(techno music intro) >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of SuperComputing Conference 2022. We are here at day three covering the amazing events that are occurring here. I'm Dave Nicholson, with my co-host Paul Gillin. How's it goin', Paul? >> Fine, Dave. Winding down here, but still plenty of action. >> Interesting stuff. We got a full day of coverage, and we're having really, really interesting conversations. We sort of wrapped things up at Supercomputing 22 here in Dallas. I've got two very special guests with me, Scott from Intel and David from Dell, to talk about yeah supercomputing, but guess what? We've got some really cool stuff coming up after this whole thing wraps. So not all of the holiday gifts have been unwrapped yet, kids. Welcome gentlemen. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, let's start with you, David. First of all, explain the relationship in general between Dell and Intel. >> Sure, so obviously Intel's been an outstanding partner. We built some great solutions over the years. I think the market reflects that. Our customers tell us that. The feedback's strong. The products you see out here this week at Supercompute, you know, put that on display for everybody to see. And then as we think about AI in machine learning, there's so many different directions we need to go to help our customers deliver AI outcomes. Right, so we recognize that AI has kind of spread outside of just the confines of everything we've seen here this week. And now we've got really accessible AI use cases that we can explain to friends and family. We can talk about going into retail environments and how AI is being used to track inventory, to monitor traffic, et cetera. But really what that means to us as a bunch of hardware folks is we have to deliver the right platforms and the right designs for a variety of environments, both inside and outside the data center. And so if you look at our portfolio, we have some great products here this week, but we also have other platforms, like the XR4000, our shortest rack server ever that's designed to go into Edge environments, but is also built for those Edge AI use cases that supports GPUs. It supports AI on the CPU as well. And so there's a lot of really compelling platforms that we're starting to talk about, have already been talking about, and it's going to really enable our customers to deliver AI in a variety of ways. >> You mentioned AI on the CPU. Maybe this is a question for Scott. What does that mean, AI on the CPU? >> Well, as David was talking about, we're just seeing this explosion of different use cases. And some of those on the Edge, some of them in the Cloud, some of them on Prem. But within those individual deployments, there's often different ways that you can do AI, whether that's training or inference. And what we're seeing is a lot of times the memory locality matters quite a bit. You don't want to have to pay necessarily a cost going across the PCI express bus, especially with some of our newer products like the CPU Max series, where you can have a huge about of high bandwidth memory just sitting right on the CPU. Things that traditionally would have been accelerator only, can now live on a CPU, and that includes both on the inference side. We're seeing some really great things with images, where you might have a giant medical image that you need to be able to do extremely high resolution inference on or even text, where you might have a huge corpus of extremely sparse text that you need to be able to randomly sample very efficiently. >> So how are these needs influencing the evolution of Intel CPU architectures? >> So, we're talking to our customers. We're talking to our partners. This presents both an opportunity, but also a challenge with all of these different places that you can put these great products, as well as applications. And so we're very thoughtfully trying to go to the market, see where their needs are, and then meet those needs. This industry obviously has a lot of great players in it, and it's no longer the case that if you build it, they will come. So what we're doing is we're finding where are those choke points, how can we have that biggest difference? Sometimes there's generational leaps, and I know David can speak to this, can be huge from one system to the next just because everything's accelerated on the software side, the hardware side, and the platforms themselves. >> That's right, and we're really excited about that leap. If you take what Scott just described, we've been writing white papers, our team with Scott's team, we've been talking about those types of use cases using doing large image analysis and leveraging system memory, leveraging the CPU to do that, we've been talking about that for several generations now. Right, going back to Cascade Lake, going back to what we would call 14th generation power Edge. And so now as we prepare and continue to unveil, kind of we're in launch season, right, you and I were talking about how we're in launch season. As we continue to unveil and launch more products, the performance improvements are just going to be outstanding and we'll continue that evolution that Scott described. >> Yeah, I'd like to applaud Dell just for a moment for its restraint. Because I know you could've come in and taken all of the space in the convention center to show everything that you do. >> Would have loved to. >> In the HPC space. Now, worst kept secrets on earth at this point. Vying for number one place is the fact that there is a new Mission Impossible movie coming. And there's also new stuff coming from Intel. I know, I think allegedly we're getting close. What can you share with us on that front? And I appreciate it if you can't share a ton of specifics, but where are we going? David just alluded to it. >> Yeah, as David talked about, we've been working on some of these things for many years. And it's just, this momentum is continuing to build, both in respect to some of our hardware investments. We've unveiled some things both here, both on the CPU side and the accelerator side, but also on the software side. OneAPI is gathering more and more traction and the ecosystem is continuing to blossom. Some of our AI and HPC workloads, and the combination thereof, are becoming more and more viable, as well as displacing traditional approaches to some of these problems. And it's this type of thing where it's not linear. It all builds on itself. And we've seen some of these investments that we've made for a better half of a decade starting to bear fruit, but that's, it's not just a one time thing. It's just going to continue to roll out, and we're going to be seeing more and more of this. >> So I want to follow up on something that you mentioned. I don't know if you've ever heard that the Charlie Brown saying that sometimes the most discouraging thing can be to have immense potential. Because between Dell and Intel, you offer so many different versions of things from a fit for function perspective. As a practical matter, how do you work with customers, and maybe this is a question for you, David. How do you work with customers to figure out what the right fit is? >> I'll give you a great example. Just this week, customer conversations, and we can put it in terms of kilowatts to rack, right. How many kilowatts are you delivering at a rack level inside your data center? I've had an answer anywhere from five all the way up to 90. There's some that have been a bit higher that probably don't want to talk about those cases, kind of customers we're meeting with very privately. But the range is really, really large, right, and there's a variety of environments. Customers might be ready for liquid today. They may not be ready for it. They may want to maximize air cooling. Those are the conversations, and then of course it all maps back to the workloads they wish to enable. AI is an extremely overloaded term. We don't have enough time to talk about all the different things that tuck under that umbrella, but the workloads and the outcomes they wish to enable, we have the right solutions. And then we take it a step further by considering where they are today, where they need to go. And I just love that five to 90 example of not every customer has an identical cookie cutter environment, so we've got to have the right platforms, the right solutions, for the right workloads, for the right environments. >> So, I like to dive in on this power issue, to give people who are watching an idea. Because we say five kilowatts, 90 kilowatts, people are like, oh wow, hmm, what does that mean? 90 kilowatts is more than 100 horse power if you want to translate it over. It's a massive amount of power, so if you think of EV terms. You know, five kilowatts is about a hairdryer's around a kilowatt, 1,000 watts, right. But the point is, 90 kilowatts in a rack, that's insane. That's absolutely insane. The heat that that generates has got to be insane, and so it's important. >> Several houses in the size of a closet. >> Exactly, exactly. Yeah, in a rack I explain to people, you know, it's like a refrigerator. But, so in the arena of thermals, I mean is that something during the development of next gen architectures, is that something that's been taken into consideration? Or is it just a race to die size? >> Well, you definitely have to take thermals into account, as well as just the power of consumption themselves. I mean, people are looking at their total cost of ownership. They're looking at sustainability. And at the end of the day, they need to solve a problem. There's many paths up that mountain, and it's about choosing that right path. We've talked about this before, having extremely thoughtful partners, we're just not going to common-torily try every single solution. We're going to try to find the ones that fit that right mold for that customer. And we're seeing more and more people, excuse me, care about this, more and more people wanting to say, how do I do this in the most sustainable way? How do I do this in the most reliable way, given maybe different fluctuations in their power consumption or their power pricing? We're developing more software tools and obviously partnering with great partners to make sure we do this in the most thoughtful way possible. >> Intel put a lot of, made a big investment by buying Habana Labs for its acceleration technology. They're based in Israel. You're based on the west coast. How are you coordinating with them? How will the Habana technology work its way into more mainstream Intel products? And how would Dell integrate those into your servers? >> Good question. I guess I can kick this off. So Habana is part of the Intel family now. They've been integrated in. It's been a great journey with them, as some of their products have launched on AWS, and they've had some very good wins on MLPerf and things like that. I think it's about finding the right tool for the job, right. Not every problem is a nail, so you need more than just a hammer. And so we have the Xeon series, which is incredibly flexible, can do so many different things. It's what we've come to know and love. On the other end of the spectrum, we obviously have some of these more deep learning focused accelerators. And if that's your problem, then you can solve that problem in incredibly efficient ways. The accelerators themselves are somewhere in the middle, so you get that kind of Goldilocks zone of flexibility and power. And depending on your use case, depending on what you know your workloads are going to be day in and day out, one of these solutions might work better for you. A combination might work better for you. Hybrid compute starts to become really interesting. Maybe you have something that you need 24/7, but then you only need a burst to certain things. There's a lot of different options out there. >> The portfolio approach. >> Exactly. >> And then what I love about the work that Scott's team is doing, customers have told us this week in our meetings, they do not want to spend developer's time porting code from one stack to the next. They want that flexibility of choice. Everyone does. We want it in our lives, in our every day lives. They need that flexibility of choice, but they also, there's an opportunity cost when their developers have to choose to port some code over from one stack to another or spend time improving algorithms and doing things that actually generate, you know, meaningful outcomes for their business or their research. And so if they are, you know, desperately searching I would say for that solution and for help in that area, and that's what we're working to enable soon. >> And this is what I love about oneAPI, our software stack, it's open first, heterogeneous first. You can take SYCL code, it can run on competitor's hardware. It can run on Intel hardware. It's one of these things that you have to believe long term, the future is open. Wall gardens, the walls eventually crumble. And we're just trying to continue to invest in that ecosystem to make sure that the in-developer at the end of the day really gets what they need to do, which is solving their business problem, not tinkering with our drivers. >> Yeah, I actually saw an interesting announcement that I hadn't been tracking. I hadn't been tracking this area. Chiplets, and the idea of an open standard where competitors of Intel from a silicone perspective can have their chips integrated via a universal standard. And basically you had the top three silicone vendors saying, yeah, absolutely, let's work together. Cats and dogs. >> Exactly, but at the end of the day, it's whatever menagerie solves the problem. >> Right, right, exactly. And of course Dell can solve it from any angle. >> Yeah, we need strong partners to build the platforms to actually do it. At the end of the day, silicone without software is just sand. Sand with silicone is poorly written prose. But without an actual platform to put it on, it's nothing, it's a box that sits in the corner. >> David, you mentioned that 90% of power age servers now support GPUs. So how is this high-performing, the growth of high performance computing, the demand, influencing the evolution of your server architecture? >> Great question, a couple of ways. You know, I would say 90% of our platforms support GPUs. 100% of our platforms support AI use cases. And it goes back to the CPU compute stack. As we look at how we deliver different form factors for customers, we go back to that range, I said that power range this week of how do we enable the right air coolant solutions? How do we deliver the right liquid cooling solutions, so that wherever the customer is in their environment, and whatever footprint they have, we're ready to meet it? That's something you'll see as we go into kind of the second half of launch season and continue rolling out products. You're going to see some very compelling solutions, not just in air cooling, but liquid cooling as well. >> You want to be more specific? >> We can't unveil everything at Supercompute. We have a lot of great stuff coming up here in the next few months, so. >> It's kind of like being at a great restaurant when they offer you dessert, and you're like yeah, dessert would be great, but I just can't take anymore. >> It's a multi course meal. >> At this point. Well, as we wrap, I've got one more question for each of you. Same question for each of you. When you think about high performance computing, super computing, all of the things that you're doing in your partnership, driving artificial intelligence, at that tip of the spear, what kind of insights are you looking forward to us being able to gain from this technology? In other words, what cool thing, what do you think is cool out there from an AI perspective? What problem do you think we can solve in the near future? What problems would you like to solve? What gets you out of bed in the morning? Cause it's not the little, it's not the bits and the bobs and the speeds and the feats, it's what we're going to do with them, so what do you think, David? >> I'll give you an example. And I think, I saw some of my colleagues talk about this earlier in the week, but for me what we could do in the past two years to unable our customers in a quarantine pandemic environment, we were delivering platforms and solutions to help them do their jobs, help them carry on in their lives. And that's just one example, and if I were to map that forward, it's about enabling that human progress. And it's, you know, you ask a 20 year version of me 20 years ago, you know, if you could imagine some of these things, I don't know what kind of answer you would get. And so mapping forward next decade, next two decades, I can go back to that example of hey, we did great things in the past couple of years to enable our customers. Just imagine what we're going to be able to do going forward to enable that human progress. You know, there's great use cases, there's great image analysis. We talked about some. The images that Scott was referring to had to do with taking CAT scan images and being able to scan them for tumors and other things in the healthcare industry. That is stuff that feels good when you get out of bed in the morning, to know that you're enabling that type of progress. >> Scott, quick thoughts? >> Yeah, and I'll echo that. It's not one specific use case, but it's really this wave front of all of these use cases, from the very micro of developing the next drug to finding the next battery technology, all the way up to the macro of trying to have an impact on climate change or even the origins of the universe itself. All of these fields are seeing these massive gains, both from the software, the hardware, the platforms that we're bringing to bear to these problems. And at the end of the day, humanity is going to be fundamentally transformed by the computation that we're launching and working on today. >> Fantastic, fantastic. Thank you, gentlemen. You heard it hear first, Intel and Dell just committed to solving the secrets of the universe by New Years Eve 2023. >> Well, next Supercompute, let's give us a little time. >> The next Supercompute Convention. >> Yeah, next year. >> Yeah, SC 2023, we'll come back and see what problems have been solved. You heard it hear first on theCube, folks. By SC 23, Dell and Intel are going to reveal the secrets of the universe. From here, at SC 22, I'd like to thank you for joining our conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, with my co-host Paul Gillin. Stay tuned to theCube's coverage of Supercomputing Conference 22. We'll be back after a short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Coming to you today from our Palo Alto studios. It's COVID is still going on. So, there's still no shows, but the good news is we've got the technology we can reach out to the community, and bring them in from far, far away. So today joining us from Virginia across the country is Dave Scott. He is the director of Product Management for Veritas, Dave, great to see you. >> Thanks Jeff, great to be here. >> Absolutely. So let's jump into it. You guys have been about backup and recovery for years and years and years, but oh my goodness, how the landscape continues to evolve between, you know, public cloud and you know, all the things happening with Amazon and Google, and Microsoft. And then now, of course big push for Hybrid. And, you know, we're the workloads, and kind of application centric infrastructure. You guys still got a backup and secure all this things. I wonder if you can give us a little bit of your perspective on, you know, kind of the increasing complexity of the computing environment, has all these different kind of pieces of the puzzle, are kind of gaining traction at the same time. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm on the compliance side of the company. So I'm more on looking after requirements around collection of content preparation for litigation, making sure you're adhering to compliance regulations in different parts of the world. And, I mean that's a constantly evolving space. One of the, so basically the products I look after are Enterprise Vaults, Enterprise Vault.cloud, and eDiscovery platform. And, as you say, I mean, one of the biggest challenges is that customers are starting to move, you know, customers are looking for flexibility in how they deploy our solutions. We've had a product in market with enterprise vault for about 20 years. And so, we have a lot of customers that have a lot of data on premise, and now they're starting, you know, they've got cloud mandates, they want to move that content to the cloud. So we have gotten very aggressive at building out our SaaS, archiving solution, Enterprise Vault.cloud. But we also provide other options. Like if you want to move enterprise vault from your data center on premise, to your tenant in Azure, Amazon, we fully support that. In fact, we're taking advantage of cloud services to make that a much more viable option for our customers. >> So let's get into the regulation and the compliance, 'cause that's a big piece of the motivation beyond just, you know, making sure that the business can recover, that the regulation and compliance thing is huge. You know, the GDPR, which has been around now for a couple of years, California protection act. And I think what I find interesting from your perspective is you have this kind of crazy sea of regulations that are different by country, by industry, by data type, and they're evolving all the time. So, that's got to be a relatively complex little grid you got to keep track of. >> Yeah, it makes the job interesting. But it also is a huge competitive advantage for us. We have a team that researches data privacy regulations around the world, and it's been a competitive advantage in that we can be incredibly nimble in creating a new policy. We had some opportunities come up in Turkey, there's a regulation there that mirrors GDPR called KVKK or KVKK I think they call it locally. And it's, a joke that it's kind of like GDPR, but with jail time for noncompliance. So there's a lot more motivation on the part of an IT department, to make sure they're meeting that requirement. But it has to do with dealing with, you know, data privacy again, and ensuring the safety of the continent. That's proliferating throughout the world. You mentioned California Consumer Privacy Act, many other States are starting to follow what the California Consumer Privacy Act. And I'm sure, it won't be long before we have a data privacy act in the US, that's nationwide instead of at the state level. In other industries that we serve, like the financial services industry. There's, you know, there's always been a lot of regulation around SEC and FINRA in the US, that's spreading to other countries now, you know, MiFID II in the European union has been huge. And that dictates you need to capture all voice conversations, all text conversations, instant messages, everything that goes on between a broker and the end customer, has to be captured, has to be supervised, and has to be maintained on warm storage. So that's a great segment for us as well. That's an area we play very well in. >> So it's interesting. 'Cause in preparing for this, I saw some of the recent announcements around the concept of data supervision. So I think a lot of people are familiar with backup and recovery, and continuity, but specifically data supervision. What does that really mean? How is that different than kind of traditional backup and recovery, and what are some of the really key features or attributes to make that a successful platform? >> Yeah, no, it is really outside of the realm of backup and recovery. Archiving is very different from backup and recovery. And then archiving is about preserving the communication, and being able to monitor that communication, for the purposes of meeting compliance regulations. So, in the case of our solution, Veritas advanced supervision, It sounds a bit big brotherish, if I'm being honest, but it is a requirement for the financial service community that you sample a subset of those communications looking for violations. So you're looking for insider trading, you're looking for money laundering. In some companies, at the HR departments, or even just trying to ensure that their employees are being compliant. And so you may sample a subset of content. But it's absolutely required within the financial services community. And we're starting to see a lot of other industries, you know, leveraging this technology just to ensure compliance with different regulations, or compliance with their own internal policies. Ensuring a safe work place, ensuring that there's not any sexual harassment, or that type of thing going on through office communications. So it is a way of just monitoring your employees communications. >> So it's while I remember when, when people used to talk about messaging, and kind of the generic sense, like I could never understand why, you know, it's an email, it's a text. I mean, little did I know that every single application is now installed on every single device that I have, has a messaging app, you know, has a direct messaging feature. So, I mean the complexity and, and I guess the, the variability in the communication methods, across all these applications and, you know, probably more than half of them, that most of us work on are SaaS as well, really adds a ton of complexity to the challenge that you were just talking about. >> Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'm old. You know, when I started, all of my communications were on a Microsoft mail server, all my files were in the file, you know, the server room down the hall. Now I've got about 20 different ways to communicate on my phone. And, the fragmentation of communication does make that job a lot more, more challenging. You know, now you need to take a voice conversation, convert it to text. With COVID and with, you know, the dawn of telemedicine, or at least the rapid growth, and telemessaging, telemedicine sorry. There is a whole new potential market for this kind of supervision tool. Now you can capture every doctor patient interaction that takes place over Zoom or over a Team's video, transcribe that content, and there's a wealth of value in that conversation. Not only can you tell if the doctor is responding to the patient, if the interaction is positive or negative, is the doctor helping to calm the patient down? Do they have good quality of interaction? That sort of thing. And so there's incredible value in capturing those communications, so you can learn from the... you know learn best practices, I guess. And then, feed that into a broader data lake, and correlate the interaction with patient outcomes, who are your great doctors? who are your, you know, that type of thing. So that's an area that we're very excited about going forward. >> Wow, that's pretty interesting. I never kind of thought that through, because I would have assumed that, you know, kind of most of the calls for this type of data were based on some type of a litigation. You know, it was some type of an ask or a request, that I was going to ask you, now how does that actually work within the context of this sea of data, that you have. Is it usually around a specific individual, who's got some issues and you're kind of looking at their ecosystem of communications, or is it more of a pattern, or is it potentially more of a keyword type of thing that's triggering, You know, kind of this forensics into this tremendous amount of data that's in all these enterprises. >> Yeah, it's a little bit of everything. Like, so first of all, we have the ability to capture a lot of different native content sources. But we also leverage partners to bring in other content sources. We can capture over 80 different content sources, all the, you know, instant messaging, social media, of course email, but even voice communications and video communications. And to answer your question as far as litigation, I mean, it really depends on the incident right? in the past, in the old days, any kind of litigation resulted in a fire drill where you're trying to find every scrap of evidence, every piece of information related to the case. By being a little bit proactive and capturing your email, and your communication streams into immutable storage in an archive, you're ready for that litigation event. And you've already indexed that content, you've already classified that content. So you can find the needle in the haystack. You can find the relevant content to prove your innocence, or at least to comply with the request for information. Now that has also led to solving similar issues for public sector. US federal, with the Freedom of Information Act. They're getting all kinds of requests for right now for COVID related communications. And that could be related to lawsuits. it could be related to just information around how stimulus funds are being spent. And they've got to respond to these requests very, very quickly. Our team came up with a COVID-19 classification policy, where we can actually weed out the communications related to COVID-19. To allow those federal agencies, and even state and local agencies, to quickly respond to those types of requests. So that's been an exciting area for us. And then there's still the SEC requirements to monitor broker dealers and conversations with end users, to ensure they're not doing anything, they shouldn't be doing like insider trading, >> Right. Which is so different, than kind of a post event, you know, kind of forensics investigation, and then collecting that data. So I'm curious, you know, how often are you having to update policies and update, you know, kind of the sniffers and the intelligence that goes behind the monitoring to trigger a flag, And then that just go into their own internal kind of compliance reg and set off a whole another chain of events? I would imagine. >> Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things we can do with our classification policies. And like, in the case of the COVID policy, we just kind of crowd source that internally, and created a policy, in about a week, really. That we, you know, we shaped the basic policy and then kept refining it, refining it, testing it. And we were able to go from start to finish, and have it publicly available within about a week and a half. It was really a great effort. And we have that kind of ability to be very nimble, to react to different types of regulations as they become, you know, get out there. And then there's also a constant refining of even data privacy for every country that we support. You know, we have data privacy regulations for the entire European union and for most countries around the world, obviously the US, Canada, Australia, and so on. And, you can always make those policies better. So we've introduced feedback loops where our customers can give us feedback on what works and what isn't working, and we can tweak the policies as needed. But it is a great way to respond to whatever's going on in the world, to help our customer base, which, you know, is largely the financial verticals, the public sector verticals, but even healthcare is becoming more important for us. >> So Dave, I wonder if there's some other use cases that people aren't thinking about, where you guys have seen value in this type of analytics. >> Yeah, I mean, definitely the one thing that I think is just starting to emerge as the value that's inherent in communications. So I mentioned earlier the telemedicine idea, and, you know, can you learn from doctor-patient interactions if you're capturing them over telemedicine vehicles, you know again, Video Chat, Zoom, and that sort of thing. But similarly, if you've captured communications for a long time, as many of our customers have, what can you do with that data? And how can it feed into a broader data lake to give you new insights? So for example, if you want to gauge whether a major deal is about to close, you know, you can rely on your sales reps to populate the CRM and give you an indication it's 10% complete, it's 50% complete, whatever. But you're dependent on all the games that salespeople play. It would be far better to look at the pattern of a traditional deal Closing. You know, first you start out with one person at your company talking, to one person at the target customer that leads to meetings, that leads to calendar invites, that leads to emails being sent back and forth. You can look at the time of response, how quickly does the target customer respond to the sales rep? How often are they interacting? How many people are they interacting with? Is it spanning different GEOS? Is it spanning different groups within the company? Are there certain documents being sent back and forth, like, a quote for example. All of this can give you a higher confidence that that deal is going to close, or that deals failing. You don't really know. You can also look at historical data, and compare the current account manager to his predecessor. You know, does the current account manager interact with his customer as much as the former rep did? And is there a correlation in their effectiveness? You know, based on kind of their interactions, and their just basic skills. So I think that's an exciting field, and it shines a new light on the data that you have to collect, to comply with regulations, the data you have to collect for litigation and other reasons. Now there's other value there. >> Right. That's a fascinating story. So the reason that you guys would be involved in this, is because you're sitting on, you're sitting all that comms data, because you have to, for the regulation. I mean, what you're describing sounds like a perfect, you know, kind of sales force. Plug in. >> Absolutely. >> With a much richer dataset, versus as you said, relying on the sales person to input the sales force, information which would require them to remember their password, which gets reset every three weeks. So the chances of that are pretty slim. (laughs) >> Yeah. There's a fact, I think I've read a stat recently that about, you know, only 10% of information is actually captured in a CRM. You know, contact information and that sort of thing. But if you're looking at their emails, if you're looking at their phone calls and their texts, and that sort of thing, you get a rich set of data on contacts and people that you're interacting with at a target customer, and, you know, sales. More than any other job, I think sales has high turnover. And so you need that record of, you know, off the counter. One account rep leaves, you don't want to lose all their contacts and start over again. You want a smooth handover to the next person. >> Right. >> If you capture all that content from their communications into CRM, you're in great shape. >> Dave, I want to get your take on something that's happening now, because you're so dialed into policy, and policy and regulations, which are such a giant determinant of what people can and should and should not do, with data. When you take something like COVID and the conversations about people going back to work, and contact tracing. To me it's like, Wow! You know, it's kind of this privacy clash against HIPAA, and, you know, that's medical information. And yet it's like this particular disease has been deemed such that it kind of falls outside the traditional, you know, kind of HIPAA rules. They're not going to test me for any other ailments before I come in the door at work, but they, you know, eventually we're going to be scanning people. So, you know, the levels of complexity and dynamicism, if that's even a word, around something like that, that's even a one off, within a specific, you know, kind of medical data is got to be, you know, I guess, interesting and challenging, but from a policy perspective and an actual handling of that information, that's got to be a crazy challenge. >> Yeah. I mean, we do expect that COVID it's going to lead to all kinds of litigation and Freedom of Information Act request. And that's a big reason why we saw the importance very quickly, that we need a classification policy to highlight that content. So what we can do in this case is we can, first of all, identify where that content is stored. We have a product called data insight that can monitor your file system and quickly locate. If you've got a document that includes, you know, patient data or anything related to COVID-19, we can find that. And now as we bring in the communications, we can flag communications, as we archive them and say, this is related to COVID-19. Then when a litigation happens, you can look, you can do a quick search and you can filter on the COVID-19 tag. And the people you're concerned with, and the date range you're concerned with, you can easily pull in all of the communications, all of the file content, anything related to COVID-19. And this is huge for, again, for public sector, where there are subject to finance, you know, sorry, Freedom of Information Act request. But it's also going to affect every company, because like, it's going to be litigation around, when a company decided that they would work from home, and did they wait too long. You know, and did someone get sick because they weren't aggressive enough. There's going to be frivolous lawsuits, there's going to be more tangible lawsuits, and, there's going to be all kinds of activity around how stimulus funds were spent and that sort of thing. So, yeah. That's a great example of a case where you've got to find the content quickly and respond to requests very quickly. Classification go a long way there. >> Yeah. That's the lawyers have hardly gotten involved in this COVID thing yet. And, to your point, it's going to be both frivolous as well as justified. And did people come back too early? Did they take the right steps? It's going to be messy and sloppy, but it sounds like you're in a good position to help people get through it. So, you know, just kind of your final thoughts you've been in this business for a long time. The rate and pace of change is only increasing the complexity of veracity, stealing some good, old, big data words. Velocity of the data is only increasing, the sources are growing exponentially. You know, as you kind of sit back and reflect obviously, a lot of exciting stuff ahead, but what do you think about what gets you up in the morning beyond just continuing to race to keep up with the neverending see of changing regulatory environment? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think we have a great portfolio that can really help us react to change, and to take advantage of some of these new trends. And that is exciting, like telemedicine, the changes that come with COVID-19, what we could do for telemedicine rating doctors gauging their performance. We could do the same sort of thing for tele-education. You know, like I have two kids that have had, you know, homeschooling for the last three months, and, probably are going to face that in the fall. And, there might be some needs to just rate how the teachers are doing, how well are the classes interacting, and what can we learn from best practices there. So I think that's interesting and interesting space as well. But what keeps me going is the fact that we've got market leading products in archiving, eDiscovery, and supervision. We're putting a lot of new energy into those solutions. They've been around a long time. We've been archiving since 1998 I think, and doing supervision and discovery for 20 years. And, it's strange, the market's still there, it's still expanding, it's still growing. And, it's kind of just keeping up to change and, trying to find better ways of surfacing the relevant human communications content that said that's kind of the key to the job, I think. >> Right. Well yeah, Finding that signal amongst the noise is going to get increasingly... >> Exactly. >> More difficult than has been kind of a recurring theme here over the last 12 weeks or 15 weeks, or however long it's been. As you know, this kind of light switch moment on digital transformation is no longer, when are we going to get to it, or we're going to do a POC or let's experiment a little bit, you know, here and there it's, you know, ready, set, go. Whether you're ready or not, whether that's a kindergarten teacher, that's never taught online, a high school teacher running a big business. So nothing but a great opportunity. (laughs) >> Absolutely. >> All right. >> Absolutely. I mean, it's a very, a changing world and lots of opportunity comes with that. >> All right. Well Dave, thank you for sharing your insight, obviously regulation compliance, and I like that, you know, data supervision is not just backup and recovery is much, much bigger opportunity, in a lot higher value activity. So congrats to you and the team. And thanks for the update. >> All right. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks for the time. >> All right. He's Dave and I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are wrapping up a three, the first day of a three-day show. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Scott Lowe. He is the CEO of ActualTech Media. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having us. >> And also David Davis, director of events at ActualTech Media. Thank you so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> So, you are a former CIO that started ActualTech Media in 2012, tell our viewers, a little bit about Actual, what was the vision and what did you set out to create? What kind of content were you setting out to create? >> You know what we started and what we have today are actually very, very different things. We started off to create sort of an empire of websites that provide content to people. What we do now is we're helping connect enterprise IT vendors with buyers, that's really what we've settled on over the years. We've found our path about six years ago, five years ago, and we've been executing on that ever since. And that's our mission, is to help buyers find the right enterprise IT solutions. >> So how do you do that? I mean, what's the lead generation that it takes? >> Sure. I mean we basically for our clients who are companies including Cohesity and companies like it, we do event series we call MegaCast, EcoCast, virtual summits, webinars, things like that. We have a significant audience that we draw from to drive those events. And we also created our own content series, we call Gorilla Guide, which is a series of books to help educate IT buyers about solutions on the market about different technologies and try to help them understand the lay of an ever-evolving landscape that seems to be changing faster than it ever has before. >> Yeah, and actually one of the reasons I invited the two of you is, you both have deep background in this environment. Scott, before the Gorilla Guides, you wrote big books about Microsoft, and David, you've been training people on this ever environment but the pace is faster. You're talking about it's changing all the time. So I'd love for both of you, just here 2019 Microsoft Ignite, first impressions, how you think of Microsoft in the ecosystem. David, let's start with you. >> I mean, it's my third Microsoft Ignite and every time I come here I'm really blown away by kind of the scope of the show compared to the typical infrastructure shows that I go to. Those shows are more you know, the plumbing of the data center. This show is the keynote, is like using AI and ML to cure cancer and provide food for the world and it's just, like, really empowering and exciting and I find it very personally exciting. And Microsoft Azure just seems to be on a breakneck pace to catch up with AWS and Office 365 and all these innovations they keep coming out with, have been really impressive so I've been excited about the show, what about you Scott? >> Same, I mean, I think that when we talk about other shows, we are really looking at plumbing. That's a good word. When we're here we're looking at real solutions that are helping solve big problems. And because Microsoft has such a wide ecosystem from which to, in which it participates, from productivity and enterprise to driving quantum computing, to artificial intelligence to help tractors talk to the internet. I mean just, it does everything and it does it increasingly well. Microsoft hasn't always been thought of as the most innovative company in the world but I think in the last few years we've seen a different Microsoft and I think that has a lot to do with Satya, and the leadership change but it also has to do with just a renewed vision for what the future looks like in the terms of IT. >> And what does that future look like? I mean it is interesting because Microsoft is a middle-aged company compared to all these young upstarts that really, that much more DNA of innovation, of course Microsoft has innovation in its DNA but how would you describe what is driving the change at Microsoft? This is not your father's Microsoft. >> Honestly, the Microsoft we see today and the Microsoft we saw 10 years ago are not the same company. This is, I feel like Microsoft is almost a startup again. And I think if you look at Microsoft as a company, it has its hands in so much that each individual silo is almost a startup feel in the way it's brought to market. Let's just look at Azure. I mean, Azure has been playing catch up in a lot of ways to AWS for a lot of years just like a lot of smaller companies are playing catch up to some of their bigger cousins in the market. But Azure has proven itself, it's still not quite as capable as its bigger, you know, its bigger sibling AWS but it's more capable than GCP for example. But as Microsoft continues to iterate that service, it gets ever more capable, it gets ever deeper into the organization and I think it's something that I see that across Microsoft and everything that it's doing. It's not just Azure that's like this. It's like this with, you know, we've been looking at Windows virtual desktops. That's not all that sexy and exciting on the surface, no pun intended on surface, sorry. But it's something that the world needs at this point. And how we're trying to handle computing in the enterprise as we move into 2020. >> There's so much, you know, there's a few shows I go to every year where you just drink from the fire hose when you go to the keynote. This absolutely is one. Amazon absolutely is one where you come through in the breath and depth of what they offer. So we've spent a lot time saying something like Azure Arc, it is early. And still trying to understand exactly where that fits, by the end of the day, I'm like, wait, it's management but actually it's highly tied to the application, which really is the strength of Microsoft if you talk about what Microsoft knows. Microsoft knows your apps, you're running so many of those apps, not just Office but SQL and some of the various pieces. I'd love to hear what, give me one or two things that jumped out at you either that you want to dig into or that you've been saying "Oh I've been waiting for that." >> I mean I was really impressed with the technical keynote where they talked about Azure Stack Edge and they have this mini server that can be ruggedized or even put in a backpack, and he had the demo going with the server, a person sitting next to him using the server and he said "It has battery power," so he pulled the power plug on it and it kept working and then he said "And it's rugged," and he just dropped it on the ground and it bounced on the ground and he said "See, the demo just keeps on running." So I was like okay, that's cool, that's pretty impressive. >> Yeah we actually had the HPE, an HPE representative on the program. They're super excited to have their gear in the keynote and those of us with a hardware background do like to wrap our arms around some sheet metal every once in a while and touch this thing, software might be eating the world. >> We call you server huggers too. >> Exactly, am I an Edge hugger now? >> I guess you probably are. >> Yeah it's free shruggs. >> When it comes to, in my opinion, Arc and Edge, I'm sorry, Azure Stack, I think it shows some incredible opportunity for Microsoft moving forward. I mean Microsoft has a formidable presence in the enterprise and not just the enterprise, from the SMB to the mid-market to the enterprise. Everybody, almost, has something Microsoft. So there's an opportunity for Microsoft to further that incursion into the enterprise that can help them be a driver for Azure. Because when you think about a lot of the challenges people have with cloud it's around adoption and integration. That's not quite a soft problem but close enough when you start thinking about the myriad of technologies that Microsoft is bringing out. >> Yeah, so Scott I think your background, you worked in some of the commercial markets, you talk about the education space, areas where Microsoft had a strong history. Are they still as prominent today as they might've been back in the days when you were a CIO? >> Yes and no, it depends on the organization. If I look K12, I think Google's had a lot of inroads there because of Google Apps for Education, whether that's good or bad is really a different opinion but I think Google's taken a lot of Microsoft's market share there. And higher education, we still see a lot of Google colleges and universities of course, but we see a lot with O365. And a lot of that is because of the pricing which you can't beat free. But it also has to do with the capability that the Stack brings to bare. So I think that Microsoft is playing differently than they used to, not necessarily, probably a little bit more strongly in some ways and weaker in others. >> Another, I'd love to hear you say, think about is, the Microsoft of old I think of as rather proprietary and you will do all Microsoft. We had one of the Microsoft partner executives on the program today and he was talking about embracing VMware, embracing Red Hat, not something that you would've thought of Microsoft in the past. How do you think of Microsoft just as a trusted partner in the ecosystem today? >> Yeah, you bring up that word trust and in fact we were talking about that at lunch, Microsoft, we feel like has so much more trust when it comes to our data, when it comes to our applications. I mean there's another cloud provider that starts with a G that's well-known for selling data, selling data that they own, you know. And he talked about in the keynote today, we protect your data and the security around your data and I feel like trust is going to be a big factor in the future when people think about which cloud should I trust? Microsoft seems like they have a leg up on some other competitors. >> I may be naive but I actually trust Microsoft and I have for a long time. There's other companies I don't trust. And Microsoft I actually do trust because for Microsoft, our data is not their resource to mine. They're using it to give me things but they're not using it to sell things to other people. Does that make sense? I mean, that is we're not the product of Microsoft. And it might be a little more expensive because of that in some ways but I think it provides that layer of trust that you're not necessarily going to get from other providers in the near term. >> So we're nearing the end of 2019, what is on deck for IT pros in 2020? I'll start with you, I want to hear both your impressions but I'll start with you. >> That's a great question, we're actually doing a big event this week. In fact and that's the topic is the pillars of IT for 2020. >> I might've done some research. >> Yeah, yeah. So I mean, in fact, I was at a local user group recently and I was asking IT professionals that very question. You know, where are you going to spend your budget in 2020? What are you going to re-architect? And there was a lot of answers around security. That was I think probably the most popular one that I heard. Automation, some people were interested in that and improving the efficiency of their infrastructure I think overall. No matter how they do it, hyperconvergence or something like that, just overall improving things to make their life easier. >> For me, I look at the role of the CIO and to look into 2020, I think we see a lot legacy challenges that are still not solved. Some new opportunities is probably a good word. Some of the legacy challenges are what's the role of IT? That's the age old question. I think we saw the next phase of IT business align with digital transformation and now we're going to look for what's next, right? 'Cause that phrase is now going out of style. But we're still looking for ways that we can do more with technology than we ever have. And as I look at some of the things that happened at the show this morning that were announced, I see a lot opportunity for CIOs and for organizations as a whole to do more than they ever have before without having to bring a whole lot more complexity to the organization. But I also think to see some of the things that have to be addressed. Security is a board level issue and it's a top issue for the CIO, it's a make or break your career type issue at this point. And I think going into 2020 as we look at some of these technologies, it becomes even more important because it's going to all require new focus on security. We have an opportunity around to actually solve the data analytics problem at some point here in the near future. That hasn't always been possible and now we have the tools to do it. And we have tools that can do it without having to hire a whole bunch of IT experts through some of things like companies like Microsoft can bring into market. >> Would love to get your viewpoint on the future of work. We've been saying what is the role of IT? And we say in its best light, IT helps drive innovation and actually can be a leader inside the business. But we know that the roles have been changing inside a company. Microsoft talks rather aspirationally about citizen developers, and we're going to empower everyone to be their best out there. But what does that mean to the person that has been a Cis Admin or going through certifications or trying to learn the latest on hyperconvergence infrastructure and Kubernetes and the latest buzzword that they heard of? >> I mean, I think that's exciting, especially for people who are new in IT or people who have the time to invest in learning development, they were talking about power apps in the keynote. I was excited, I wanted to try it for myself, it looks fun and easy. But in reality, in the real world of IT organizations, things take time. I mean I talked to a CIO at a large bank and he said "Hey, I have 10 stand administrators "and we're going to move to hyperconvergence "when they die or retire." So things take time, that's my take, Scott. >> For me, I think it's the enabling new ways to work. If you look at ActualTech Media, we're 100% virtual. We don't have, people ask where we're headquartered, we have a PO box in North Charleston, South Carolina and the rest of us work in Microsoft Teams. For me one of the most exciting things I've looked at in the last year is Teams. I absolutely adore the tool. >> I've heard a couple of people talking about you know people thought Teams was dying and Slack was killing it but Teams is really good. What is it about it that drives your business? >> So we used to use Slack, we used Skype, and then we used Slack. And Slack was good for what it was, it's an instant messaging tool that makes sure that you can get in touch with people right away and you can share a file. What it lacks is context. Once something is scrolled off the screen, that's it, you don't ever look at it again. And what we get with Teams is an ability to provide context for the work we do. So we were working on one of our Gorilla Guide books this week collaboratively inside Teams. We had the document open in one window and we were chatting about it in a chat in Teams in the other window. But the document lived in the same channel that we were having the conversation. So enabled a great degree of collaboration that we just couldn't get with Slack. That's not to say Slack's not a great tool, for what it is, it's a great tool and I still use it for other teams, which sounds weird. But I love the ability that we've had to bring additional tools into Teams that we didn't have before. When we bought, when we bought, when we deployed Teams, we got rid of Slack, we got rid of Smartsheet and we're in the process of getting rid of Dropbox. And it wasn't 'cause we wanted to save money, I mean it's nice, but at the end of the day it's about improving workflows especially when you don't live in the same office. You don't get to talk to each other over the water cooler. >> So particularly for distributed virtual teams, Microsoft Teams. >> It's a beautiful thing >> It's a beautiful thing. >> And also even with clients, now that Teams has guest capability, we have guest teams that we work on, work with clients in the same way we work internally. So it's become a central hub for just about everything we do. Literally Teams is open on my laptop and on my phone 24/7. It's an app that never closes. >> That's a powerful endorsement. >> It is. >> Scott, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, David thank you so much. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will see you tomorrow for more of theCUBE's live coverage from Microsoft Ignite.

(upbeat music) >> From the Silicon Valley Media Office in Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this exclusive CUBE conversation. Here's the setup. The storage industry has been drowning in complexity for years. Companies like Pure Storage and Nutanix, you know they reached escape velocity last decade, primarily because they really understood well how to deliver great products, that were simpler to use. But as we enter the 2020's, virtually every player in the storage business is trying to simplify it's portfolio. And the mandate is coming from customers, that are under huge pressure to operationalize and bring to market their major digital initiatives. They simply can't spend time managing infrastructure that the way they used to. They have to reallocate resources up the stack, so to speak to more strategic efforts. Now, as you know post the acquisition of EMC by Dell, we have followed closely, and been reporting on their efforts to manage the simplification of the storage portfolio under the leadership of Jeff Clark. IBM is one of those leading companies, along with Dell EMC, NetApp, and HPE that are under tremendous pressure to continue to simplify their respective portfolios. IBM as a company, has declared the dawn of a new era. They call it Chapter II of Digital and AI. Whereas, the company claims it's all about scaling and moving from experimentation to transformation. Chapter II, I will tell you unquestionably is not about humans managing complex storage infrastructure. Under the leadership of General Manager, Ed Walsh, the companies storage division has aligned with this Chapter II vision, and theCUBE has been able to secure an exclusive interview with Ed, who joins me today. Great to see you my friend. >> Thanks very much for having me. >> So, you're very welcome. And you heard my narrative. How did we get here? How did the industry get so complex? >> I like the way you kicked it off, because I think you nailed it. It's just how the storage industry has always been. And there was a reason for it twenty years ago, but it's almost, it's run its course, and I could tell you what were now seeing, but everyone there's always a difference between high end solutions sets, and low end solution sets. In fact their different, there's custom silicon on the high end. So think about EMC Matrix in the day, it was the ultimate custom hardware and software combination. And then the low end storage, well it didn't have any of that. And then there's a mid tier. But we actually, everything is based upon it. So you think about the right availability, the right price port, feature function, availability features. It made sense that you had to have that unique thing. So, what's happened is, we're all doing sustaining innovation. So we're all coming out with the next high end array for you. EMC's next one is Hashtag, Next Generation storage, right, mid-range. So they're going to redo their midrange. And then low end, but they never come together, and this is where the complexity is, you're nailing it. So no one is a high end or a low end shop, they basically use it all, but what they're having to do, is they have to manage and understand each one of those platforms. How to maintain it, it's kind of specialized. How to report on it, how to automate, each the automation requirements are different, but different API to actually automate it. Now the minute you say, now help me modernize that and bring me to a hybrid multi-cloud, now you're doing kind of a complex thing over multiple ways, and against different platforms, which are all completely different. And the key thing is, in the past it made sense to a have high end silicon with high end software, and it made sense. And different low end, and basically, because of some of the innovation we've driven, no longer do you have to do that. There's one platform that allows you to have one platform to meet those different requirements, and dramatically simplify what you're doing for enterprises. >> So, we're going to talk a little bit more about what you guys are announcing. But how do you know when you get there, to this land of simple? >> One it's hard to get there, we can talk about that too. But it's a, when a client, so we just had a call this morning with our board advisor for storage, our division. And they're kind of the bigs of the bigs. Up on the need, more on the high end side, just so you know the sample size. But literally, in the discussion we were talking about the platform simplification, how do you get to hybrid cloud, what we're going to do with the cyber incident response type of capabilities have resiliency. And literally in the call they are already emailing their team, saying we need to do something more strategic, we need to do that, we need to look at this holistically. They love the simplicity. Everything we just went through, they can't do anymore. Especially in Chapter II, it's about modernizing your existing mission critical enterprises, and then put them in the context of Hybrid multi-cloud. That's hard, you can't do it with all these different platforms, so they're looking for, let me spend less. Like you said, to get my team to do up-stack things, they definitely don't want to be managing different disparate storage organizations. They want to move forward and use that freed up resource to do other things, so. When I see big companies literally jumping at it, and giving the example. You know I want to talk about the cyber resiliency thing, I've had four of those this week. That's exactly what we need to have done, so it's just, I haven't had a conversation yet that clients aren't actually excited about this, and it's actually pretty straightforward. >> So I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and again we'll get there, but assuming your there. Why do you think it took you so long? You kind of mentioned it's hard. >> So, transformations are never easy, and typically whoever is the transformation engine, gets shot in the back of the head, right. So it's really hard to get teams to do something different. So imagine every platform, EMC has nine now, right. So it is through acquisition of others, you have VP's, you know. VP of development, offering and maybe sales, and then you have whole teams, where you have founders you've acquired. So you have real people, that they love their platform, and there's no way they're going to give it up. They always come up with the next generation, and how it's going to solve all ills, but it's a people transformation. How do you get we're going to take three and say, hey, it's one platform. Now to do that it's a operational transformation challenge. It's actually driving the strategy, you don't do it in matter of a week, there's development to make sure that you can actually meet all the different use cases, that will take you literally years to do, and have a new platform. But, I think it's just hard to do. Now, anyone that's going to do that, let's say you know EMC or HP wants to do it. They're going to have to do the same thing we did, which is going to take them years of development. But also, it's managing that transition and the people involved, or the founders you've acquired, or it just it's amazing. In fact, it's the most wonderful part of my job is dealing with people, but it can frustrate you. >> So we've seen this over the years, look at NetApp, right with waffle, it was one size fits all for years, but they just couldn't cover all markets. And then they were faced with TAM expansion, of course now the portfolio expands. Do you think -- >> And now they have three and -- >> And David Scott at HPE, Storage VP at the time used to talk about how complex EMC's portfolio was, and you see HPE has to expand the portfolio. >> We all did, including IBM. >> Do you think Pure will have to face the same sort of -- >> We are seeing Pure with three, right. And that's without the file, so I'm just talking about what we do for physical, virtual, and container workloads and cloud. If you start going to what we're going to scale up to object we all have our own there too. And I'm not even counting the three to get to that. So you see Pure doing the exact the same thing, because they are trying to expand their TAM. And you have to do some basic innovation to have a platform actually meet the requirements, of the high end requirements, the mid range, and the entry level requirements. It's not just saying, I'm going to have one, you're actually have to do a lot of development to do it. >> All right, let's get to the news. What are you guys announcing? >> So basically, we're announcing a brand new, a dramatic simplification of our distributed storage. So, everything for non-Z. If you're doing physical boxes, bare metal, Linux. You're doing virtual environments, VMware environments, hyper-V, Power VM, or if you're doing container workloads or into the cloud. Our platforms are now one. One software, one API to manage. But we're going to actually, we're going to do simplification without compromise. We're going to give you want you need. You're going to need an entry level packaging, midrange and high end, but it's going to be one software allows you to meet every single price requirement and functionality. And we'll be able to do some surprises on the upside for what we're bringing out to you, because we believe in value in automation. We can up the value we bring to our clients, but also dramatically take out the cost complexity. But one thing we're getting rid of, is saying the need, the requirement to have a different hardware software platform for high end, midrange and low end. It's one hardware and software platform that gets you across all those. And that's where you get a dramatic simplification. >> So same OS? >> Same OS? >> Normally, you'd do, you'd optimize the code for the high end, midrange and low end. Why are you able to address all three with one OS? How are you able to do that? >> It took us three and half years, it was actually, I will talk about a couple innovation pieces. So, on the high end you have customized silicon, we did, everyone does, we had a Texas Memory Systems acquisition. It was the flash drawer 2U, about 375 TB, uncompressed de dup, pretty big chunky, you had to buy big chunks. So it was on the high end. >> That was the unit of granularity, right. >> But it gave you great value, but also you had great performance, latency better than you get in NVMe today, before NVMe. But you get inline compression, encryption, so it was wonderful. But it was really ultra high end. What we did was we took that great custom silicon, and we actually made it onto what it looks like a custom, or to be a standard NVMe SSD. So you take a Samsung NVMe, or a WD and you compare it to what we call our flash core module. They look the same and they go interchangeably into the NVMe standard slot. But what's in there is the same silicon, that was on this ultra high end box. So we can give the high end, exactly what we've did before. Ultra low latency, better than NVMe, but also you can get inline compression de dup and the were leveling, and the stuff that you expect in the custom silicon level. But we can take this same NVMe drive and we can put it in our lowest end model. Average sale price $15,000. Allows you to literally, no compromise on the high end, but have unbelievable surprises on the midrange and the low end, where now we can get the latency and the performance and all those benefits, to be honest on a much lower box. >> Same functionality? >> Same functionality, so you lose nothing. Now that took a lot of work, that wasn't easy. You're talking about people, there was roadmaps that had to be changed. We had to know that we were going to do that, and stick to our guns. But that'll be one. Other things is, you know you're going to get some things on the upside that you're not expecting, right. Because it's custom silicon, right, I might have a unique price performance. But also cost advantages, so I'm going to have best price performance or density across the whole product line. But also, I'm going to do things like, on the high end you used to unbelievable operational resiliency. Two site, three site, hyper-swap, you know two boxes that would act like one. Have a whole outage, or a site outage and you don't really miss a transaction, or multi-sites. But we're going to be able to do that on the low end and the midrange as well. Cyber resiliency is a big deal. So I talked about Operational Resiliency. It's very different coming back when it's cyber. But cyber incident response becomes key, so we're going to give you special capabilities there which are not available for anyone in the industry. But is cyber incident response only a high end thing, or is it a low end thing. No, it's across everywhere. So I think we're going to shock on the upside a lot of it, was the development to make sure the code stack, but also the hardware, we can at least say no compromise if you want entry-level. I'm going to meet anyone at that mote. In fact, because the features of it, I'm able to compete at an unfair level against everyone on the low end. So you say, midrange and high end, but you're not losing anything because your losing the custom silicon. >> So let's come back to the cyber piece, what exactly is that? >> All right, so, listen, this is not for data breaches. So if a data breach happens, they steal your database or they steal your customer name, you have to report to, you know you have to let people know. But it's typically than I call the storage guy and say hey, solve it. It was stolen at a different level. Now the ones that doesn't hit the media, but happens all the time actually more frequently. And it definitely, gets called down to the operations team and the storage team is for cyber or malicious code. They've locked up your system. Now they didn't steal data, so it's not something you have to report. So what happens is call comes down, and you don't know when they got you. So it's an iterative process, you have to literally find the box, bring up, maybe it's Wednesday, oh, bring it up, give it to application group, nope, it's there. Bring up Tuesday... it's an iterative process. >> It's like drilling for oil, a 100 years ago, nope, not it, drill another hole. >> So what happens is, if it's cyber without the right tools, you use your backup, one of our board advisors, literally major bank, I had four of those, I'll give you one. It took me 33 hours to bring back a box. It was a large database 30 TB, 33 hours. Now why did you backup, why didn't he use his primary storage against DR copies of everything. Well they didn't have the right tool sets, so what we were able to do is, tape is great for this air gap, but it takes time to restore and come back up and running. The modern day protection we have like Veeam or Cohesity allows the recovery being faster, because your mounting backup copies faster. But the fastest is your primary snapshot and your replicated DR snapshots. And if you can leverage those, the reason people don't leverage it, and we came upon this, almost accidentally. We were seeing our services brethren from IBM doing, IBM SO or outsourcing GTS, when they did have a hit. And what they want to do is, bring up your snapshots, but if you bring up a snapshot and you're not really careful, you start crashing production workloads, because it looks like the VM that just came up. So you need to have, and we're providing the software that allows you to visualize what your recovery points are. Allows you to orchestrate bringing up environments but more importantly, orchestrate into a fenced network environment, so it's not going to step on production workloads and address this. But allows you to do that, and provide a URL to the different business users, that they can come and say yes, it's there or it's not. So even if you don't use this software before this incident, it gives you visibility, orchestration, and then more importantly a fence, a safe fence network, a sandbox to bring these up quickly and check it out, and easily promote to production. >> So that's your safe zone? >> Safe zone, but it's just not there. You know you start bringing up snapshots, it's not like a DR case, where you're bringing things up, you have to be really smart, because you bring it up, and checking out. So without that, they don't want to trust to use the snapshots, so they just don't use primary storage. With it, it becomes the first thing you do. Because you hope you got it within a week, or week and a half of your snapshots. And it's in the environment for ninety days, now you're going to tape. Now if you do this, if you put this software in place before an incident, now you get more values, you can do orchestrated DR testing. Because where doing this orchestrated, bring up application sets it's not a VM, it's sets of VM's. Fenced network, bring it up, does it work. You can use it for Test/Dev data, you can use it for automatic DR. But even if you don't set it up, we're going to make it available so you can actually come back from these cyber incidents much faster. >> And this is the capability that I get on primary storage. Because everybody's targeting you know the backup corpus for ransomware and things of that nature. This is primary storage. >> And we do put it on our backups. So our backups allows you to do the exact same thing and do the bootable copies. And so if you have our backup product, you could already do this on primary. But, what we're saying is, regardless of who your using, we're still saying you need to do backup, you need to air a cup your backup. 'cause you know Want to Cry was in the environment for 90 days, you know your snapshots are only for a week or two. So the fact of the matter is that you need it, but in this case, if you're using the other guys, you can also, we're going to give it just for this tool set. >> How does immutability does it factor? I know like for instance AWS Reinvent they announced an immutability capability. I think IBM may have that, because of the acquisition that you made years ago, Clever Safe was fundamental to that, their architecture. Is that a way to combat ransomware? >> So immutability is obviously not just changes. So ransomware and you know malware typically is either encrypting or deleting things. Encrypting is what they do, but they have the key, so. The fact of the matter is that they're deleting things. So if it's immutable, than you can't change it. Now if you own the right controls, you can delete it, but you can't change it, they can't encrypt it on you. That becomes critical. So what you're looking for, is we do like for instance all of our flash system allows you to do these snapshots, local or remote that allow you to have, go to immutable copies either in Amazon, we support that or locally on our object storage, or in IBM's cloud. It allows you to do that. So the different platforms have this immutability that our software allows you integrate with. So I think immutability is kind of critical. >> How about consumption models? The way in which your packaging and pricing. People want to, the cloud is sort of change the way we think about this, how have you responded to that? >> So, you hit upon our Chapter II. We, IBM, actually resonates to the clients. In Chapter I, we are doing some lift and shift, and we're doing some new use cases in the cloud. And they had some challenges but it worked in general. But we're seeing the next phase II, is looking at the 80% of your key workloads, your mission critical workloads, and basically how you transfer those in. So basically, as you look at your Chapter 2, you're going to do the modernization, and you might move those into the cloud. So if you're going to move into the cloud, you might say, I'd like to modernize my storage, free my team up, because it's simple, I don't have to do a lot of things. But you need to simplify so you can now, modernize so you can transform. But, I'm going to be in the cloud in 18 months, so I don't want to modernize my storage. So what we have, is of course we have so you can buy things, you can lease things, we have a utility model, that is great for three to five years. But we have now a subscription model, which think of just cloud pricing. No long term commitment. Use what you use, up and down, and if it goes to zero, call us we'll pick it up, and there's no expense to you. So, no long term commitments and returns. So in 14 months, I've done my modernization, you've helped me free up my team. Let me go, and then we'll come and pick it up, and your bill stops that day. >> Cancel at anytime? >> Yeah, cancel at anytime. >> Do you expect people to take advantage of that? Is there a ton of demand at this point in time? >> I think everyone is on their own cloud journey. We talk a lot about meeting the client where they are, right. So how do I meet them where they're at. And everyone is on their own journey, so a lot of people are saying, hey, why would I do anything here, I need to get there. But if they can modernize and simplify what they're doing, and again these are your mission critical. We're not talking, this is how you're running your business, if we can make it better in the mean time, and then modernize it, get it in containers, get it into a new platform, that makes all the sense in the world. And because if we can give them a flexible way, say it's cheaper than using cloud storage, like in Amazon or IBM cloud. But you can use it on-prem, free you up, and then at anytime, just return it, that's a big value that people say, you know what, you're right, I'm going to go do that. You're able to give me cloud based pricing, down to zero when I'm done with it. Now I can use that to free up my team, that's the value equation. I don't think it's for everyone. But I think for a segment of the market, I think it's critical. And I think IBM's kind of perfectly positioned to do it with a balance sheet to help clients out. >> So how do you feel about this? Obviously, you've put a lot of work into it. You seem pretty excited. Do you feel as though this is going to help re-energize your business, your customer base, and how do you think competitors are going to respond? >> Good question. So, I think simplification, especially we can talk about value equation. I think I can add more value to you Mr. Customer. I can bring things you're not expected, right, and we're get to this cyber in a second, that would be one of the things they would not expected. And reduce the costs and complexity. So we've already done this a couple of times, so we did it with our Mainframe storage launch in the fall. It bar none, the best box for that workload. Lowest latency, most integration, encrypt, pervasive encryption, encryption in flight. But also, we took it from nine variants, to two. Because we could. We go, why did you need all those, we'll there's reasons for it in the past, but no longer. We also got rid of all the hard disk drives. We also add a little non-volatile cache and allowed you to get rid of all those battery backups. All these custom things that you used to have on this high end box. And now it's dramatically simpler, better. And by the way, no one asked, hey what are my other seven variants went. It was simpler, it was better, faster, but then it was the best launch we've had in the history of the product line. It think we can add better value and simplify for our clients. So that's what we'll do. You asked about how people respond. Listen, they're going to have to go through the same thing we did, right. A product line has people behind it, and it's really hard, or a founder behind it. You mentioned a couple, they're acquiring companies. I think they're going to have to go this, it's a transformational journey, that they'll have to go through. It's not as simple as doing a PowerPoint. I couldn't come to you and say, I can simplify without compromise. I can help you on the low end, the midrange, high end with same platform unless I did a lot of fundamental design work to make sure I could do that. Flash core modules being one of them, right. So I think it's going to be hard. It'll be interesting, well, they're going to have to go through the same thing I did, how about that. >> Usually when you make a major release like that, you're able to claim Top Gun, at least for a while with things like latency, and bandwidth and IOP's and performance. Are you able to make that claim? >> So, basically you saw it in the launch today. But basically you saw the latency which is one, because we're bringing a custom silicon down, our latency you'll see like I'll give you Pure bragging on their websites, their lowest latency is 70 microseconds, which by the way is pretty, you know. It's gonna be 150 microseconds, pretty good bragging rights. We're at 70 microseconds, but that's on the X90 using storage class memory. So literally we are 2x faster than on latency, how fast can you respond to something. But we can do it not only on our high end box, but we can also do it on our average sale price $15,000 box. Because I'm bringing that silicon up and down. So we can do the latency, now EMC the highest and PowerMax box. Two big chassis put together, that can do 100 microseconds. Again, still we're 70 microseconds, so we're 30% faster. And that's epitomized of the high end custom silicon software. So latency we got it. IOP's, so look at the biggest baddest two boxes of EMC, they'll do you know 15 million IOPs on their website. We'll do 18 million IOPs, but instead of two racks, it's 8U. It is 12x better IOPs per rack space, if you want to look at it that way. Throughput, which if you could do, it's all about building for our businesses. It's all about journey of the cloud and building for our businesses, everyone's trying to do this. Throughput in analytics becomes everything, and we you can do analytics in everything. Your DBA's are going to run analytics, so throughput matters. Ours is for every one of our boxes, that you can kind of add up and cluster out, it's 45 Gb/s. Pure, for instance their bragging rights, is 18, and they can't cluster anymore. So what we're able to do is on any of the, and most of those are high end, but I'll say, I can do the same thing up and down my line, because of where I'm bringing the custom silicon. So on bragging rights, and that's just kind of website, big bragging rights, I think we got a cold, and if you look price performance, and just overall price per capacity, we're inline to be the most the cost effective across everyone. >> Yeah, up and down the line, it's very interesting, it's kind of unique. >> And then you mentioned resiliency, I'll tell you that's the hottest thing, so. You mentioned the cyber incident response, that is something that we did on the Mainframe. So, we did the last Mainframe cycle, we allow you to do the same thing, and it literally drove all the demand for the product sets. It's already the number one thing people want to talk about, because it becomes a you're right, I needed that this week, I needed it last week. So, I think that's going to really drive demand? >> What worries you? >> (laughs) On this launch, not much. I think it's how fast and far we can get this message out. >> Wow, okay, so execution, obviously. You feel pretty confident about that, and yeah, getting the word out. Letting people know. Well, congratulations Ed. >> No, thank you very much, I appreciate it. I appreciate you coming in. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Covering Actifio 2019 Data Driven. (upbeat techno music) Brought to you by Actifio. >> Hello everyone and welcome to Boston and theCUBE's special coverage of Actifio Data Driven 19. I'm Dave Vellante. Stu Miniman is here. We've got a special guest, John Furrier is in the house from from Palo Alto. Guys, theCUBE we love to go out on the ground, you know, we go deep. We're here at this data theme, right? We were there in the early days, John, you called me up and say, "Get your butt here, we're going to cover the first of Doop World". And since then things have moved quite fast. Everybody thought, you know, Hadoop Big Data was going to take over the world. Nobody even uses that term anymore, right? It's kind of, now it's AI, and machine intelligence, and block chain, and everything else. So what do you think is happening? Did the early Big Data days fail? You know, Frank Genus this morning called it The experimentation phase. >> I mean, I don't really think Frank has a good handle on what's going on in my opinion, cause I think it's not an experimentation, it's real. That was a wave that was essentially the beginning of, not an experimentation, of realization and reality that data, unstructured data in particular was real and relevant. Hadoop looked good off the tee, mill the fairway as we say, but the thing about the Hadoop ecosystem is that validated big data. Every financial institution jumped on it. Everyone who knew anything about data or had data issues or had a lot of data, knew the value. It's just that the apparatus to build via Hadoop was too expensive. In comes Cloud computing at scale, so, as Cloud was accelerating, you look at the Amazon Web Services Revenue Chart you can almost see the D mark where the inflection point is on the hockey stick of Amazon's revenue numbers. And that is the point in time where Hadoop was on the declining of failure. Hortonworks sold the Cloudera. Cloudera's earnings are at an all-time low. A lot of speculation of their entire strategy, and their venture back company went public, but bet the ranch to be the next data warehouse. That wasn't the business model. The data business was a completely new industry, completely being re-transformed, and, far from experimentation, it is real and definitely growing like a weed, but changing because of the underpinning infrastructure dynamics of Cloud Native, Microservices, and that's only going to get highly accelerated and the people who talk about context of industry like Frank, are going to be off. Their predictions will be off because they don't really see the new picture clear enough, in my opinion, >> So, >> I think he's off. >> So it's not so much of a structural change like it was when we went from, you know, mainframes to PCs, it's more of a sort of flow, evolution into this new area which is being driven, powered by new technologies, we talk about block chain machine intelligence and other things. >> Well, I mean, the make up of companies that were building quote, "Big Data Solutions", were trying to build an apparatus or mechanisms to solve big data problems, but none of them actually had the big data problem. None of them were full of data. None of them had a lot of data. The ones that had problems were the financial institutions, the credit card companies, the people who were doing a lot of large scale, um, with Google, Facebook, and some of the hyperscalers. They were actually dealing with the data tsunami themselves, so the practitioners ended up driving it. You guys at Wikibomb, we pointed this out on theCUBE many times, that the value was going to come from the practitioners not the suppliers of so called technology. So, you know, the Clouderas of the world who thought Hadoop would be relevant and growing as a technology were right on one side, on the other side of the coin was the Cloud decimation of that sector. The Cloud computer just completely blew away that Hadoop market because you didn't have to hire a PhD, you didn't have to hire specialty skills to stand up Hadoop clusters. You could actually throw it in the Cloud and get agile quickly, and get value out of data very very quickly. That has been real, it has not been an experiment. There's been new case studies, new companies born, new brands, so it's not an experiment, it is reality, and it's only going to get more real every day. >> And I add of course now you've got, you mentioned Cloudera and Hortenworks, you also got Matt Bar reeling Stu. Let's talk about Actifio. So they coined the term Copy Data Management, they created the category, of course they do a lot of backup, I mean, everybody in this space does a lot of backup. And then you saw the Silicon Valley companies come in. Particularly Cohesity and Rubric, you know, to a lesser extent he got some other guys like Zerto and Durva, but it was really those two companies, Cohesity and Rubric, they raised more money in their D round than Actifio has since inception. But yet Actifio keeps, you know, plodding along, growing, you know, word is they're profitable, you know, they're not like this really sectioned very East Coast versus kind of West Coast mentality. What's your take on what's going on? >> Yeah, so, Dave right, you look at the early days of Actifio and you say great, Copy Data Management, I have all these copies of data, how do I reduce my cost, get greater utilization than I have and leverage the data? I love the title of the show here, Data Driven. You know, we know at the center of digital transformation if you can't become data driven, like the CMO Brian Regan got up on stage talk about that industrialization of data. How am I going along that journey being this, I collected data versus now, you know, data, you know, is the reason that I make decisions, how I make decisions, I get smarter. The Cloud of course is a huge enabler of this, there's all these services that I can instantly access to be able to get greater insight, and move along with that environment, and if you look underneath all of these backup companies, it's really how I can change that data into business value and drive my business, the metadata underneath and all those pieces, not just the wonky storage and technical solutions that make things better, and I get a faster ROI. It's that data at the core of what we do and how do I get that as a business to accelerate. Because we know IT needs to be able to respond back to the business and data needs to be that rocket fuel. >> Is it the case of data haves and data have-nots? I mean, Amazon has data >> I mean, you're right-- >> and Facebook has data. >> We're talking about Actifio, you brought that up, okay, on this segment, on the inside segment, which is cool, they're here at the event, but they have a good opportunity but they also, they got some challenges. I mean, the thing about Actifio is, to my earlier point, which side of the wave are they on? Are they out too much out front with virtualization and Amazon, the Cloud will take them away, or are they riding the Cloud wave, making that an enabler? And I think what really I like about Actifio is because they have a lot of virtualization capabilities, the question is can they scale that Stu, to containers and microservices, because, the real opportunity in this market, in my opinion, is going to build on the virtualization trend, and make container aware, microservices capabilities because if they don't, then that would be a tell sign. Now either way it's a hot M&A market right now, so I think being in the market, horse on the track as you say. You look at the tableau sales force deal monster numbers we are in clearly a hot IPO market and a major roll up market on the M&A side. I think clearly there's two types of companies, old and new, and that is really what people are looking at, are they part of the old guard, are they the new guard. So, you know, this to me is going to be a tell sign of what they do next, can they make the data driven value proposition, you articulated Stu, actually a reality It's going to come from the technology underneath. >> Well I think it's a really interesting point you're making because, Stu as you probably know, that Amazon announced the Amazon backup service right, and you talked about the backup guys and they're like, "Ah yeah it's backup, but it really doesn't do recovery, it's really not that robust". It's part of me says, "Uh oh"... >> Watch out. >> You better move fast", because Amazon has stated, "Hey if you don't move fast we're going to just keep gobbling", and you've seen Amazon do this. What are your thoughts on that? Can these specialists, can they survive, John's talking about M&A. Can the market support all these guys along with the big, you know, traditional guys like Veritas, and Dell EMC, and IBM and Combol? >> Right, well so Actifio started very much in the data center. They were before this Could wave really took off. It's really only in the last year that they've been sassifying their product. So the question is, does that underlying IP, which wasn't tied to hardware, but, you know, sat at really more of, you know, reminded us of that storage virtualization battles that we talked about for years, Dave, but now they are going in the Cloud. They've got all the partnerships in the Cloud, but they are competing against those new vendors that you talked about like Cohesity and Rubric out there, and there's big money chasing this environment. So, you know, I want to talk to the customers here and find out, you know, where they are using them, and especially some of those first customers using this--. >> Well they clearly need a Cloud play cause that's clearly where the action is. But if you look at what's going on with Amazon, Azure, and Google you see a lot of on premises, Stu, because that's where the customers are. So just because the customers are currently not migrating their existing workloads to the Cloud doesn't mean it's not going to happen. So I think there's an opportunity for any company like Actifio, who may or may not be on the curve on the tech side, one little misfire on a tech bet could cripple the company and also make the company. There's a lot of high risk, reward ratio. How they handle containers. How they build on virtualizations. Virtualization going to to be part of the future with Cloud. These are the kind of the dynamics that are going to be in play, and they got some time on their hands because the on premises growth is because the clients are trying to figure out what to do and they're not going to be migrating, lifting, and shifting workloads all off to the Cloud. New will be Cloud based, but enterprises have proven why we are in multi-Cloud and hybrid-Cloud conversation, that... The enterprise on premises is not going away anytime soon. >> I want to ask you guys, John you specifically, about this sort of new Silicon Valley growth model and how companies are achieving escape velocity. When you and I made our first trip to Barcelona, I was having dinner with David Scott who was the CEO of 3PAR and he said to me, When I came to 3PAR the board said, "Hey we're willing to invest 30 million dollars in this company". And David Scott said to them, "I need way more, I need 80 million dollars". Today 80 million dollars is nothing. You saw, you know, Pure Storage hit escape velocity, was just throwing money, and growing at the problem. You're seeing Cohesity-- >> Well you can debate that. I mean, If you have to build a rocket ship, hit critical mass and you want to fund that, you're going to to need an enterprise. However, there's arguments on the south side that you can actually get fly wheel effect going early with less capital. So again, that's 3PAR-- >> But so that's my point. >> Well so that's 3PAR, that was 2009. >> So, yeah that was early days so that's ancient history. But software is generally supposed to be a capital efficient market, yet these companies are raising many hundreds and hundreds of millions, you know, half a billion dollar raises and they are putting it largely in promotion. Is that the new model, is that sustainable, in your view? >> Well I think you're conflating capital market dynamics with viable companies to invest in. I think there's a robust seed in series A market but the series A market and Silicon Valley is you know, 15 to 25 million, it used to be 3 to 5. So the dynamics are changing on funding. There's just not enough companies, horses on the track, to deploy capital at tranches of 30, 50, 80 million. So the capital markets are clearly going to have the money available so it's a market for the startups and the broke companies. That's separate from actually winning. So you've got slacks going public this weeks, you have other companies who have built business on a sass fly wheel, and then everything else is gravy in terms of the go to market, they got a couple hundred million. I think slack got close to a billion dollars in cash that they've raised. So they're flooded with cash, they'll never spend it all. So there are some companies that can achieve success like that. Others have to buy market share, they got to push and build out a sales force, and it's going to be a function of the role of customer, customization, specialism, and whatnot. But with AI machine leaning there's more efficiencies coming in so I think the modern company can do more with less. >> What do you think of the ride sharing on IPOs, Uber and Lift, do you abol? Do you like 'em or do you think it's just, they're losing too money and can't sustain it? >> I was thinking about that this morning after looking at the article in the Wall Street Journal in our coverage on Silicon angle. You look at Zoom communications, I like models that actually can take a simple concept and an existing mature market and disrupt it by being Cloud efficient and completely sass and data driven. That is an example of success. That to me, Zoom Communications and Zscaler, another company that we talk to, these are companies that were built with a specific value proposition that made the product and they were targeting mature markets with leaders in it. Video conferencing, Webex, Citrix, Zoom came out of nowhere, optimized on simple value proposition, used Cloud scale and data, and crushed it. Uber, Lift, little bit different issue. They're losing money but I would bet on the long term that that is going to be the used case for how people will have transportation. I think that's the long game and I think that without regulatory kind of pressure, without, there's regulatory issues that's really the big risk. But I believe that Uber and Lift absolutely will be long brands and just like Facebook was early on, although they threw off a lot of cash, those guys are building for penetration, and that's where the funding matters. Penetration is critical. Now they're the standard, and people really don't take taxis anymore, but they're really using the ride sharing. And you get the scooters, you get the bikes, they're all sequencing into these adjacent markets which drains more cash but builds the brand, builds the footprint. >> Well that's what I want to ask you. So people compare the early Uber, Lift, Taxi, Ride sharing to Amazon selling books, but there's all these other adjacencies. You have a thought on this? >> Well, just, you know, right, Uber Eats is a huge opportunity for that environment and autonomous vehicles everybody talks about, but it's still quite a ways out. So there are a lot of different- >> Scooters are the same, we're in San Diego, there are 8 gazillion scooters. >> San Diego had fun, you know, going around on their electronic scooters, boy, talk about the gig economy, they pay people at the night, to like go pay by the recharge you do on that, what is the future of work, >> Yeah, that's a great point. >> and how can we have that-- >> Uber going to look a lot like Amazon. You subsidize the front end retail side of the business, but look at the data that they throw up. Uber's data that they're gathering on, not only customer behavior, but just mapping services, 3-D mapping is going to be huge, so you've got these cars that are essentially bots on the road, providing massive mapping and traffic analysis. So you're going to start to see data driven, like Actifio slogan here, be a big part of all design decisions and value proposition from any company out there. And if they're not data driven I think they're going to be toast. >> Probably could because there's that data and that machine learning underneath, that can optimize, you know, where the people are, how I use the system, such a huge wave that we're watching. >> How about one last topic which is heavily data driven, it's Facebook. Facebook is obviously a data driven company, the Facebook crypto play, I love it, I love Facebook. I'm a bull on Facebook, I think it's been beat up. I think, two billion users is hard to replicate, but what's your thoughts on their crypto play? >> Well it's kind of a middle finger to the United States of America but it's a great catalyst for the international market because crypto needed a whale to come in and bring all those users in. Bad timing, in my mind, for Facebook, because given all the anti-trust and regulatory conversations, what better way to show your threat to the world order when you say we're going to run a banking system with a collection of international companies. I think the US is going to look at this and say, "Oh my God! They can't even be trusted to handle personal information and we're going to now let them run a banking system? Run monetary, basically World Bank equivalent infrastructure?" No frickin way! I think this is going to to be a major road to home. I think Facebook has to really make this an ecosystem play if they want to make it work, that's their telegraphic move they're saying, "Hey we want to do for the community but we got our own wallet and we got our own network". But they bring a lot to the table so it's going to be a really interesting dynamic to see the coalescing around Facebook because they could make the market. Look what Instagram did to Snapchat. They literally killed the company, took all their users. That is what's going to happen in the digital money economy when Facebook brings billions of users user experience with money. What happened with Snapchat with Instagram is going to happen to the World Bank if this continues. >> Where do you stand on the government breaking up big tech? >> So Dave, you know, you look in these companies, it's not easy to pull those apart. I don't think our government understands how most of big tech works. You know, take Amazon and AWS, that's one company underneath it. You know, Facebook, Microsoft. You know, Microsoft went through all these issues. Question Dave, we've had lots of debates on Twitter you know, are they breaking the law, are they not doing trust? I have some trust issues with Facebook myself, but most of the big companies up there I don't think the anti-trust kicks in, I don't think it makes sense to pull them apart. >> Stu, the Facebook story and the YouTube story are simply this, they have been hiding under the platform rules, of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and they are an editing platform so you can't sue them. Okay, once they become a publisher they could be sued. Just like CNN, Fox News, and everybody else. And we're publishers. So they've been hiding behind the platform. That gig is up. They're going to have to address are you a platform or are you a publisher? You're making editing decisions around what users can see with software, you are essentially editing the feed, that is a publisher role, with that becomes responsibility, and then obviously regulartory. >> Well Facebook is conflicted right now. They're trying to figure out which side of the fence to go on. >> No no no! They want one side! The platform side! They're make billions of dollars! >> Yeah but so they're making decisions about you know, which content to show and whether they monetize it. And when it's controversial content, they'll turn down the ads a little bit but they won't completely eliminate it sometimes. >> So, Dave, the only thing that the partisans in politics seem to agree on though is that big tech has too much power. You know, What's your take on that? >> Well so I think that if they are breaking the law then they should be moderated. But I don't think the answer is to go hard after Elizabeth Warren. Hard after them and break them up. I think you got to start with okay, because you break these companies up what's going to happen is they're going to be worth more, it's going to be AT&T all over again. >> While you guys were at Sysco Live, we covered this at Amazon Web Service and Public Sector Summit. The real issue in government, Stu, is there's too much tech for bad on the PR side, and there's not enough tech for good. Tech is not bad, tech is good. There's not enough promotion around the apps around there. There's real venture funds being created to promote tech for good. That's going to where the tide will turn. When does the tech industry start doing good stuff, not bad stuff. >> All right we've got to wrap. John, thanks for sitting in. Thank you for watching. Be right back, we're here at Actifio Data Driven 2019. From Boston this is theCUBE, be right back. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate, 2018, brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin. Been here all day with Dave Vellante. We're joined by David Floyer now. Guys, really interesting, very informative day. We got to talk to a lot of puritans, but also a breadth of customers, from Mercedes Formula One, to Simpson Strong-Tie to UCLA's School of Medicine. Lot of impact that data is making in a diverse set of industries. Dave, you've been sitting here, with me, all day. What are some of the key takeaways that you have from today? >> Well, Pure's winning in the marketplace. I mean, Pure said, "We're not going to bump along. "We're going to go for it. "We're going to drive growth. "We don't care if we lose money, early on." They bet that the street would reward that model, it has. Kind of a little mini Amazon, version of Amazon model. Grow, grow, grow, worry about profits down the road. They're eking out a slight, little positive free cashflow, on a non-gap basis, so that's good. And they were first with All-Flash, really kind of early on. They kind of won that game. You heard David, today. The NVMe, the first with NVMe. No uplifts on pricing for NVMe. So everybody's going to follow that. They can do the Evergreen model. The can do these things and claim these things as we were first. Of course, we know, David Floyer, you were first to make the call, back in 2008, (laughs) on Flash and the All-Flash data center, but Pure was right there with you. So they're winning in that respect. Their ecosystem is growing. But, you know, storage companies never really have this massive ecosystem that follow them. They really have to do integration. So that's, that's a good thing. So, you know, we're watching growth, we're watching continued execution. It seems like they are betting that their product portfolio, their platform, can serve a lot of different workloads. And it's going to be interesting to see if they can get to two billion, the kind of, the next milestone. They hit a billion. Can they get to two billion with the existing sort of product portfolio and roadmap, or do they have to do M&A? >> David: You're right. >> That's one thing to watch. The other is, can Pure remain independent? David, you know well, we used to have this conversation, all the time, with the likes of David Scott, at 3PAR, and the guys at Compellent, Phil Soran and company. They weren't able, Frank Slootman at Data Domain, they weren't able to stay independent. They got taken out. They weren't pricey enough for the market not to buy them. They got bought out. You know, Pure, five billion dollar market cap, that's kind of rich for somebody to absorb. So it was kind of like NetApp. NetApp got too expensive to get acquired. So, can they achieve that next milestone, two billion. Can they get to five billion. The big difference-- >> Or is there any hiccup, on the way, which will-- >> Yeah, right, exactly. Well the other thing, too, is that, you know, NetApp's market was growing, pretty substantially, at the time, even though they got hit in the dot-com boom. The overall market for Pure isn't really growing. So they have to gain share in order to get to that two billion, three billion, five billion dollar mark. >> If you break the market into the flash and non flash, then they're in the much better half of the market. That one is still growing, from that perspective. >> Well, I kind of like to look at the service end piece of it. I mean, they use this term, by Gartner, today, the something, accelerated, it's a new Gartner term, in 2018-- >> Shared Accelerated Storage >> Shared Accelerated Storage. Gartner finally came up with a category that we called service end. I've been joking all day. Gartner has a better V.P. of naming than we do. (chuckles) We're looking' at service end. I mean, I started, first talking about it, in 2009, thanks to your guidance. But that chart that you have that shows the sort of service end, which is essentially Pure, right? It's the, it's not-- >> Yes. It's a little more software than Pure is. But Pure is an awful lot of software, yes. And showing it growing, at the expense of the other segments, you know. >> David: Particularly sad. >> Particularly sad. Very particularly sad. >> So they're really well positioned, from that standpoint. And, you know, the other thing, Lisa, that was really interesting, we heard from customers today, that they switched for simplicity. Okay, not a surprise. But they were relatively unhappy with some of their existing suppliers. >> Right. >> They got kind of crummy service from some of their existing suppliers. >> Right. >> Now these are, maybe, smaller companies. One customer called out SimpliVity, specifically. He said, "I loved 'em when they were an independent company, "now they're part of HPE, meh, "I don't get service like the way I used to." So, that's a sort of a warning sign and a concern. Maybe their, you know, HPE's prioritizing the bigger customers, maybe the more profitable customers, but that can come back to bite you. >> Lisa: Right. >> So Pure, the point is, Pure has the luxury of being able to lose money, service, like crazy, those customers that might not be as profitable, and grow from it's position of a smaller company, on up. >> Yeah, besides the Evergreen model and the simplicity being, resoundingly, drivers and benefits, that customers across, you know, from Formula One to medical schools, are having, you're right. The independence that Pure has currently is a selling factor for them. And it's also probably a big factor in retention. I mean, they've got a Net Promoter Score of over 83, which is extremely high. >> It's fantastic, isn't it? I think there would be VMI, that I know of, has even higher one, but it's a very, very high score. >> It's very high. They added 300 new customers, last quarter alone, bringing their global customer count to over 4800. And that was a resounding benefit that we were hearing. They, no matter how small, if it's Mercedes Formula One or the Department of Revenue in Mississippi, they all feel important. They feel like they're supported. And that's really key for driving something like a Net Promoter Score. >> Pure had definitely benefited from, it's taken share from EMC. It did early on with VMAX and Symmetrix and VNX. We've seen Dell EMC storage business, you know, decline. It probably has hit bottom, maybe it starts to grow again. When it starts to grow again, I think, even last quarter, it's growth, in dollars, was probably the size of Pure. (chuckles) You know, so, but Pure has definitely benefited from stealing share. The flip side of all this, is when you talk to you know, the CxOs, the big customers, they're doing these big digital transformations. They're not buying products, you know, they're buying transformations. They're buying sets of services. They're buying relationships, and big companies like Dell and IBM and HPE, who have large services arms, can vie for certain business that Pure, necessarily, can't. So, they've got the advantage of being smaller, nimbler, best of breed product, but they don't have this huge portfolio of capabilities that gives them a seat at the CxO table. And you saw that, today. Charlie Giancarlo, his talk, he's a techie. The guys here, Kicks, Hat, they're techies. They're hardcore storage guys. They love storage. It reminds me of the early days of EMC, you know, it's-- >> David: Or NetApp. Yeah. Yeah, or NetApp, right. They're really focused on that. So there's plenty of market for them, right now. But I wonder, David, if you could talk about, sort of architecturally, people used to criticize the two controller, you know, approach. It obviously seems to be doing very well. People take shots at their, the Evergreen model, saying "Oh, we can do that too." But, again, Pure was first. Architecturally, what's your assessment of Pure? >> So, the Evergreen, I think, is excellent. They've gone about that, well. I think, from a straighforward architecture, they kept it very simple. They made a couple of slightly, odd decisions. They went with their own NAND chips, putting them into their own stuff, which made them much smaller, much more compact, completely in charge of the storage stack. And that was a very important choice they made, and it's come out well for them. I have a feeling. My own view is that M.2 is actually going to be the form factor of the future, not the SSD. The Ssd just fitted into a hard disk slot. That was it's only benefit. So, when that comes along, and the NAND vendors want to increase the value that they get from these stacks, etc., I'm a little bit nervous about that. But, having said that, they can convert back. >> Yeah, I mean, that seems like something they could respond to, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> I was at the Micron financial analysts' meeting, this week. And a lot of people were expecting that, you know, the memory business has always been very cyclical, it's like the disk drive business. But, it looks like, because of the huge capital expenses required, it looks like supply, looks like they've got a good handle on supply. Micron made a good strong case to the street that, you know, the pricing is probably going to stay pretty favorable for them. So, I don't know what your thoughts are on that, but that could be a little bit of a head wind for some of the systems suppliers. >> I take that with a pinch of salt. They always want to have the market saying it's not going to go down. >> Of course, yeah. And then it crashes. (chuckles) >> The normal market place is, for any of that, is go through this series of S-curves, as you reach a certain point of volume, and 3D NAND has reached that point, that it will go down, inevitably, and then cue comes in,and then that there will go down, again, through that curve. So, I don't see the marketplace changes. I also think that there's plenty of room in the marketplace for enterprise, because the biggest majority of NAND production is for consumer, 80% goes to consumer. So there's plenty of space, in the marketplace, for enterprise to grow. >> But clearly, the prices have not come down as fast as expected because of supply constraints And the way in which companies like Pure have competed with spinning disks, go through excellent data reduction algorithms, right? >> Yes. >> So, at one point, you had predicted there would be a crossover between the cost per bit of flash and spinning disk. Has that crossover occurred, or-- >> Well, I added in the concept of sharing. >> Raw. >> Yeah, raw. But, added in the cost of sharing, the cost-benefit of sharing, and one of the things that really impresses me is their focus on sharing, which is to be able to share that data, for multiple workloads, in one place. And that's excellent technology, they have. And they're extending that from snapshots to cloud snaps, as well. >> Right. >> And I understand that benefit, but from a pure cost per bit standpoint, the crossover hasn't occurred? >> Oh no. No, they're never going to. I don't think they'll ever get to that. The second that happens, disks will just disappear, completely. >> Gosh, guys, I wish we had more time to wrap things up, but thanks, so much, Dave, for joining me all day-- >> Pleasure, Lisa. >> And sporting The Who to my Prince symbol. >> Awesome. >> David, thanks for joining us in the wrap. We appreciate you watching theCUBE, from Pure Storage Accelerate, 2018. I'm Lisa Martin, for Dave and David, thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamOn 2018 brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back at VeeamOn 2018, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman. Stu, always great working with you. Bruce Shaw is here, he's the Senior Director of Global Alliances and Industry Solutions at NetApp. Great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, I got to start out with NetApp, I mean, we've followed NetApp for decades, ya know, from the very beginning back when I was at IDC, Stu, you were probably still in your mother's womb. (laughing) But you guys are back in a big way, I mean, for a while there it looked vulnerable. You took advantage of the Dell EMC merger. You're gaining share again, you're growing, stock price is up, there's a spring in your step, what's going on? >> Well, a lot of things are going on. I think we've had a lot of leadership additions to the company, Henri Richard joined and took over as the CSO with the company. We've got a new CMO in Jean English. But more importantly, a lot of the areas that we were late to the market, and candidly we've admitted we were late. We didn't have a good Flash story a couple years ago. We've been very aggressive with Flash over the last 24 to 18 months. We're now the fastest growing Flash storage provider out in the market, and we think we'll exit this year as number one. In fact, we think that's the current course and trajectory. We're very happy with where that's going. The FlexPod partnership with Cisco was great this past year. We had a record year in Converged infrastructure, which was a down market, we picked up about 13 points a share according to IDC, so a lot of the cylinders are starting to fire, but the one that is probably the biggest and the most shocking for folks is three, four years ago, the belief was that cloud was going to kill on-prem storage for companies like NetApp. I think the one thing that they did right ahead of the curve was they embraced the cloud. They've got great partnerships with Google, Amazon, the hyperscalers, and cloud strategy and the business that drives the company there is the fastest part of the company, and Anthony Lye runs that team, and it's doing an amazing job. >> Explain how, and you're absolutely right, many, most, frankly myself at times, felt that way. Explain how cloud is a tailwind and not just a one-way street into the roach motel. >> Oh well, there isn't an enterprise today that isn't thinking about cloud in some way, shape, or form, right? Now, ya have prognosticators on either side saying it's all going to the cloud or something less than that, but the truth is when you look at a strategy like ONTAP and the ability to move your data, whether it's on-prem or to the cloud and manage it through our data fabric story, that's where NetApp really starts coming into their own. I think, again, that's where we've been able to take advantage, and it's not just having it one way or the other or being good just with the hyperscalers or good with the guys that want to be secure because most companies do a hybrid story, and they want to bit of both. >> Well, I think the one thing that I would observe about NetApp, having followed the company for many, many years, which I think gives you an advantage, is NetApp really has always had storage services in software that were largely decoupled from the hardware, and that allowed you to get into cloud early, don't ya think, Stu? >> Yeah, absolutely, and Bruce, we're here at VeeamOn, and their message sounds a lot like that to me, so maybe help explain, we were just talking to Veeam's CMO, when you hear some of the descriptions of storage services, software, multicloud, and everything, NetApp and Veeam sound alike. How are they complementary in, ya know, maybe where do they bump up against each other, yeah? >> Yeah, well, we both compete in the same market, which is storage, so of course, there's areas where we're going to compete with each other, but we are very complementary in terms of the story and the markets that we serve, right? NetApp is incredible strong in the enterprise. Veeam has great commercial channel presence, so from a route to market there's a lot of complementary stuff we do with each other. Price point, in terms of where we hit the market and the things that we go after, we have a lot of opportunity where there's not overlap to help each out to the point they're now, the relationship's evolved over the last four years where we're actually doing OEM of each other's products. We've got our E-Series we just announced yesterday that we're OEMing with these guys, which again is targeted at exactly those markets. The story between the two that we're both at our core not hardware companies, not storage companies, but data management companies really is where this starts to come together and play well. The fact that they're mutually supportive of each other makes for a really strong value proposition for the customer and the channel, especially the guys like the service providers or ya know, hybrid cloud providers, it's a big time story for them. >> So you're growing with, the partnership with Veeam is growing. >> Right. >> Ya got a combination of trends that become tailwinds, but then you've got execution. Can you explain what are those tailwinds, and what's the execution ethos with the partnership? >> We are a channel-only company for all intents and purposes. >> Dave: Oh yeah, I don't know what the number is now, but you've always been very, very high performing. >> Yeah, I know, so we look at businesses that we drive, and channel is at the core of what we do, so when you have a tailwind like, ya know, where we are with Flash and the growth there, the channel partners are making more money, the programs that are coming for them, we're not taking business that they're doing today and pushing it towards the cloud. Again, we're talking about the story that's transitory between the two, so for a lot of the channel providers that are out there getting in the market, that's a very powerful story for them. That it's not a competitive business, we're not going to try to create our own cloud service to take away from them. We want to help them as they migrate between the two. >> All right, Bruce, one of the other areas we're hearing a lot about at this show that I think lines up with NetApp is the analytics and AI, can you maybe talk about how that ties into the products? >> Yeah, I mean, you look at a lot of these markets like AI, like analytics in terms of what companies are doing, it sheds off a tremendous amount of data, right? And that data is at the heart of what they want to analyze and go through, and when they bring those things to market, the goal is how I quickly move it from where I'm capturing it to where I need it, and ONTAP does a really good job of doing that in terms of being able to take the data to where they need it, whether it's at the edge or whether it's back at the core of the company, so that you can actually do the real work with it and gain the insights that drive the business. >> Bruce, what's the resale agreement that you have with Veeam, can you explain that? >> We have Veeam on our price list. Our sales reps can sell Veeam, can be compensated for it, vice versa, they can absolutely hook in and drive away with NetApp, and now that we're getting products like E-Series where their product is embedded in ours, that only strengthens that kind of motion. So for a NetApp sales rep today, if they have an opportunity where Veeam is needed on it as part of the offering, it's absolutely in their wheelhouse to go sell it, and they get the sale level of love and attention from quote and comp standpoint that they would if it was NetApp only products. >> So this is kind of interesting innovation that Veeam, I think, has been out in front of, they, and I dunno how they do it, Stu, but I think Veeam understands the lifetime value of a customer and is willing to make, put sweat equity into a deal as part of a partnership to make it transparent to a partner sales force. >> Yeah absolutely. >> That's innovation in business model. >> Absolutely, we're very proud of our sales force and the work that they're able to do. We view ourselves as kind of the last big enterprise standalone storage company that's out there doing this, and I run strategic alliances, and some partners integrate really well with our sales guys. Others, it's more of a, ya know, it requires more work. To your point, Veeam has done a superb job at identifying how and where they play with our folks and getting together where we go to market together. >> It's interesting, we used to, ya know, several years ago now, ask the question can NetApp remain independent. We've seen all these independent storage companies kind of go away. Used to have this conversation with David Scott at 3PAR all the time, EMC itself wasn't able to maintain it, and then NetApp got to the point where it was almost too big for an acquisition, and although stock price was down, everybody, NetApp was the rumor of MNA more than any company I can think of in the storage business, but now you're seeing sort of antithetical to what most people expected, it's kind of like the cloud we were talking about before, storage companies emerged. Pure was the first one over a billion since NetApp. What are your thoughts, and what's that, I wonder what, you guys must talk in the hallways about that whole, the dynamics of the industry. It seems like it's still a viable business model to be best of breed. >> It's very viable, so I took over running the strategic alliances at the beginning of January, and my dance card's full. I can't believe the number of folks that are calling up wanting to partner. I think we've gotten much more mature in terms of how we view the market and our ability to get strategically with other companies to be successful, and there absolutely is always going to be a place out there for a best of breed story. Customers want the best technology that they can get to handle their business needs, and if we partner with great partners, whether it's Veeam or others to provide that for them, I think the viability of NetApp only gets stronger not weaker. >> It's interesting because now ya got NetApp, Pure, Nutanix, soon to be Veeam, as billion dollar independent pure play companies in the storage business. Isilon couldn't get there, Data Domain couldn't get there, Compellent couldn't get there, 3PAR couldn't get there, Lefthand couldn't get, EqualLogic, I can go down the list. They were never able to reach that escape velocity, and maybe it is cloud, maybe cloud is that weird tailwind for people who can figure out how to take advantage of cloud and hybrid cloud, your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think it is, number one. I think also the companies that you mentioned at various times, and I'm a hardware industry dinosaur, I've been around forever. A lot of those companies you talk about the difficult moment from them was hey, we're a storage company, now we want to add compute or now we want to go into this part of the market that put them at odds with the guys they were partnering with. George, our CEO, has been absolutely maniacal with his vision of our path forward is managing data, period. Whatever that form takes, we don't need to be a compute company, we don't need to be a networking company, we want to be a data company. I think how that then drives the decisions, whether it's partnering with cloud, whether it's going into new markets with HCI, even if it's things about transforming the legacy data center from traditional data center and how it's managed on-prem to something that's all Flash driven and much more efficient and much more programmable than it was in the past, so it's easier to administer, those are the areas that we can go innovate, and as long as we're partnering with the right partners out in the industry, that makes us a very good viable destination for the customer without worrying about well, do we have a compute node, are we in the server business now, are we suddenly in the switch business? Those are things that are not even on our radar. >> Yeah, I mean, you guys are in a unique position from that standpoint. You're very large now, you're the largest independent storage company, so everybody wants to work with you. You don't bump up into these adjacencies, and you can make bets, you can place your chips in areas whereas some of the startups, there's tons of innovation, but it's really hard to hit that escape. The amount of resources that you need, the money you need for promotion, the talent war that's going on out there, the go-to-market challenges, the partner challenges, so you guys are in a pretty good position right now. >> We really are, and I think we've actually done a lot of the restructuring internally to continue that and capitalize on it. Probably the biggest change, which outside the company, most folks wouldn't notice immediately, is that we moved at the beginning of this year to a three distinct business unit structure where we're focusing on three parts of the business to go forward. We've got our cloud business unit, which is driving into, as I said, the hyperscalers under Anthony Lye. We've got cloud data center, which is more of the new technologies like HCI and Converge and object storage technology like StorageGRID, and that's, right now that's an incredibly fast growing business for us. Then, of course, we've got our traditional storage software infrastructure business where we have products like E-Series and modernizing the data center, which is primarily driven with this transition to Flash. You've got three BUs now that are maniacally focused on the different areas of the market where we see here's an immediate opportunity in Flash. Here's a slightly longer opportunity in things like hybrid cloud and HCI and Converge infrastructure and a much longer term bet was how does the cloud really become a piece where we're managing between all of those. It lets us be a lot nimble between it. It's almost like three subbusinesses where we're going to market. >> Yeah, Dave, and actually that aligns perfectly with the research we've been doing for over five years from server stand and true private cloud, you've got the hyperscale, you've got the transformation locally in spanning those two, and then you've got that transition from the traditional. >> Oh, I think it's a sound strategy, and it'll serve us well in the years to come. >> There's obviously a lot of noise about artificial intelligence in the marketplace. You've got some companies trying to position to be the platform for machine intelligence or artificial intelligence, what's NetApp's point of view on that? >> Well certainly, we share some of that, but again, I think at the end of the day for us, it's much more important about fine, wherever I'm capturing that artificial intelligence is not likely the place where I'm going to do a lot of the analytics and work on it, so it really does come down to, ya know, am I moving it up to the cloud to do that work, where am I making my big insights, where am I mining through it, and then how am I relating that back, whether it's at the edge or whether it's at the core data center, and again, we think with ONTAP, with the partners that we're going to market with for AI, for ML, IoT, that's the difference maker for us at the end of the day. It's not that we're just another storage company storing the telemetry data off of a car for AI, we're putting it into a format and a form that's usable quickly, efficiently, real time, where Tesla can go make a decision on the car right now, not days, weeks, months from now. >> All right, Bruce, well hey, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time and good luck. >> Enjoyed having me, thank you. >> All right, great. >> Good to see you guys. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching VeeamOn 2018, this is theCUBE.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the third day of live coverage here at IBM Think in Las Vegas. This is The Cube, our flagship program, we go out to the events, and extract a civil noise of the leader in live technology coverage. I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our seventh, eighth year covering a bunch of IBM shows. With all now six of them rolled into one IBM Think, this is their big tent event, day three, keynotes just finished, it's blockchain day here at IBM, and as we said, on the opening, on Tuesday, this is like, the innovation sandwich. In the middle is the meat, is data, and then the bread is blockchain and AI. And really that is the architecture of IBM's future strategy, foundationally set up by cloud computing and a variety of other applications and whatnot, but really the future is about data, with blockchain and AI surrounding it. Today's blockchain day, your thoughts on the keynote? Keynote speeches? >> Mm-hm. >> IBM, blockchain, certainly we've seen a lot of advertising on TV. Your thoughts and reaction to the keynote. >> Yeah, and I like your innovation sandwich, I just want to add, that the substrate of all this is cloud. It's critical, if you're going to get network effects, you've got to have the cloud. Today, yeah, was blockchain day, we heard from Marie Wieck, who's the general manager of IBM blockchain. IBM has a tendency, as you know, John, to identify a hot trend, especially some in Open Source, they did this with Linux, they did this with Spark, and they kind of, elbow their way in, you know, maybe that's a pejorative, but they do that, and they say, "Here's some code, here's some resources." They spend money on it, and they give credibility to that Open Source effort. The Hyperledger project is the one they targeted here. It's the fastest growing project in the history of the Linux Foundation. IBM contributed lines of code, people, they've got 15 hundred blockchain experts on this, and they're going all in on blockchain. Which I think, John, is really positive for the blockchain, and even the crypto community, because it brings the credibility of a, you know, a Fortune 100 company to that world. They've announced the blockchain starter kit. All this stuff is available on the IBM cloud. They announced today PWC as an audit partner, which again, brings credibility to the table. Although, I think as you and I know, and we're going to have some guests on later today, there's some other tech emerging, that is going to maybe complement that. >> Yeah. >> And we heard from David Katz, who is the CEO of Plastic Bank, this is the company that's essentially creating currency out of plastic. Allowing disadvantaged people to turn collecting plastic into money. And, at the same time, help save the planet. >> I mean, this is a great example of blockchain as an enabling technology. New ways to do business. As you know, we've been hot on blockchain for the audience watching, you know, we've been covering big data, and AI, that's in our wheelhouse, do all those shows and events, cover that territory with our journalism, and TV and research. But blockchain is an adjacency to storage and infrastructure, and also decentralized applications. The fundamental thing that we're seeing, and we talked to Brian-- Brian Behlendorf, who's with the Hyperledger project, at the Open Source Summit, the Apache Foundation, which IBM is a big sponsor of, IBM needs to do well here. Because they're, again, innovations is essentially betting on blockchain. But it's not just the developers at Open Source, the business users are the ones that are going to create the value, and what I mean by that is, if you look at the blockchain world, and crypto currency and decentralized applications, that's essentially the three components to this market. The blockchain is the infrastructure, ledger, storage of data, et cetera, you know over simplified, but the cryptocurrency runs protocols and infrastructure that power that, and then the application's going to sit on top. We've reported and observed that the secret of success in this new world, is nailing the business logic, and the business model, efficiencies that take advantage of the underlying technology. And that the risk factors in making that success happen, is that business model, not the technology. Although the technology is super important, the technology can be switched out a reduced risk. So the real risk in blockchain and cryptocurrency, and decentralized applications is nailing the business model disruption. This is different than the old way of tech, which was the risk was technology selection. This is a big deal, IBM needs to up their game on that piece of it. I've heard a lot of tech, I've got some nice use cases, but on the outreach basis, they got to go to the business users, and say, "This is an opportunity to leverage the data, "leverage the software and AI with watts and other things." And then leverage the underlying technology, software defined storage, software systems that move to the blockchain, in a decentralized and distributed way. Distributed and decentralized is the future of infrastructure, this is the secret of success, this is where the winners are establishing the clear line of sight. >> Well, one of the things that you're hearing at this conference, Ginny set this up yesterday, was incumbent disrupters, and we were just, kind of, having fun at the open yesterday, but I think it's really smart for IBM. You know me, John, I'm a big fan of saying most of your business is going to come from your existing customers, and if you're chasing all this new business, and start ups, and developers, you're not going to be as productive as if you go to your core. And I think that you're seeing this. IBM back to the core, and they're bringing blockchain to that core as a way to disrupt existing business models, defend against disrupters. So you're absolutely right, companies need to look for inefficiencies where there's a third party taking a toll, and then attack it hard with blockchain. I actually think-- well no, so IBM is really talking business. How do we bring blockchain to the business? They're not really talking about what we talk about a lot, this crypto economy and this whole other mission driven initiative. >> Well, but I mean, if they want to talk business, they got to talk token economics. That's where the business model efficiencies will be rendered on the app side, and the money side. The killer wrap in blockchain and crypto is money. Okay, and marketplaces. IBM got to great marketplace, but it's not just about the developers, that's an organic one stakeholder. The stakeholders that matter is the business guys and the developers coming together. That is absolutely fundamental. If they don't understand that, that's going to be hard to be successful. You can't just throw money at developer programs and say, "Oh, when we win the developers, we win the day." Cloud was, kind of, that playbook, but this world is so fast, and accelerating in it's value creation, that the business users are fundamental in actually grokking what the capabilities are, and putting that into motion quickly, and the proof points is pilots converting to production. That's going to come from the business units. That's where the intellectual property is, is looking at the technology innovations that are possible on the business logic. Business logic is the new IP, this is where the action is, and I haven't heard IBM talk at all about token economics, they kind of talk about it, but that really is the business impact. >> Well, I mean, you sort of heard that today from Plastic Bank, although they didn't talk about a token, they didn't talk about coins, they did talk about monetizing plastic, but in using blockchain to do that, I assume there's tokens behind that, but maybe not. Maybe it's just Fiat currency. It's unclear to me, but I think you're right, the killer app is money. >> Look at it, this is simple. The equation in crypto, and not blockchain, is value creators create value, and they can capture the value. Capturing the value is where the money is, the creating the value is where the technology can happen. So you got to nail both of those as areas. And money is the killer app, so that's going to come from the business side, so the real benefit of decentralization is offering the value capture equation to look different and be different. That's token economics. That's where the action's going to be. So, it really is, it's not mutually exclusive, they're both things. >> Well I think that what you're hearing, so value comes from two places in the simplest form, increased revenue, cut costs. I'm hearing a lot from IBM of cut costs, now again, the Plastic Bank this morning was a really interesting example, I'm glad IBM uses it, but the vast majority of things you're hearing from IBM, like the IBM Maersk relationship, et cetera, are about cutting costs, taking out inefficiencies. >> Well, I mean, the bank thing is easy to look at in your mind, but it's any supply chain. The ICO market that's at a massive bubble right now, is because the supply chain of funding start ups and growth, used to come from private equity and venture capital, that is being disrupted because it certainly hyped up, but that's a supply chain. Any supply chain activities, set of activities, that make up a supply chain, can and will be disrupted by blockchain, crypto, and token economics. >> Yeah, so let's talk about that. Because again, you're not hearing a lot of that from IBM. But I think we have a perspective there. You know, the 1.0 was the wild west, a bunch of developers, blockchain developers, theory developers, doing stuff, building up protocols, making a lot of money. And disintermediating the VCs, right? The new form of raising capital. The VCs are now all in, right? We saw this in Bahamas, you saw this in Puerto Rico, at the two conferences, at four conferences that we covered. So explain that? >> Well, that's just one application, the VCs and these guys are inefficient in some way, but what's happening with crypto currency about access to capital. Now there's a lot of capital being thrown out there. That's mainly because of the hype and the bubble aspect of it, but the real disruption is access to capital, that value chain, value activities are being disrupted and being more efficient. That's a global phenomenon, and that's happening in financing of start ups. Anything with a supply chain, whether it's moving food from point A to point B, is what IBM also highlights as well, anything that's structural incumbent is at risk. And so, this is where, I mean IBM has a ton of supply chain business. They've been doing this for generations in the computer industry. They connect systems together, and create value with using technology. So this is not going to be-- this is a great opportunity for IBM. Again, if they can convert that business value into the blockchain with the value capture, the create capture model, they can run the table. >> But I want to come back to innovation equation. And part of that innovation equation is being able to raise capital. And last I checked, which was last month, about 6.5 billion had been raised in crypto investments. >> And 60% of the projects failed. >> For sure, okay. But failure-- Silicon Valley, fail fest, it's probably up to 10 billion now, much more is being raised through crypto in startups in blockchain than there is in VC. The VCs realized this, and they want a piece of the action, but we're seeing private equity, we're seeing hedge funds, we're seeing crypto billionaires. >> The path of least resistance for the entrepreneur is where the action is. They go right to the new money opportunity. Because they can raise more money. >> So, here's the question. You take Fiocoin, for example, smart guys, trying to go after S3 with peer to peer storage, they raised 250 million dollars in 30 minutes, okay? Is it too much too fast? >> Yes, I think so, but it's what the market's giving. I mean, Fiocoin doesn't even have a product. They're on a roadmap. That's essentially a series A financing. >> Dave: That's a series C. >> Well, no, in terms of the evolution of the startup, it's a seed financing as a series C or D or F financing. >> Yeah, 250 million. >> I mean, it's insane. >> David Scott told us that he needed 85 to start Three Par. I mean that's a storage company 10 years ago, 20 years ago. >> Yeah. >> What a change. At 250 million. >> Look, it's a bubble. But the reality is that it's a bubble that's not going to pop and destroy the sector, it's just a proof point that the efficiency of funding is going to be disrupted. It is being disrupted. >> No, we'll see if it's going to destroy this sector or not. This could, you know-- Warren Buffet says it's going to end badly, others are believers. >> I'm long on blockchain, obviously you know that. I'm pretty biased, but anywhere there's inefficiencies, there's an opportunity for entrepreneurs and business leaders to put new business logic in place to capture that value. That's where the action will be. That's the innovation. And if IBM's innovation sandwich could work, you got a blockchain AI, data in the middle, everyone's going to be full and hungry and eat up everyone's lunch. So, Dave, that's the blockchain day. I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante, day three wall to wall coverage here at IBM Think in Las Vegas. More live coverage after this short break. (futuristic music)