically over the last three years with privacy laws with things like gdpr CCP etc how do you actually manage your customers obviously you actually manage their content how do you ensure that while you're using all this data from across these apps that we talked about here you and you're using for the first benefit how do you make sure that the minister private is secure and and how do you ensure your customers that's another major area that I think our customers are asking us for helping and so those are areas or so that you should be a big signature the next two to three years some of it will be through partnership that's generally that high-level directions we're headed in wealthy you so much for coming on the key on the key and sharing the product roadmap and some other details about the great company really interested in watching its continued ascendancy good luck in the marketplace and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Villante you conversations we'll see you next time [Music]

hello everyone and welcome to this week's wiki Bond cube insights powered by ETR in this breaking analysis we're going to share fresh data from etrs latest spending survey in particular ETR added a drill down question on the impact of coronavirus now yesterday I had the pleasure of hosting ETRS director of research Sagar khadiyah who took us through the details of that survey and we're gonna bring his comments in to this discussion so today I want to accomplish three things first I want to summarize the macro where are we at this point on the second day of spring in Massachusetts second I want to assess the impact from Co vid 19 on i.t spend for 2020 and the third thing I want to do is drill down into the findings from ET ARS latest survey after we do this I'll summarize and talk about what the outlook it looks like so where are we today you know we've gone from the fear of missing out in the stock market to basically fall out fear now as you well know the economic impact is not pretty I gotta say this is the first time I've ever seen a government imposed recession rightly so to save lives but I've also never seen such an escrow the board doubled downward shift in both supply and demand this creates uncertainty and ambiguity in pricing which makes forecasting anything really really difficult the liquidity shock and the credit risks are really of primary concern right now the price of oil is a huge issue why it's because energy companies account for a very sizable portion of the high-yield credit market over 10% so as prices fall it's going to be harder for oil companies to repay loans this creates default risk so this is the markets freaked out and functioning very very poorly now a poorly functioning market signals that we are not at the bottom everybody wants to know where the bottom is I'm not a stock picker and I'm not a market technician but I've seen a lot of downturns I'll share a quick story when I was at IDC we had an exclusive deal with Goldman Sachs two of the Goldman analysts were embedded into our Framingham offices now in 1987 on Black Monday and the following weeks I would stand at their real-time terminal there was no internet back then kids nobody had access to real-time trades but I did and I would watch the market in freefall and I would see it bounce back and then I would see it freefall again what I will tell you is this bottoms are impossible to protect everybody says that why because bottoms are not technical their psychological their emotional and in 1987 and then after the dot-com bust and after the financial crisis each time you saw the S&P with rally sometimes it would rally as high as 10% it would suck people back into the market and then pull back and that's going to happen here the markets not just gonna be fine any day now now if you're looking for some positives there is some silver linings that the canals in Venice are running clear which is amazing to see nitrous oxide levels over China are way way down okay let's shift and take a look at what this all means for IT spending what are the industries that are being most affected right now now as I show here there are some obvious sectors like energy and transportation retail etc but let's listen to Sagar from ETR what he told me yesterday now pay particular attention to what he says about supply chains roll the clip yeah industrials materials manufacturing retail consumer you know the healthcare pharma they you know those are the verticals from a supply chain perspective that are in you know elevated levels of broken supply chains and what's actually interesting is we in this survey we actually asked not only whether your supply chains were broken today but do you anticipate or do you continue or do and just they continue getting experiencing broken supply chains in three months from now and those percentages were up and I think that really tells us that this is not a one or two month type of recovery we're gonna see supply chains and demand continuing to be broken continuing to come down over the next three four months that I think is probably one of the biggest takeaways from the drill-down study so you see in the EGR survey it really underscores that we are not likely to see a quick snap back it's not a 1 or a two-month fix now in my own research I go out to the field I talked to people on the cube within our network I can add some excuse me some comments and some color here what we see is that healthcare right now is so swamped that they're not buying anything I mean they just they just are how many cycles most customers are taking they're skunkworks put anyone hold they're narrowing the capital spend and really focusing only on mission-critical items banks even though banks are down they have capital and they're still buying they got cash thanks they're smart and they're negotiating very hard for big discounts the other thing is a lot of customers have no choice but to buy many are on an AR are in your recurring revenue or annual current contract and have compliance edicts like we got to send out monthly statements if they don't renew they can't use their software to do that it's different but somewhat similar with maintenance contracts so you're seeing that sales teams are clearly bringing down their forecasts but they're not cutting them in half mmm not yet anyway all right but here's what's somewhat counterintuitive and you really you can really only quantify this with data some companies actually believe it or not they're spending more why because they try to preserve productivity would their work from home solutions they need infrastructure to do that so they're pivoting their budget to work from home they also have to secure that infrastructure so that means the cyber cyber security is seeing a little bit of momentum now let's take a look at the EGR data this is from more than a thousand CIOs and IT buyers it's fresh data right from March 40% of the survey said they see no current impact on their IT budget that is surprisingly high and look at all the green to the right-hand side you know most are showing five to ten percent increase but more than 20% of the respondents are actually expecting to increase budget in 2020 for things like work from home infrastructure let's take a listen to saga kadia who explains this further roll the clip yeah I think that's I think the the positive spent or the no change in spend I think that is what a lot of the market right now is missing and I haven't seen a lot of research on that because no one else has really been able to quantify how budgets are changing and so as you noted we're actually seeing people accelerate spend because of Kovan 19 and the reason is you know they're trying to avoid a catastrophe in productivity they are ramping up all this work from home infrastructure right not just collaboration tools virtualization infrastructure increasing VPN networking bandwidth mobile devices laptops security desktop support right you're a fortune 500 organization and you have 40 50 60 thousand employees working from home all the sudden you have to be able to support those employees and as a result you're actually seeing a large number of organizations accelerating spend and even the ones that are being hurt by the broken supply chains the demand coming down you're seeing some of their spendy seller ation being offset by spending a little bit more kind of what we're calling this kind of work from home infrastructure so sada went on to explain that consensus consensus expectations for global IT spend they were roughly at four percent before coronavirus and the pullback takes us now to flat or zero percent but what's not been reported is really the offset to the declines particularly from the work from home infrastructure now obviously this could all change in a likely will but this next chart really underscores that uncertainty and really the dynamic nature of the risk here what this track charts is the daily impact of the expected retraction so earlier this month in the et our survey you saw about a two percent retraction and exceed by March seventeenth it's down to flat so as we heard from Sagar the et our thesis is currently at 0% IT spend for growth in 2020 because of some of the offset now if the news continues to worsen the outlook is going to follow alright I want to wrap up by summarizing and and talking about what what's next and what you can expect so the current call as I said is for flat IT spend in 2020 it would be worse if not for the uptick in work from home and corollaries security infrastructure now it's not just collaboration and video tools it's virtualization solutions it's VPNs network upgrades mobile devices laptops and and the software to to secure all this stuff and make it work now despite the work from home offset we fully expect this picture or worsen over the next three months you got a watch for the duration of the the remote work at home mandates the travel bans the the no meeting policies there's a little doubt that productivity is going to be heard as we discussed yesterday with Sagar you can't just flick a switch and scale remote worker productivity you know that's a real challenge now having said that the expectation from CIOs is that this spending decline is going to be temporary what's unclear is the shape of the recovery is it going to be a v-shaped or a slow slog you can see the distant rim on the other side of the canyon it's there we just don't know how far away it is and we don't know how deep the canyon really is now there will be changes in our opinion that are going to be permanent as we said on a last braking analysis over the next several months organizations they're going to learn new things and that is going to shape their thinking in the future I personally expect accelerated digital transformations and a sustained viability of the work from home options you're gonna see new capabilities from distant learning with all the college shutdowns you're also going to see new risk mitigation paradigms you know the list goes on and on and on in terms of what we're going to see here as I said earlier there seemed to be some environmental benefits you know if you're looking for some positives here I think this next generation is much more in tune with that and you have my word and my promise and our team's promise that the cube and ETR is going to be here to keep you up to date et our survey data keeps rolling in you can check that out at ETR dot plus they are vigilant on this issue as are we from our remote studios look this is the new normal our skeleton crews are in studio and we're keeping the content flowing as many folks on our team they're working from home and they're on the grid currently our Palo Alto studio is fully operational four days a week each week and we're capturing remote guests on camera and Boston is open as well so get in touch if you need anything we are here to help and we're here to serve you okay this is Dave Villante for wiki bones cube insights powered by ETR thanks for watching this breaking analysis remember these episodes they're available on podcasts wherever you listen please connect with me emails David Galante at Silicon angle dot-com comment on my LinkedIn post I always appreciate that from the community thanks for watching everybody wishing good health and safety for you and your families we'll see you next time [Music]

(techno music) >> From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to MIT CDOIQ. The CDO Information Quality Conference. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host, Paul Gillin. This is our day two of our two day coverage. Jean Ross is here. She's the principle research scientist at MIT CISR, Jean good to see you again. >> Nice to be here! >> Welcome back. Okay, what do all these acronyms stand for, I forget. MIT CISR. >> CISR which we pronounce scissor, is the Center for Information Systems Research. It's a research center that's been at MIT since 1974, studying how big companies use technology effectively. >> So and, what's your role as a research scientist? >> As a research scientist, I work with both researchers and with company leaders to understand what's going on out there, and try to present some simple succinct ideas about how companies can generate greater value from information technology. >> Well, I guess not much has changed in information technology since 1974. (laughing) So let's fast forward to the big, hot trend, digital transformation, digital business. What's the difference between a business and a digital business? >> Right now, you're hoping there's no difference for you and your business. >> (chuckling) Yeah, for sure. >> The main thing about a digital business is it's being inspired by technology. So in the past, we would establish a strategy, and then we would check out technology and say, okay, how can technology make us more effective with that strategy? Today, and this has been driven a lot by start-ups, we have to stop and say, well wait a minute, what is technology making possible? Because if we're not thinking about it, there sure are a lot of students at MIT who are, and we're going to miss the boat. We're going to get Ubered if you will, somebody's going to think of a value proposition that we should be offering and aren't, and we'll be left in the dust. So, our digital businesses are those that are recognizing the opportunities that digital technologies make possible. >> Now, and what about data? In terms of the role of digital business, it seems like that's an underpinning of a digital business. Is it not? >> Yeah, the single biggest capability that digital technologies provide, is ubiquitous data that's readily accessible anytime. So when we think about being inspired by technology, we could reframe that as inspired by the availability of ubiquitous data that's readily accessible. >> Your premise about the difference between digitization and digital business is interesting. It's more than just a sematic debate. Do companies now, when companies talk about digital transformation these days, in fact, are most of them of thinking of digitization rather than really transformative business change? >> Yeah, this is so interesting to me. In 2006, we wrote a book that said, you need to become more agile, and you need to rely on information technology to get you there. And these are basic things like SAP and salesforce.com and things like that. Just making sure that your core processes are disciplined and reliable and predictable. We said this in 2006. What we didn't know is that we were explaining digitization, which is very effective use of technology in your underlying process. Today, when somebody says to me, we're going digital, I'm thinking about the new value propositions, the implications of the data, right? And they're often actually saying they're finally doing what we thought they should do in 2006. The problem is, in 2006, we said get going on this, it's a long journey. This could take you six, 10 years to accomplish. And then we gave examples of companies that took six to 10 years. LEGO, and USAA and really great companies. And now, companies are going, "Ah, you know, we really ought to do that". They don't have six to 10 years. They get this done now, or they're in trouble, and it's still a really big deal. >> So how realistic is it? I mean, you've got big established companies that have got all these information silos, as we've been hearing for the last two days, just pulling their information together, knowing what they've got is a huge challenge for them. Meanwhile, you're competing with born on the web, digitally native start-ups that don't have any of that legacy, is it really feasible for these companies to reinvent themselves in the way you're talking about? Or should they just be buying the companies that have already done it? >> Well good luck with buying, because what happens is that when a company starts up, they can do anything, but they can't do it to scale. So most of these start-ups are going to have to sell themselves because they don't know anything about scale. And the problem is, the companies that want to buy them up know about the scale of big global companies but they don't know how to do this seamlessly because they didn't do the basic digitization. They relied on basically, a lot of heroes in their company to pull of the scale. So now they have to rely more on technology than they did in the past, but they still have a leg up if you will, on the start-up that doesn't want to worry about the discipline of scaling up a good idea. They'd rather just go off and have another good idea, right? They're perpetual entrepreneurs if you will. So if we look at the start-ups, they're not really your concern. Your concern is the very well run company, that's been around, knows how to be inspired by technology and now says, "Oh I see what you're capable of doing, "or should be capable of doing. "I think I'll move into your space". So this, the Amazon's, and the USAA's and the LEGO's who say "We're good at what we do, "and we could be doing more". We're watching Schneider Electric, Phillips's, Ferovial. These are big ole companies who get digital, and they are going to start moving into a lot of people's territory. >> So let's take the example of those incumbents that you've used as examples of companies that are leaning into digital, and presumably doing a good job of it, they've got a lot of legacy debt, as you know people call it technical debt. The question I have is how they're using machine intelligence. So if you think about Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, they own horizontal technologies around machine intelligence. The incumbents that you mentioned, do not. Now do they close the gap? They're not going to build their own A.I. They're going to buy it, and then apply it. It's how they apply it that's going to be the difference. So do you agree with that premise, and where are they getting it, do they have the skill sets to do it, how are they closing that gap? >> They're definitely partnering. When you say they're not going to build any of it, that's actually not quite true. They're going to build a lot around the edges. They'll rely on partners like Microsoft and Google to provide some of the core, >> Yes, right. >> But they are bringing in their own experts to take it to the, basically to the customer level. How do I take, let me just take Schneider Electric for an example. They have gone from being an electrical equipment manufacturer, to a purveyor of energy management solutions. It's quite a different value proposition. To do that, they need a lot of intelligence. Some of it is data analytics of old, and some of it is just better representation on dashboards and things like that. But there is a layer of intelligence that is new, and it is absolutely essential to them by relying on partners and their own expertise in what they do for customers, and then co-creating a fair amount with customers, they can do things that other companies cannot. >> And they're developing a software presumably, a SAS revenue stream as part of that, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> How about the innovators dilemma though, the problem that these companies often have grown up, they're very big, they're very profitable, they see disruption coming, but they are unable to make the change, their shareholders won't let them make the change, they know what they have to do, but they're simply not able to do it, and then they become paralyzed. Is there a -- I mean, looking at some of the companies you just mentioned, how did they get over that mindset? >> This is real leadership from CEO's, who basically explain to their boards and to their investors, this is our future, we are... we're either going this direction or we're going down. And they sell it. It's brilliant salesmanship, and it's why when we go out to study great companies, we don't have that many to choose from. I mean, they are hard to find, right? So you are at such a competitive advantage right now. If you understand, if your own internal processes are cleaned up and you know how to rely on the E.R.P's and the C.R.M's, to get that done, and on the other hand, you're using the intelligence to provide value propositions, that new technologies and data make possible, that is an incredibly powerful combination, but you have to invest. You have to convince your boards and your investors that it's a good idea, you have to change your talent internally, and the biggest surprise is, you have to convince your customers that they want something from you that they never wanted before. So you got a lot of work to do to pull this off. >> Right now, in today's economy, the economy is sort of lifting all boats. But as we saw when the .com implosion happened in 2001, often these breakdown gives birth to great, new companies. Do you see that the next recession, which is inevitably coming, will be sort of the turning point for some of these companies that can't change? >> It's a really good question. I do expect that there are going to be companies that don't make it. And I think that they will fail at different rates based on their, not just the economy, but their industry, and what competitors do, and things like that. But I do think we're going to see some companies fail. We're going to see many other companies understand that they are too complex. They are simply too complex. They cannot do things end to end and seamlessly and present a great customer experience, because they're doing everything. So we're going to see some pretty dramatic changes, we're going to see failure, it's a fair assumption that when we see the economy crash, it's also going to contribute, but that's, it's not the whole story. >> But when the .com blew up, you had the internet guys that actually had a business model to make money, and the guys that didn't, the guys that didn't went away, and then you also had the incumbents that embrace the internet, so when we came out of that .com downturn, you had the survivors, who was Google and eBay, and obviously Amazon, and then you had incumbent companies who had online retailing, and e-tailing and e-commerce etc, who thrived. I would suspect you're going to see something similar, but I wonder what you guys think. The street today is rewarding growth. And we got another near record high today after the rate cut yesterday. And so, but companies that aren't making money are getting rewarded, 'cause they're growing. Well when the recession comes, those guys are going to get crushed. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> And you're going to have these other companies emerge, and you'll see the winners, are going to be those ones who have truly digitized, not just talking the talk, or transformed really, to use your definition. That's what I would expect. I don't know, what do you think about that? >> I totally agree. And, I mean, we look at industries like retail, and they have been fundamentally transformed. There's still lots of opportunities for innovation, and we're going to see some winners that have kind of struggled early but not given up, and they're kind of finding their footing. But we're losing some. We're losing a lot, right? I think the surprise is that we thought digital was going to replace what we did. We'd stop going to stores, we'd stop reading books, we wouldn't have newspapers anymore. And it hasn't done that. Its only added, it hasn't taken anything away. >> It could-- >> I don't think the newspaper industry has been unscathed by digital. >> No, nor has retail. >> Nor has retail, right. >> No, no no, not unscathed, but here's the big challenge. Is if I could substitute, If I could move from newspaper to online, I'm fine. You don't get to do that. You add online to what you've got, right? And I think this right now is the big challenge. Is that nothing's gone away, at least yet. So we have to sustain the business we are, so that it can feed the business we want to be. And we have to make that transition into new capabilities. I would argue that established companies need to become very binary, that there are people that do nothing but sustain and make better and better and better, who they are. While others, are creating the new reality. You see this in auto companies by the way. They're creating not just the autonomous automobiles, but the mobility services, the whole new value propositions, that will become a bigger and bigger part of their revenue stream, but right now are tiny. >> So, here's the scary thing to me. And again, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. And I've been an outspoken critic of Liz Warren's attack on big tech. >> Absolutely. >> I just think if they're breaking the law, and they're really acting like monopolies, the D.O.J and F.T.C should do something, but to me, you don't just break up big tech because they're good capitalists. Having said that, one of the things that scares me is, when you see Apple getting into payment systems, Amazon getting into grocery and logistics. Digital allows you to do something that's never happened before which is, you can traverse industries. >> Yep. >> Yeah, absolutely >> You used to have this stack of industries, and if you were in that industry, you're stuck in healthcare, you're stuck in financial services or whatever it was. And today, digital allows you to traverse those. >> It absolutely does. And so in theory, Amazon and Apple and Facebook and Google, they can attack virtually any industry and they kind of are. >> Yeah they kind are. I would certainly not break up anything. I would really look hard though at acquisitions, because I think that's where some of this is coming from. They can stop the overwhelming growth, but I do think you're right. That you get these opportunities from digital that are just so much easier because they're basically sharing information and technology, not building buildings and equipment and all that kind of thing. But I think there all limits to all this. I do not fear these companies. I think there, we need some law, we need some regulations, they're fine. They are adding a lot of value and the great companies, I mean, you look at the Schneider's and the Phillips, yeah they fear what some of them can do, but they're looking forward to what they provide underneath. >> Doesn't Cloud change the equation here? I mean, when you think of something like Amazon getting into the payments business, or Google in the payments business, you know it used to be that the creating of global payments processing network, just going global was a huge barrier to entry. Now, you don't have nearly that same level of impediment right? I mean the cloud eliminates much of the traditional barrier. >> Yeah, but I'll tell you what limits it, is complexity. Every company we've studied gets a little over anxious and becomes too complex, and they cannot run themselves effectively anymore. It happens to everyone. I mean, remember when we were terrified about what Microsoft was going to become? But then it got competition because it's trying to do so many things, and somebody else is offering, Sales Force and others, something simpler. And this will happen to every company that gets overly ambitious. Something simpler will come along, and everybody will go "Oh thank goodness". Something simpler. >> Well with Microsoft, I would argue two things. One is the D.O.J put some handcuffs on them , and two, with Steve Ballmer, I wouldn't get his nose out of Windows, and then finally stuck on a (mumbles) (laughter) >> Well it's they had a platform shift. >> Well this is exactly it. They will make those kind of calls . >> Sure, and I think that talks to their legacy, that they won't end up like Digital Equipment Corp or Wang and D.G, who just ignored the future and held onto the past. But I think, a colleague of ours, David Moschella wrote a book, it's called "Seeing Digital". And his premise was we're moving from a world of remote cloud services, to one where you have to, to use your word, ubiquitous digital services that you can access upon which you can build your business and new business models. I mean, the simplest example is Waves, you mentioned Uber. They're using Cloud, they're using OAuth.in with Google, Facebook or LinkedIn and they've got a security layer, there's an A.I layer, there's all your BlockChain, mobile, cognitive, it's all these sets of services that are now ubiquitous on which you're building, so you're leveraging, he calls it the matrix, to the extent that these companies that you're studying, these incumbents can leverage that matrix, they should be fine. >> Yes. >> The part of the problem is, they say "No, we're going to invent everything ourselves, we're going to build it all ourselves". To use Andy Jassy's term, it's non-differentiated heavy lifting, slows them down, but there's no reason why they can't tap that matrix, >> Absolutely >> And take advantage of it. Where I do get scared is, the Facebooks, Apples, Googles, Amazons, they're matrix companies, their data is at their core, and they get this. It's not like they're putting data around the core, data is the core. So your thoughts on that? I mean, it looks like your slide about disruption, it's coming. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> No industry is safe. >> Yeah, well I'll go back to the complexity argument. We studied complexity at length, and complexity is a killer. And as we get too ambitious, and we're constantly looking for growth, we start doing things that create more and more tensions in our various lines of business, causes to create silos, that then we have to coordinate. I just think every single company that, no cloud is going to save us from this. It, complexity will kill us. And we have to keep reminding ourselves to limit that complexity, and we've just not seen the example of the company that got that right. Sooner or later, they just kind of chop them, you know, create problems for themselves. >> Well isn't that inherent though in growth? >> Absolutely! >> It's just like, big companies slow down. >> That's right. >> They can't make decisions as quickly. >> That's right. >> I haven't seen a big company yet that moves nimbly. >> Exactly, and that's the complexity thing-- >> Well wait a minute, what about AWS? They're a 40 billion dollar company. >> Oh yeah, yeah, yeah >> They're like the agile gorilla. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> I mean, I think they're breaking the rule, and my argument would be, because they have data at their core, and they've got that, its a bromide, but that common data model, that they can apply now to virtually any business. You know, we're been expecting, a lot of people have been expecting that growth to attenuate. I mean it hasn't yet, we'll see. But they're like a 40 billion dollar firm-- >> No that's a good example yeah. >> So we'll see. And Microsoft, is the other one. Microsoft is demonstrating double digit growth. For such a large company, it's astounding. I wonder, if the law of large numbers is being challenged, so. >> Yeah, well it's interesting. I do think that what now constitutes "so big" that you're really going to struggle with the complexity. I think that has definitely been elevated a lot. But I still think there will be a point at which human beings can't handle-- >> They're getting away. >> Whatever level of complexity we reach, yeah. >> Well sure, right because even though this great new, it's your point. Cloud technology, you know, there's going to be something better that comes along. Even, I think Jassy might have said, If we had to do it all over again, we would have built the whole thing on lambda functions >> Yeah. >> Oh, yeah. >> Not on, you know so there you go. >> So maybe someone else does that-- >> Yeah, there you go. >> So now they've got their hybrid. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> You know maybe it'll take another ten years, but well Jean, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, >> it was great to have you. >> My pleasure! >> Appreciate you coming back. >> Really fun to talk. >> All right, keep right there everybody, Paul Gillin and Dave Villante, we'll be right back from MIT CDOIQ, you're watching theCUBE. (chuckles) (techno music)

from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hey welcome back everybody Jeffrey here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto Studios here today for a cute conversation it's a little bit of a dog days of summer conference seasons a little bit slow so we're excited we can kind of take a step back and we're gonna look back actually in time we're excited to have a very special guest rich Kolbert he is the field CTO at Dell EMC but really what we're talking about today is this data domain is 10-year anniversary of the date domain acquisition so rich first off welcome to the to the cube thanks Jeff excited to be here thanks for the invitation appreciate it I can't believe we're talking before we turned the cameras on that you join in 2006 and yet it's been 10 years I'm like wait 2006 was more than 10 can that be we're just getting old I don't know things are changing too fast no it's like a trip down memory lane and it just seems so long ago and yes in a way it also seems like yesterday I think things have gone so quickly so we're also joined in this segment by our top data analyst also the founder of wiki bond and co-ceo of Silicon angle media and founder of that as well so Dave Villante is joining us all the way from Boston Dave good to see ya hey Jeff hi rich to talk to you guys hey Dave so let's take a quick trip back 10 years ago actually maybe 11 years ago things were starting to heat up there was a lot of different vendors out there a lot of different players and things started to consolidate so I wonder if you can give us a little bit of your perspective what what's going on rich and then we'll get Dave's perspective yeah it was an interesting time right before the data domain acquisition we actually went through some economic times in 2008 and the markets are changing and and and some companies are becoming more successful some companies were struggling through that time customers were also looking for ways to to you know save money and do some interesting things there so it was a mixed feeling set of you know through that times data domain had IPO in 2007 and we were kind of going through this this explosive period of growth but you know across the board we just saw so many things change all at once and we really were surprised I think when initially was NetApp that an that they had intentions to bias and I think that was due to some of the economic factors of play and then of course EMC stepped in and and started a bidding contest with NetApp for for the company right so I Dave wonder if you could share your perspective you're sitting as an analyst you got Jo TG The Godfather of storage back in Boston what were you seeing in terms of the kind of the market dynamics and was it a surprise wouldn't that app decided to make a move well if you know first first of all I had left the storage industry for quite some time and when I started wiki bond we looked at storage and nothing had changed except one thing which was David deduplication that was new until a new tape was finally I always hated the tape the tape was finally being attacked so it was it was amazing time and EMC at the time we had some obviously great management yet Frank Sluman running data domain yo Joe Tucci who always balanced out acquisitions with organic you know in how to R&D and when Tom Georgians and NetApp said they were gonna go by David domain emt's walk right in and said no way so it was somewhat of a defensive move but at the same time when you talk to the M&A guys they said no no it's not just defense we can actually make this a growth play and that's exactly what happened Dayna domain I think at the time rich was probably a couple of hundred million dollar company and then they they popped that at the EMC and scaled that to you know well over a billion dollars and it'll maintain the the franchise and then grew it quite dramatically beyond where all the expectations were for the market the market team at the time was probably around a billion and I think ID seen rich as a over three billion today yeah one of the things that's so don't quote me on all the numbers because I'm not like you know watching the market caps and stocks but I think we'd gotten up to about a 500 million dollar run rate in terms of sales and prior to the crash I think our market cap was actually significantly higher so so our price came down you know which is one of the things I think that attracted NetApp to the game so the interesting dynamic inside the company was that the NetApp offer was was kind of the first one so they were working with the data domain leadership and they were speaking with us EMC was more of a kind of unsolicited offer so there was less communication and I remember there was a morning I was at San Francisco Airport going out to meet a customer and Joe to Chi put out a full-page ad in a local newspaper and we were reading that and that was his way of communicating to the to the people a data domain saying he wants to welcome us into the family it was quite a moment well it sure was and of course you guys were fierce competitors data domain was fierce competitors with with EMC you know fighting for for the install base and then all of a sudden you know the cultures it's somehow work EMC was was very good at acquisitions and he made it work and they not active it was an outside observer but you were there you know Frank Sluman came in did it's kind of running the the data protection organization but a lot has changed since then hasn't it I mean back then you stored you know a little bit of data I think accounting of terabytes today we live in a petabyte scale world I could talk about what's changed well you know the scales and performance certainly has changed I think the data domain platform today is about a thousand times larger than it was when it first came to market and in fact when we were being bid on by NetApp and EMC we had a flagship product is the DD 690 you know behind the scenes we had a system that was coming out that was double that size and EMC nor Netta knew about that so once the deal closed they got to find out that our size had just doubled in our performance and doubled at the same time but you're right you kind of talked about the dynamics inside of EMC EMC had a very large data protection you know division they had avemar networker santaros v TLS they also had an OEM arrangement for a competing product with the data domain platform so it was really like you know I compared to going to Hogwarts right where you have all of these different houses and we came in with with data domain and and I think the thing that really the glue that really helped it come to get was Joe Tucci you know tapping Frank's Luqman on the shoulder as the leader to bring this together and taking what was the borough division and and reforming it as the BRS division and I think we came together very quickly as a team even though people came from all of these different backgrounds you know standing for these different products rich let me follow up on that because there's a lot of M&A activity going on right now and and not very many big M&A deals are ultimately successful it turns out so what you said a little bit about you know Joe and Frank you know coming together but what are some of the other attributes that you would say that made it work it actually did what everybody hopes on an acquisition which is take great technology put it into a big sales machine and watch it grow and grow I think part of it you know quite frankly just comes down to the product and being differentiated because there are a lot of products out there and and if you take a step back they have good things that they're doing but it's very hard to find a product that says hey you're doing something that even if you put the blueprints out there it's very hard for other people to follow in those footsteps and create a similar value proposition and I think I think in this case it was a differentiated product and it had a lot of energy of its own and and I think from an EMC perspective they just stood back and said let's take this momentum and and play it out and see how how far it can take itself unfortunately I think a lot of times they don't do that right a lot of times acquiring companies don't just take this great thing and kind of get out of the way and add the juice where they can but you try to to try to change it so that's a really nice statement on Joe to G and what he was able to accomplish yeah no he was fantastic for us and and his support was tremendous but also his you know delegation and and kind of seeing how this but you know kind of having a vision of how this business unit should be formed right I think what was was very prison and then now you're part of Dell so obviously Michael Dell big personality as well the Dell technology stories he's doing a great job of pulling all these pieces together and you know kind of reinvigorating the brand coming back out of the little little side bar you know make it private for a while and come back so I wonder if you can talk about that integration how's that going as you've gone now a couple of times well I think it's been very exciting for us because the one piece that EMC had always been lacking had been the the compute part of the picture and now we have really the ability to go in and talk about the entire stack with our customers and that's that's a lot more powerful than saying here is an element of it and then if you want to go and add compute to that perhaps you know put in your virtual or physical servers then you're gonna we're going to need to partner with somebody and you know it's it's just a much cleaner story from end to end right right so the big big change obviously that wasn't around ten years ago that is around today is public cloud right huge impact not only directly in in taking workloads to the public cloud but also I think much more importantly changing the way people think about provisioning thinking about the way people think about elastic capacity so as as the market has evolved the rise of AWS and any other public clouds how has that changed what you guys are doing how are you reacting to that house at a new opportunity you know to kind of grow the maturity of the core product yeah well the thing is we have taken a lot of approach you know that's been learning and evolving as well right so so you know developers and applications really figured out AWS and the public cloud early I think data protection has has followed along with a couple years of lag in terms of doing that so you know our perspective is we learned as well right so so 2015 2016 I think there was some resistance and I think ultimately when we started to follow those workloads into the cloud there was a little bit of a lift and shift what we've learned is that the architecture really matters when you get to the cloud so the efficient use of resources the ability to do things in a cloud like way to use for example object storage instead of block storage when when the case presents itself so we took our products and virtualize them and followed them into the cloud but we realized that just taking the on-premise version of the product and putting it in the cloud itself isn't enough right because at the end of the day the customer is paying for all the underlying resources and so if your architecture is an efficient from a cost perspective as well as a performance perspective it's not going to be a viable solution and so 2017-2018 we've really seen a big acceleration in our adoption in the cloud because we have adapted our architecture to be more cloud friendly and more cost-effective for our customers to deploy but it was a learning experience for sure you know and and I think we're continuing to learn and continue to develop in that space and there's a lot of opportunity ahead of us the other big change I think that's come that we see over and over and over is really data as an asset only as an asset but as a huge valuable asset that drives your business drives real lytx but then becomes actually something that drives your company value and I think we see that and the Facebook's of the world and the googles of the world of why they have these crazy high valuations relative to here to their revenue and their profits because they're getting value for the data alright great news for you right it used to be a sample the day of the day was a pain it was expensive to store I didn't want to keep it all now everyone wants all the data they want to analyze it in real time and they want to put it in a place where they can actually put multiple applications across that same data set to do all kinds of new analytics so again super opportunity for you guys people aren't storing any less data no absolutely yeah no the data amount being stored is definitely growing one of the things that we're seeing that that's this kind of pervasive is this idea of of really using the right data the right place the right time so accessibility to whether it is a data Lake or it is your protection copies or you know an instant access of your protection copies there's a lot of different thing customers are doing with data but it's no longer a one-size-fits-all proposition like it was back in the tape automation days where I'm just throwing all of this stuff into a box and and never accessing it again right so the dynamics are changing and continue to evolve I expect that if we have this conversation two or three years down the road we're going to see some amazing things happen in the next couple of years that and some of it we were not predicting now we're gonna find out as customer demand and as innovation guides us along right because then the other big piece is the media right we've talked about tapes and the original data domain was was in response to some issues with tape and we get spinning rust as everybody likes to call it and now of course flash so yeah again see change in terms of capability the cost is coming down it's no longer the super high-end thing just for super high value applications so very transfer transformative opportunity on the on the media side as well on the flashlight as well you hit on a couple of really key things data domain was very successful because it became viable and practical to displace tape automation and nobody was a fan of their tape automation environments and now I think we're gonna see that's that same shift you know spinning disk is right now being relegated to archival and backup purposes but we're gonna hit an inflection point very soon I think we're where every instance of spinning disk probably can be questioned and so we are actually doing the you know kind of getting ahead of that curve and coming out with all flash products as a choice for a customer so we'll still have spinning disk for some backup use cases but we'll also have you know be able to offer customers a choice of the data domain technology on an all flash set of platforms and that will give customers a chance to get out of the yeah that spinning disk business as well right good I wonder if I get what if I get chime in here I you guys were talking about the the technologies and the cloud and the architecture it's interesting it David the main really started out don't hate me for saying this but as a feature product and the key feature was data deduplication data domain had the best you had a lot of guys doing post process you had you know some guys trying to do server-side avemar itself for example but they domain really killed it with regard to data David II do and if this feature product became a platform and had an architecture people became as you know unicorn times 2 plus plus and so I wanted to ask you rich about that architecture and aware it can go you're talking about different media now beyond spinning disk you know it used to be just a kind of a dumb target you've now got integrated appliances you've got software that's integrated there so it's you know you talked about the scale and the capacity where do you see this architecture going I wonder if you could comment on yeah well I think a lot of that belongs in in the realm of the data management software that speaks to it and and by having a distributed ecosystem and having things like you know distributed segment processing so we can take data domains technology and extend it out into those data management activities because a lot of the what's happening in the market is as new workloads are coming into the market they're having their own methods and native tools built-in for data protection and to be able to leverage those and have a highly consolidated affect on the backend is still extremely valuable to our customers and you're right it was a differentiated product from a deduplication standpoint but really the feature was that I can keep my 30 60 or 90 days worth of copies that are separate from my primary copies so I putting them somewhere safe I can even put them under different governance from my primary storage or my primary application owners right and it's practical and feasible and and prior to that the only real way to do that was with tape automation deduplication has become more of a broader word itself and it goes beyond what data domain does so there's deduplication and primary storage but if you look at primary storage deduplication it's good but it's designed to help you reduce the use of primary storage by 2 or 3 times it doesn't touch on the 30 60 90 days of retention that data domain does so there the similar technologies and a common use of the word but but they're two different use cases that the the remains separate I think yeah and you know as a former practitioner the other you are I think a former customer the genius part of the genius of data domain was its ability to just plug in to existing processes yes you didn't have to change things up and so it was an easy in but but it's impressive that you've been able to keep that that architecture going I wanted to ask you about market share you aided them in has always had a sixty plus percent market share I think it's at sixty now but it's it's like the Cisco of purpose-built backhaul appliances you're able to sort of dominate that little segment of the market which keeps getting bigger what but now you've got a lot of new entrants you know on VC money pouring in a lot of noise in the marketplace I feel like you guys maybe a couple years ago took your eye off the wall and now you've got this renewed sense of a vigor you know maybe it was parked partly the acquisition but you know we've talked to Beth Phelan about this a number of times you've really refreshed the portfolio so so wonder if you can talk about that and my question is what gives you confidence that you can continue to maintain your dominance yeah that's a great question and things have really changed I think starting around 2014 we were having some internal conversations about things like simplification the consumerization of IT and and all of those those dollars that you're talking about are really being poured into companies that are trying to take a different approach they're going into the white space that we had kind of left open which was simplicity right if you if you look back 10 or 15 years and you look at the the data management and enterprise backup software space enterprise backup software has been complicated and as you add more use cases it has become even more complicated and the customer base is no longer tolerant of that that's something that that maybe 10 or 15 years ago that was kind of a badge of honor to be working with complex and people just don't have the time for that there's a lot of IT generalists and folks that are out there that don't want to go to training class you know you know five days or ten days out of the year to learn how to use a product so that was a really good thing that we're seeing in the marketplace in terms of making products simpler easier to use and more approachable with things like discoverable functionality we certainly have the you know put a lot of effort into going in that direction because we think that's the right direction but what gives me confidence is the underlying storage value proposition about efficiency and performance and scale is something that we've still think that we have a strong upper hand on and when it comes down to that you know we take cloud as an example our data reduction in the cloud we think allows a much lower cost to serve and you know the customer is going to pay for that cloud storage or that cloud compute regardless of which vendor they're trusting in terms of their their solutions so simple only goes so far we think we can get there with simple but we don't necessarily see our competition having the efficiencies scalability and and so forth that we've already had so that that's good that gives me a lot of confidence so when you talk to customers what's the big problem the big hairy problem that they're trying to solve in your space and how are you guys helping so I one of the two big problems I see is is really a lot of IT teams are confronted with they've got a digital transformation going on they've got a cloud strategy going on an IT isn't necessarily being invited to the table early enough or often enough to go ahead and help with that process so what you have is you a cloud team building applications bringing things online and then the data protection the backups the snapshots whatever they're doing to make sure that that data is safe is is a bit of an afterthought and it you know I think of DevOps and I think about the ops part and I've never really come across an application team that wanted to own the business responsibility for the risk of you know backups recovery replication and all of that and I think IT has a lot of established practices that would be good to inform how those things should be built so the number one thing that I'm talking to with my customers when we're talking about this whole you know tectonic shift and in the way things are being done is that IT and the digital transformation or the cloud team do need to speak early and often and proactively about how they approach data protection because they continue to need to have a strategy that evolves and make sure they keep themselves protected as they start moving these critical workloads into the cloud it's an age-old problem with backup and data protection people think of it as a back as a bolt-on is an afterthought and your point is right on it's got to be a fundamental part of any transformation it's just like security you can't bolt it on earth just doesn't scale yeah and it's very much like you know back in the day when open systems was just coming of age there was a lot of operational discipline that the mainframe teams had and the mid-range teams had but the open systems was the Wild West and eventually open systems learned and and and a lot of that you know was knowledge sharing about best practices and you know Mis became IT now IT is becoming you know DevOps and digital transformation we're seeing a lot of that same dynamic happening again and and you know my main point is just you know start those conversations and if you're on the IT side start those conversations proactively you might not be getting invited to the digital transformation party invite yourself rich has been quite a 10 years and and as I was just watching an Andy Jazzy interview if you think the last 10 years have been crazy you ain't seen nothing yet so you guys are in a great position to stay agile and I'm gonna steal your line that it's no longer an honor to work on complicated systems that's great yeah it's been great being here thanks for having me and looking forward to maybe coming back in ten years and seeing what changed so hopefully we won't wait 10 years so rich thanks for stopping by Dave thanks for checking in from Boston and it's great to see you as well thanks you guys thanks Dave thanks Jeff [Music]

>> Voiceover: Live from San Diego, California. It's the CUBE, covering Cisco Live U.S. 2019, brought to you by Cisco, and its EcoSystem Partners. >> Welcome back to San Diego, day two here, of Cisco Live 2019, I'm Dave Villante with my co-host Stu Miniman, Lisa Martin is also here. You're watching the Cube, the leader live tech coverage, we're here in the DevNet zone, which is a very happenin' place, and all the action is here the CCIE folks are getting trained up on how to do Infrastructure as Code. Terry Ramos is here, he's the Vice President of Alliances, at Cohesity, hot company, achieving escape velocity. Terry great to have you on. Good to see you again. >> Great to be here, really enjoy it. >> So Cisco is a big partner of yours, perhaps the biggest I know you don't like to say that, you love all your partners like you love your kids, but clearly a lot of good action going on with you guys. Talk about the partnership, where it started, how it's evolved. >> Sure so first off a little bit about Cohesity, I think would be helpful right, we're in the data management space, really helping customers with their data management, and how do they deal with the problem of mass data fragmentation, right if you think about the traditional data silos that enterprises have, we really take and level that out into one platform, our platform, and really allows customers to get the most out of their data. If we talk about the partnership with Cisco, it's actually a really good partnership. They have been an investor with us, both series C and D rounds. We recently, about three months ago announced that we were on the price book, so now a customer has the ability to go buy a Cisco UCS, Hyperflex, and Cohesity, as a cohesive bundle to solve their problems, right, to really help them grow. And then we are working on some new things, like Cisco Solutions Plus Support, where customers has a single call place, where they get all their support needs addressed. >> That's huge Stu, I remember when the, remember the Vblock when it first came out. It's a V support, I forget how many VMs, like thousands and thousands of VMs, and I just have one question, how do you back it up? And they went, and they were staring at their feet, so the fact that now you're bundled in to UCS HyperFlex, and that's part of the SKU, or its a different SKU or? >> Terry: Yeah they're all different SKUs, but it is bundled together. >> Yeah, so it's all integrated? It's a check box item, right okay? >> What we did was came up with the CVD, validated design so customers can get a validated design that says HyerFlex, UCS, Cohesity, here's how to deploy it, here's the best use cases, and they can actually go buy that, then it's a bundled solution. >> Terry brings us inside a little bit that go to market, because it's one thing to be partnered with CBDs, they're great but Cisco as you know hundred of these, if not more, but you know when you've got access to that Cisco channel out there, people that are transforming data centers, they talked about conversion infrastructure, hyper conversion infrastructure, Cisco UCS, tip of the spear for Cisco in that Data Center world, what does it mean to be that oh hey you know that whole channel, they are going to help get paid on that not just say oh yeah yeah that works. >> Yeah, I think that there's a few things for the channel for us, one is just Cisco's team themselves right, they don't have a backup solution so we are really the next gen backup and that's really helped them out. When we talk about Channel as well Channel partners are looking for a solution that differentiates them from everybody else. So we are a high touch sales team, but we are a hundred percent channel so working with the channel, giving them new ways actually to go out a sell the solution. >> So lets talk a little bit about backup, data protection, data insurance you know sort of we're trying to pass between, all right, what's the marketing and what's the reality for customers, so we remember the VM where Ascendancy days, it caused people to really have to rethink their backup and their data protection. What's driving it now? Why are so many customers kind of reassessing their backup approach and their overall data protection and data management? >> Yeah, I think it's the best analogy to last one is data management right, everybody has thought of data protection, it's just protecting your data. Backup and recovery. What we've done is really looked at it as it's data, you should be able to use your data however you want to. So, yeah we made do data protection on the platform, but then we do tests that, we do file shares, we do things like that, and we make it this cohesive data management platform, where customers get various use cases, but then they can look at their entire dataset, and that is really the key anymore. And when you talk about the data protection as it was, it was very silo. You data protect one set of systems, and data protect the next, and data protect the next. They never talked you couldn't do management across them. >> Dave: Okay so. >> Yeah yeah Terry. So I love when you're talking about the silos there, back in Barcelona we heard Cisco talking about HyperFlex anywhere, and some of the concerns of us have is, is multi-cloud the new multi vendor, and oh my gosh have I just created a whole bunch of silos that are just outside of my data center, like I used to do inside my data center. How's Cohesity helping to solve that solution for people from your. >> Yeah I think that's a interesting one. Cloud is really come along, right? Everybody thought we'll see what cloud does, it's really come a long way and people are using multi-cloud, so they are doing cloud on prem. Then they're archiving out to public cloud providers, and they're archiving out to other silos where they, or other data services where they have it, and that's really been the approach lately, is you can't just have your data in one location, you're going to move it out to the Cloud, you're going to store it on UCS and HyperFlex, and Cohesity. And again its how do you use that data, so that's the key is really that. But it is a cloud world for sure, where you're doing On-prem Cloud and Public Cloud. >> So today a lot of that focus, correct me it I am wrong, is infrastructure as a service? >> Yes >> Whether it's AWS, Google, you know Azure. Do you, have you started to think about, or are customers and partners asking you to think about, all the protecting all the data in SAS, is that something that's sort of on the road map are you hearing that for customers, or to is it still early for that? >> No I think that actually a great use case, if you talk about I'll just pick on one, Office 365 right, if you think about what they really provide it's availability right it's not backup so, if you need to back a year and get that critical email that you need for whatever reason, that's really not what they're doing. They're making sure it's up and running, and available to the users. So data protection for SAS apps is actually a new use case that I think is enormous. >> Okay so take Office 365 as an example, is that something you can protect today, or is that kind on the road map? >> That's something we can do today. >> So explain to our audience, why if I am using Office 365 which is in the Cloud, isn't Microsoft going to take care of that for me, why do I need Cohesity explain? >> Yeah, I think it is really comes down to that, it's they're really providing availability, yeah they have some backup services, but even if they do it's not tying into your overall data management solution. And so backing up O-365 gives you access to all that data as well, so you can do algorithms on it, analytics all those things once it's part of the bigger platform. >> And you probably have more facile recovery, which is, backup is one thing, recovery Stu. >> Is a everything. >> There you go. >> It is. (laugh) >> Terry talk to us about your customers, how about any big you know Cisco joint customers that you can talk about but would love to hear some of the latest from your customers? >> Yeah I think when we started this partnership awhile ago, what we really focused on Cohesity on UCS, and we got some traction there. When we went on the price sheet that really changed, things because the customers are now able to buy on a single price sheet. When you talk about the large customers it's been incredible the last three, four months, the numbers of joint customers that we've been in, and Cisco's been in, and its enterprise customers, it's the fortune five hundred customers that we're going after. A customer that's here later today, Quantium is a great use case. They're data analytics, they're AI, and they're providing a lot of information to customers on supply chain. And he's here later today on the CUBE, and it's a really great use case to what they are doing with it. >> Yeah we're excited to talk to him so lets do a little prep for him, what, tell us about Quantium, what do you know about them so we, gives us the bumper sticker so we're ready for the interview. >> Craig will do a much better job of it, but my understanding is they're looking at data, supply chain data, when to get customers in, when they should have product there, propensity to buy, all of those things, and they are doing all that for very large enterprise customers, and then they're using us to data protect all that they do. >> So, so the reason I asked that is I wanted to double click on that, because you've been stressing Terry, that it's not just backup. It's this notion of data management. You can do Analytics, you can do other things. So when you, lets generalize and lets not make it specific to Quantium, we'll talk to them later, but what specifically are customers doing beyond backup? What kind of analytics are they doing? How is affecting their business? What kind of outcomes are they trying to drive? >> Yeah I think it's a great question, we did something about four months ago, where we replaced released the market place. So now we've gotten all this data from data protection, file shares, test-dev, cloud as we talked about. So we've got this platform with all this data on top of it, and now partners can come in and write apps on top to do all sorts of things with that data. So think of being able to spin up a VM in our platform, do some Analytics on it, looking at it for any number of things, and then destroy it right, destroy the backup copy not the backup the copy that's made, and then be able to go to the next one, and really get deep into what data is on there, how can I use that data, how can I use that data across various applications? >> Are you seeing, I've sort have always thought the corpus, the backup corpus could be used in a security context, not you know, not to compete with Palo Alto Networks but specifically to assess exposure to things like Ransomware. If you see some anomalous behavior 'cause stuff when it goes bad it goes bad quickly these days, so are you seeing those types of use cases emerging? >> Absolutely, ransomware is actually a really big use case for us right now, where customers are wanting data protection to ensure Ransomware's not happening, and if they do get hit how do we make sure to restart quickly. Give you another example is we have a ClamAV so we can spin up a VM and check it for anitivirus. Right in their data protection mode so not without, not touching the production systems but touching the systems that are already backed up. >> I think you guys recently made an acquisition of a Manas Data which if I recall correctly was a specialized, sort of data protection company focused on things like, NoSQL and maybe Hadoop and so forth, so that's cool. We had those guys on in New York City last fall. And then, so I like that, building out the portfolio. My question is around containers, and all this cloud native stuff going on we're in the DevNet zone so a lot DevOps action, data protection for containers are you, your customers and your partners are they sort of pushing you in that direction, how are you responding? >> Yeah I think when you talk about cloud in general right, there's been a huge amount of VMs that are there, containers are there as well so yeah customers are absolutely talking about containers. Our market place is a container based market place, so containers are absolutely a big thing for us. >> So what else can you share with us about you know conversations that you're having with customers and partners at the show? What are the, what's the narrative like? What are some of the big concerns, maybe that again either customers or partners have? >> Yeah I don't want to sound like a broken record but I think the biggest thing we hear always is the data silos, right? It's really breaking down those silos, getting rid of the old legacy silos where you can't use the data how you want to, where you can't run analytics across the data. That is the number one talk track that customers tell us. >> So how does that fit in, you know the old buzz word of digital transformation, but we always say the difference between a business and a digital business is how they use data. And if you think about how a traditional business looks at it's data, well that data's all in silos as you pointed out and there's something in the middle like a business process or a bottling plant or... >> That's right. >> manufacturing facility, but the data's all dispersed in silos, are you seeing people, as at least as part of their digital transformation, leveraging you guys to put that data in at least in a logical place that they can do those analytics and maybe you could add some color to that scenario. >> Yeah, for sure, I mean the data from I'll give you a great example. The CBD we just did with Cisco, the updated one has Edge. So now when you're talking about plants and branch offices and those things, now we can bring that data back in to the central core as well, do analytics on it, and then push it to other offices for updated information. So absolutely, it is a big use case of, it's not just looking at that core central data center. How do you get that data from your other offices, from your retail locations, from your manufacturing plants. >> Final thoughts. San Diego, good venue you know great weather. >> Beautiful. >> Cisco Live. >> Yeah. >> Dave: Put a bumper sticker on it. >> I'm impressed with Cisco Live. I haven't been here in several years. It's an impressive show, 26 thousand people, great, beautiful weather, great convention center. Just a great place to be right now. >> All right and we're bring it all to you live from the CUBE. Thank you Terry for coming on. Dave Villante, for Stu Miniman, Lisa Martin is also here. Day two, Cisco Live, 2019. You're watching the CUBE, we'll be right back. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Cisco Live! We're in Barcelona, Dave Villante and Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. George Bentinck is here. He's a product manager for Camera Systems at Cisco Meraki. >> Hi. >> Great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks very much. >> So, we were saying, Meraki's not just about wireless. It's all about cameras now. Tell us about your role. >> The Meraki camera is relatively new. It's one of the newer products. It came out just over two years ago and it's really embodying what we're about as a business unit at Cisco, which is about simplicity. It's about taking normally complex technology and sort of distilling it so customers can really use it. So what we did with the camera was we spoke to a lot of our customers, listened what they had to say, and they were fed up with the boxes. They don't want these servers, they don't want the recording solutions, they just want to get video. And so we built a camera which has everything inside it. All the video is stored in the camera using the latest solid state storage. And then we did all the analytics and the other sort of cool things people want to do with video in the camera as well. And yet to make it easy to use, it's all managed from the Meraki cloud. So that allows you to scale it from one camera to 100 cameras to 100,000 cameras and yet have nothing else other than the cameras and the management from the cloud. >> Well the way you describes it sounds so simple, but technically, it's a real challenge, what you've described. What were some of the technical challenges of you guys getting there? >> Well, there are sort of two components. There's the device piece and when we look at the device piece, we basically leverage the latest advances in the mobile phone industry. So if you look at the latest iPhones and Android phones, we've taken that high density, highly reliable storage and integrated it into the camera. And then we've also taken the really powerful silicone, so we have Qualcomm Snapdragon system-on-chip in there and that performance allows us to do all the analytics in the camera. And so the second piece is the cloud, the scaling, and the management. And with video, it's lots of big data, which I'm guessing you guys are probably pretty familiar with. And trying to search that and know what's going on and managing its scale can be really painful. But we have a lot of experience with this. Meraki's cloud infrastructure manages millions of connected nodes with billions of connected devices and billions of pieces of associated metadata. This is just like video, so we can reuse a lot of the existing technology we've built in the cloud and now move it to this other field of video and make it much easier to find things. >> And when people talk about, y'know, the camera systems, IoT obviously comes into play and security's a big concern. Y'know, people are concerned about IP cameras off the shelf. Y'know, everybody knows the stories about the passwords where, y'know, they never changed out of the factory and they're the same passwords across the, and so, y'know, presumably, Cisco Meraki, trusted name, and there's a security component here as well. >> Yeah, absolutely. This is actually one of my favorite topics because, unfortunately, not many people ask about it. It's one of those, it's not an issue until it's an issue type of things and we put a lot of work in it. I mean, Cisco has security in its DNA. It's just like part of what we do. And so we did all of the things which I think every camera vendor and IoT vendor should be doing anyway. So that's things like encryption for everything and by default. So all the storage on the camera is encrypted. It's mandatory so you can't turn it off. And there's zero configuration, so when you turn it on, it won't record for a few minutes while it encrypts its storage volume and then you're good to go. We also manage all the certificates on the camera and we also have encrypted management for the camera with things like two-factor authentication and other authentication mechanisms on top of that as well. So it's sort of leaps and bounds ahead of where most of the decision makers are thinking in this space because they're physical security experts. They know about locks and doors and things like that. They're not digital security experts but the Cisco customer and our organization, we know this and so we have really taken that expertise and added it to the camera. >> Yeah, George, security goes hand-in-hand with a lot of the Cisco solutions. Is that the primary or only use case for the Meraki camera? Y'know, I could just see a lot of different uses for this kind of technology. >> It really is very varied and the primary purpose of it is a physical security camera. So being able to make sure that if there's an incident in your store, you have footage of maybe the shoplifting incident or whatever. But, because it's so easy to use, customers are using it for other things. And I think one of the things that's really exciting to me is when I look at the data. And if I look at the data, we know that about 1% of all the video we store is actually viewed by customers. 99% just sits there and does nothing. And so, as we look at how we can provide greater value to customers, it's about taking the advances in things such as machine learning for computer vision, sort of artificial intelligence, and allowing you to quantify things in that data. It allows you to, for example, determine how many people are there and where they go and things like that. And to maybe put it all into context, because one of my favorite examples is a Cisco case study in Australia, where they're using cameras at a connected farm as part of an IoT deployment, to understand sheep grazing behavior and so this camera watches the sheep all day. Now as a human, I don't want to watch the sheep all day, but the camera doesn't care. And so the farmer looks at eight images representing eight hours, which is a heat map of the animals' movement in the field, and they can know where they've been grazing, where they need to move them, where this might be overgrazed. And so the camera's not security at this point, it really is like a sensor for the enterprise. >> Yeah, it's interesting, actually I did a walk through the DevNet Zone and I saw a lot of areas where I think they're leveraging some of your technology. Everything from let's plug in some of the AI to be able to allow me to do some interesting visualizations. What we're doing, there's a magic mirror where you can ask it like an Alexa or Google, but it's Debbie, the robot here as to give you answers of how many people are in a different area here. A camera is no longer just a camera. It's now just an end node connected and there's so many technologies. How do you manage that as a product person where you have the direction, where you put the development? You can't support a million different customer use cases. You want to be able to scale that business. >> Absolutely, I think the North Star always has to be simplistic. If you can't go and deploy it, you can't use it. And so we see a lot of these cool science projects trapped in proof of concept. And they never go into production and the customers can't take advantage of it. So we want to provide incredibly simple, easy out-the-box technology, which allows people to use AI and machine learning, and then we're the experts in that, but we give you industry-standard APIs using REST or MQTT, to allow you to build business applications on it directly or integrate it into Cisco Kinetic, where you can do that using the MQTT interface. >> So, Stu, you reminded me so we're here in the DevNet Zone and right now there's a Meraki takeover. So what happens in the DevNet Zone is they'll pick a topic or a part of Cisco's business unit, right now, it's the Meraki, everyone's running around with Meraki takeover shirts, and everybody descends on the DevNet Zone. So a lot of really cool developer stuff going on here. George, I wanted to ask you about where the data flows. So the data lives at the edge, y'know, wherever you're taking the video. Does it stay there? Given that only 1% is watched, are you just leaving it there, not moving it back into the cloud? Are you sometimes moving it back into the cloud? What's the data flow look like? >> You can think of this interesting sort of mindset, which is let's have a camera where we don't ever want to show you video, we want to give you the answer because video is big, it's heavy. Let's give you the answer and if that answer means we give you video, we give you video. But if we can give you the answer through other forms of information, like a still image, or an aggregate of an image, or metadata from that, then we'll give you that instead. And that means customers can deploy this on cellular networks out in the middle of nowhere and with much fewer constraints than they had in the past. So it really depends but we try and make it as efficient as possible for the person deploying it so they don't have to have a 40G network connection to every camera to make the most of it. >> Yeah, so that would mean that most of it stays-- >> Most of it stays at the edge in the camera. >> Talk a little bit more about the analytics component. Is that sort of Meraki technology the came over with the acquisition? What has Cisco added to that? Maybe speak to that a little bit. >> So the camera is a relatively new product line within the last two and a half years and the Meraki acquisition was, I think we're only like five years or more now down that road, so this is definitely post-acquisition and part of the continued collaboration between various departments at Cisco. What it enables you to do is object detection, object classification, and object tracking. So it's I know there's a thing, I know what that thing is, and I know where that thing goes. And we do it for a high level object class today, which is people. Because if you look at most business problems, they can be broken down into understanding location, dwell times, and characteristics of people. And so if we give you the output of those algorithms as industry-standard APIs, you can build very customized business analytics or business logics. So let me give you a real world example. I have retail customers tell me that one of the common causes of fraud is an employee processing a refund when there's no customer. And so what if you could know there was no customer physically present in front of the electronic point of sale system where the refund is being processed? Well, the camera can tell you. And it's not a specialist analytics camera, it's a security camera you were going to buy anyway, which will also give this insight. And now you know if that refund has a customer at the other side of the till. >> Well, that's awesome. Okay, so that's an interesting use case. What are some of the other ones that you foresee or your customers are pushing you towards? Paint a picture as to what you think this looks like in the future. >> It really is this camera as a sensor so one of the newer things we've added is the ability to have real-time updates of the lights' conditions from the camera, so you can get from the hardware-backed light sensor on the camera the lux levels. And what that means is now you have knowledge of people, where they are, where they go, knowledge of lights, and now you can start going okay, well maybe we adjust the lighting based on these parameters. And so we want to expose more and more data collection from this endpoint, which is the camera, to allow you to make either smarter business decisions or to move to the digital workplace and that's really what we're trying to do in the Meraki offices in San Francisco. >> And do you get to the point or does the client get to the point where they know not only that information you just described but who the person is? >> Yes and no. I think one of the things that I'm definitely advocating caution on is the face recognition technology has a lot of hype, has a lot of excitement, and I get asked about it regularly. And I do test state-of-the-art and a lot of this technology all the time. And I wear hats because I find them fun and entertaining but they're amazingly good at stopping most of these systems from working. And so you can actually get past some of the state-of-the-art face recognition systems with two simple things, a hat and a mobile phone. And you look at your phone as you walk along and they won't catch you. And when I speak to customers, they're expectation of the performance of this technology does not match the investment cost required. So I'm not saying it isn't useful to someone, it's just, for a lot of our customers, when they see what they would get in exchange for such a huge investment, it's not something they are interested in. >> Yeah, the ROI's just really not there today. >> Not today, but the technology's moving very fast so we'll see what the future brings. >> Yeah, great. Alright, George, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was really, really interesting. Leave you the last word. Customer reactions to what you guys are showing at the event? Any kind of new information that you want to share? >> There are some that we'll talk about in the Whisper Suite, which I will leave unsaid, unfortunately. It's just knowing that you can use it so simply and that the analytics and the machine learning come as part of the product at no additional cost. Because this is pretty cutting-edge stuff. You see it in the newspapers, you see it in the headlines and to say I buy this one camera and I can be a coffee shop, a single owner, and I get the same technology as an international coffee organization is pretty compelling and that's what's getting people excited. >> Great and it combines the sensor at the edge and the cloud management so-- >> Best of both worlds. >> That's awesome, I love the solution. Thanks so much for sharing with us. >> Fantastic. >> Alright, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Cisco Live! Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Cisco Live! We're in Barcelona, Dave Villante and Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. George Bentinck is here. He's a product manager for Camera Systems at Cisco Meraki. >> Hi. >> Great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks very much. >> So, we were saying, Meraki's not just about wireless. It's all about cameras now. Tell us about your role. >> The Meraki camera is relatively new. It's one of the newer products. It came out just over two years ago and it's really embodying what we're about as a business unit at Cisco, which is about simplicity. It's about taking normally complex technology and sort of distilling it so customers can really use it. So what we did with the camera was we spoke to a lot of our customers, listened what they had to say, and they were fed up with the boxes. They don't want these servers, they don't want the recording solutions, they just want to get video. And so we built a camera which has everything inside it. All the video is stored in the camera using the latest solid state storage. And then we did all the analytics and the other sort of cool things people want to do with video in the camera as well. And yet to make it easy to use, it's all managed from the Meraki cloud. So that allows you to scale it from one camera to 100 cameras to 100,000 cameras and yet have nothing else other than the cameras and the management from the cloud. >> Well the way you describes it sounds so simple, but technically, it's a real challenge, what you've described. What were some of the technical challenges of you guys getting there? >> Well, there are sort of two components. There's the device piece and when we look at the device piece, we basically leverage the latest advances in the mobile phone industry. So if you look at the latest iPhones and Android phones, we've taken that high density, highly reliable storage and integrated it into the camera. And then we've also taken the really powerful silicone, so we have Qualcomm Snapdragon system-on-chip in there and that performance allows us to do all the analytics in the camera. And so the second piece is the cloud, the scaling, and the management. And with video, it's lots of big data, which I'm guessing you guys are probably pretty familiar with. And trying to search that and know what's going on and managing its scale can be really painful. But we have a lot of experience with this. Meraki's cloud infrastructure manages millions of connected nodes with billions of connected devices and billions of pieces of associated metadata. This is just like video, so we can reuse a lot of the existing technology we've built in the cloud and now move it to this other field of video and make it much easier to find things. >> And when people talk about, y'know, the camera systems, IoT obviously comes into play and security's a big concern. Y'know, people are concerned about IP cameras off the shelf. Y'know, everybody knows the stories about the passwords where, y'know, they never changed out of the factory and they're the same passwords across the, and so, y'know, presumably, Cisco Meraki, trusted name, and there's a security component here as well. >> Yeah, absolutely. This is actually one of my favorite topics because, unfortunately, not many people ask about it. It's one of those, it's not an issue until it's an issue type of things and we put a lot of work in it. I mean, Cisco has security in its DNA. It's just like part of what we do. And so we did all of the things which I think every camera vendor and IoT vendor should be doing anyway. So that's things like encryption for everything and by default. So all the storage on the camera is encrypted. It's mandatory so you can't turn it off. And there's zero configuration, so when you turn it on, it won't record for a few minutes while it encrypts its storage volume and then you're good to go. We also manage all the certificates on the camera and we also have encrypted management for the camera with things like two-factor authentication and other authentication mechanisms on top of that as well. So it's sort of leaps and bounds ahead of where most of the decision makers are thinking in this space because they're physical security experts. They know about locks and doors and things like that. They're not digital security experts but the Cisco customer and our organization, we know this and so we have really taken that expertise and added it to the camera. >> Yeah, George, security goes hand-in-hand with a lot of the Cisco solutions. Is that the primary or only use case for the Meraki camera? Y'know, I could just see a lot of different uses for this kind of technology. >> It really is very varied and the primary purpose of it is a physical security camera. So being able to make sure that if there's an incident in your store, you have footage of maybe the shoplifting incident or whatever. But, because it's so easy to use, customers are using it for other things. And I think one of the things that's really exciting to me is when I look at the data. And if I look at the data, we know that about 1% of all the video we store is actually viewed by customers. 99% just sits there and does nothing. And so, as we look at how we can provide greater value to customers, it's about taking the advances in things such as machine learning for computer vision, sort of artificial intelligence, and allowing you to quantify things in that data. It allows you to, for example, determine how many people are there and where they go and things like that. And to maybe put it all into context, because one of my favorite examples is a Cisco case study in Australia, where they're using cameras at a connected farm as part of an IoT deployment, to understand sheep grazing behavior and so this camera watches the sheep all day. Now as a human, I don't want to watch the sheep all day, but the camera doesn't care. And so the farmer looks at eight images representing eight hours, which is a heat map of the animals' movement in the field, and they can know where they've been grazing, where they need to move them, where this might be overgrazed. And so the camera's not security at this point, it really is like a sensor for the enterprise. >> Yeah, it's interesting, actually I did a walk through the DevNet Zone and I saw a lot of areas where I think they're leveraging some of your technology. Everything from let's plug in some of the AI to be able to allow me to do some interesting visualizations. What we're doing, there's a magic mirror where you can ask it like an Alexa or Google, but it's Debbie, the robot here as to give you answers of how many people are in a different area here. A camera is no longer just a camera. It's now just an end node connected and there's so many technologies. How do you manage that as a product person where you have the direction, where you put the development? You can't support a million different customer use cases. You want to be able to scale that business. >> Absolutely, I think the North Star always has to be simplistic. If you can't go and deploy it, you can't use it. And so we see a lot of these cool science projects trapped in proof of concept. And they never go into production and the customers can't take advantage of it. So we want to provide incredibly simple, easy out-the-box technology, which allows people to use AI and machine learning, and then we're the experts in that, but we give you industry-standard APIs using REST or MQTT, to allow you to build business applications on it directly or integrate it into Cisco Kinetic, where you can do that using the MQTT interface. >> So, Stu, you reminded me so we're here in the DevNet Zone and right now there's a Meraki takeover. So what happens in the DevNet Zone is they'll pick a topic or a part of Cisco's business unit, right now, it's the Meraki, everyone's running around with Meraki takeover shirts, and everybody descends on the DevNet Zone. So a lot of really cool developer stuff going on here. George, I wanted to ask you about where the data flows. So the data lives at the edge, y'know, wherever you're taking the video. Does it stay there? Given that only 1% is watched, are you just leaving it there, not moving it back into the cloud? Are you sometimes moving it back into the cloud? What's the data flow look like? >> You can think of this interesting sort of mindset, which is let's have a camera where we don't ever want to show you video, we want to give you the answer because video is big, it's heavy. Let's give you the answer and if that answer means we give you video, we give you video. But if we can give you the answer through other forms of information, like a still image, or an aggregate of an image, or metadata from that, then we'll give you that instead. And that means customers can deploy this on cellular networks out in the middle of nowhere and with much fewer constraints than they had in the past. So it really depends but we try and make it as efficient as possible for the person deploying it so they don't have to have a 40G network connection to every camera to make the most of it. >> Yeah, so that would mean that most of it stays-- >> Most of it stays at the edge in the camera. >> Talk a little bit more about the analytics component. Is that sort of Meraki technology the came over with the acquisition? What has Cisco added to that? Maybe speak to that a little bit. >> So the camera is a relatively new product line within the last two and a half years and the Meraki acquisition was, I think we're only like five years or more now down that road, so this is definitely post-acquisition and part of the continued collaboration between various departments at Cisco. What it enables you to do is object detection, object classification, and object tracking. So it's I know there's a thing, I know what that thing is, and I know where that thing goes. And we do it for a high level object class today, which is people. Because if you look at most business problems, they can be broken down into understanding location, dwell times, and characteristics of people. And so if we give you the output of those algorithms as industry-standard APIs, you can build very customized business analytics or business logics. So let me give you a real world example. I have retail customers tell me that one of the common causes of fraud is an employee processing a refund when there's no customer. And so what if you could know there was no customer physically present in front of the electronic point of sale system where the refund is being processed? Well, the camera can tell you. And it's not a specialist analytics camera, it's a security camera you were going to buy anyway, which will also give this insight. And now you know if that refund has a customer at the other side of the till. >> Well, that's awesome. Okay, so that's an interesting use case. What are some of the other ones that you foresee or your customers are pushing you towards? Paint a picture as to what you think this looks like in the future. >> It really is this camera as a sensor so one of the newer things we've added is the ability to have real-time updates of the lights' conditions from the camera, so you can get from the hardware-backed light sensor on the camera the lux levels. And what that means is now you have knowledge of people, where they are, where they go, knowledge of lights, and now you can start going okay, well maybe we adjust the lighting based on these parameters. And so we want to expose more and more data collection from this endpoint, which is the camera, to allow you to make either smarter business decisions or to move to the digital workplace and that's really what we're trying to do in the Meraki offices in San Francisco. >> And do you get to the point or does the client get to the point where they know not only that information you just described but who the person is? >> Yes and no. I think one of the things that I'm definitely advocating caution on is the face recognition technology has a lot of hype, has a lot of excitement, and I get asked about it regularly. And I do test state-of-the-art and a lot of this technology all the time. And I wear hats because I find them fun and entertaining but they're amazingly good at stopping most of these systems from working. And so you can actually get past some of the state-of-the-art face recognition systems with two simple things, a hat and a mobile phone. And you look at your phone as you walk along and they won't catch you. And when I speak to customers, they're expectation of the performance of this technology does not match the investment cost required. So I'm not saying it isn't useful to someone, it's just, for a lot of our customers, when they see what they would get in exchange for such a huge investment, it's not something they are interested in. >> Yeah, the ROI's just really not there today. >> Not today, but the technology's moving very fast so we'll see what the future brings. >> Yeah, great. Alright, George, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was really, really interesting. Leave you the last word. Customer reactions to what you guys are showing at the event? Any kind of new information that you want to share? >> There are some that we'll talk about in the Whisper Suite, which I will leave unsaid, unfortunately. It's just knowing that you can use it so simply and that the analytics and the machine learning come as part of the product at no additional cost. Because this is pretty cutting-edge stuff. You see it in the newspapers, you see it in the headlines and to say I buy this one camera and I can be a coffee shop, a single owner, and I get the same technology as an international coffee organization is pretty compelling and that's what's getting people excited. >> Great and it combines the sensor at the edge and the cloud management so-- >> Best of both worlds. >> That's awesome, I love the solution. Thanks so much for sharing with us. >> Fantastic. >> Alright, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Cisco Live! Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> (Narrator) Live from Madrid, Spain it's theCUBE. Covering HP Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> We're back in Espana. theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage is here covering HPE Discover Madrid, day one. I'm Dave Villante with my cohost, Peter Burris. Well, it's all coming into focus, Peter. >> It is, it actually is. >> It is, I mean, it better be after five or six years. It's taking longer than I had hoped. But, the story is consistent now. The last four Discovers, despite some of the distractions of spin merges and so forth the story of hybrid IT, the Intelligent Edge, bringing automation is somewhat new to the data center. Services lead starts to actually make sense. >> Peter: Through private cloud. >> Yep, and you know, we talked about at the top of the show today, the spectrum. We're running AWS re:Invent, we got a big presence there. Obviously its affected the entire industry, and then you've got HPE, the likes of HPE, Dell EMC, to a certain extent IMB basically not given up, say wait a minute, these are our customers, they want Cloud on prem, we're gonna deliver to them. They want Cloud in the Cloud, we'll help them get there. >> Peter: Oracle. >> Oracle as well. Oracle, different strategy. We should talk about that a little bit. But, summarize, you know synthesize your take on the day, and where we're at with HPE. >> So I would say that the... What we talked about this morning was, when Meg first took over the reins, she stopped a whole bunch of stuff, and HP stopped spending and behaving like a company that believed that it had to get scale as fast as possible because that was the only way to win. And she ended up going back to, look, lets focus on the customers and what the customers are trying to do, and not how we're trying to leverage our assets. And it kind of took a pause, and for a while you could kind of see them start putting things back together, and you kind of had a sense of where it was all gonna go. But this has been kind of the coming out party for what the last five years have been about. As you said, I think we've seen the three core messages that certainly line up, you know, with a little bit of cavat here. Their story is very much aligned with what we think the industry needs to see right now. At least, our research suggests. Gonna need true private Cloud, the ability to put the Cloud service where your data requires, and not force your business to move it's data to some Clouds location. You're gonna need increased automation within your IT organization, because you're not going to be able to support these more complex workloads if you don't find ways to increase the productivity of your people, and even more importantly, dramatically reduce even the possibility of a failure, and that's what AI inside IT's all about. And very importantly, the idea that you gotta put more intelligence at the Edge, that that interface between the real world and the digital world is really what's gonna drive the dynamic in the computing industry over the next few years. And HP has shown up and they're not just talking about it, they're showing it. And it's nice to be there. >> Well it's interesting, Meg Whitman came by and was talking to us, and we were talking about the Aruba acquisition. She said, look, we bought this because it was a nice business, it could show some growth. And it was, you know, a way to compete with Cisco and differentiate, because, hey were trying to compete head to head with Cisco and it was going okay, but not great. Aruba gave them a clear differentiator. And then all of the sudden, the Edge became this tailwind. And it kinda got them there early. >> Well, lets remember what Mark Hurd talked about. He said, well, why are you going after the network world. I like their 67% gross margins. Okay, so... >> Dave: Talking about 3Com. >> He's talking about 3Com, he's talking about all the things that HP did as it tried to get into the networking business. >> Dave: Cisco, right, yeah. >> It was purely driven by gross margin. They didn't quite have the customer story down. Aruba has always been a great customer story. They've always say, look, this is your business challenge. You know, are you sick and tired of dropping your connection as you go from one conference room to another. This is your security issues. On, and on, and on. They had three or four concrete value propositions that just worked for customers. That acquisition at that time it happened, it happened about the same time that HP was starting to rededicate itself back to thinking about it's customer base. So, it's not surprising to me that that integration, or that merger has been one of the more successful that HP's undertaken. >> So again, the spectrum. You know, you got Andy Jassy on one end who started this whole thing, and you got the likes of HPE on the other end. And you're right, it does align with a lot of things that we've been saying around true private cloud and so forth. Jassy doesn't buy it. He flat out says, this is old guard thinking trying to hang on to the past. But, our analysis suggests it's not just old guard thinking. It's customer thinking because they can't just move their business into the Cloud. Thoughts. >> Totally agree. So I'd say there are a couple of things about it. It's customer thinking based on the realities of the data assets that they're trying to leverage as they transform into a digital business. Data is real, and it has, it's gonna weigh in on how your infrastructure looks. And the Edge is gonna have characteristics that mean you're gonna have to do automation right there, right where the action is. You're not gonna be able to send it up to the Cloud all the time. There's gonna be a lot of business events that take place in that core, in that second tier. So, it's not that it's... It's not that it's old versus new guard. And here's why I say that, Dave. It's because in many respects, we're giving some props to HP right now, which is great. But, in many respects, the story that HP is telling today is a story that is still being largely, has largely been told, largely fashioned by what AWS has done over the last 10 years. And that is, here's what the Cloud experience is. And now HP's adding, "And you want that Cloud experience whatever your data demands." The difference, therefore, between the old guard and and the new guard, or the old way and the new way, on premise, is that it used to be, it was pretty clear to me, and I think it was pretty clear to us, that the old, that the talk about private Cloud was simply a way of thinking about how to put new marketing spin on the enhancement, upgrade, replacement cycle for servers and storage. And that did not work. It just flat out didn't work. >> Well it worked in the sense that it froze the market a little bit. >> Eh, it froze the market a little bit. But, overall, for the past five or six years our growth has been slowing down pretty dramatically. So, I would say, that the data is pretty unassailable. You're not gonna move everything to a central location. But, you're gonna want that Cloud experience. And so, the question is, are we gonna see great Cloud experience where the physics, the legality, and inertia property governance demands that you put your data. >> Well, I thought Jesse St Laurent was gonna talk about the next wave. He mentioned Multi-Cloud. >> Peter: He's CTO of... >> Of SimpliVity, now HPE Hyperconverged. >> Peter: Right. >> I thought he was talking about, he said the next wave is Hyper-V. Okay, check. I mean, like, that's like to me a feature of the product. And then he sort of talked about Multi-Cloud. And that really where I thought he was gonna go, because when you look at what AWS is doing, and I've always contended, they're years ahead, we can debate how many. Five, seven, three. Probably closer to five than three. But where they're headed is serverless, you know, functional programming. Stateless, new programming models. It's all about the developer to those guys. And that's the parlance that they speak in. The Hyperconverge guys all talk in VM terms. And that's not how Amazon talks or thinks. So, you know, the question is, is that a next wave, and can the Enterprise guys >> Peter: Talk developer? >> Yeah, can they catch that wave? >> So, I think... Look, lets be honest. AWS is a great company. There's no question about it. They've done things that a lot of old style infrastructure jocks thought couldn't be done. And they did it. And they continue to, they continue to demonstrate that they are really engaging their customers and turning that insight and knowledge into great services. So, this is not, this is not a knock on AWS. But what ultimately has to, and I think AWS is recognizing this as well, because they're starting to talk a lot about IoT and their approach to IoT, recognizing that not all the data is gonna be sourced up in the Cloud. The data is gonna be generated in a lot of other places and they have to participate there as well. So, from our perspective ultimately, we would say that Multi-Cloud, the ability to, the ability to naturally place your data where the data needs to be placed, which is increasingly is gonna be closer to the event that needs to be automated, that needs to have that high quality experience, is gonna be the way, is gonna be the dominant factor in determining the characteristics of the application infrastructure that you put in place. And, we'll see what happens. Serverless, yeah, serverless is great. You can do a lot with it. But, you can also still build junky applications with serverless. Microservices are great, yeah. But you can still build junky applications with Microservices. >> A lot of those services aren't so micro as Neil Raden would say. >> That's exactly right. So you can still do bad stuff in the Cloud. So, at the end of the day, the whole point is to get a new compact between business who have the vision of the digital services and digital capabilities they want, IT professionals and developers who are gonna generate, create that value, and then infrastructure people who are not who are allowing the data and the workload to fall where is naturally should fall, and then making it possible for the industry to work together, because that's what users want. >> Okay, so let me ask the question differently. You agree that the Cloud guys generally, Amazon specifically, is ahead of the Enterprise guys when it comes to infrastructures and servers. >> Peter: Yeah, there's no question there. >> Okay, is the lead extending, or is it dwindling. Amazon's lead in your view. >> Well, so look, you have Amazon's lead, first of you have to think about Amazon's lead relative to Microsoft, Oracle, and others. And, they're not as far ahead as, they're not that far ahead of Microsoft. >> Dave: Right. >> So there's a real battle raging there. Google has at least as good a relationship with a lot of developers as Amazon does. When you think about what a lot of developers are building in the Cloud experience, they're using Kubernetes, they're using TensorFlow, they're increasingly going to use Istio. I mean, so, it's not, There's gonna be increased energy being put forward to try to talk about how that Cloud innovation's gonna happen. >> So those are the three Hypercloud guys. >> Those are three Hypercloud guys. And, as we talked about, they are increasingly defining what the Cloud experience is. I think what we're seeing now, is the Enterprise guys stepping back and saying, you know what, we have to define our roll in the Cloud experience, and not presume that we're gonna tell everybody what the Cloud experience is. Which is what they were doing for many years, and they failed at it. >> And you could make an argument that HPE as a smaller company with less assets to encumber them, can actually deliver that through partnerships, maybe not as profitably, most definitely not as profitably, but actually can deliver that outcome for customers as a more agile customer. >> We'll see, we'll see, because... >> Dave: You could make that argument is all I'm saying. >> Well, you could make that argument, but remember, we're moving from, and even HP announced some stuff today with Greenlake, moving from a product orientation increasingly to a service orientation. And there's demonstration that you can do things with your business model that may allow you to do things in different levels of profitability at somewhere, you know, when you take more of a services approach to things. So, I think the most important message that we can leave from today is that, our observation on that notion of a spectrum, from, you know, public put it on public, to a true private orientation which is hybrid where an on premise play is gonna be essential. That spectrum seems to be real, number one. Number two, however, it doesn't mean that AWS in particular is not going to be successful at driving the definition of the Cloud experience, and number three, we're now seeing at least one company, but we're also starting to see indications of others, acknowledge that their roll in all of this will be to take whatever the leaders in Cloud are talking about and make it possible, that experience possible where the data requires and that will include on premise. >> So, and I agree with you, AWS is defining that Cloud experience. So, as Ana Pinczuk was speaking, I just wrote down, I jotted down, AWS Cloud experience, which they've defined, and HPE Cloud experience. So I've got pay as you go, you know this kind of flex capacity, kind of. I mean it's as close as you can probably get. >> Peter: Greenlake. >> Yeah, Greenlake Kind of. >> Something we all need to learn more about. But, it's getting there, it's getting there. >> But it will never get there entirely, right? Because, they're gonna require to be, you know, buy a years worth of capacity, thresholds, you're gonna have thresholds above and threshold below. >> Except, we also heard, again I think there's more, I don't wanna, I think you're right. >> It's nuanced, it's not 100% of the way there. >> You start throwing the balance sheet and finances in there and how you're gonna do it. >> We'll come back to that. So, elastic? Again, kind of. You know, to a point. Integrated services? Like tons of them, like thousands a year? Some of those, but as I was saying before, HP's ecosystem play, allows them to pick and choose. >> Yeah, but remember Dave, okay keep going, keep going. >> Security, sort of, let's call it the Amazon way. Here's our security, it's good. But take it or leave it. And then, the HP approach is your way. HPE, you have security your way. If that's the edict of the organization, we can map to that. One Cloud versus Multi-Cloud. Obviously, HPE has a Multi-Cloud strategy, Amazon doesn't. They don't care about managing Multi-Clouds. They care about managing their Cloud. And then services as a service. HPE can deliver that and, Amazon I got a question mark, it's their ecosystem that's delivering those services. So I guess the point is, that I'm making is, maybe it's not the exact replica of the Amazon experience, but there are attributes of it, which appeal to Enterprise IT. >> Peter: That's right. >> Which Amazon is really not interested in delivering. >> Peter: Right. >> Ergo, the assumption is, my assumption is that, that business, that on prem business will be here for a long, long time. >> Peter: Absolutely. >> Indefinitely. >> And we would agree with that. In fact we think, ultimately, that there's gonna be enough uniqueness about how businesses use their data and treat their data that we expect to see this notion of true private Cloud actually be a bigger overall piece of the marketplace than the one size fits all, with a degree of customization possible, that Amazon's providing. But, again, this is, we have to be careful here. Because as analysts, we're sort of naturally falling into this trap of setting up AWS and HPE or any of these folks in opposition. There are companies that have very, very different opposed visions of how this is gonna play out. Specifically, we can talk about Amazon saying it's all gonna be IaaS, we're gonna out paths in there. And then, increasingly obviously, Microsoft and Oracle saying, oh no, we're gonna have application Clouds. You're gonna buy and application Cloud, and you're gonna do a whole bunch of stuff in that. What we see today is not in opposition, >> Dave: Right. >> to the AWS vision, it's not. It is a, okay, great. But for this type of work, this type of data, this type of workload, this type of reality, chances are, you're gonna need to put this type of stuff here, and have it fit into the overall motion of Cloud experience, and it doesn't have to be a complete substitute. It just has to work for that class of workload. >> Well, but, bringing it back to HP, and we gotta wrap, is HPE does not have an application Cloud, right? >> Peter: They don't. >> And as a result, it's going to be in a knife fight. With Amazon, with Dell EMC, and with China. >> It's gonna be in a knife fight with companies that are like it. China, you know, Huawei, Dell EMC, Cisco. >> You're right, you're right. Amazon's setting the pricing tone and the business model tone. >> Look, right now it's Amazon and Microsoft, are helping to set the stage of what this is all gonna look like. >> So, again, bottom line is, it's not a 60% gross margin company, Mark Hurds vision of going to compete with Cisco. It's a 25 to 32% gross margin business. >> Peter: That's really focused on customer problems. >> Focus on customer problems throws off a couple billion dollars of cash, it can eke out a little bit of growth. You know, that's what it is. >> Not a bad business. >> No, it's a great business, actually. Alright, Pete, thanks the wrap on day one. We'll be back tomorrow 8:30 am local time, right? >> Man: Sure. >> Roughly. >> Man: 8:45. >> 8:45 local time. Check out theCUBE.net, where you'll see this show, you'll see the other shows that we're doing including re:Invent John Furrier and the crew are over there today. That's a wrap for day one, this is theCUBE. We'll see you tomorrow. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Washington D.C., it's the CUBE covering dot next conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to Nutanix.next everybody. This is Dave Villante with Stu and this is the CUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Alan Cohen is here, he's the chief commercial officer of hot startup Illumio. Alan, friend of the CUBE, great to see you again. Always happy to be here. Wherever you guys are, I'm going to show up. >> It's nice not to be in Silicon Valley for a change, hanging out with the CUBE. >> Right, the real world, you'll have to talk to John Courier that things happen outside of Palo Alto. >> So the timing of this interview is perfect because we just had Stephen Hadley on, who's sort of a public policy expert. We were talking about basically how industry should really lead with this whole new era of cyber and he was talking about if we let government do it, they're probably going to mess it up. >> Right. >> So it's guys like yourselves and others in our industry that really have to lead, so, but before we do that, give us the update on Illumio. You guys did another big raise, you guys are smokin' hot, growing like crazy, what's the update? >> So I mean so since we spoke to you guys last we did have a little funding round. It was led by J.P. Morgan Chase. You might have heard of them, they have credit cards and branches and things like that. Actually, they're also a customer of Illumio's. Which is a really big deal. They are advanced, so we're growing very rapidly, lot of geographic expansion, lot of technology expansion and I think actually today and this morning Sineal and the technology roadmap talked about micro segmentation, the ability to create really smaller and smarter water tight compartments around your data, down even to the workload or the process level is just going to be a way that people are going to have to do their computing. And so as you look at the journey now from data center or enterprise cloud into public cloud, this approach to security that we're building is a key component allowing people to take advantage of cloud architectures. So that's also really led to our growth. >> So I think it's fair to say you guys are really the pioneer of this concept of micro segmentation. Others have sort of hopped on board. >> Well I got to give Vmware credit, they actually did break- >> They were first. >> Yeah, but they- >> To commercialize it. >> Yeah, they commercialized it in their environment, I would say Illumio is the first company through software to commercialize it in all environments. In a cloud, in a box, with a fox, in a house, with a mouse, bare metal virtual machines, containers, Amazon, Azure, Oracle, across all of those environments simultaneously. And I think we were talking earlier this morning about the idea of multi-cloud, right? So you're going to pick your cloud based on where the workload and the applications should live. So your security has to move with that. And that's really what we've focused on. >> Right, okay, so VMware's there, you know Cisco's in there as well, so- >> Yeah, I've heard of those guys. >> Duking it out, so how do you feel about our competitive position, talk about about that a little bit. >> Well, we feel good that our competitors have finally kind of woken up and started to amplify our message. About this, you know, at the end of the day, you have to make a decision whether your goal in building security is to drive the sale of your infrastructure, or is to make your customer's environment more secure wherever they run. So in their own environments they're clearly adding value. But at the end of the day they're dependent on maintaining server licenses or upgrading your switches. That's not a really good motivation for how to make your security decision. You should make your security decision based on what you're trying to do, not what infrastructure you're in. >> Okay, so, now what about the traditional security guys? Are they catching up, are they hopping on board, do they just think this is an itch that's not worth it, or they just missed the boat? >> Well, you know, with the I'm being respectful and aggressive at the same time, I think most of the firewall vendors have been primarily focused on the perimeter, and then they've looked at APT technologies, things like fire I have done and they've made a lot of their investments there, so they have not been as focused. Now, to also be fair, in the heart of the data center in the public cloud, you don't see firewall technology. Right? So people said I have this hard crunchy exterior, I protect the perimeter of my environment, and I assume once I protect the perimeter the inside is safe. So their traditional model didn't lend itself to that kind of introspection and focus on the interior. What's happened in the last couple of years, though, and you had Hadley on, is that the focus of cyber has shifted to the interior, right? So, Target, Sony, OPM, all the big breaches started with basically vulnerabilities on the inside that have then kind of spread and then ex-filtrated outside of the organization. So we started focusing on the inside out, not the outside in, I mean to say I think ultimately the large security venues and perimeters, they're partners of ours, because they're going to wind up working both sides of the equation. >> Yeah, because even an air gap doesn't protect you. >> You don't want an air gap, actually, you know, we have a partnership with F-five, we actually talked about it with the CUBE couple years ago, because you think about the consequence of something like a load balancer, it sits between tiers of applications, you don't want that to be a black box. So the basically the world is moving into the zero trust model, so trust nothing. And you know it's kind of like running it you know like in a mob, it's like the Sopranos, you've got to make sure everybody does the collections and everybody's got to check in everyday, everything's got to be part of the security fabric. >> Alan, so, bringing it back to the Nutanix discussion. We had Sue Neil on earlier in the keynote this morning I saw broad ecosystem, love our partners, saw Illumio, >> Huge logo, wasn't that great? They got me. >> Great glow man, they finally figured it out. >> Release the Krakken, yeah, you know what, up there. And I asked Neil, how do you balance the we're going to have broad ecosystem but seems a lot of that energy is being put into AHV. And one of the examples he brought up was like oh, if you buy, if you use AHV, you get micro segmentation for free included in there. What are you seeing, how does Nutanix fit into micro segmentation environment? >> Yeah, I mean I showed her the slides too, right, so? If you remember how he defined it, if I have ten workloads, and I want to segment them off, I will put it in what I call micro segmentation. And that to me is like a virtual network segment, but he said you don't have to use an FCN overlay, and that is not any different than what a security group does in Amazon or Azure and I assume Google has its own version of that. When you go into that couple of levels deeper, that's where Illumio lives. So we live inside public cloud security groups today and across them and to non-environment. So you got to remember a lot of people are going to have Nutanix workloads, but then they're going to have workloads sitting in Azure and they're not going to have anything to do with each other for awhile from a software point of view. So illumio is really that bridge. So I mean I think it's actually a fairly synergystic kind of relationship to do that. Actually for me, that recognition, and that communication and micro segmentation into their base, is really good. So, you're always going to have a little bit of overlap. I mean they're smart and they really build great software. >> So it sounds like you're saying the definitions of micro segmentation are a little bit complementary and you're also going to help with that heterogeneous mess that everybody has and gives them consistent security across those environments. >> Right, we don't define micro segmentation that way. I might want to say I want to micro segment off one workload or I want to segment processes or I'm going to have a Kubernetes application running someplace and then I'm going to have the core database someplace else. How do I move across that? >> So it's granularity and flexibility of the use case that you provide. >> Yeah, we have this thing we call the wheel of cheese, from the segmentation. So there's like rough front use segmentation, and then there's micro and then there's nano, so over time, people are going to basically close the gates tighter and tighter. Because the challenge in cyber is lateral spread. Like you guys you have these fast high speed networks. So if I compromise one server, one workload, today it flies through the environment, so you actually have to keep closing those doors from a security point of view. So, I mean I think it was a great first move for them. And I mean, we like it, it works really well. We work with other vendors, cloud vendors, today that do some form of segmentation. >> So I know we're super tight on time, everybody wants to talk security, and your schedule's packed John Furry is watching, no surprise. >> Oh, hey John. >> So when he has to give up the mic there's always crowd chat, so he's got a question on crowd share for you. Ask Alan about the economics of the cyber security business models with all this stuff going on with cyber war and ransom ware and- >> Yes, so here are some stats. You guys are great analysts you focus on this. So cyber security is about a hundred billion dollar business somewhere between 80 and 100, depending on who's counting on that. But think about the scheme of overall IT. How much is IT? Three trillion dollars? >> Trillions, yeah. >> Right, so a hundred billion dollars is a fairly small segment. Now, I would be disingenuous as a vendor, but I'll go for it, I would say people are highly underinvested in security relative ... Stu's laughing his head off, right? >> Well, is that not a big enough pie for you, come on. >> No, it's not, I think the pie should be like five times bigger, I mean. >> You don't want to make that comparison with health insurance, do you? >> You have health insurance, you have life insurance, you insurance on your car, you have insurance on your home. You guys are high net worth individuals, you probably have policies so you don't get sued. You probably spend ten percent of your total income on forms of insurance, things that protect you and your family. >> So you're saying it should be triple the spend. >> Why are you only spending two or three percent of your IT given the criticality of the data that's sitting in those environments? >> Okay, so we know we only pay for insurance when we need it, in marketing the joke's always I waste half of money, I just don't know which half. You know, how much are we wasting in security vs. >> Well, I mean I think if you're buying infrastructure based models you're spending, you're building, you're wasting a lot. Illumio is a consumption-based model based on how much you use. So I mean we look more like you know, it's a per operating system instance that you pay a yearly license for. So I think we're closer to the Amazon consumption model for security, and we've led with that four years ago, when we started the company. So I think if security became more like you pay as you go, and less pay for just having it, just as we talk about the different models for infrastructure, where I own it, where I rent it, where I pay as I go, I think you will get better spends. I mean, we effectively sell security the way Uber sells or Lyft sells car, when you need to pay for it, use it, you pay for it. There's probably a whole lot of efficiency that could be there, but I'd argue it's under invested. >> Well, the other dimension that is inside out vs. outside in, I mean, you're building more moats. We know still more money is spent over here. >> Well here's a stat. So the vast bulk of data center security, so the perimeter firewall market's about a ten billion dollar market. Only about Cisco just sent out their announcement this week about their cloud index. 17 percent of the traffic, net traffic that goes in and out of the data center and about 80 percent of it's inside, and a little bit of it goes to the co-load, right? So you are putting all your investment on 17 percent of your traffic. So that's like buying all the cable channels. You watch the cooking channel? You're paying for it. You're watching rugged outdoor fishermen channel? You're paying for it. So I think you're going to have to, just like you're making infrastructure investments are moving to paying for what you use, your security investments have to go the same way. So why would you put all your money only guarding 17% of your network traffic? >> Okay, we're out of time, but so, last question, what are you guys going to do, what are you doing with this big bag of money that you just got? Where are you directing it? What's your strategy? >> Well, I mean we're probably going to have to hire the CUBE to come to like Illumio. >> Fantastic, let's do that. >> Yeah, we're totally going to do that but ... >> Oh really, well, what's the show, Illumio World? >> Well there's going to be an Illumio World when we launch it you guys are going to be there. >> Fantastic, I'd love to be there. >> So, there's no doubt. You have that in writing, you have that on video, like testimony. >> Yeah, even better. >> Yeah, like I can't even say I didn't tweet it, like you'll have a record of it. >> We can shame you into it. >> You can totally shame me into it. I think you're going to see a lot of geographic expansion of the company. We're about to expand down under and other places we've been mostly in North America and parts of Europe. And a lot of investments going into the channels, strategic partnerships and I mean a lot like Nutanix, I mean our company's half R&D, we're going to just as heavily a year from now we'll still be half R&D. Even with growth, because we've got a lot of platform build, and we're building a platform that's going to be around for decades. So there's still a lot of engineering to do too. >> Al, we love having you on, you're plugged in, great Silicon Valley friend, really appreciate you coming back. >> Appreciate you having me today. >> You're welcome. Okay, keep it right there everybody, we're back with our next guest after this short break. This is the CUBE here live from next.conf. We'll be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back everyone, we're here live in Las Vegas for theCUBE's exclusive three days of coverage for Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Discover 2017, also known as HPE Discover, I'm Jeff Furrier siliconANGLE, here is my co-host, David Villante with Wikibon.org Our next guests are Jeff Carlat, Senior Director, Solutions Good Market for HPE, Internet of Things and Tushar Halgali, who's the IoT Senior Manager at Deloitte these guys putting together all the solutions. Welcome back to theCube, great to meet you, thanks for joining us. >> Jeff: You bet, it's great to be here. Great to see you guys again. >> So one of the things, actually, digital transformation which is really overblown we all know we are in this digital transformation wave. But the thing that we've been hearing on the queue over the past, I'd say 6 months of event coverage, the consistent theme with digital transformation is business transformation, and really people putting it into action. And that really is whether it's a service provider we've heard from earlier, and also just businesses trying to get their value chains and reconstruct their architectures at a business level but then having their infrastructure be responsive to that. And that's cool, but really IoT has kind of changed the equation, right, that's what you guys are doing so I want just dig right into it, IoT wave that's hitting here. >> Jeff: Right >> John: Your thoughts on the impact to customers in real time to their world. I mean obviously they have refresh cycles they're going through all kinds of infrastructure they had apps, Cloud-native on the horizon, Hybrid Cloud what's the impact to their business? How has IoT changed the game for the customers? >> Jeff: Well I'll start it, you can add on. First off, IoT brings the promise of changing the game, but not everyone is really realizing that yet, first-off because right now there's still many, many business challenges for companies of all sizes. Ya know the lack of internal corporate sponsorship to do a massive transformation and change, or the organization and the culture within. Cause you're talkin' a full life cycle digitization rather than, ya know investing or dropping new applications technology wise we've got problems, IoT represents IT merging with OT, so you've got this partnership and your solutions and offerings need to transcend your core data center and your IT technologies with the traditional operational technologies. You're talking companies that have been, Bosch and National Instruments, and folks that have been in the marketplace for some time so it's harder, it's heavy lifting, and there're limitations in the customer environment around the current IT architecture, so first and foremost to get the benefit, you've got to get them across the chasm to be able to deliver that new transformation. >> John: Tushar, I want you to weigh-in on this because the question also kind of digging in here a bit kind of subtext of the original question, where's the mindset of the customer? Are they having a wake-up call moment, are they beyond that? Where are they in the progress bar, if you will, on the IoT? Yeah, they've had some pre-existing infrastructure, operational technologies, sensors. Is it a wake-up call? Where are they? >> Tushar: Yeah, so I mean I think what is happening really is that a lot of organizations are now beginning to look into business outcomes and what technology does for them, right. A lot of them are saying "Well why should we invest on anything else?" So, companies are becoming really focused on top line growth ya know, bottom line cost optimization, and ultimately margin improvement for their shareholders. So, as industry lines are blurring, as new entrants are coming into markets, and new threats are being created there is more pressure from shareholders to come up with new growth opportunities. IoT as a field is sort of encapsulates, and takes all these different technology domains and puts it all together. Case and example, I mean, since 1970 to 2010 the worldwide productivity for manufacturing was about four percent every year, and then it just dropped to one percent. Now that's a really big deal, right. Manufacturing costs are about 18-20 percent of the costs of goods sold for a manufacturing client, so how do you increase the productivity because any impact on the productivity, or reduced down time for a manufacturing client, not only has cause on revenue but also a lot on the profit margin, right. The same thing around retailers. Because of the online presence, and because of the sales are increasing over there retail margins have reduced from 10.5 percent to about 9 percent. So retailers are asking "Well, how do we increase our sales in the in-store channel?" Where 85 percent of their sales are coming. So IoT is a huge component in delivering that. >> John: You bring up a good point. What I love about the IoT, and some of the stuff you guys are doing, is that it's the confluence of big data meets real infrastructure, and what you're referring to we hear this in the ad business all the time. "I don't know where my spins going." It's an instrumentation game, right. So talk about that impact because now actually not an art it's actually science as well. You can actually instrument it and focus on those areas. >> Tushar: I mean absolutely, just to build on the marketing story that you just talked about, that's a huge piece in retail, right. So if you have a multi-brand retailer you want to be able to not only see what your customers are doing, but also try and monetize the data. So one channel is to look into who your marketers are, advertisers are, and then be able to place the ad at the right place, in the right context with the consumer that you might have in your store. And a lot of this is about in-store data attribution right. What is the ROI that marketers and the advertisers are getting back for the spin that they have. And so ROI with the help of, Beacons and Colts and wifi all these technologies, is able to sort of capture all of that location data the contextual data, the behavioral data of the clients along with wireless infrastructure data. Put it all together and create that picture. >> Jeff: And what I'm seeing customers are kind of one of two camps. Those that understand a grocket, but they don't know where to start. How do I truly start digitizing? Then the other ones are they don't fully realize the value and the necessity to start transforming, or their going to be out of business. >> Tushar: Yep. >> Jeff: I mean go look at a lot of examples, your brick and mortars >> Tushar: Yep. >> Jeff: talk about your retails. I think this is where we're coming together to really deliver and make it easier for those clients... >> John: It's the classic case of early adopters. Believers and non-believers, and the believers kind of go jump in the deep end, waffle around, learn how to swim. And then the non-believers become believers cause they get bitten in the butt with cost >> Jeff: Yeah. >> John: or some sort of impact. >> Jeff: Exactly right. >> Tushar: Or their out of business. >> David: But it's a really hard problem for organizations. So and you mentioned it before, is that companies have to go through their digital transformation, but they have to fund it. And it's hard to fund it if your having to grow your top-line, and cut the cost of your legacy systems. Okay so part of the problem is you talk about digital transformation, it's all about technology, it's all about data certainly IoT plays into that as John pointed out but people really don't understand the value of their data. The accounting industry doesn't recognize value of data on the balance sheet. There's really no standards. People don't know how to monetize data. So how can you guys help customers through those really gnarly problems? Where do you start? >> Tushar: Well I mean what we started with was an industry focused view, right. So Deloitte goes to the market by industry, so let's take retail and manufacturing, whichever the case might be, and what we really are looking into is an industrial digital value chain transformation story. So we'll take the value chain off an industry, break it down into processes, and then break that down further into use cases. We'll look at a use case, look at the value drivers of the use case. See what economic impact, or the business outcomes that might be derived of those use cases. And then when you aggregate all of them it starts creating a shareholder value impact, and that becomes really interesting. So case and example, for a retailer you can look at improving the basket size, or in-store conversion improving the the foot fall traffic. All of that improves the growth, increases the revenue. You talk about asset efficiency or improving the resources or the associates, their utilization to store the supply chain operations improvement. All of that improves the cost optimization and together impacts the margin. So we put that picture together for our clients to see in real economic terms. >> David: And data sits at the center of that analysis, right? >> Tushar: Well, correct. So the enablement of the use cases happen through technology and as the various facets of technology, the ERB system, the CRM the point-of-sales, the Beacons, the wifi all work together. The data generated will create 360 degree views of the customer, which then leads to all of these outcomes. >> John: Tushar talk about the value chain piece on that. Because I think that's indicative of IoT's impact as well as other things that are digitally connected. What is the difference between the digital value chain, in terms of its configuration its value, verus non-digital? How they used to approach it from a management perspective, and obviously digital is a little bit different. Is there any characteristics you can point out that you've seen in your observations, and with your engagement with customers, that jump out? >> Tushar: Sure, I mean the traditional value chain I think is very linear, right. If you take a manufacturing value chain for example a lot of it was let's do R&D, come up with a product, then let's go procure the product, the raw materials. Then make the product, then you ship it, logistics, and then you do after sale services. It's very linear one after the other. With the admit of data and the way you capture at every stage of the value chain. Well different stages now talk to one another. So as a machine is about to break you can create a new order, and then it improves the production. So it's less linear and more interrelated, and so the value chain is no longer very simple it's very complex, but by showing visibility into each stage of the value chain, that's where value created and captured from. >> David: And the data model is very complex, >> Tushar: Absolutely. >> David: Before you've got external data and now you've got a whole new data quality challenge >> Tushar: That's right. >> David: and data access challenge. Okay so back to John's question about where are we on the maturity meter? Is it sort of second inning here or the game is just starting, national anthem? >> Jeff: Well, hey for certain industries I think we're on second inning. You go look at areas like oil and gas, I mean there is a lot of historical work going on around machine learning, AI. Go and look at automotive, autonomous vehicles semi-autonomous vehicles, I think that's advancing and advancing rapidly. But I'll guarantee there are many, many industries that they don't even realize how much data they have. And yes there may be tag in two to three percent of that. This is a new wave. This is a really, really exciting time. >> John: So Jeff, on that point are you finding that, that makes a lot of sense actually if people have existing operational technologies, they have some legacy experience in some systems. It may not be connected to IT so they have some legacy with respect to that piece. >> Jeff: Perfect, perfect example. Part of our joint partnership and the announcement that we're making together around IoT is not only deliver the consulting the advisory services, but we're delivering prepackaged offerings specifically for vertical use margins. Asset maintenance and monitoring, we're coming together, bringing together our edge line capabilities we're bringing together PTC and National Instruments from the center. Bringing all this together in consortium, building an appliance and its going through consulting of nature of proof of concept to show and prove through proof of concepts the value that a customer can achieve by harnessing all that data, and being able to actually drive predictive analytics and then well once they see the benefits of that the value, the proof in the pudding, they will expand that across their entire production line, then its just going to go skyrocket. >> John: Alright talk about the relationship with Deloitte. I'd like you guys to just take us through a day in the life of a use case and how someone would envision and engage with you guys. Obviously Deloitte well known on the services side you guys got great credibility and track record, also with you guys IoT new market, how do you guys engage? What does a joint relationship look like? Take us through an example. >> Jeff: Well I'll start. First off we're building off of twenty years of joint partnership together, and a day in the life is we strategically sit down and we take the assets we can bring to the table as the new HPE, and that spans heavily the infrastructure and some of the support, point next services capability and we bring that in with the capabilities of Deloitte and we build these offerings, and we build a comprehensive program to take it to market, and have those discussions at the right level of the organization and hold their hand through this whole transformation process. Don't worry we got ya covered. We can help you get through this, and we can demonstrate the value on the returns. >> Tushar: So yeah, I'll just build on this. Some of the offerings that we have built together now, so as we get a client who's let's say interested in IoT what we'd actually do is sort of work with them and say let's do an IoT workshop, right. It might be a one day workshop, we might get our industry experts that are very focused on the vertical. We might get our technology experts. We might get our ecosystem partners who are doing startups and things of that sort, so they kind of know what is going on in the marketplace. We're together then we'll sit down we'll figure out what's a value chain transformation story. What are the things, let's say a manufacturing client just take for example, needs to do to go from a modern factory to connected factory to a smart factory to do that manufacturing transformation story. What are those 50 60 use cases that they need to go through. And out of that what are the one or two use cases that they need to do today that'll deliver near term tangible value. So for those 50-60 let's create the business case that delivers the enterprise shareholder return. Today what do they need to do to get that quick win. Take those two-three use cases, the offerings that Jeff spoke about, let's take those offerings and within 8 weeks let's deliver a proof of concept that shows the client I can take one of your assets, connect them, get the data out, show the inside, and then create the roadmap for scaling it out to make it a reality. >> Jeff: Start small, think big, and scale fast. That's what we say. >> John: Alright that's a great point I'm glad you brought that up because I want to ask the tough question. Cause this is the bottom line, we hear a lot of customers through our research Wikibon team, and we get a lot of "There's tons of barriers in front of me." So I want to ask you what are the barriers and how do they get over those obstacles, but also privately a lot of CXOs say to us, "Look it, this is like a four year sports contract, if I'm not up and running in four years, I'm out of job." So the notion of bringing the consultant, and HP, and we're going to do a focus group, and we're going to lay this out. The old days, back in the early ERP days, those time cycles were 18 months just to get going, and do the organizational transformation. They need proof on the table immediately. >> Tushar: That's right. >> John: So the Ford CEO was replaced, not sayin that was because of this, but people have short tenure, they need to see results immediately. >> Tushar: That's right. >> John: So the psychology of the pressure, with the work that needs to get done are two huge issues. What are the obstacles? And then the psychology of showing the results immediately. >> Tushar: I think in terms of the sort of business challenges we have a lot of centers around leadership and sponsorship. Do you have a tech focused culture in the company? Right. Is there collaboration between business and IT? Do you have expertise for IoT within the business, or within the enterprise and outside? Right. Those are some very basic, it's people, people, people all the time. From a technology stand point a lot of this is around the whole IT OT convergence piece of things. Right, it's this very complex domain. Nobody has all the knowledge base, so how do you get that to work? And traditionally IT hasn't played well with OT and vice versa. So how do you get that? Standards are evolving around security, privacy things of that sort, so how do you keep up with that? And finally, there are so many different solutions. How you do make sense out of that? Procurement is painful, right. And that's where some of the solutions like Jeff talked about were made. The solutions were at the procurement cycle becomes really simple. >> John: So tons of choices out there, >> Tushar: Right, >> John: That's an obstacle init of itself. >> Tushar: Exactly >> Jeff: Yeah >> Tushar: So how do we deal with these challenges, and how do we jumpstart the story. If you take the principle of agile and software development that's what we have pulled into our offerings, right. Instead of spending three, four, six months in trying to figure out what the universe is going to look like, and how things will change, it's not like that. We've taken sprint approaches to our delivery, like I shared earlier it's about that one day IoT journey workshop, quickly get that done, get it out of the way. >> John: Not a lot of waterfall, which that prolongs that organizational transformation piece >> Tushar: Correct. And then its constant recalibration, that's what we want to focus on. Let's show some quick wins in eight week increments. >> Jeff: And I'll guarantee as we are showing the quick wins in certain verticals, their dropping like dominoes because when they see their competition all of sudden gain efficiencies and providing greater experience for their clients or their customers, believe me everyone wants a piece of that. >> John: Bottom line there's obstacles to point. Move fast, start small, think big, move fast, I love that. And again there's a psychology out there it's real, and being agile, the waterfall takes too long. Alright guys thanks so much for sharing the inside of IoT, congratulations. Event here, what do you think, what's going on for you guys real quick we'll end the segment, final words. >> Jeff: Final words? >> John: 2017 Discover, what's your take away so far? >> Tushar: Well my take away is we are just at the cusp here. In IoT we are still in the, I'd call it the crawl stages of this. IoT's going to be huge, very exciting times coming, and it's going to impact every industry. >> Jeff: Yeah my parting word, I love to see the partner first mentality we have in here. The fact that we are here with all SIs our OT partners. I also love to see we are now building and designing innovations, such as the HP Edgeline Conversion systems from the ground up, specifically for IoT, same thing with Aruba Portfolios. We got a great set of tools and a great set of partners to work with. >> John: We didn't bring up Aruba, we had a big conversation on that earlier. Tushar, Jeff thanks so much for sharing the insight. Internet of Things, Industrial of Things. This theCube, the video of things here at HPE Discover 2017 I'm John Furrier, Dave Villante. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Stay with us. (upbeat techno music)