(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, wonderful Cloud community and welcome back to our wall-to-wall coverage of AWS re:Invent here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by the brilliant John Furrier. John, how you doing this afternoon? >> Doing great, feeling good. We've got day three here, another day tomorrow. Wall-to-wall coverage we're already over a hundred something videos, live getting up. >> You're holding up well. >> And then Cloud show is just popping. It's back to pre-pandemic levels. The audience is here, what recession? But there is one coming but apparently doesn't seem to be an unnoticed with the Cloud community. >> I think, we'll be talking a little bit about that in our next interview in the state of the union. Not just our union, but the the general global economy and the climate there with some fabulous guests from Software One. Please welcome Neil and Bernd, welcome to the show, guys. How you doing? >> Great, thank you. >> Really good. >> Yeah, like you said, just getting over the jet lag. >> Yeah, yeah. Pretty good today, yeah, (laughing loudly) glad we did it today. >> I love that Neil, set your smiling and I can feel your energy. Tell us a little bit about Software One and what you all do. >> Yeah, so Software One we're a software and Cloud solutions provider. We're in 90 countries. We have 65,000 customers. >> Savannah: Just a few. >> Yeah, and we really focus on being close to the customers and helping customers through their software and Cloud journey. So we transact, we sell software in Cloud, 10,000 different ISVs. And then on top of that we a lot of services around the spend optimization FinOps we'll talk about as well, and lots of other areas. But yeah, we're really a large scale partner in this space. >> That's awesome. FinOps, cost optimization, pretty much all we've been talking about here on the give. It's very much a hot topic. I'm actually excited about this and Bernd I'm going to throw this one to you first. We haven't actually done a proper definition of what FinOps is at the show yet. What is FinOps? >> Well, largely speaking it's Cloud cost optimization but for us it's a lot more than for others. That's our superpower. We do it all. We do the technology side but we also do the licensing side. So, we have a differentiated offering. If you would look at the six Rs of application migration we do it all, not even an Accenture as it all. And that is our differentiation. >> You know, yesterday Adams left was on the Keynote. He's like waving his hands around. It's like, "Hey, we got if you want to tighten your belt, come to the Cloud." I'm like, wait a minute. In 2008 when the last recession, Amazon wasn't a factor. They were small. Now they're massive, they're huge. They're a big part of the economic equation. What does belt tightening mean? Like what does that mean? Like do customers just go to the marketplace? Do they go, do you guys, so a lot of moving parts now on how they're buying software and they're fine tuning their Cloud too. It's not just eliminate budget, it's fine tune the machine if you will... >> 'make a smarter Cloud. >> Explain this phenomenon, how people are tackling this cost optimization, Cloud optimization. 'Cause they're not going to stop building. >> No. >> This is right sizing and tuning and cutting. >> Yeah, we see, of course with so many customers in so many countries, we have a lot of different views on maturity and we see customers taking the FinOps journey at different paces. But fundamentally what we see is that it's more of an afterthought and coming in at a panic stage rather than building it and engaging with it from the beginning and doing it continuously. And really that's the huge opportunity and AWS is a big believer in this of continued optimization of the Cloud is a confident Cloud. A confident Cloud means you'll do more with it. If you lose confidence in that bill in what how much it's costing you, you're going to retract. And so it's really about making sure all customers know exactly what's in there, how it's optimized, restocking, reformatting applications, getting more out of the microservices and getting more value out the Cloud and that will help them tighten that belt. >> So the euphoric enthusiasm of previous years of building water just fallen the pipes leaving the lights on when you go to bed. I mean that's kind of the mentality. People were not literally I won't say they weren't not paying attention but there was some just keep going we're all good now it's like whoa, whoa. We turn that service off and no one's using it or do automation. So there's a lot more of that mindset emerging. We're hearing that for the first time price performance being mindful of what's on and off common sense basically. >> Yeah, but it's not just that the lights are on and the faucets are open it's also the air condition is running. So the FinOps foundation is estimating that about a third of Cloud spend is waste and that's where FinOps comes in. We can help customers be more efficient in the Cloud and lower their Cloud spend while doing the same or more. >> So, let's dig in a little bit there. How do you apply FinOps when migrating to the Cloud? >> Well, you start with the business case and you're not just looking at infrastructure costs like most people do you ought look at software licensing costs. For example, if you run SQL on-premise you have an enterprise agreement. But if you move it to the Cloud you may actually take a different more favorable licensing agreement and save a lot of money. And these things are hidden. They're not to be seen but they need to be part of the business case. >> When you look at the modernization trend we had an analyst on our session with David Vellante and Zs (indistinct) from ZK Consulting. He had an interesting comment. He said, "Spend more in Cloud to save more." Which is a mindset that doesn't come across right. Wait a minute, spend more, save more. You can do bet right now with the Clouds kind of the the thesis of FinOps, you don't have to cut. Just kind of cut the waste out but still spend and build if you're smart, there's a lot more of that going on. What does that mean? >> I mean, yeah I've got a good example of this is, we're the largest Microsoft provider in the world. And when of course when you move Microsoft workloads to the Cloud, you don't... Maybe you don't want a server, you can go serverless, right? So you may not win a server. Bernd said SQL, right? So, it's not just about putting applications in the Cloud and workloads in the Cloud. It's about modernizing them and then really taking advantage of what you can really do in the Cloud. And I think that's where the customers are still pretty immature. They're still on that journey of throwing stuff in there and then realizing actually they can take way more advantage of what services are in there to reduce the amount and get even more in there. >> Yeah, and so the... You want to say, something? >> How much, just building on the stereotypical image of Cloud customer is the marketing person with a credit card, right? And there are many of them and they all buy their own Cloud and companies have a hard time consolidating the spend pulling it together, even within a country. But across countries across the globe, it's really, really hard. If you pull it all together, you get a better discount. You spend more to save more. >> Yeah, and also there's a human piece. We had an intern two summers ago playing with our Cloud. We're on a Cloud with our media plus stack left a service was playing around doing some tinkering and like, where's this bill? What is this extra $20,000 came from. It just, we left a service on... >> It's a really good point actually. It's something that we see almost every day right now which is customers also not understanding what they've put in the Cloud and what the implications of spikes are. And also therefore having really robust monitoring and processes and having a partner that can look after that for them. Otherwise we've got customers where they've been really shocked about not doing things the right way because they've empowered the business but also not with the maturity that the business needs to have that responsibility. >> And that's a great point. New people coming in and or people being platooned through new jobs are getting used to the Cloud. That's a great point. I got that brings up my security question 'cause this comes up a lot. So that's what's a lot of spend of people dialing up more security. Obviously people try everything with security, every tool, every platform, and throw everything at the problem. How does that impact the FinOps equation? 'Cause Dev SecOps is now part of everything. Okay, moving security at the CICD pipeline, that's cool. Check Cloud native applications, microservices event-based services check. But now you've got more security. How does that factor into the cost side? What you guys look at that can you share your thoughts on how your customers are managing their security posture without getting kind of over the barrel, if you will? >> Since we are at AWS re:Invent, right? We can talk about the well architected framework of AWS and there's six components to it. And there's reliability, there's security cost, performance quality, operational quality and sustainability. And so when we think about migrating apps to the Cloud or modernizing them in the Cloud security is always a table stakes. >> And it has to be, yeah, go ahead. >> I really like what AWS is doing with us on that. We partner very closely on that area. And to give you a parallel example of Microsoft I don't feel very good about that at the moment. We see a lot of customers right now that get hacked and normally it's... >> 'yeah that's such a topic. >> You mean on Azure? >> Yeah, and what happens is that they normally it's a crypto mining script that the customer comes in they come in as the customer get hacked and then they... We saw an incident the other day where we had 2,100 security incidents in a minute where it all like exploded on the customer side. And so that's also really important is that the customer's understanding that security element also who they're letting in and out of their organization and also the responsibility they have if things go bad. And that's also not aware, like when they get hacked, are they responsible for that? Are they not responsible? Is the provider... >> 'shared responsibility? >> Yeah. >> 'well that security data lake the open cybersecurity schema framework. That's going to be very interesting to see how that plays out to your point. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Yeah, it is fascinating and it does require a lot of collaboration. What other trends, what other big challenges are you seeing? You're obviously working with customers at incredible scale. What are some of the other problems you're helping them tackle? >> I think we work with customers from SMB all the way up to enterprise and public sector. But what we see is more in the enterprise space. So we see a lot of customers willing to commit a lot to the Cloud based on all the themes that we've set but not commit financially for all the PNLs that they run in all the business units of all the different companies that they may own in different countries. So it's like, how can I commit but not be responsible on the hook for the bill that comes in. And we see this all the time right now and we are working closely with AWS on this. And we see the ability for customers to commit centrally but decentralized billing, decentralized optimization and decentralized FinOps. So that's that educational layer within the business units who owns the PNL where they get that fitness and they own what they're spending but the company is alone can commit to AWS. And I think that's a big trend that we are seeing is centralized commitment but decentralized ownership in that model. >> And that's where the marketplaces kind of fit in as well. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, yeah. Do you want to add some more on that? >> I mean the marketplace, if you're going to cut your bill you go to the marketplace right there you want single dashboard or your marketplace what's the customer going to do when they're going to tighten their belts? What do they do? What's their workflow, marketplace? What's the process? >> Well, on marketplaces, the larger companies will have a private marketplace with dedicated pricing managed service they can call off. But that's for the software of the shelf. They still have the data centers they still have all the legacy and they need to do the which ones are we going to keep which ones are we going to retire, we repurchase, we license, rehouse, relocate, all of those things. >> That's your wheelhouse. >> It's a three, yes is our wheelhouse. It's a three to five year process for most companies. >> This could be a tailwind for you guys. This is like a good time. >> I mean FinOps is super cool and super hot right now. >> Not that you're biased? (all laughing loudly) >> But look, it's great to see it because well we are the magic quadrant leader in software asset management, which is a pedigree of ours. But we always had to convince customers to do that because they're always worried, oh what you're going to find do I have an audit? Do I have to give Oracles some more money or SAP some more money? So there's always like, you know... >> 'don't, (indistinct). >> How compliant do I really want? >> Is anyone paying attention to this? >> Well FinOps it's all upside. Like it's all upside. And so it's completely flipped. And now we speak to most customers that are building FinOps internally and then they're like, hold on a minute I'm a bank. Why do I have hundred people doing FinOps? And so that's the trend that we've seen because they just get more and more value out of it all the time. >> Well also the key mindset is that the consumption based model of Cloud you mentioned Oracle 'cause they're stuck in that whoa, whoa, whoa, how many servers license and they're stuck in that extortion. And now they got Cloud once you're on a variable, what's the downside? >> Exactly and then you can look at all the applications, see where you can go serverless see where you can go native services all that sort of stuff is all upside. >> And for the major workloads like SAP and Oracle and Microsoft defined that customers save in the millions. >> Well just on that point, those VMware, SAP, these workloads they're being rolled and encapsulated into containers and Kubernetes run times moved into the Cloud, they're being refactored. So that's a whole nother ballgame. >> Yes. Lift and shift usually doesn't save you any money. So that's relocation with containers may save you money but in some cases you have to... >> 'it's more in the Cloud now than ever before. >> Yeah >> Yeah, yeah. >> Before we take him to the challenge portion we have a little quiz for you, or not a quiz, but a little prop for you in a second. I want to talk about your role. You have a very important role at the FinOps Foundation and why don't you tell me more about that? You, why don't you go. >> All right, so yeah I mean we are a founding member of the Finops organization. You can tell I'm super passionate about it as well. >> I wanted to keep that club like a poster boy for FinOps right now. It's great, I love the energy. >> You have some VA down that is going to go up on the table and dance, (all laughing loudly) >> We're ready for it. We're waiting for that performance here on theCUBE this week. I promise I would keep everyone up an alert... >> 'and it's on the post. And our value to the foundation is first of all the feedback we get from all our customers, right? We can bring that back as an organization to that also as one of the founding members. We're one of the only ones that really deliver services and platforms. So we'll work with Cloud health, Cloud ability our own platform as well, and we'll do that. And we have over 200 practitioners completely dedicated to FinOps as well. So, it's a great foundation, they're doing an amazing job and we're super proud to be part of that. >> Yeah, I love that you're contributing to the community as well as supporting it, looking after your customers. All right, so our new tradition here on theCUBE at re:Invent 'cause we're looking for your 32nd Instagram reel hot take sizzle of thought leadership on the number one takeaway most important theme of the show this year Bernd do you want to go first? >> Of the re:Invent show or whatever? >> You can interpret that however you want. We've gotten some unique interpretations throughout the week, so we're probing. >> Everybody's looking for the superpower to do more with less in the Cloud. That will be the theme of 2023. >> Perfect, I love that. 10 seconds, your mic very efficient. You're clearly providing an efficient solution based on that answer. >> I won't that much. That's... (laughing loudly) >> It's the quiz. And what about you Neil? Give us your, (indistinct) >> I'm going to steal your comment. It's exactly what I was thinking earlier. Tech is super resilient and tech is there for customers when they want to invest and modernize and do fun stuff and they're also there for when they want to save money. So we are always like a constant and you see that here. It's like this is... It's always happening here, always happening. >> It is always happening. It really can feel the energy. I hope that the show is just as energetic and fun for you guys. As the last few minutes here on theCUBE has been thank you both for joining us. >> Thanks. >> Thank you very much. >> And thank you all so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this conversation about FinOps, Cloud confidence and all things AWS re:Invent. We're here in Las Vegas, Nevada with John Furrier, my name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Tim Everson, CISO at Kalahari Resorts & Conventions. Tim, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. Looking forward to it. >> So, you know, RSA is going on this week. We're talking a lot about security. You've got a lot of conferences. Security is a big scale now across all enterprises, all businesses. You're in the hospitality, you got conventions. You're in the middle of it. You have an interesting environment. You've got a lot of diverse use cases. And you've got a lot of needs. They're always changing. I mean, you talk about change. You've got a network that has to be responsive, robust and support a lot of tough customers who want to have fun or do business. >> Exactly, yeah. We have customers that come in, that we were talking about this before the segment. And we have customers that come in that bring their own Roku Sticks their own Amazon devices. All these different things they bring in. You know, our resort customers need dedicated bandwidth. So they need dedicated network segments stood up at a moment's notice to do the things they're doing and run the shows they're showing. So it's never, never ending. It's constantly changing in our business. And there's just data galore to keep an eye on. So it's really interesting. >> Can you scope the scale of the current cybersecurity challenges these days in the industry? Because they're wide and far, they're deep. You got zero trust on one end, which is essentially don't trust anything. And then you got now on the software supply chain, things like more trust. So you got the conflict between a direction that's more trusted and then zero trust, and everything in between. From, endpoint protection. It's a lot going on. What's the scale of this situation right now in cyber? >> You know, right now everything's very, very up in the air. You talk about zero trust. And zero trust can be defined a lot of ways depending on what security person you talk to today. So, I won't go into my long discussion about zero trust but suffice to say, like I said zero trust can be perceived so many different ways. From a user perspective, from a network perspective, from an end point. I look more broadly at the regulatory side of things and how that affects things too. Because, regulations are changing daily. You've got your GDPRs, your CCPAs, your HIPAA regulations, PCI. All these different things that affect businesses, and affect businesses different ways. I mean, at Kalahari we're vulnerable or we're not vulnerable, but we're subject to a lot of these different regulations, more so than other people. You wouldn't expect a lot of hotels to have HIPAA regulations for instance. We have health people at our resorts. So we actually are subject to HIPAA in a lot of cases. So there's a lot of these broad scenarios that apply and they come into play with all different industries. And again, things you don't expect. So, when you see these threats coming, when you see all the hacks coming. Even today I got an email that the Marriott breach data from a few years ago, or the MGM breach from a few years ago. We've got all these breaches out there in the world, are coming back to the surface and being looked at again. And our users and our guests and our corporate partners, and all these different people see those things and they rely on us to protect them. So it makes that scope just exponentially bigger. >> Yeah, there's so many threads to pull on here. One is, you know we've observed certainly with the pandemic and then now going forward is that if you weren't modern in your infrastructure, in your environment, you are exposed. Even, I'm not talking old and antiquated like in the dark ages IT. We're talking like really state of the art, current. If you're lagging just by a few years, the hackers have an advantage. So, the constant bar raising, leveling up on technology is part of this arms race against the bad guys. >> Absolutely. And you said it, you talked earlier about the supply chain. Supply chain, these attacks that have come through the SolarWinds attacks and some of these other supply chain attacks that are coming out right now. Everybody's doing their best to stay on top of the latest, greatest. And the problem with that is, when you rely on other vendors and other companies to be able to help you do that. And you're relying on all these different tool sets, the supply chain attack is hugely critical. It makes it really, really important that you're watching where you're getting your software from, what they're doing with it, how they secure it. And that when you're dealing with your vendors and your different suppliers, you're making sure that they're securing things as well as you are. And it just, it adds to the complexity, it adds to the footprint and it adds to the headache that a lot of these security teams have. Especially small teams where they don't have the people to manage those kind of contacts. >> It's so interesting, I think zero trust is a knee jerk reaction to the perimeter being gone. It's like, you got to People love the zero trust. Oh it's like, "We're going to protect this that nobody, and then vet them in." But once you're trusted, trust also is coming in to play here. And in your environment, you're a hotel, you're a convention. You have a lot of rotation of guests coming in. Very much high velocity. And spear phishing and phishing, I could be watching and socially engineering someone that could be on your property at any given time. You got to be prepared for that. Or, you got ransomware coming around the corners or heavily. So, you got the ransomware threat and you got potentially spear phishing that could be possible at your place. These are things that are going on, right? That you got to protect for. What's your reaction to that? >> Absolutely. We see all those kind of attacks on a daily basis. I see spear phishing attacks. I see, web links and I chase them down and see what's going on. I see that there's ransomware trying to come in. We see these things every single day. And the problem you have with it is not only, especially in a space where you have a high volume of customers and a high turnover of customers like you're talking about that are in and out of our resorts, in and out of our facilities. Those attacks aren't just coming from our executives and their email. We can have a guest sitting on a guest network, on a wireless network. Or on one of our business center machines, or using our resort network for any one of a number of the conference things that they're doing and the different ports that we have to open and the different bandwidth scenarios that you've got dealing with. All of these things come into play because if any attack comes from any of those channels you have to make sure that segmentation is right, that your tooling is proper and that your team is aware and watching for it. And so it does. It makes it a very challenging environment to be in. >> You know, I don't want to bring up the budget issue but I'll bring up the budget issue. You can have unlimited budget because there's so many tools out there and platforms now. I mean, if you've look at the ecosystem map of the cybersecurity landscape that you have to navigate through as a customer. You've got a lot of people knocking on your door to sell you stuff. So I have to ask you, what is the scale? I mean, you can't have unlimited budget. But the reality is you have to kind of, do the right thing. What's the most helpful kind of tools and platforms for you that you've seen that you've had experience with? Where's this going in terms of the most effective mechanisms and software and platforms that are available out there? >> From the security perspective specifically, the three things that are most important to me are visibility. Whether it's asset visibility or log visibility. You know, being able to see the data, being able to see what's going on. End user. Making sure that the end user has been trained, is aware and that you're watching them. Because the end user, the human is always the weakest link. The human doesn't have digital controls that can be hard set and absolutely followed. The human changes every day. And then our endpoint security solutions. Those are the three biggest things for me. You know, you have your network perimeter, your firewalls. But attackers aren't always looking for those. They're coming from the inside, they're finding a way around those. The biggest three things for me are endpoint, visibility and the end user. >> Yeah, it's awesome. And a lot of companies are really looking at their posture right now. So I would ask you as a CISO, who's in the front end of all this great stuff and protecting your networks and all your environments and the endpoints and assets. What advice would you have for other CISOs who are kind of trying to level up to where you're at, in terms of rethinking their security posture? What advice would you give them? >> The advice I would give you is surround yourself with people that are like-minded on the security side. Make sure that these people are aware but that they're willing to grow. Because security's always changing. If you get a security person that's dead set that they're going to be a network security person and that's all they're going to do. You know, you may have that need and you may fill it. But at the end of the day, you need somebody who's open rounded and ready to change. And then you need to make sure that you can have somebody, and the team that you work with is able to talk to your executives. It never fails, the executives. They understand security from the standpoint of the business, but they don't necessarily understand security from the technical side. So you have to make sure that you can cross those two boundaries. And when you grow your team you have to make sure that that's the biggest focus. >> I have to ask the pandemic question, but I know cybersecurity hasn't changed. In fact, it's gotten more aggressive in the pandemic. How has the post pandemic or kind of like towards the tail end of where we're at now, affect the cybersecurity landscape? Has it increased velocity? Has it changed any kind of threat vectors? Has it changed in any way? Can you share your thoughts on what happened during the pandemic and now has we come out of it into the next, well post pandemic? >> Absolutely. It affected hospitality in a kind of unique way. Because, a lot of the different governments, state, federal. I'm in Ohio. I work out of our Ohio resort. A lot of the governments literally shut us down or limited severely how many guests we could have in. So on the one hand you've got less traffic internal over the network. So you've got a little bit of a slow down there. But on the flip side it also meant a lot of our workers were working from home. So now you've got a lot of remote access coming in. You've got people that are trying to get in from home and work machines. You have to transition call centers and call volume and all of the things that come along with that. And you have to make sure that that human element is accounted for. Because, again, you've got people working from home, you no longer know if the person that's calling you today, if it's not somebody you're familiar with you don't know if that person is Joe Blow from the front desk or if that person's a vendor or who they are. And so when you deal with a company with 5,000 ish employees or 10,000 that some of these bigger companies are. 15,000, whatever the case may be. You know, the pandemic really put a shift in there because now you're protecting not only against the technologies, but you're dealing with all of the scams, all of the phishing attempts that are coming through that are COVID related. All of these various things. And it really did. It threw a crazy mix into cybersecurity. >> I can imagine that the brain trust over there is prior thinking, "Hey, we were a hybrid experience." Now, if people who have come and experienced our resorts and conventions can come in remotely, even in a hybrid experience with folks that are there. You've seen a lot of hybrid events for instance go on, where there's shared experience. I can almost imagine your service area is now extending to the homes of those guests. That you got to start thinking differently. Has that been something that you guys are looking at? >> We're looking at it from the standpoint of trying to broaden some of the events. In the case of a lot of our conventions, things of that nature. The conventions that aren't actually Kalahari's run conventions, we host them, we manage them. But it does... When you talk about workers coming from home to attend these conventions. Or these telecommuters that are attending these conventions. It does affect us in the stance that, like I said we have to provision network for these various events. And we have to make sure that the network and the security around the network are tight. So it does. It makes a big deal as far as how Kalahari does its business. Being able to still operate these different meetings and different conventions, and being able to host remotely as well. You know, making sure that telecommunications are available to them. Making sure that network access and room access are available to them. You know for places where we can't gather heavily in meetings. You know, these people still being able to be near each other, still being able to talk, but making sure that that technology is there between them. >> Well, Tim is great to have you on for this CUBE Conversation. CISO from the middle of all the action. You're seeing a lot. There's a lot of surface area you got to watch. There's a lot of data you got to observe. You got to get that visibility. You can only protect what you can see, and the more you see the better it is. The better the machine learning. You brought up the the common area about like-minded individuals. I want to just ask you on the final point here, on hiring and talent coming into the marketplace. I mean, this younger generation coming out of university and college is, or not even going to school. There's no cyber degree. I mean, there are now. But I mean, the world's changing. It's easy to level up. So, skill sets you can't get a degree in certain things. I mean, you got to have a broad set. What do you look for in talent? Is there a trend you see in terms of what makes a good cybersecurity professional, developer, analyst? Is there roles that you see emerging that you think people should pay attention to? What's your take on this as someone who's looking at the future? And- >> You know, it's very interesting that you bring this up. I actually have two of my team members, one directly working for me and another team member at Kalahari that are currently going through college degree programs for cybersecurity. And I wrote recommendations for them. I've worked with them, I'm helping them study. But as you bring people up, you know the other thing I do is I mentor at a couple of the local technical schools as well. I go in, I talk to people, I help them design their programs. And the biggest thing I try to get across to them is, number one, if you're in the learning side of it. Not even talking about the hiring side of it. If you're in the learning side of it, you need to come into it with a kind of an understanding to begin with to where you want to fit into security. You know, do you want to be an attacker, a defender, a manager? Where do you want to be? And then you also need to look at the market and talk to the businesses in the area. You know, I talk to these kids regularly about what their need is. Because if you're in school and you're taking Cisco classes, and focusing on firewalls and what an organization needs as somebody who can read log and do things like that. Or somebody who can do pen testing. You know, that's a huge thing. So I would say if you're on the hiring side of that equation, you know. Like you said, there's no super degrees that I can speak to. There's a lot of certifications. There's a lot of different things like that. The goal for me is finding somebody who can put hands to the ground and feet to the ground, and show me that they know what they know. You know, I'll pull somebody in, I'll ask them to show me a certain specific or I'll ask them for specific information and try to feel that out. Because at the end of the day, there's no degree that's going to protect my network. There's no degree that's a hundred percent going to understand Kalahari, for instance. So I want to make sure that the people I talk to, I get a broad interview scope, I get a number of people to talk to. And really get a feel for what it is they know, and what tools they want to work with and make sure it's going to align with us. >> Well, Tim, that's great that you do that. I think the industry needs that. And I think that's really paying it forward, by getting in and using your time to help shape the young curriculums and the young guns out there. It's interesting you know, like David Vellante and I talk on theCUBE all the time. Cyber is like sports. If you're playing football, you got to know the game. If you're playing football and you come in as a baseball player, the skills might not translate, right? So it's really more of, categorically cyber has a certain pattern to it. Math, open mindedness, connecting dots, seeing things around corners. Maybe it's more holistic views, if you're at the visibility level or getting the weeds with data. A lot of different skill sets needed. The aperture of the job requirements are changing a lot. >> They are. And you know, you touched on that really well. You know, they talk about hacking and the hacker mindset. You know, all the security stuff revolves around hacker. And people mislabel hacker. Hacking in general is making something do something that it wasn't originally designed to do. And when I hire people in security, I want people that have that mindset. I want people that not only are going to work with the tool set we have, and use that mathematical ability and that logic and that reasoning. But I want them to use a reasoning of, "Hey, we have this tool here today. How can this tool do what I want it do but what else can it do for me?" Because like any other industry we have to stretch our dollar. So if I have a tool set that can meet five different needs for me today, rather than investing in 16 different tool sets and spreading that data out and spreading all the control around. Let's focus on those tool sets and let's focus on using that knowledge and that adaptive ability that the human people have on the security side, and put that to use. Make them use the tools that work for them but make 'em develop things, new tools, new methods, new techniques that help us get things across. >> Grow the capabilities, protect, trust all things coming in. And Tim, you're a tech athlete, as we say and you've got a great thing going on over there. And again, congratulations on the work you're doing on the higher ed and the education side and the Kalahari Resorts & Conventions. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate the insight you're sharing. Thank you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto for theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (somber music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to the special Cube conversation that we're launching in conjunction with Pure Accelerate. Prakash Darji is here, is the general manager of Digital Experience. They actually have a business unit dedicated to this at Pure Storage. Prakash, welcome back, good to see you. >> Yeah Dave, happy to be here. >> So a few weeks back, you and I were talking about the Shift 2 and as a service economy and which is a good lead up to Accelerate, held today, we're releasing this video in LA. This is the fifth in person Accelerate. It's got a new tagline techfest so you're making it fun, but still hanging out to the tech, which we love. So this morning you guys made some announcements expanding the portfolio. I'm really interested in your reaffirmed commitment to Evergreen. That's something that got this whole trend started in the introduction of Evergreen Flex. What is that all about? What's your vision for Evergreen Flex? >> Well, so look, this is one of the biggest moments that I think we have as a company now, because we introduced Evergreen and that was and probably still is one of the largest disruptions to happen to the industry in a decade. Now, Evergreen Flex takes the power of modernizing performance and capacity to storage beyond the box, full stop. So we first started on a project many years ago to say, okay, how can we bring that modernization concept to our entire portfolio? That means if someone's got 10 boxes, how do you modernize performance and capacity across 10 boxes or across maybe FlashBlade and FlashArray. So with Evergreen Flex, we first are starting to hyper disaggregate performance and capacity and the capacity can be moved to where you need it. So previously, you could have thought of a box saying, okay, it has this performance or capacity range or boundary, but let's think about it beyond the box. Let's think about it as a portfolio. My application needs performance or capacity for storage, what if I could bring the resources to it? So with Evergreen Flex within the QLC family with our FlashBlade and our FlashArray QLC projects, you could actually move QLC capacity to where you need it. And with FlashArray X and XL or TLC family, you could move capacity to where you need it within that family. Now, if you're enabling that, you have to change the business model because the capacity needs to get build where you use it. If you use it in a high performance tier, you could build at a high performance rate. If you use it as a lower performance tier, you could build at a lower performance rate. So we changed the business model to enable this technology flexibility, where customers can buy the hardware and they get a pay per use consumption model for the software and services, but this enables the technology flexibility to use your capacity wherever you need. And we're just continuing that journey of hyper disaggregated. >> Okay, so you solve the problem of having to allocate specific capacity or performance to a particular workload. You can now spread that across whatever products in the portfolio, like you said, you're disaggregating performance and capacity. So that's very cool. Maybe you could double click on that. You obviously talk to customers about doing this. They were in pain a little bit, right? 'Cause they had this sort of stovepipe thing. So talk a little bit about the customer feedback that led you here. >> Well, look, let's just say today if you're an application developer or you haven't written your app yet, but you know you're going to. Well, you need that at least say I need something, right? So someone's going to ask you what kind of storage do you need? How many IOPS, what kind of performance capacity, before you've written your code. And you're going to buy something and you're going to spend that money. Now at that point, you're going to go write your application, run it on that box and then say, okay, was I right or was I wrong? And you know what? You were guessing before you wrote the software. After you wrote the software, you can test it and decide what you need, how it's going to scale, et cetera. But if you were wrong, you already bought something. In a hyper disaggregated world, that capacity is not a sunk cost, you can use it wherever you want. You can use capacity of somewhere else and bring it over there. So in the world of application development and in the world of storage, today people think about, I've got a workload, it's SAP, it's Oracle, I've built this custom app. I need to move it to a tier of storage, a performance class. Like you think about the application and you think about moving the application. And it takes time to move the application, takes performance, takes loan, it's a scheduled event. What if you said, you know what? You don't have to do any of that. You just move the capacity to where you need it, right? >> Yep. >> So the application's there and you actually have the ability to instantaneously move the capacity to where you need it for the application. And eventually, where we're going is we're looking to do the same thing across the performance hearing. So right now, the biggest benefit is the agility and flexibility a customer has across their fleet. So Evergreen was great for the customer with one array, but Evergreen Flex now brings that power to the entire fleet. And that's not tied to just FlashArray or FlashBlade. We've engineered a data plane in our direct flash fabric software to be able to take on the personality of the system it needs to go into. So when a data pack goes into a FlashBlade, that data pack is optimized for use in that scale out architecture with the metadata for FlashBlade. When it goes into a FlashArray C it's optimized for that metadata structure. So our Purity software has made this transformative to be able to do this. And we created a business model that allowed us to take advantage of this technology flexibility. >> Got it. Okay, so you got this mutually interchangeable performance and capacity across the portfolio beautiful. And I want to come back to sort of the Purity, but help me understand how this is different from just normal Evergreen, existing evergreen options. You mentioned the one array, but help us understand that more fully. >> Well, look, so in addition to this, like we had Evergreen Gold historically. We introduced Evergreen Flex and we had Pure as a service. So you had kind of two spectrums previously. You had Evergreen Gold on one hand, which modernized the performance and capacity of a box. You had Pure as a service that said don't worry about the box, tell me how many IOPS you have and will run and operate and manage that service for you. I think we've spoken about that previously on theCUBE. >> Yep. >> Now, we have this model where it's not just about the box, we have this model where we say, you know what, it's your fleet. You're going to run and operate and manage your fleet and you could move the capacity to where you need it. So as we started thinking about this, we decided to unify our entire portfolio of sub software and subscription services under the Evergreen brand. Evergreen Gold we're renaming to Evergreen Forever. We've actually had seven customers just crossed a decade of updates Forever Evergreen within a box. So Evergreen Forever is about modernizing a box. Evergreen Flex is about modernizing your fleet and Evergreen one, which is our rebrand of Pure as a service is about modernizing your labor. Instead of you worrying about it, let us do it for you. Because if you're an application developer and you're trying to figure out, where should I put my capacity? Where should I do it? You can just sign up for the IOPS you need and let us actually deliver and move the components to where you need it for performance, capacity, management, SLAs, et cetera. So as we think about this, for us this is a spectrum and a continuum of where you're at in the modernization journey to software subscription and services. >> Okay, got it. So why did you feel like now was the right time for the rebranding and the renaming convention, what's behind? What was the thing? Take us inside the internal conversations and the chalkboard discussion? >> Well, look, the chalkboard discussion's simple. It's everything was built on the Evergreen stateless architecture where within a box, right? We disaggregated the performance and capacity within the box already, 10 years ago within Evergreen. And that's what enabled us to build Pure as a service. That's why I say like when companies say they built a service, I'm like it's not a service if you have to do a data migration. You need a stateless architecture that's disaggregated. You can almost think of this as the anti hyper-converge, right? That's going the other way. It's hyper disaggregated. >> Right. >> And that foundation is true for our whole portfolio. That was fundamental, the Evergreen architecture. And then if Gold is modernizing a box and Flex is modernizing your fleet and your portfolio and Pure as a service is modernizing the labor, it is more of a continuation in the spectrum of how do you ensure you get better with age, right? And it's like one of those things when you think about a car. Miles driven on a car means your car's getting older and it doesn't necessarily get better with age, right? What's interesting when you think about the human body, yeah, you get older and some people deteriorate with age and some people it turns out for a period of time, you pick up some muscle mass, you get a little bit older, you get a little bit wiser and you get a little bit better with age for a while because you're putting in the work to modernize, right? But where in infrastructure and hardware and technology are you at the point where it always just gets better with age, right? We've introduced that concept 10 years ago. And we've now had proven industry success over a decade, right? As I mentioned, our first seven customers who've had a decade of Evergreen update started with an FA-300 way back when, and since then performance and capacity has been getting better over time with Evergreen Forever. So this is the next 10 years of it getting better and better for the company and not just tying it to the box because now we've grown up, we've got customers with like large fleets. I think one of our customers just hit 900 systems, right? >> Wow. >> So when you have 900 systems, right? And you're running a fleet you need to think about, okay, how am I using these resources? And in this day and age in that world, power becomes a big thing because if you're using resources inefficiently and the cost of power and energy is up, you're going to be in a world of hurt. So by using Flex where you can move the capacity to where it's needed, you're creating the most efficient operating environment, which is actually the lowest power consumption environment as well. >> Right. >> So we're really excited about this journey of modernizing, but that rebranding just became kind of a no brainer to us because it's all part of the spectrum on your journey of whether you're a single array customer, you're a fleet customer, or you don't want to even run, operate and manage. You can actually just say, you know what, give me the guarantee in the SLA. So that's the spectrum that informed the rebranding. >> Got it. Yeah, so to your point about the human body, all you got to do is look at Tom Brady's NFL combine videos and you'll see what a transformation. Fine wine is another one. I like the term hyper disaggregated because that to me is consistent with what's happening with the cloud and edge. We're building this hyper distributed or disaggregated system. So I want to just understand a little bit about you mentioned Purity so there's this software obviously is the enabler here, but what's under the covers? Is it like a virtualizer or megaload balancer, metadata manager, what's the tech behind this? >> Yeah, so we'll do a little bit of a double tech, right? So we have this concept of drives where in Purity, we build our own software for direct flash that takes the NAND and we do the NAND management as we're building our drives in Purity software. Now ,that advantage gives us the ability to say how should this drive behave? So in a FlashArray C system, it can behave as part of a FlashArray C and its usable capacity that you can write because the metadata and some of the system information is in NVRAM as part of the controller, right? So you have some metadata capability there. In a legend architecture for example, you have a distributed Blade architecture. So you need parts of that capacity to operate almost like a single layer chip where you can actually have metadata operations independent of your storage operations that operate like QLC. So we actually manage the NAND in a very very different way based on the persona of the system it's going into, right? So this capacity to make it usable, right? It's like saying a competitor could go ahead name it, Dell that has power max in Isilon, HPE that has single store and three power and nimble and like you name, like can you really from a technology standpoint say your capacity can be used anywhere or all these independent systems. Everyone's thinking about the world like a system, like here's this system, here's that system, here's that system. And your capacity is locked into a system. To be able to unlock that capacity to the system, you need to behave differently with the media type in the operating environment you're going into and that's what Purity does, right? So we are doing that as part of our direct Flex software around how we manage these drives to enable this. >> Well, it's the same thing in the cloud precaution, right? I mean, you got different APIs and primitive for object, for block, for file. Now, it's all programmable infrastructure so that makes it easier, but to the point, it's still somewhat stovepipe. So it's funny, it's good to see your commitment to Evergreen, I think you're right. You lay down the gauntlet a decade plus ago. First everybody ignored you and then they kind of laughed at you, then they criticized you, and then they said, oh, then you guys reached the escape velocity. So you had a winning hand. So I'm interested in that sort of progression over the past decade where you're going, why this is so important to your customers, where you're trying to get them ultimately. >> Well, look, the thing that's most disappointing is if I bought 100 terabytes still have to re-buy it every three or five years. That seems like a kind of ridiculous proposition, but welcome to storage. You know what I mean? That's what most people do with Evergreen. We want to end data migrations. We want to make sure that every software updates, hardware updates, non disruptive. We want to make it easy to deploy and run at scale for your fleet. And eventually we want everyone to move to our Evergreen one, formerly Pure as a service where we can run and operate and manage 'cause this is all about trust. We're trying to create trust with the customer to say, trust us, to run and operate and scale for you and worry about your business because we make tech easy. And like think about this hyper disaggregated if you go further. If you're going further with hyper disaggregated, you can think about it as like performance and capacity is your Lego building blocks. Now for anyone, I have a son, he wants to build a Lego Death Star. He didn't have that manual, he's toast. So when you move to at scale and you have this hyper disaggregated world and you have this unlimited freedom, you have unlimited choice. It's the problem of the cloud today, too much choice, right? There's like hundreds of instances of this, what do I even choose? >> Right. >> Well, so the only way to solve that problem and create simplicity when you have so much choice is put data to work. And that's where Pure one comes in because we've been collecting and we can scan your landscape and tell you, you should move these types of resources here and move those types of resources there, right? In the past, it was always about you should move this application there or you should move this application there. We're actually going to turn the entire industry on it's head. It's not like applications and data have gravity. So let's think about moving resources to where that are needed versus saying resources are a fixed asset, let's move the applications there. So that's a concept that's new to the industry. Like we're creating that concept, we're introducing that concept because now we have the technology to make that reality a new efficient way of running storage for the world. Like this is that big for the company. >> Well, I mean, a lot of the failures in data analytics and data strategies are a function of trying to jam everything into a single monolithic system and hyper centralize it. Data by its very nature is distributed. So hyper disaggregated fits that model and the pendulum's clearly swinging to that. Prakash, great to have you, purestorage.com I presume is where I can learn more? >> Oh, absolutely. We're super excited and our pent up by demand I think in this space is huge so we're looking forward to bringing this innovation to the world. >> All right, hey, thanks again. Great to see you, I appreciate you coming on and explaining this new model and good luck with it. >> All right, thank you. >> All right, and thanks for watching. This is David Vellante, and appreciate you watching this Cube conversation, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> theCube presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to Dell Technologies World 2022. You're watching theCube's coverage of this, three-day coverage wall to wall. My name is David Vellante John Furrier's here, Lisa Martin, David Nicholson. Talk of the town here is data. And one of the big announcements at the show is Snowflake and Dell partnering up, building ecosystems. Snowflake reaching into on-prem, allowing customers to actually access the Snowflake Data Cloud without moving the data or if they want to move the data they can. This is really one of the hotter announcements of the show. Martin Glynn is here, he's the Senior Director of Storage Product Management at Dell Technologies. And Clark Patterson, he's the Head of Product Marketing for Snowflake. Guys, welcome. >> Thanks for having us. >> So a lot of buzz around this and, you know, Clark, you and I have talked about the need to really extend your data vision. And this really is the first step ever you've taken on-prem. Explain the motivation for this from your customer's perspective. >> Yeah. I mean, if you step back and think about Snowflake's vision and our mission of mobilizing the world's data, it's all around trying to break down silos for however customers define what a silo is, right? So we've had a lot of success breaking down silos from a workload perspective where we've expanded the platform to be data warehousing, and data engineering, and machine learning, and data science, and all the kind of compute intensive ways that people work with us. We've also had a lot of success in our sharing capabilities and how we're breaking down silos of organizations, right? So I can share data more seamlessly within my team, I can do it across totally disparate organizations, and break down silos that way. So this partnership is really like the next leg of the stool, so to speak, where we're breaking down the silos of the the data and where the data lives ultimately, right? So up until this point, Cloud, all focus there, and now we have this opportunity with Dell to expand that and into on-premises world and people can bring all those data sets together. >> And the data target for this Martin, is Dell ECS, right? Your object store, and it's got S3 compatibility. Explain that. >> Yeah, we've actually got sort of two flavors. We'll start with ECS, which is our turnkey object storage solution. Object storage offers sort of the ultimate in flexibility, you know, potential performance, ease of use, right? Which is why it fits so well with Snowflake's mission for sort of unlocking, you know, the data within the data center. So we'll offer it to begin with ECS, and then we also recently announced our software defined object scale solution. So add even more flexibility there. >> Okay. And the clock, the way it works is I can now access non-native Snowflake data using what? Materialized views, external tables, how does that work? >> Some combination of all the above. So we've had in Snowflake a capability called external tables which we refer to, it goes hand in hand with this notion of external stages. Basically through the combination of those two capabilities, it's a metadata layer on data wherever it resides. So customers have actually used this in Snowflake for data lake data outside of Snowflake in the Cloud up until this point. So it's effectively an extension of that functionality into the Dell on-premises world, so that we can tap into those things. So we use the external stages to expose all the metadata about what's in the Dell environment. And then we build external tables in Snowflake so that data looks like it is in Snowflake. And then the experience for the analyst or whomever it is, is exactly as though that data lives in the Snowflake world. >> Okay. So for a while you've allowed non-native Snowflake data but it had to be in the Cloud. >> Correct. >> It was the first time it's on-prem, >> that's correct >> that's the innovation here. Okay. And if I want to bring it into the Cloud, can I? >> Yeah, the connection here will help in a migration sense as well, right? So that's the good thing is, it's really giving the user the choice. So we are integrating together as partners to make connection as seamless as possible. And then the end user will say like, look I've got data that needs to live on-premises, for whatever reasons, data sovereignty whatever they decide. And they can keep it there and still do the analytics in another place. But if there's a need and a desire to use this as an opportunity to migrate some of that data to Cloud, that connection between our two platforms will make that easier. >> Well, Michael always says, "Hey, it's customer choice, we're flexible." So you're cool with that? That's been the mission since we kind of came together, right? Is if our customers needed to stay in their data center, if that makes more sense from a cost perspective or, you know, a data gravity perspective, then they can do that. But we also want to help them unlock the value of that data. So if they need to copy it up to the public Cloud and take advantage of it, we're going to integrate directly with Snowflake to make that really easy to do. >> So there are engineering integrations here, obviously that's required. Can you describe what that looks like? Give us the details on when it's available. >> Sure. So it's going to be sort of second half this year that you'll see, we're demoing it this week, but the availability we second half this year. And fundamentally, it's the way Clark described it, that Snowflake will reach into our S3 interface using the standard S3 interface. We're qualifying between the way they expect that S3 interface to present the data and the way our platform works, just to ensure that there's smooth interaction between the two. So that's sort of the first simplest use case. And then the second example we gave where the customer can copy some of that data up to the public Cloud. We're basically copying between two S3 buckets and making sure that Snowflake's Snowpipe is aware that data's being made available and can easily ingest it. >> And then that just goes into a virtual warehouse- >> Exactly. >> and customer does to know or care. >> Yep Exactly. >> Yeah. >> The compute happens in Snowflake the way it does in any other manner. >> And I know you got to crawl, walk, run second half of this year, but I would imagine, okay, you're going to start with AWS, correct? And then eventually you go to other Clouds. I mean, that's going to take other technical integrations, I mean, obviously. So should we assume there's a roadmap here or is this a one and done? >> I would assume that, I mean, based on our multi-Cloud approach, that's kind of our approach at least, yeah. >> Kind of makes sense, right? I mean, that would seem to be a natural progression. My other thought was, okay, I've got operational systems. They might be transaction systems running on a on a PowerMax. >> Yeah. >> Is there a way to get the data into an object store and make that available, now that opens up even more workloads. I know you're not committing to doing that, but it just, conceptually, it seems like something a customer might want to do. >> Yeah. I, a hundred percent, agree. I mean, I think when we brought our team together we started with a blank slate. It was what's the best solution we can build. We landed on this sort of first step, but we got lots of feedback from a lot of our big joint customers about you know, this system over there, this potential integration over here, and whether it's, you know, PowerMax type systems or other file workloads with native Snowflake data types. You know, I think this is just the beginning, right? We have lots of potential here. >> And I don't think you've announced pricing, right? It's premature for that. But have you thought about, and how are you thinking about the pricing model? I mean, you're a consumption based pricing, is that kind of how this is going to work? Or is it a sort of a new pricing model or haven't you figured that out yet? >> I don't know if you've got any details on that, but from a Snowflake perspective, I would assume it's consistent with how our customers engage with us today. >> Yeah. >> And we'll offer both possibilities, right? So you can either continue with the standard, you know, sort of CapEx motion, maybe that's the most optimal for you from a cost perspective, or you can take advantage through our OpEx option, right? So you can do consumption on-prem also. >> Okay. So it could be a dual model, right? Depending on what the customer wants. If they're a Snowflake customer, obviously it's going to be consumption based, however, you guys price. What's happening, Clark, in in the market? Explain why Snowflake has so much momentum and, you know, traction in the marketplace. >> So like I spent a lot of time doing analysis on why we win and lose, core part of my role. And, you know, there's a couple of, there's really three things that come up consistently as to why people people are really excited about Snowflake platform. One is the most simplest thing of all. It feels like is just ease of use and it just works, right? And I think the way that this platform was built for the Cloud from the ground up all the way back 10 years ago, really a lot allows us to deliver that seamless experience of just like instant compute when you want it, it goes away, you know, only pay for what you use. Very few knobs to turn and things like that. And so people absolutely love that factor. The other is multi-Cloud. So, you know, there's definitely a lot of organizations out there that have a multi-Cloud strategy, and, you know, what that means to them can be highly variable, but regardless, they want to be able to interact across Clouds in some capacity. And of course we are a single platform, like literally one single interface, consistent across all the three Cloud providers that we work upon. And it gives them that flexibility to mix and match Cloud infrastructure under any Snowflake however they see fit. The last piece of it is sharing. And, you know, I think it's that ability as I kind of alluded to around like breaking down organizational silos, and allow people to be able to actually connect with each other in ways that you couldn't do before. Like, if you think about how you and I would've shared data before, I'd be like, "Hey, Dave, I'm going to unload this table into a spreadsheet and I'm going to send it over in email." And there's the whole host of issues that get introduced in that and world, now it's like instantly available. I have a lot of control over it, it's governed it's all these other things. And I can create kind of walled gardens, so to speak, of how far out I want that to go. It could be in a controlled environment of organizations that I want to collaborate with, or I can put it on our marketplace and expose it to the whole world, because I think there's a value in that. And if I choose I can monetize it, right? So those, you know, the ease of use aspect of it, absolutely, it's just a fantastic platform. The multi-Cloud aspect of it and our unique differentiation around sharing in our marketplace and monetization. >> Yeah, on the sharing front. I mean, it's now discoverable. Like if you send me an email, like what'd you call that? When did you send that email? And then the same time I can forward that to somebody else's not governed. >> Yeah. >> All right. So that just be creates a nightmare for the compliance. >> Right. Yeah. You think about how you revoke access in that situation. You just don't, right? Now I can just turn it off and you go in to run your query. >> Don't get access on that data anymore. Yeah. Okay. And then the other thing I wanted to ask you, Clark is Snowflake started really as analytics platform, simplifying data warehousing, you're moving into that world of data science, you know, the whole data lake movement, bringing those two worlds together. You know, I was talking to Ben Ward about this, maybe there's a semantic layer that helps us kind of talk between those two worlds, but you don't care, right? If it's in an object store, it can play in both of those worlds, right? >> That's right. >> Yeah, it's up to you to figure it out and the customer- >> Yeah. >> from a storage standpoint. Here it is, serve it up. >> And that's the thrust of this announcement, right? Is bringing together two great companies, the Dell platform, the Snowflake platform, and allowing organizations to bring that together. And they decide like it, as we all know, customers decide how they're going to build their architecture. And so this is just another way that we're helping them leverage the capabilities of our two great platforms. >> Does this push or pull or little bit of both? I mean, where'd this come from? Or customers saying, "Hey, it would be kind of cool if we could have this." Or is it more, "Hey, what do you guys think?" You know, where are you at with that? >> It was definitely both, right? I mean, so we certainly started with, you know, a high level idea that, you know, the technologies are complimentary, right? I mean, as Clark just described, and at the same time we had customers coming to us saying, "Hey, wait a minute, I'm doing this over here, and this over here, how can I make this easier?" So that was like I said, we started with a blank sheet and lots of long customer conversations and this is what resulted. So >> So what are the sequence of events to kind of roll this out? You said it's second half, you know, when do you start getting customers involved? Do you have your already, you know, to poke at this and what's that look like? >> Yeah, sure. I can weigh in there. So, absolutely. We've had a few of our big customers that have been involved sort of in the design already who understand how they want to use it. So I think our expectation is that now that the sort of demonstrations have been in place, we have some pre functionality, we're going to see some initial testing and usage, some beta type situations with our customers. And then second half, we'll ramp from there. >> It's got to be a huge overlap between Dell customers and Snowflake customers. I mean, it's hundred billion. You can't not bump into Dell somewhere. >> Exactly. Yeah, you know. >> So where do you guys want to see this relationship go, kind of how should we measure success? Maybe you could each give your perspectives of that. >> I mean, for us, I think it's really showing the value of the Snowflake platform in this new world where there's a whole new ecosystem of data that is accessible to us, right? So seeing those organizations that are saying like, "Look, I'm doing new things with on-premises data that I didn't think that I could do before", or, "I'm driving efficiency in how I do analytics, and data engineering, and data science, in ways that I couldn't do before," 'cause they were locked out of using a Snowflake-like technology, right? So I think for me, that's going to be that real excitement. I'm really curious to see how the collaboration and the sharing component comes into this, you know, where you can think of having an on-premises data strategy and a need, right? But you can really connect to Cloud native customers and partners and suppliers that live in the Snowflake ecosystem, and that wasn't possible before. And so that is very conceivable and very possible through this relationship. So seeing how those edges get created in in our world and how people start to collaborate across data, both in the Cloud and on-prem is going to be really exciting. >> I remember I asked Frank, it was kind of early in the pandemic. I asked him, come on, tell me about how you're managing things. And he was awesome. And I asked him to at the time, you know, "You're ever going to do, you know, bring this platform on-prem?" He's like unequivocal, "No way, that's never going to happen. We're not going to do it halfway house ware Cloud only." And I kept thinking, but there's got to be a way to expand that team. There's so much data out there, and so boom, now we see the answer . Martin, from your standpoint, what does success look like? >> I think it starts with our partnership, right? So I've been doing this a long time. Probably the first time I've worked so closely with a partner like Snowflake. Joint customer conversations, joint solutioning, making sure what we're building is going to be really, truly as useful as possible to them. And I think we're going to let them guide us as we go forward here, right? You mentioned, you know, systems or record or other potential platforms. We're going to let them tell us where exactly the most value will come from the integration between the two companies. >> Yeah. Follow data. I mean, remember in the old days a hardware company like Dell would go to an ISP like Snowflake and say, "Hey, we ran some benchmarks. Your software runs really fast on our hardware, can we work together?" And you go, "Yeah, of course. Yeah, no problem." But wow! What a different dynamic it is today. >> Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. >> All right guys. Hey, thanks so much for coming to theCube. It's great to see you. We'll see you at the Snowflake Summit in June. >> Snowflake Summit in a month and a half. >> Looking forward to that. All right. Thank you again. >> Thank you Dave. >> All right. Keep it right there everybody. This is Dave Vellante, wall to wall coverage of Dell Tech World 2022. We'll be right back. (gentle music)

>> theCube presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to Dell Technologies World 2022. You're watching theCube's coverage of this, three-day coverage wall to wall. My name is David Vellante John Furrier's here, Lisa Martin, David Nicholson. Talk of the town here is data. And one of the big announcements at the show is Snowflake and Dell partnering up, building ecosystems. Snowflake reaching into on-prem, allowing customers to actually access the Snowflake Data Cloud without moving the data or if they want to move the data they can. This is really one of the hotter announcements of the show. Martin Glynn is here, he's the Senior Director of Storage Product Management at Dell Technologies. And Clark Patterson, he's the Head of Product Marketing for Snowflake. Guys, welcome. >> Thanks for having us. >> So a lot of buzz around this and, you know, Clark, you and I have talked about the need to really extend your data vision. And this really is the first step ever you've taken on-prem. Explain the motivation for this from your customer's perspective. >> Yeah. I mean, if you step back and think about Snowflake's vision and our mission of mobilizing the world's data, it's all around trying to break down silos for however customers define what a silo is, right? So we've had a lot of success breaking down silos from a workload perspective where we've expanded the platform to be data warehousing, and data engineering, and machine learning, and data science, and all the kind of compute intensive ways that people work with us. We've also had a lot of success in our sharing capabilities and how we're breaking down silos of organizations, right? So I can share data more seamlessly within my team, I can do it across totally disparate organizations, and break down silos that way. So this partnership is really like the next leg of the stool, so to speak, where we're breaking down the silos of the the data and where the data lives ultimately, right? So up until this point, Cloud, all focus there, and now we have this opportunity with Dell to expand that and into on-premises world and people can bring all those data sets together. >> And the data target for this Martin, is Dell ECS, right? Your object store, and it's got S3 compatibility. Explain that. >> Yeah, we've actually got sort of two flavors. We'll start with ECS, which is our turnkey object storage solution. Object storage offers sort of the ultimate in flexibility, you know, potential performance, ease of use, right? Which is why it fits so well with Snowflake's mission for sort of unlocking, you know, the data within the data center. So we'll offer it to begin with ECS, and then we also recently announced our software defined object scale solution. So add even more flexibility there. >> Okay. And the clock, the way it works is I can now access non-native Snowflake data using what? Materialized views, external tables, how does that work? >> Some combination of all the above. So we've had in Snowflake a capability called external tables which we refer to, it goes hand in hand with this notion of external stages. Basically through the combination of those two capabilities, it's a metadata layer on data wherever it resides. So customers have actually used this in Snowflake for data lake data outside of Snowflake in the Cloud up until this point. So it's effectively an extension of that functionality into the Dell on-premises world, so that we can tap into those things. So we use the external stages to expose all the metadata about what's in the Dell environment. And then we build external tables in Snowflake so that data looks like it is in Snowflake. And then the experience for the analyst or whomever it is, is exactly as though that data lives in the Snowflake world. >> Okay. So for a while you've allowed non-native Snowflake data but it had to be in the Cloud. >> Correct. >> It was the first time it's on-prem, >> that's correct >> that's the innovation here. Okay. And if I want to bring it into the Cloud, can I? >> Yeah, the connection here will help in a migration sense as well, right? So that's the good thing is, it's really giving the user the choice. So we are integrating together as partners to make connection as seamless as possible. And then the end user will say like, look I've got data that needs to live on-premises, for whatever reasons, data sovereignty whatever they decide. And they can keep it there and still do the analytics in another place. But if there's a need and a desire to use this as an opportunity to migrate some of that data to Cloud, that connection between our two platforms will make that easier. >> Well, Michael always says, "Hey, it's customer choice, we're flexible." So you're cool with that? That's been the mission since we kind of came together, right? Is if our customers needed to stay in their data center, if that makes more sense from a cost perspective or, you know, a data gravity perspective, then they can do that. But we also want to help them unlock the value of that data. So if they need to copy it up to the public Cloud and take advantage of it, we're going to integrate directly with Snowflake to make that really easy to do. >> So there are engineering integrations here, obviously that's required. Can you describe what that looks like? Give us the details on when it's available. >> Sure. So it's going to be sort of second half this year that you'll see, we're demoing it this week, but the availability we second half this year. And fundamentally, it's the way Clark described it, that Snowflake will reach into our S3 interface using the standard S3 interface. We're qualifying between the way they expect that S3 interface to present the data and the way our platform works, just to ensure that there's smooth interaction between the two. So that's sort of the first simplest use case. And then the second example we gave where the customer can copy some of that data up to the public Cloud. We're basically copying between two S3 buckets and making sure that Snowflake's Snowpipe is aware that data's being made available and can easily ingest it. >> And then that just goes into a virtual warehouse- >> Exactly. >> and customer does to know or care. >> Yep Exactly. >> Yeah. >> The compute happens in Snowflake the way it does in any other manner. >> And I know you got to crawl, walk, run second half of this year, but I would imagine, okay, you're going to start with AWS, correct? And then eventually you go to other Clouds. I mean, that's going to take other technical integrations, I mean, obviously. So should we assume there's a roadmap here or is this a one and done? >> I would assume that, I mean, based on our multi-Cloud approach, that's kind of our approach at least, yeah. >> Kind of makes sense, right? I mean, that would seem to be a natural progression. My other thought was, okay, I've got operational systems. They might be transaction systems running on a on a PowerMax. >> Yeah. >> Is there a way to get the data into an object store and make that available, now that opens up even more workloads. I know you're not committing to doing that, but it just, conceptually, it seems like something a customer might want to do. >> Yeah. I, a hundred percent, agree. I mean, I think when we brought our team together we started with a blank slate. It was what's the best solution we can build. We landed on this sort of first step, but we got lots of feedback from a lot of our big joint customers about you know, this system over there, this potential integration over here, and whether it's, you know, PowerMax type systems or other file workloads with native Snowflake data types. You know, I think this is just the beginning, right? We have lots of potential here. >> And I don't think you've announced pricing, right? It's premature for that. But have you thought about, and how are you thinking about the pricing model? I mean, you're a consumption based pricing, is that kind of how this is going to work? Or is it a sort of a new pricing model or haven't you figured that out yet? >> I don't know if you've got any details on that, but from a Snowflake perspective, I would assume it's consistent with how our customers engage with us today. >> Yeah. >> And we'll offer both possibilities, right? So you can either continue with the standard, you know, sort of CapEx motion, maybe that's the most optimal for you from a cost perspective, or you can take advantage through our OpEx option, right? So you can do consumption on-prem also. >> Okay. So it could be a dual model, right? Depending on what the customer wants. If they're a Snowflake customer, obviously it's going to be consumption based, however, you guys price. What's happening, Clark, in in the market? Explain why Snowflake has so much momentum and, you know, traction in the marketplace. >> So like I spent a lot of time doing analysis on why we win and lose, core part of my role. And, you know, there's a couple of, there's really three things that come up consistently as to why people people are really excited about Snowflake platform. One is the most simplest thing of all. It feels like is just ease of use and it just works, right? And I think the way that this platform was built for the Cloud from the ground up all the way back 10 years ago, really a lot allows us to deliver that seamless experience of just like instant compute when you want it, it goes away, you know, only pay for what you use. Very few knobs to turn and things like that. And so people absolutely love that factor. The other is multi-Cloud. So, you know, there's definitely a lot of organizations out there that have a multi-Cloud strategy, and, you know, what that means to them can be highly variable, but regardless, they want to be able to interact across Clouds in some capacity. And of course we are a single platform, like literally one single interface, consistent across all the three Cloud providers that we work upon. And it gives them that flexibility to mix and match Cloud infrastructure under any Snowflake however they see fit. The last piece of it is sharing. And, you know, I think it's that ability as I kind of alluded to around like breaking down organizational silos, and allow people to be able to actually connect with each other in ways that you couldn't do before. Like, if you think about how you and I would've shared data before, I'd be like, "Hey, Dave, I'm going to unload this table into a spreadsheet and I'm going to send it over in email." And there's the whole host of issues that get introduced in that and world, now it's like instantly available. I have a lot of control over it, it's governed it's all these other things. And I can create kind of walled gardens, so to speak, of how far out I want that to go. It could be in a controlled environment of organizations that I want to collaborate with, or I can put it on our marketplace and expose it to the whole world, because I think there's a value in that. And if I choose I can monetize it, right? So those, you know, the ease of use aspect of it, absolutely, it's just a fantastic platform. The multi-Cloud aspect of it and our unique differentiation around sharing in our marketplace and monetization. >> Yeah, on the sharing front. I mean, it's now discoverable. Like if you send me an email, like what'd you call that? When did you send that email? And then the same time I can forward that to somebody else's not governed. >> Yeah. >> All right. So that just be creates a nightmare for the compliance. >> Right. Yeah. You think about how you revoke access in that situation. You just don't, right? Now I can just turn it off and you go in to run your query. >> Don't get access on that data anymore. Yeah. Okay. And then the other thing I wanted to ask you, Clark is Snowflake started really as analytics platform, simplifying data warehousing, you're moving into that world of data science, you know, the whole data lake movement, bringing those two worlds together. You know, I was talking to Ben Ward about this, maybe there's a semantic layer that helps us kind of talk between those two worlds, but you don't care, right? If it's in an object store, it can play in both of those worlds, right? >> That's right. >> Yeah, it's up to you to figure it out and the customer- >> Yeah. >> from a storage standpoint. Here it is, serve it up. >> And that's the thrust of this announcement, right? Is bringing together two great companies, the Dell platform, the Snowflake platform, and allowing organizations to bring that together. And they decide like it, as we all know, customers decide how they're going to build their architecture. And so this is just another way that we're helping them leverage the capabilities of our two great platforms. >> Does this push or pull or little bit of both? I mean, where'd this come from? Or customers saying, "Hey, it would be kind of cool if we could have this." Or is it more, "Hey, what do you guys think?" You know, where are you at with that? >> It was definitely both, right? I mean, so we certainly started with, you know, a high level idea that, you know, the technologies are complimentary, right? I mean, as Clark just described, and at the same time we had customers coming to us saying, "Hey, wait a minute, I'm doing this over here, and this over here, how can I make this easier?" So that was like I said, we started with a blank sheet and lots of long customer conversations and this is what resulted. So >> So what are the sequence of events to kind of roll this out? You said it's second half, you know, when do you start getting customers involved? Do you have your already, you know, to poke at this and what's that look like? >> Yeah, sure. I can weigh in there. So, absolutely. We've had a few of our big customers that have been involved sort of in the design already who understand how they want to use it. So I think our expectation is that now that the sort of demonstrations have been in place, we have some pre functionality, we're going to see some initial testing and usage, some beta type situations with our customers. And then second half, we'll ramp from there. >> It's got to be a huge overlap between Dell customers and Snowflake customers. I mean, it's hundred billion. You can't not bump into Dell somewhere. >> Exactly. Yeah, you know. >> So where do you guys want to see this relationship go, kind of how should we measure success? Maybe you could each give your perspectives of that. >> I mean, for us, I think it's really showing the value of the Snowflake platform in this new world where there's a whole new ecosystem of data that is accessible to us, right? So seeing those organizations that are saying like, "Look, I'm doing new things with on-premises data that I didn't think that I could do before", or, "I'm driving efficiency in how I do analytics, and data engineering, and data science, in ways that I couldn't do before," 'cause they were locked out of using a Snowflake-like technology, right? So I think for me, that's going to be that real excitement. I'm really curious to see how the collaboration and the sharing component comes into this, you know, where you can think of having an on-premises data strategy and a need, right? But you can really connect to Cloud native customers and partners and suppliers that live in the Snowflake ecosystem, and that wasn't possible before. And so that is very conceivable and very possible through this relationship. So seeing how those edges get created in in our world and how people start to collaborate across data, both in the Cloud and on-prem is going to be really exciting. >> I remember I asked Frank, it was kind of early in the pandemic. I asked him, come on, tell me about how you're managing things. And he was awesome. And I asked him to at the time, you know, "You're ever going to do, you know, bring this platform on-prem?" He's like unequivocal, "No way, that's never going to happen. We're not going to do it halfway house ware Cloud only." And I kept thinking, but there's got to be a way to expand that team. There's so much data out there, and so boom, now we see the answer . Martin, from your standpoint, what does success look like? >> I think it starts with our partnership, right? So I've been doing this a long time. Probably the first time I've worked so closely with a partner like Snowflake. Joint customer conversations, joint solutioning, making sure what we're building is going to be really, truly as useful as possible to them. And I think we're going to let them guide us as we go forward here, right? You mentioned, you know, systems or record or other potential platforms. We're going to let them tell us where exactly the most value will come from the integration between the two companies. >> Yeah. Follow data. I mean, remember in the old days a hardware company like Dell would go to an ISP like Snowflake and say, "Hey, we ran some benchmarks. Your software runs really fast on our hardware, can we work together?" And you go, "Yeah, of course. Yeah, no problem." But wow! What a different dynamic it is today. >> Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. >> All right guys. Hey, thanks so much for coming to theCube. It's great to see you. We'll see you at the Snowflake Summit in June. >> Snowflake Summit in a month and a half. >> Looking forward to that. All right. Thank you again. >> Thank you Dave. >> All right. Keep it right there everybody. This is Dave Vellante, wall to wall coverage of Dell Tech World 2022. We'll be right back. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> We're back at AWS reinvent 2021. You're watching The Cube, I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Dave Nicholson. David Nicholson, I'm Dave he's David. >> We're trying something new here at the cube. A little stand up cube. You've heard of the pop-up cube, maybe. We're going to stand up. I work at a stand, standing desk at my office, so let's try it. Four days, two sets, a hundred plus guests. Why not? So Manish Sood is here, he's the founder and CTO of Reltio, Cube alum. >> Dave: Manish, thank you for standing and good to see you again. >> Dave, It's great to see you again, and David, thank you for having me here. >> So, tell us a little bit about your, yourself, your background. I'm always interested to ask founders why you started your company, but tell us the background. >> Yeah, so a little bit of my background and the company's history. I, most of my background has been in data management and creating products for data management. I was at a company called Informatica, came through an acquisition through Informatica, back in 2010. And Started Reltio in 2011. The reason why we started Reltio was that, if you look at the enterprise space and how things have been evolving, there have been an explosion of applications. There's almost an application for every little business process that you can possibly imagine. Enterprise customers who used to struggle with 12 or 24 different systems, are now coming to us and saying they have 300 or 500 different applications that they use to run their business. And that's at the lower end of the spectrum. Even a business like Reltio today, runs on a hundred plus SAAS applications, end to end. And that it is creating one of the biggest opportunities, as well as one of the biggest friction points in the enterprise. Because in order to create better, efficient business outcomes, you have silos of data and you don't know where the source of truth is. And that is something that we saw early on in 2011. At the same time, we also saw that digital transformation or cloud transformation type of requirements, were going to drive a larger need for this kind of capability, where Reltio type of products could act as that single source of truth to unify all of the multi-source siloed information. So, that's what got us started down this journey. >> So, okay. So, when see people hear single source of truth, they think, oh, database, right? But that's not what you guys do, right? I mean, it's, it's, can I call it master data management? But it's really modern master data management. You're kind of recreating a new or creating a new category that- >> Manish: A little bit. >> solves a similar problem. Maybe you could explain that. >> Yeah. A little bit of background. So the term master data management came about the 1920s. (Dave laughing) You believe that? When during the pandemic, the U.S. government was trying to figure out how to know who is still alive versus, you know, not there anymore. And they created something called the death master. Now a very ominous name, for a concept of just bringing data together and figuring out what's going on in the economy, but that need, or problem hasn't gone away. It has just become a harder problem to solve because now we have so many different systems, to deal with. And both internal as well as third-party data sources that companies have to work with. And that's where the need has been around, but the technical capabilities to really keep solving the problem and delivering the solution in a manner where it can keep pace with the evolving needs, that capability has been missing. And that's where the "aha" moment for us was that we really needed to build it out as a foundation that would continue to grow and scale, with the magnitude of the problem that we were going to see in the future. >> Okay, so this idea of single version of the truth, obviously critically important for reporting, financials, you can't, you can't tell an auditor one thing, you know, your, your customers are another thing, your consumers, it's got to be consistent. And especially in regulated industries. Is there a difference Manish, between sort of that type of data and the data maybe that's in the line of business that doesn't necessarily affect the rest of the business? Can they have their own version of the truth, which is just their version, their, their, their single version? It doesn't necessarily have to affect anything else. Do you, are you seeing that changing data landscape, where things are getting more distributed and ownership is becoming more distributed? >> So, the change in the paradigm that we are seeing is because of the proliferation of the data, there is a need to establish, what is the aggregated view of the information. Aggregated and unified, which means that, you know, if there is a record for Dave Vellante or David Vellante. It's the same person. Establishing that fact as the truth across any number of systems that you have, versus the multiple versions of the truth, where somebody comes in and says, for compliance reasons, I want the entire collection of data versus for marketing reasons, I only want one third the slice of this information. So that's where this concept of aggregate once, unify that information, but then make it ready and available for multiple consumers to partake from that. That's becoming the norm. >> Dave: Got it. >> And you mentioned something, Dave, that analytics, reporting, BI, data science, those have been some of the traditional playgrounds for this kind of information to be unified, because if you're trying to roll up the revenue for, you know, the business that you do with Coke or Coca-Cola, you know, you don't know which name you used, then you have to go back to the analytics warehouse and aggregate all of that information and do the reporting. But the same problem is coming up in real time, digital experiences as well. The only difference is, that instead of having the luxury of a few hours, now you have to make the decision in a few milliseconds. >> So, when you talk about those silos of data and seeking to have a unification of those silos, how has that changed in the era of cloud? Is it that Reltio is integrating those disparate sources that now exist in cloud, or is it that you are leveraging cloud to address the problem that's been with us for a long time? And I have to say that Dave Vellante, take him off the the death master. He's definitely still with us. (Manish and Dave laugh) >> Dave: Another good day. >> I'm pretty sure too. But how, how, how has, how have things changed as you know, with, with the dawn of cloud? >> With the dawn of cloud, there are two things that have become available to us. One is using the power of the cloud compute to solve the problem, so that you can keep growing with the footprint of the problem itself and have a solution that scales along with it. But at the same time, you have systems of record, could be your mainframe systems, could be your SAP, ERP type of deployments that you have. Some of those functional applications, they're not going away anytime soon, they're there to stay. But at the same time, you also need the new digital experiences to be delivered on. The glue between those two worlds is the source of truth data that sits in the middle and the best place for it to sit is the cloud, because you have to open it up to the rest of the ecosystem that sits in the cloud, but you also have to maintain a connection to the on the ground type of systems. Putting it behind the firewall and trying to do that is next to impossible, but doing it in the cloud opens up all the doors that you need for your transformation to take place. >> You know Dave, there was a time when I was part of an industry where coding, not writing code, but coding data to basically say, look, this field here is the person's last name. This field is the address where the mortgage is being held. How much of that is still manual, as opposed to applying some form of AI to the problem? Let's say you have 200 different sources of information, where Dave Vellante's name shows up in a variety of contexts. Are we still having to go in manually and sift through to make those correlations? How much of that has been automated at this point? >> So, there are systems of capture where some of that information, because your loan mortgage application was entered by somebody into a system, will still be captured in those places, but we'll take in that information. That's the starting point, but if there are other sources, then we will apply AIML type of capabilities to bring on those new emerging sources. Because at the same time, think about this equation where, you started with five systems or, you know, a dozen systems. Now you're talking about 300 plus systems. You cannot keep doing this manually for every system possible. And this number is only going to grow as we move forward. So AIML definitely has a role to play and further automate this landscape. >> I had to, I saw an amazing stat the other day, the source was the Sand Hill Econometrics, you know, a Silicon valley company. And the stat was that 70% of the series, A, B and C companies, fail to return at least one X to their investors. So you've made it through that nut hole. Congratulations you just raised $120 million dollar round. That's got to be super exciting for you. >> David: No pressure by the way. >> Dave: Tell us about that. Well, I mean, you'd think the industry would have de-risked by now, right. But anyway, so, tell us about that raise. Where are you, where are you guys are at? Very exciting times for you. >> Yeah, really, really exciting time for us. We just raised $120 million dollars. The company was valued at $1.7 billion dollars. >> Dave: Awesome. Congratulations. >> And the round was, you know, all of our existing investors participated in it. We also had a new investor join in the process, as well. >> Dave: They wanted their pro-rata. (Dave and Manish laugh) >> Everybody, everybody wanted their pro-rata. >> Dave: That's great. >> But you know, one of the things that we have been very careful about in this whole process and journey, is something that you and I were talking about, the step function of scale. We're making sure that we are efficient stewards of capital and applying it in a manner where we are at every turn, looking at what's the next step function that we need to graduate to, because we want to make use of this capital to efficiently grow our business and be a Rule of 40 growth company. And that's something that you don't typically hear these days from a lot of the growth companies, but we are certainly focused on building long-term value and focusing on that Rule of 40 growth efficiency. >> Yeah, so Rule of 40 is growth plus EBITDA, or sometimes they use other metrics, but is that how you look at it? Growth plus EBITDA. >> Yes. Yeah. >> Great. >> And that's the formula that we are driving for. And most of our investments with this round of capital are going to be not only pushing forward with the go-to market strategy, because we have a lot of growth opportunity, we have been North America focused, now we can take this global. At the same time, looking at the verticals where we need to double down and invest more, given that we have been a horizontal platform that is core to our capabilities, that we have built with Reltio. But at the same time, making sure that we are investing in the key verticals that we are present in. >> Yeah. So, you were explaining to me that you, you started in the pharmaceutical industry, that's where you got go to market fit. And then you went to other industries. When you went to those other industries where they're similar patterns, or do you do almost have to start from ground zero again, to get that product market fit? >> No. So from the very beginning, the concept has been that this is a horizontal data problem. And at the heart of it, it's information about people, organizations, product, locations, and most of the businesses run on that type of information. That's the core part of the data that they build their business on. Life sciences was a perfect starting point for us, because it had examples of all of those data. When you start with commercial operations, which is sales and marketing, you have people, organization, product type of information. When you go into clinical trials, you have site investigators and patient type of information. When you go into R and D within that same space, you have drugs, compounds, substances, finished products, type of information, all coming from multiple sources. So it was a perfect place for us to prove out, all of the capabilities end to end, which we like to call multi-domain capabilities. And then we looked at what other verticals have similar patterns. And that's why we went after healthcare, financial services, insurance, retail, high tech. Those are some of the key verticals that we are in right now. >> That's awesome. Great vision. Last question, could you give us a sense of the futures, where you're going? Well, first of all, what are you doing with the money? Is it, you go to market, throwing gas on the fire? And what can we expect in the coming year and years? >> Go to market expansion is a key area of investment, but also doubling down on the customer experience that we deliver, how we invest in the product, what are some of the adjacent capabilities that we need to invest in? Because you know, data is a great starting point and data should not hold businesses back. Data should be the accelerant to the business. And that's our philosophy, that we are trying to bring to life. So making sure that we are making the data, readily available, accessible and usable for all of our customers is the key goal to aim for. And that's where all the investment is going. >> Well, Manish was a pleasure having you on at the AWS startup showcase, and then subsequently you become a unicorn. So congratulations on that. Really excited to watch the continued progress. Thanks for coming back in The Cube. >> Well, thank you so much, Dave and David, thanks for having me. >> David: Thanks for validating that Mr. Vellante is still with us. >> (laughs) He's going to be with us for a long time. >> I hope so, I hope so, I got, I got one more to put through college. Thank you for watching this edition of The Cube, at AWS reinvent. I'm Dave Vellante, for Dave Nicholson. We are The Cube, the leader in high-tech coverage, Be right back. (somber music)

(upbeat techno music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021. Brought to you by EBD. >> Hello everyone, this is David Vellante, for the CUBE. And we're here covering Postgres Vision 2021. The virtual version, thCUBE virtual, if you will. And welcome to our power-panel. Now in this session, we'll dig into database modernization. We want to better understand how and why customers are tapping open source to drive innovation. But at the same time, they've got to deliver the resiliency and enterprise capabilities that they're used to that are now necessary to support today's digital business requirements. And with me are three experts on these matters. Abdul Sheik, is Global CTO and President of Cintra. Young Il Cho, aka Charlie, is High Availability Cluster Sales Manager, at Daone CNS. And Alan Villalobos, is the Director of Development Partnerships, at IBM. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave, nice to be here. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right, let's talk trends and frame the problem. Abdul, I want to start with you? Cintra you're all about this topic. Accelerating innovation using EDB Postgres helping customers move to modern platforms. And doing so, you got to do it cost-effectively but what's driving these moves? What are the problems that you're seeing at the organizations that you serve? >> Oh, so let me quickly introduce, Abdul Sheik, CTO. I'll quickly introduce Cintra. So we are a multicloud and database architecture MSP. And we've been around for 25 plus years. Headquartered in New York and the UK. But as a global organization, we're serving our SMB customers as well as large enterprise customers. And the trends we're seeing certainly in this day and age is transformation and modernization. And what that means is, customers looking to get out of the legacy platforms, get out of the legacy data centers and really move towards a modern strategy with a lower cost base, while still retaining resiliency and freedom. Ultimately, in terms of where they're going. The key words that really I see driving this, number one is choice. They've been historically locked into vendors. With limited choice with a high cost base. So choice, freedom to choose in terms of what database technologies they apply to which workloads and certainly EDB and the work that has been done to closely marry what enterprise RD platforms offer with EDBs in a work that they've done in terms of filling those gaps and addressing where the resiliency monitoring performance and security requirements are, are certainly are required from an enterprise customer perspective. Choice is driving the move that we see and choice towards a lower cost platform that can be deployed anywhere. Both on-prem modernization customers are looking to retain on premise platforms or moving into any multi clouds whether it's an infrastructure cloud play or a platform cloud play. And certainly with EDBs offering in terms of, you know the latest cloud native offerings also very interesting. And lastly, aside from just cost and the freedom to choose where they deploy those platforms the SLA, the service level model where is the resiliency requirement where the which system is going to bronze, silver, gold? Which ones are the tier one revenue platform revenue generating platforms which are the lower, lower utility platforms. So a combination of choice, a combination of freedom to deploy anywhere and while still maintaining the resiliency and the service levels that the customers need to deliver to their businesses >> Abdul that was a beautiful setup. And, and we've got so much to talk about here because customers want to move from point A to point B but getting there and they, they need help. It's sometimes not trivial. So Charlie Daone is a consultancy. You've got a strong technical capabilities. What are you seeing in this space? You know, what are the major trends? Why are organizations considering that move? And what are some of the considerations there? >> Well, like in other country in South Korea or so our a lot of customers, banking's a manufacturing distributor. They are 90, over 90%. They are all are using Oracle DB and a rack system. But as the previous presenters pointed out, a lot of customers that are sick of the Oracle and they have to undergo the huge cost of a maintenance costs. They want to move away from this cost stress. And secondly, they can think about they're providing service to customer on their cloud base which is a private or the public. So we cannot imagine running on database, Oracle database running on the cloud the system that's not matches on this cloud. And first and second, and finally the customer what they want is the cost and they want to move away from the Oracle locking. They cannot be just a slave at Oracle for a long time and the premium for the new cloud the service for the customer. >> Great. Thank you for that. Oh, go ahead. Yeah. Did you have something else to add Charlie go ahead and please. >> No that's all. >> Okay, great. Yeah, Allen, welcome to theCUBE. You know, it's very interesting to us. IBM, you, you, of course, you're a big player in database. You have a lot of expertise here. And you partner with EDB, you're offering Postgres to customers, you know, what are you seeing? Charlie was talking about Oracle and RAC. I mean, the, the, the thing there is obviously, we talked about the maintenance costs but there's also a lot of high availability capabilities. That's something that IBM really understands well. Do you see this as largely a cloud migration trend? Is it more modernization? Interested in what's IBM's perspective on this? >> I think modernization is the right word. The points that the previous panelists brought up or are on point, right? You know, lower TCO or lower costs in general but that of agility and then availability for developers and data scientists as well. And then of course, you know, hybrid cloud, right? You know, you want to be able to deploy on prem or in the cloud, or both in a mixture of all of that. And I think, I think what ties it together is the customers are looking for insights, right? And, you know, especially in larger organizations there's a myriad of data sources that they're already working with. And, you know, we, you know we want to be able to play in that space. We want to give an offering that is based on Postgres and open source and be able to further what they're strong at at and kind of, you know on top of that, you know, a layer of, of of need that we see is, is seamless data governance across all of those different stores. >> All right, I'm going to go right to the heart of the hard problem here. So if, I mean, I want to, it's just that I want to get from point A to point B, I want to save money. I want to modernize, but if I'm the canary in the coal mine at the customer, I'm saying guys, migration scares me. How do I do that? What are the considerations? And what do I need to know that I don't know. So Abdul, maybe you could walk us through what are some of the concerns that customers have? How do you help mitigate those? Whether it's other application dependencies, you know freezing code, you know, getting, again from that point A to point B without risking my existing business processes how do you handle that? >> Yeah, certainly I think a customer needs to understand what the journey looks like to begin with. So we've actually developed our own methodology that we call Rocket Cloud, which is also part of our cloud modernization strategy that builds in and database modernization strategy built into it starts with an assessment in terms of current state discovery. Not all customers totally understand where they are today. So understanding where the database state is, you know where the risks lie what are the criticality of the various databases? What technologies are used, where we have RAC or we don't have RAC but we have data God, where we have encryption. And so on. That gives the customer a very good insight in terms of the current state, both commercially and technically that's a key point to understand how they're licensed today and what costs could be freed up to free the journey to effectively fund the journey. It's a big, big topic, but once we do that, we get an idea and we've actually developed a tool called rapid discovery. That's able to discover a largest stake without knowing the database list. We just put the scripts at the database servers themselves and it tells us exactly which databases are suited to be you know, effectively migrated to Postgres with in terms of the feature function usage in terms of how heavy they are, would store procedures in the database amount of business logic use of technologies like RAC data guard and how they convert over to to Postgres specifically. That ultimately gives us the ability to give that customer an assessment and that assessment in a short sharp few weeks and get the customer view of all of my hundreds of databases. Here are the subset of candidates for Postgres and specifically than we do the schemer advisor tool the actual assessment tool from EDB, which gives us a sense of how well the schema gets converted and how best to then also look at the stored procedure conversion as well. That gives the customer a full view of their architecture mapping their specific candidate databases and then a cost analysis in terms of what that migration looks like and how we migrate. We also run and maintain those platforms once we're on EDB. >> Thank you for that again, very clear but so you're not replacing, doing an organ transplant. You may, you're you're, you know, this is not I don't mean this as a pejorative, but you're kind of cherry picking those workloads that are appropriate for EDB and then moving those and then maybe, maybe through attrition or, you know over time, sun-setting those other, those other core pieces. >> Exactly. >> Charlie, let me ask you, so we talked about RAC, real application clusters, data guard. These are, you know kind of high profile Oracle capabilities. Can you, can you really replicate the kind of resiliency at lower costs with open source, with EDB Postgres and how do you do that? >> It's my turn? >> yes, please. >> Quite technically, again, I go on in depths and technically the RAC, RAC system is so-called is the best you know, best the tool to protect data and especially in the Unix system, but apart from the RAC by the some nice data replication solution we just stream the application and log shipping and something and then monitor Pam and, and EFM solution which is enterprise failover manager. So even though it be compared to Apple the Apple RAC versus with EDB solution, we can definitely say that RAC is more stable one, but after migration, whatever, we can overcome the, you know, drawbacks of the HA cluster system by providing the EDB tools. So whatever the customer feel that after a successful migration, utilizing the EDB high availability failable solution they can make of themselves at home. So that's, that's how we approach it with the customers. >> So, Alan, again, to me, IBM is fascinating here with your level of involvement because you're the, you guys are sort of historically the master of proprietary the mainframes, VCM, CICF, EB2, all that stuff. And then, you know IBM was the first I remember Steve Mills actually announced we're going to invest a billion dollars in open source with Linux. And that was a major industry milestone. And of course, the, the acquisition of red hat. So you've got now this open source mindset this open source culture. So we, you know, as it's all about recovery in, in database and enterprise database and all the acid properties in two phase commits, and we're talking about, you know the things that Charlie just talked about. So what's your perspective here? IBM knows a lot about this. How do you help customers get there? >> Yeah, well, I mean the main, the main thrust right now IBM has a offering called IBM cloud Pak for data which from here, which runs EDB, right? EDB, Postgres runs on top of cloud Pak for Data But the, you know I think going back to Abdul's points about, you know migrating whatever's needed and whatever can be migrated to Postgres and maybe migrating other things other places, we have data virtualization and autoSQL, right? So once you have migrated those parts of your database or those schemes that can be, having, you know a single point where you can query across them and by the way, being able to query across them you know, before, during and after migration as well. Right? So we're kind of have that seamless experience of layer of SQL. And now with autoSQL of spark SQL as well, as you're, as you're migrating and after is, I'd say, you know, key to this. >> What, what's the typical migration look like? I know I'm sorry, but it's a consultant question but thinking about the, you know, the average, in terms of timeframe, what are the teams look like? You know who are the stakeholders that I need to get involved? If I'm a customer to really make this a success? maybe Abdul, you could talk about that and Charlie and Alan can chime in. >> Well, I think, well, number one you knew the exact sponsors bought into it in terms of the business case, supporting the business case an architect has got a big picture understanding not only database technology but also infrastructure that they're coming from as well as the target cloud platforms and how you ensure that the infrastructure can deliver the performance. So the architect role is important, of course the core DBA that lives within the scope of the database understands the schema of the data model the business logic itself, and the application on it. That's key specifically around the application certification testing connectivity and the migration of the code. And specifically in terms of timeline just to touch on that quickly. I mean, in our experience so far and we're seeing the momentum really really take off the last 18 months, a small project with limited business logic within the database itself can we migrate it in a couple of months but typically with all the testing and rigor around that you typically say three months timeline a medium-sized complexity projects, a six month timeline and a large complex project could be anything from nine months and beyond, but it really comes down to how heavy the database is with business logic and the database and how much effort it will take to re-engineer effectively migrate that PLC code, business logic into EDB given the compatibility level between Oracle and EDB it's relatively certainly an easier path than any other target platform in terms of options. Yeah. Not perspective. That's certainly looks like the composition of a team and timeline >> Charlie or Alan, anything you guys would add. >> Yeah. So, so I think all those personas make sense. I think you might, on the consumer side of the consumer the consumer of the data side the data scientists often we see, you know during migrations and then obviously the dev ops, I think or any operations, right, have to be heavily involved. And then lastly, you know, you see more and more data steward role or data steward type persona, CDO office type type person coming in there make sure that, you know, whatever data governance that is already in place or wants to be in place after the migration is also part of the conversation. >> Why EDB? You know, there's a lot of databases out there you know, it's funny, I always say like, you know, 10, 15 years ago databases were kind of sort of a boring market, right? It was like, okay, you're going to work or whatever. And now it's exploded. You got open source databases, you got, you know not only sequel databases, you got graph databases you know, you get cloud databases, it's going crazy. Why EDB? You wonder if you guys could address that? >> Allan why don't you go first this time? I'll compliment your answers. >> Yeah. I mean, again, I think it goes back to, to the, the I guess varying needs and, and enterprises. Right. And I think that's, what's driven this explosion in databases, whether it's a document store like you're saying, or, or new types of RDBMS, the needs that we talked about at the beginning, like lower TCO, and the push to open source. But you know, the fact of the matter is that that yes, there is a myriad, an ecosystem of databases, pretty much any organization. And so, yeah, we want to tap into that. And why EDB? EDB has done a great job of taking Postgres and making it enterprise ready, you know, that's what they're, they're good at and that, you know fits very nicely with the IBM story obviously. And, and so, you know, and they've they've worked with us as well. They have an operator on, on the runs on red hat OpenShift. So that makes it portable as well but also part of the IBM cloud Pak for data story. And, and yeah, you know, we want to break down those silos. We realized that that need is there for all of these, you know, there's this ecosystem of databases. And so, you know, we're, we see our role as being that platform, whether it's red hat OpenShift, or IBM cloud Pak for data that, that unifies, and kind of gives you that single pane of glass across all of those sources. >> And Charlie, you're obviously all in, you've got EDB in your background. Why EDB for you? >> Before talking about EDB you asked about the previous question about how the migration was different from Oracle to EDB. We had a couple of success story in Korea telecom and some banking area, and it was easier. So EDB provide MTK tool as a people know but it was an appropriate, like a 90%. So we are the channel partner of the EDB for four years. So what we have done was to hire the Oracle expert. So we train Oracle export as as EDB expert at the same time so that they can approach customer and make it easy. So you have no worry about that. Just migrating EDB, Oracle to EDB. There is a no issue. Those telltales include all the tasks, you know Stratus test and trainee, and a POC that we there. So by investing that Oracle expert that we could overcome and persuade the customer to adopt EDB. So, why EDB? Simply I can say there, is there any database they can finally replaced Oracle in the world? Why is the, it's the interoperability between Oracle to EDB as the many experts pointed out there is no other DBE. They can, you know, 90, 90% in compatibility and intercooperability with EDB. That's why, of course, there's the somewhat, you know budget issues or maintenance issue cost the issue escape from Oracle lock-in. But I think the the number one reason was the interoperability and the compatibility with database itself, Oracle database. That was a reason, I guess >> Great Abdul we've talked about, we all know the, as is, you've got a high maintenance costs. You got a lot of tuning, and it's just a lot of complexity. What about the 2B maybe you could share with us sort of the outcome some of the outcomes you've seen what the business impact has been of some of these migrations? >> Sure. I mean, I'll give you a very simple example then just the idea of running Oracle on prem a lot of customer systems teams, for example will drive a virtualization VMware strategy. We know some of the challenges of running Oracle MBM where from a license perspective. So giving the business the ability where I want to go customer in the financial services market in New York, heavy virtualization strategy the ability for them to move away from Oracle on, you know expensive hardware on to Postgres EDB on virtualization just leverage existing skillsets, leveraging existing investment in terms of infrastructure, and also give them portability in AWS. The other clouds, you know, in terms of a migration. More from a business perspective as well, I would say about some of the Allan's points in terms of just freeing up the ability for data scientists and data consumers, to, you know, to consume some of that data from an Postgres perspective more accessibility spinning up environments quicker less latency in terms of the agility is another key word in terms of the tangible differences, the business, lower cost agility, and the freedom to deploy anywhere at the end of the day. Choices, I think the key word that we could come back to and knowing that we can do that to Charlie's point specifically around maintaining service levels. And as architects, we support some of the big, big names out there in terms of airlines, online, cosmetic retailers, financial services, trading applications, hedge funds, and they all want one thing as architect: for us to deliver that resiliency and stand behind them. And as the MSP we're accountable to ensure those systems are up and running and performing. So knowing that the EDB is provided the compatibility but also plugged the specific requirements around performance management, security availability that's fundamentally been key. >> [Dave I mean, having done a lot of TCO studies in this area, it's, it's it Oracle's different. You know, normally the biggest component of TCO is labor with Oracle. The biggest component of TCO is licensed and maintenance costs. So if you can virtualize and reduce those costs and of course, of course the Oracle will fight you and say we won't support it in a VMware environment. Of course, you know, they will, but, but you got to really, you got to battle. But, so here's my last question. So if I'm a customer in that state that you described you know, a lot of sort of Oracle sprawl a lot of databases out there, high maintenance costs, the whole lock-in thing. I got to choices. I, you know, a lot of choices out there. One is EDB. You guys have convinced me that you've got the expertise If I can partner with firms like yours, it's safer route. Okay, cool. My other choice is Oracle is going to, The Oracle sales reps is going to get me in a headlock and talk about exit data and how their Oracle cloud, and how it's, they've invested a lot there. And they have, and, I can pay by the drink all this sort of modern sort of discussion, you know, Oracle act like they invented it late to the game. And then here we are. So, so help me. What's the pitch as to, well, that's kind of compelling. It's maybe the safe bet they're there. They're working with my CIO, whatever. Why should I go with the open source route versus that route? It sounds kind of attractive to me, help me understand that each of you maybe take me through that. Abdul, why don't you start. >> Yeah. I'd say, you know, Oracle's being the defacto for so many years that people have just assumed and defaulted saying, high availability, RAC, DR. Data guard, you know, and I'll apply to any database need that I have. And at the end of the day customers have a three tier database requirement: the lowest, less critical, bronze level databases that really don't need RAC or a high availability, silver tier that are departmental solutions. That means some level of resiliency. And then you've got your gold revenue producing brand impact databases that are they're down. And certainly they won. You see no reason why the bronze and silver databases can be targeted towards EDB. Admittedly, we have some of our largest customers are running platforms, are running $5 million an hour e-commerce platform or airlines running large e-commerce platforms. And exit data certainly has a place. RAC has a place in those, in those scenarios. Were not saying that the EDB is a solution for everything in all scenarios, but apply the technology where it's appropriate where it's required and, you know, generally wherever Oracle has being the defacto and it's being applied across the estate, that's fundamentally what's changed. It doesn't have to be the only answer you have multiple choices now. EDB provides us with the ability to probably address, you know more than 50% of the databases' state, and comfortably cope with that and just apply that more expensive kind of gold tier one cost-based but also capability, you know from the highest requirements of performance and availability where it's appropriate. >> Yeah. Very pragmatic approach. Abdul, thank you for that. And Charlie. Charlie, what's your perspective? Give us your closing thoughts. >> Well, it has been, Oracle has been dominating in Asia in South Korea has market or over many years. So customers got tired of this, continuous spending money for the maintenance costs and there is no discount. There is no negotiation. So they want to move away from expensive stuff. And they were looking for a flexible platform with the easygoing and the high speed and performance open source database like a possibly as career. And now the EDB cannot replace a hundred percent of existing legacy worker, but 10%, 20% 50% as time goes on the trend that will continue. And it will be reaching some high point or replacing the existing Oracle system. And it can, it can also leading to good business chance to a channel partner and EDB steps and other related business in open source. >> Great. Thank you, Charlie and Allen, bring us home here. Give us your follow up >> I think my, co- panelists hit the nail on the head, right? It's a menu, right? That's as things become more diverse and as people make more choices and as everybody wants more agility, you have to provide, I mean, and so that, that's where that's coming in and I liked the way that Andul I kind of split it into gold silver and bronze. Yeah. And I think that that's where, we're going, right? I mean you should ask your developers right? Are your developers like pining to start up a new instance of Oracle every time you're starting a new project? Probably not reach for their Postgres right? And so, because of that, that's where this is coming from and that's not going to change. And, and yeah, that that ecosystem is going to continue to, to thrive. And there'll be lots of different flavors in the growing open source ecosystem. >> Yeah. I mean, open source absolutely is the underpinning you know, the, the bedrock of innovation, these days. Gentlemen, great power panel. Thanks so much for bringing your perspectives and best of luck in the future. >> Thank you, next time we'll try and match our backgrounds >> Next time. Well, we'll up our game. Okay. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for theCUBE. Stay tuned for more great coverage. Postgres vision, 21. Be right back. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat techno music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021. Brought to you by enterprise Enterprise DB. >> Hello everyone, this is David Vellante, for the CUBE. And we're here covering Postgres Vision 2021. The virtual version, thCUBE virtual, if you will. And welcome to our power-panel. Now in this session, we'll dig into database modernization. We want to better understand how and why customers are tapping open source to drive innovation. But at the same time, they've got to deliver the resiliency and enterprise capabilities that they're used to that are now necessary to support today's digital business requirements. And with me are three experts on these matters. Abdul Sheik, is Global CTO and President of Cintra. Young Il Cho, aka Charlie, is High Availability Cluster Sales Manager, at Daone CNS. And Alan Villalobos, is the Director of Development Partnerships, at IBM. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave, nice to be here. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right, let's talk trends and frame the problem. Abdul, I want to start with you? Cintra you're all about this topic. Accelerating innovation using EDB Postgres helping customers move to modern platforms. And doing so, you got to do it cost-effectively but what's driving these moves? What are the problems that you're seeing at the organizations that you serve? >> Oh, so let me quickly introduce, Abdul Sheik, CTO. I'll quickly introduce Cintra. So we are a multicloud and database architecture MSP. And we've been around for 25 plus years. Headquartered in New York and the UK. But as a global organization, we're serving our SMB customers as well as large enterprise customers. And the trends we're seeing certainly in this day and age is transformation and modernization. And what that means is, customers looking to get out of the legacy platforms, get out of the legacy data centers and really move towards a modern strategy with a lower cost base, while still retaining resiliency and freedom. Ultimately, in terms of where they're going. The key words that really I see driving this, number one is choice. They've been historically locked into vendors. With limited choice with a high cost base. So choice, freedom to choose in terms of what database technologies they apply to which workloads and certainly EDB and the work that has been done to closely marry what enterprise RD platforms offer with EDBs in a work that they've done in terms of filling those gaps and addressing where the resiliency monitoring performance and security requirements are, are certainly are required from an enterprise customer perspective. Choice is driving the move that we see and choice towards a lower cost platform that can be deployed anywhere. Both on-prem modernization customers are looking to retain on premise platforms or moving into any multi clouds whether it's an infrastructure cloud play or a platform cloud play. And certainly with EDBs offering in terms of, you know the latest cloud native offerings also very interesting. And lastly, aside from just cost and the freedom to choose where they deploy those platforms the SLA, the service level model where is the resiliency requirement where the which system is going to bronze, silver, gold? Which ones are the tier one revenue platform revenue generating platforms which are the lower, lower utility platforms. So a combination of choice, a combination of freedom to deploy anywhere and while still maintaining the resiliency and the service levels that the customers need to deliver to their businesses >> Abdul that was a beautiful setup. And, and we've got so much to talk about here because customers want to move from point A to point B but getting there and they, they need help. It's sometimes not trivial. So Charlie Daone is a consultancy. You've got a strong technical capabilities. What are you seeing in this space? You know, what are the major trends? Why are organizations considering that move? And what are some of the considerations there? >> Well, like in other country in South Korea or so our a lot of customers, banking's a manufacturing distributor. They are 90, over 90%. They are all are using Oracle DB and a rack system. But as the previous presenters pointed out, a lot of customers that are sick of the Oracle and they have to undergo the huge cost of a maintenance costs. They want to move away from this cost stress. And secondly, they can think about they're providing service to customer on their cloud base which is a private or the public. So we cannot imagine running on database, Oracle database running on the cloud the system that's not matches on this cloud. And first and second, and finally the customer what they want is the cost and they want to move away from the Oracle locking. They cannot be just a slave at Oracle for a long time and the premium for the new cloud the service for the customer. >> Great. Thank you for that. Oh, go ahead. Yeah. Did you have something else to add Charlie go ahead and please. >> No that's all. >> Okay, great. Yeah, Allen, welcome to theCUBE. You know, it's very interesting to us. IBM, you, you, of course, you're a big player in database. You have a lot of expertise here. And you partner with EDB, you're offering Postgres to customers, you know, what are you seeing? Charlie was talking about Oracle and RAC. I mean, the, the, the thing there is obviously, we talked about the maintenance costs but there's also a lot of high availability capabilities. That's something that IBM really understands well. Do you see this as largely a cloud migration trend? Is it more modernization? Interested in what's IBM's perspective on this? >> I think modernization is the right word. The points that the previous panelists brought up or are on point, right? You know, lower TCO or lower costs in general but that of agility and then availability for developers and data scientists as well. And then of course, you know, hybrid cloud, right? You know, you want to be able to deploy on prem or in the cloud, or both in a mixture of all of that. And I think, I think what ties it together is the customers are looking for insights, right? And, you know, especially in larger organizations there's a myriad of data sources that they're already working with. And, you know, we, you know we want to be able to play in that space. We want to give an offering that is based on Postgres and open source and be able to further what they're strong at at and kind of, you know on top of that, you know, a layer of, of of need that we see is, is seamless data governance across all of those different stores. >> All right, I'm going to go right to the heart of the hard problem here. So if, I mean, I want to, it's just that I want to get from point A to point B, I want to save money. I want to modernize, but if I'm the canary in the coal mine at the customer, I'm saying guys, migration scares me. How do I do that? What are the considerations? And what do I need to know that I don't know. So Abdul, maybe you could walk us through what are some of the concerns that customers have? How do you help mitigate those? Whether it's other application dependencies, you know freezing code, you know, getting, again from that point A to point B without risking my existing business processes how do you handle that? >> Yeah, certainly I think a customer needs to understand what the journey looks like to begin with. So we've actually developed our own methodology that we call Rocket Cloud, which is also part of our cloud modernization strategy that builds in and database modernization strategy built into it starts with an assessment in terms of current state discovery. Not all customers totally understand where they are today. So understanding where the database state is, you know where the risks lie what are the criticality of the various databases? What technologies are used, where we have RAC or we don't have RAC but we have data God, where we have encryption. And so on. That gives the customer a very good insight in terms of the current state, both commercially and technically that's a key point to understand how they're licensed today and what costs could be freed up to free the journey to effectively fund the journey. It's a big, big topic, but once we do that, we get an idea and we've actually developed a tool called rapid discovery. That's able to discover a largest stake without knowing the database list. We just put the scripts at the database servers themselves and it tells us exactly which databases are suited to be you know, effectively migrated to Postgres with in terms of the feature function usage in terms of how heavy they are, would store procedures in the database amount of business logic use of technologies like RAC data guard and how they convert over to to Postgres specifically. That ultimately gives us the ability to give that customer an assessment and that assessment in a short sharp few weeks and get the customer view of all of my hundreds of databases. Here are the subset of candidates for Postgres and specifically than we do the schemer advisor tool the actual assessment tool from EDB, which gives us a sense of how well the schema gets converted and how best to then also look at the stored procedure conversion as well. That gives the customer a full view of their architecture mapping their specific candidate databases and then a cost analysis in terms of what that migration looks like and how we migrate. We also run and maintain those platforms once we're on EDB. >> Thank you for that again, very clear but so you're not replacing, doing an organ transplant. You may, you're you're, you know, this is not I don't mean this as a pejorative, but you're kind of cherry picking those workloads that are appropriate for EDB and then moving those and then maybe, maybe through attrition or, you know over time, sun-setting those other, those other core pieces. >> Exactly. >> Charlie, let me ask you, so we talked about RAC, real application clusters, data guard. These are, you know kind of high profile Oracle capabilities. Can you, can you really replicate the kind of resiliency at lower costs with open source, with EDB Postgres and how do you do that? >> It's my turn? >> yes, please. >> Quite technically, again, I go on in depths and technically the RAC, RAC system is so-called is the best you know, best the tool to protect data and especially in the Unix system, but apart from the RAC by the some nice data replication solution we just stream the application and log shipping and something and then monitor Pam and, and EFM solution which is enterprise failover manager. So even though it be compared to Apple the Apple RAC versus with EDB solution, we can definitely say that RAC is more stable one, but after migration, whatever, we can overcome the, you know, drawbacks of the HA cluster system by providing the EDB tools. So whatever the customer feel that after a successful migration, utilizing the EDB high availability failable solution they can make of themselves at home. So that's, that's how we approach it with the customers. >> So, Alan, again, to me, IBM is fascinating here with your level of involvement because you're the, you guys are sort of historically the master of proprietary the mainframes, VCM, CICF, EB2, all that stuff. And then, you know IBM was the first I remember Steve Mills actually announced we're going to invest a billion dollars in open source with Linux. And that was a major industry milestone. And of course, the, the acquisition of red hat. So you've got now this open source mindset this open source culture. So we, you know, as it's all about recovery in, in database and enterprise database and all the acid properties in two phase commits, and we're talking about, you know the things that Charlie just talked about. So what's your perspective here? IBM knows a lot about this. How do you help customers get there? >> Yeah, well, I mean the main, the main thrust right now IBM has a offering called IBM cloud Pak for data which from here, which runs EDB, right? EDB, Postgres runs on top of cloud Pak for Data But the, you know I think going back to Abdul's points about, you know migrating whatever's needed and whatever can be migrated to Postgres and maybe migrating other things other places, we have data virtualization and auto-sequel, right? So once you have migrated those parts of your database or those schemes that can be, having, you know a single point where you can query across them and by the way, being able to query across them you know, before, during and after migration as well. Right? So we're kind of have that seamless experience of layer of sequel. And now with auto sequel of sparks sequel as well, as you're, as you're migrating and after is, I'd say, you know, key to this. >> What, what's the typical migration look like? I know I'm sorry, but it's a consultant question but thinking about the, you know, the average, in terms of timeframe, what are the teams look like? You know who are the stakeholders that I need to get involved? If I'm a customer to really make this a success? maybe Abdul, you could talk about that and Charlie and Alan can chime in. >> Well, I think, well, number one you knew the exact sponsors bought into it in terms of the business case, supporting the business case an architect has got a big picture understanding not only database technology but also infrastructure that they're coming from as well as the target cloud platforms and how you ensure that the infrastructure can deliver the performance. So the architect role is important, of course the core DBA that lives within the scope of the database understands the schema of the data model the business logic itself, and the application on it. That's key specifically around the application certification testing connectivity and the migration of the code. And specifically in terms of timeline just to touch on that quickly. I mean, in our experience so far and we're seeing the momentum really really take off the last 18 months, a small project with limited business logic within the database itself can we migrate it in a couple of months but typically with all the testing and rigor around that you typically say three months timeline a medium-sized complexity projects, a six month timeline and a large complex project could be anything from nine months and beyond, but it really comes down to how heavy the database is with business logic and the database and how much effort it will take to re-engineer effectively migrate that PLC code, business logic into EDB given the compatibility level between Oracle and EDB it's relatively certainly an easier path than any other target platform in terms of options. Yeah. Not perspective. That's certainly looks like the composition of a team and timeline >> Charlie or Alan, anything you guys would add. >> Yeah. So, so I think all those personas make sense. I think you might, on the consumer side of the consumer the consumer of the data side the data scientists often we see, you know during migrations and then obviously the dev ops, I think or any operations, right, have to be heavily involved. And then lastly, you know, you see more and more data steward role or data steward type persona, CDO office type type person coming in there make sure that, you know, whatever data governance that is already in place or wants to be in place after the migration is also part of the conversation. >> Why EDB? You know, there's a lot of databases out there you know, it's funny, I always say like, you know, 10, 15 years ago databases were kind of sort of a boring market, right? It was like, okay, you're going to work or whatever. And now it's exploded. You got open source databases, you got, you know not only sequel databases, you got graph databases you know, you get cloud databases, it's going crazy. Why EDB? You wonder if you guys could address that? >> Allan why don't you go first this time? I'll compliment your answers. >> Yeah. I mean, again, I think it goes back to, to the, the I guess varying needs and, and enterprises. Right. And I think that's, what's driven this explosion in databases, whether it's a document store like you're saying, or, or new types of RDBMS, the needs that we talked about at the beginning, like lower TCO, and the push to open source. But you know, the fact of the matter is that that yes, there is a myriad, an ecosystem of databases, pretty much any organization. And so, yeah, we want to tap into that. And why EDB? EDB has done a great job of taking Postgres and making it enterprise ready, you know, that's what they're, they're good at and that, you know fits very nicely with the IBM story obviously. And, and so, you know, and they've they've worked with us as well. They have an operator on, on the runs on red hat OpenShift. So that makes it portable as well but also part of the IBM cloud Pak for data story. And, and yeah, you know, we want to break down those silos. We realized that that need is there for all of these, you know, there's this ecosystem of databases. And so, you know, we're, we see our role as being that platform, whether it's red hat OpenShift, or IBM cloud Pak for data that, that unifies, and kind of gives you that single pane of glass across all of those sources. >> And Charlie, you're obviously all in, you've got EDB in your background. Why EDB for you? >> Before talking about EDB you asked about the previous question about how the migration was different from Oracle to EDB. We had a couple of success story in Korea telecom and some banking area, and it was easier. So EDB provide MTK tool as a people know but it was an appropriate, like a 90%. So we are the channel partner of the EDB for four years. So what we have done was to hire the Oracle expert. So we train Oracle export as as EDB expert at the same time so that they can approach customer and make it easy. So you have no worry about that. Just migrating EDB, Oracle to EDB. There is a no issue. Those telltales include all the tasks, you know Stratus test and trainee, and a POC that we there. So by investing that Oracle expert that we could overcome and persuade the customer to adopt EDB. So, why EDB? Simply I can say there, is there any database they can finally replaced Oracle in the world? Why is the, it's the interoperability between Oracle to EDB as the many experts pointed out there is no other DBE. They can, you know, 90, 90% in compatibility and intercooperability with EDB. That's why, of course, there's the somewhat, you know budget issues or maintenance issue cost the issue escape from Oracle lock-in. But I think the the number one reason was the interoperability and the compatibility with database itself, Oracle database. That was a reason, I guess >> Great Abdul we've talked about, we all know the, as is, you've got a high maintenance costs. You got a lot of tuning, and it's just a lot of complexity. What about the 2B maybe you could share with us sort of the outcome some of the outcomes you've seen what the business impact has been of some of these migrations? >> Sure. I mean, I'll give you a very simple example then just the idea of running Oracle on prem a lot of customer systems teams, for example will drive a virtualization VMware strategy. We know some of the challenges of running Oracle MBM where from a license perspective. So giving the business the ability where I want to go customer in the financial services market in New York, heavy virtualization strategy the ability for them to move away from Oracle on, you know expensive hardware on to Postgres EDB on virtualization just leverage existing skillsets, leveraging existing investment in terms of infrastructure, and also give them portability in AWS. The other clouds, you know, in terms of a migration. More from a business perspective as well, I would say about some of the Allan's points in terms of just freeing up the ability for data scientists and data consumers, to, you know, to consume some of that data from an Postgres perspective more accessibility spinning up environments quicker less latency in terms of the agility is another key word in terms of the tangible differences, the business, lower cost agility, and the freedom to deploy anywhere at the end of the day. Choices, I think the key word that we could come back to and knowing that we can do that to Charlie's point specifically around maintaining service levels. And as architects, we support some of the big, big names out there in terms of airlines, online, cosmetic retailers, financial services, trading applications, hedge funds, and they all want one thing as architect: for us to deliver that resiliency and stand behind them. And as the MSP we're accountable to ensure those systems are up and running and performing. So knowing that the EDB is provided the compatibility but also plugged the specific requirements around performance management, security availability that's fundamentally been key. >> [Dave I mean, having done a lot of TCO studies in this area, it's, it's it Oracle's different. You know, normally the biggest component of TCO is labor with Oracle. The biggest component of TCO is licensed and maintenance costs. So if you can virtualize and reduce those costs and of course, of course the Oracle will fight you and say we won't support it in a VMware environment. Of course, you know, they will, but, but you got to really, you got to battle. But, so here's my last question. So if I'm a customer in that state that you described you know, a lot of sort of Oracle sprawl a lot of databases out there, high maintenance costs, the whole lock-in thing. I got to choices. I, you know, a lot of choices out there. One is EDB. You guys have convinced me that you've got the expertise If I can partner with firms like yours, it's safer route. Okay, cool. My other choice is Oracle is going to, The Oracle sales reps is going to get me in a headlock and talk about exit data and how their Oracle cloud, and how it's, they've invested a lot there. And they have, and, I can pay by the drink all this sort of modern sort of discussion, you know, Oracle act like they invented it late to the game. And then here we are. So, so help me. What's the pitch as to, well, that's kind of compelling. It's maybe the safe bet they're there. They're working with my CIO, whatever. Why should I go with the open source route versus that route? It sounds kind of attractive to me, help me understand that each of you maybe take me through that. Abdul, why don't you start. >> Yeah. I'd say, you know, Oracle's being the defacto for so many years that people have just assumed and defaulted saying, high availability, RAC, DR. Data guard, you know, and I'll apply to any database need that I have. And at the end of the day customers have a three tier database requirement: the lowest, less critical, bronze level databases that really don't need RAC or a high availability, silver tier that are departmental solutions. That means some level of resiliency. And then you've got your gold revenue producing brand impact databases that are they're down. And certainly they won. You see no reason why the bronze and silver databases can be targeted towards EDB. Admittedly, we have some of our largest customers are running platforms, are running $5 million an hour e-commerce platform or airlines running large e-commerce platforms. And exit data certainly has a place. RAC has a place in those, in those scenarios. Were not saying that the EDB is a solution for everything in all scenarios, but apply the technology where it's appropriate where it's required and, you know, generally wherever Oracle has being the defacto and it's being applied across the estate, that's fundamentally what's changed. It doesn't have to be the only answer you have multiple choices now. EDB provides us with the ability to probably address, you know more than 50% of the databases' state, and comfortably cope with that and just apply that more expensive kind of gold tier one cost-based but also capability, you know from the highest requirements of performance and availability where it's appropriate. >> Yeah. Very pragmatic approach. Abdul, thank you for that. And Charlie. Charlie, what's your perspective? Give us your closing thoughts. >> Well, it has been, Oracle has been dominating in Asia in South Korea has market or over many years. So customers got tired of this, continuous spending money for the maintenance costs and there is no discount. There is no negotiation. So they want to move away from expensive stuff. And they were looking for a flexible platform with the easygoing and the high speed and performance open source database like a possibly as career. And now the EDB cannot replace a hundred percent of existing legacy worker, but 10%, 20% 50% as time goes on the trend that will continue. And it will be reaching some high point or replacing the existing Oracle system. And it can, it can also leading to good business chance to a channel partner and EDB steps and other related business in open source. >> Great. Thank you, Charlie and Allen, bring us home here. Give us your follow up >> I think my, co- panelists hit the nail on the head, right? It's a menu, right? That's as things become more diverse and as people make more choices and as everybody wants more agility, you have to provide, I mean, and so that, that's where that's coming in and I liked the way that Andul I kind of split it into gold silver and bronze. Yeah. And I think that that's where, we're going, right? I mean you should ask your developers right? Are your developers like pining to start up a new instance of Oracle every time you're starting a new project? Probably not reach for their Postgres right? And so, because of that, that's where this is coming from and that's not going to change. And, and yeah, that that ecosystem is going to continue to, to thrive. And there'll be lots of different flavors in the growing open source ecosystem. >> Yeah. I mean, open source absolutely is the underpinning you know, the, the bedrock of innovation, these days. Gentlemen, great power panel. Thanks so much for bringing your perspectives and best of luck in the future. >> Thank you, next time we'll try and match our backgrounds >> Next time. Well, we'll up our game. Okay. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for theCUBE. Stay tuned for more great coverage. Postgres vision, 21. Be right back. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Tech spending is poised to rebound as the economy reopens in 2021. CIOs and IT buyers, they expect a 4% increase in 2021 spending based on ETR's latest surveys. And we believe that number will actually be higher, in the six to 7% range even. The big drivers are continued fine tuning of, and investment in digital strategies, for example, cloud security, AI data and automation. Application modernization initiatives continue to attract attention, and we also expect more support with work from home demand, for instance laptops, et cetera. And we're even seeing pent-up demand for data center infrastructure and other major risks to this scenario, they remain the pace of the reopening, of course, no surprise there, however, even if there are speed bumps to the vaccine rollout and achieving herd immunity, we believe tech spending will grow at least two points faster than GDP, which is currently forecast at 4.1%. Hello and welcome to this week's (indistinct) on Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we want to update you on our latest macro view of the market, and then highlight a few key sectors that we've been watching, namely cloud with a particular drill down on Microsoft and AWS, security, database, and then we'll look at Dell and VMware as a proxy for the data center. Now here's a look at what IT buyers and CIOs think. This chart shows the latest survey data from ETR and it compares the December results with the year earlier survey. Consistent with our earlier reporting, we see a kind of a swoosh-like recovery with a slower first half and accelerating in the second half. And we think that CIOs are being prudently conservative, 'cause if GDP grows at 4% plus, we fully expect tech spending to outperform. Now let's look at the factors that really drive some of our thinking on that. This is data that we've shown before it asks buyers if they're initiating any of the following strategies in the coming quarter, in the face of the pandemic and you can see there's no change in work from home, really no change in business travel, but hiring freezes, freezing new deployments, these continue to trend down. New deployments continue to be up, layoffs are trending down and hiring is also up. So these are all good signs. Now having said that, one part of our scenario assumes workers return and the current 75% of employees that work from home will moderate by the second half to around 35%. Now that's double the historical average, and that large percentage, that will necessitate continued work from home infrastructure spend, we think and drive HQ spending as well in the data center. Now the caveat of course is that lots of companies are downsizing corporate headquarters, so that could weigh on this dual investment premise that we have, but generally with the easy compare in these tailwinds, we expect solid growth in this coming year. Now, what sectors are showing growth? Well, the same big four that we've been talking about for 10 months, machine intelligence or AI/ML, RPA and broader automation agendas, these lead the pack along with containers and cloud. These four, you can see here above that red dotted line at 40%, that's a 40% net score which is a measure of spending momentum. Now cloud, it's the most impressive because what you see in this chart is spending momentum or net score in the vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness in the data center on the horizontal axis. Now cloud it stands out, as it's has a large market share and it's got spending velocity tied to it. So, I mean that is really impressive for that sector. Now, what we want to do here is do a quick update on the big three cloud revenue for 2020. And so we're looking back at 2020, and this really updates the chart that we showed last week at our CUBE on Cloud event, the only differences Azure, Microsoft reported and this chart shows IaaS estimates for the big three, we had had Microsoft Azure in Q4 at 6.8 billion, it came in at 6.9 billion based on our cloud model. Now the points we previously made on this chart, they stand out. AWS is the biggest, and it's growing more slowly but it throws off more absolute dollars, Azure grew 48% sent last quarter, we had it slightly lower and so we've adjusted that and that's incredible. And Azure continues to close that gap on AWS and we'll see how AWS and Google do when they report next week. We definitely think based on Microsoft result that AWS has upside to these numbers, especially given the Q4 push, year end, and the continued transition to cloud and even Google we think can benefit. Now what we want to do is take a closer look at Microsoft and AWS and drill down into those two cloud leaders. So take a look at this graphic, it shows ETR's survey data for net score across Microsoft's portfolio, and we've selected a couple of key areas. Virtually every sector is in the green and has forward momentum relative to the October survey. Power Automate, which is RPA, Teams is off the chart, Azure itself we've reported on that, is the linchpin of Microsoft's innovation strategy, serverless, AI analytics, containers, they all have over 60% net scores. Skype is the only dog and Microsoft is doing a fabulous job of transitioning its customers to Teams away from Skype. I think there are still people using Skype. Yes, I know it's crazy. Now let's take a look at the AWS portfolio drill down, there's a similar story here for Amazon and virtually all sectors are well into the 50% net scores or above. Yeah, it's lower than Microsoft, but still AWS, very, very large, so across the board strength for the company and it's impressive for a $45 billion cloud company. Only Chime is lagging behind AWS and maybe, maybe AWS needs a Teams-like version to migrate folks off of Chime. Although you do see it's an uptick there relative to the last survey, but still not burning the house down. Now let's take a look at security. It's a sector that we've highlighted for several quarters, and it's really undergoing massive change. This of course was accelerated by the work from home trend, and this chart ranks the CIO and CSO priorities for security, and here you see identity access management stands out. So this bodes well for the likes of Okta and SailPoint, of course endpoint security also ranks highly, and that's good news for a company like CrowdStrike or Forescout, Carbon Black, which was acquired by VMware. And you can see network security is right there as well, I mean, it's all kind of network security but Cisco, Palo Alto, Fortinet are some of the names that we follow closely there, and cloud security, Microsoft, Amazon and Zscaler also stands out. Now, what we want to do now is drill in a little bit and take a look at the vendor map for security. So this chart shows one of our favorite views, it's getting net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share on the horizontal. Okta, note in the upper right of that little chart there that table, Okta remains the highest net score of all the players that we're showing here, SailPoint and CrowdStrike definitely looming large, Microsoft continues to be impressive because of its both presence, you can see that dot in the upper right there and it's momentum, and you know, for context, we've included some of the legacy names like RSA and McAfee and Symantec, you could see them in the red as is IBM, and then the rest of the pack, they're solidly in the green, we've said this before security remains a priority, it's a very strong market, CIOs and CSOs have to spend on it, they're accelerating that spending, and it's a fragmented space with lots of legitimate players, and it's undergoing a major change, and with the SolarWinds hack, it's on everyone's radar even more than we've seen with earlier high profile breaches, we have some other data that we'll share in the future, on that front, but in the interest of time, we'll press on here. Now, one of the other sectors that's undergoing significant changes, database. And so if you take a look at the latest survey data, so we're showing that same xy-view, the first thing that we call your attention to is Snowflake, and we've been reporting on this company for years now, and sharing ETR data for well over a year. The company continues to impress us with spending momentum, this last survey it increased from 75% last quarter to 83% in the latest survey. This is unbelievable because having now done this for quite some time, many, many quarters, these numbers are historically not sustainable and very rarely do you see that kind of increase from the mid-70s up into the '80s. So now AWS is the other big call out here. This is a company that has become a database powerhouse, and they've done that from a standing start and they've become a leader in the market. Google's momentum is also impressive, especially with it's technical chops, it gets very, very high marks for things like BigQuery, and so you can see it's got momentum, it does not have the presence in the market to the right, that for instance AWS and Microsoft have, and that brings me to Microsoft is also notable, because it's so large and look at the momentum, it's got very, very strong spending momentum as well, so look, this database market it's seeing dramatically different strategies. Take Amazon for example, it's all about the right tool for the right job, they get a lot of different data stores with specialized databases, for different use cases, Aurora for transaction processing, Redshift for analytics, I want a key value store, hey, some DynamoDB, graph database? You got little Neptune, document database? They've got that, they got time series database, so very, very granular portfolio. You got Oracle on the other end of the spectrum. It along with several others are converging capabilities and that's a big trend that we're seeing across the board, into, sometimes we call it a mono database instead of one database fits all. Now Microsoft's world kind of largely revolves around SQL and Azure SQL but it does offer other options. But the big difference between Microsoft and AWS is AWS' approach is really to maximize the granularity in the technical flexibility with fine-grained access to primitives and APIs, that's their philosophy, whereas Microsoft with synapse for example, they're willing to build that abstraction layer as a means of simplifying the experiences. AWS, they've been reluctant to do this, their approach favors optionality and their philosophy is as the market changes, that will give them the ability to move faster. Microsoft's philosophy favors really abstracting that complexity, now that adds overhead, but it does simplify, so these are two very interesting counter poised strategies that we're watching and we think there's room for both, they're just not necessarily one better than the other, it's just different philosophies and different approaches. Now Snowflake for its part is building a data cloud on top of AWS, Google and Azure, so it's another example of adding value by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure complexity and it obviously seems to be working well, albeit at a much smaller scale at this point. Now let's talk a little bit about some of the on-prem players, the legacy players, and we'll use Dell and VMware as proxies for these markets. So what we're showing here in this chart is Dell's net scores across select parts of its portfolio and it's a pretty nice picture for Dell, I mean everything, but Desktop is showing forward momentum relative to previous surveys, laptops continue to benefit from the remote worker trend, in fact, PCs actually grew this year if you saw our spot on Intel last week, PCs had peaked, PC volume at peaked in 2011 and it actually bumped up this year but it's not really, we don't think sustainable, but nonetheless it's been a godsend during the pandemic as data center infrastructure has been softer. Dell's cloud is up and that really comprises a bunch of infrastructure along with some services, so that's showing some strength that both, look at storage and server momentum, they seem to be picking up and this is really important because these two sectors have been lagging for Dell. But this data supports our pent-up demand premise for on-prem infrastructure, and we'll see if the ETR survey which is forward-looking translates into revenue growth for Dell and others like HPE. Now, what about Dell's favorite new toy over at VMware? Let's take a look at that picture for VMware, it's pretty solid. VMware cloud on AWS, we've been reporting on that for several quarters now, it's showing up in the ETR survey and it is well, it's somewhat moderating, it's coming down from very high spending momentum, so it's still, we think very positive. NSX momentum is coming back in the survey, I'm not sure what happened there, but it's been strong, VMware's on-prem cloud with VCF VMware Cloud Foundation, that's strong, Tanzu was a bit surprising because containers are very hot overall, so that's something we're watching, seems to be moderating, maybe the market says okay, you did great VMware, you're embracing containers, but Tanzu is maybe not the, we'll see, we'll see how that all plays out. I think it's the right strategy for VMware to embrace that container strategy, but we said remember, everybody said containers are going to kill VMware, well, VMware rightly, they've embraced cloud with VMware cloud on AWS, they're embracing containers. So we're seeing much more forward-thinking strategies and management philosophies. Carbon Black, that benefits from the security tailwind, and then the core infrastructure looks good, vSAN, vSphere and VDI. So the big thing that we're watching for VMware, is of course, who's going to be the next CEO. Is it going to be Zane Rowe, who's now the acting CEO? And of course he's been the CFO for years. Who's going to get that job? Will it be Sanjay Poonen? The choice I think is going to say much about the direction of VMware going forward in our view. Succeeding Pat Gelsinger is like, it's going to be like following Peyton Manning at QB, but this summer we expect Dell to spin out VMware or do some other kind of restructuring, and restructure both VMware and Dell's balance sheet, it wants to get both companies back to investment grade and it wants to set a new era in motion or it's going to set a new era in motion. Now that financial transaction, maybe it does call for a CFO in favor of such a move and can orchestrate such a move, but certainly Sanjay Poonen has been a loyal soldier and he's performed very well in his executive roles, not just at VMware, but previous roles, SAP and others. So my opinion there's no doubt he's ready and he's earned it, and with, of course with was no offense to Zane Rowe by the way, he's an outstanding executive too, but the big questions for Dell and VMware's what will the future of these two companies look like? They've dominated, VMware especially has dominated the data center for a decade plus, they're responding to cloud, and some of these new trends, they've made tons of acquisitions and Gelsinger has orchestrated TAM expansion. They still got to get through paying down the debt so they can really double down on an innovation agenda from an R&D perspective, that's been somewhat hamstrung and to their credit, they've done a great job of navigating through Dell's tendency to take VMware cash and restructure its business to go public, and now to restructure both companies to do the pivotal acquisition, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera and clean up it's corporate structure. So it's been a drag on VMware's ability to use its free cash flow for R&D, and again it's been very impressive what it's been able to accomplish there. On the Dell side of the house, it's R&D largely has gone to kind of new products, follow-on products and evolutionary kind of approach, and it would be nice to see Dell be able to really double down on the innovation agenda especially with the looming edge opportunity. Look R&D is the lifeblood of a tech company, and there's so many opportunities across the clouds and at The Edge we've talked this a lot, I haven't talked much about or any about IBM, we wrote a piece last year on IBM's innovation agenda, really hinges on its R&D. It seems to be continuing to favor dividends and stock buybacks, that makes it difficult for the company to really invest in its future and grow, its promised growth, Ginni Rometty promised growth, that never really happened, Arvind Krishna is now promising growth, hopefully it doesn't fall into the same pattern of missed promises, and my concern there is that R&D, you can't just flick a switch and pour money and get a fast return, it takes years to get that. (Dave chuckles) We talked about Intel last week, so similar things going on, but I digress. Look, these guys are going to require in my view, VMware, Dell, I'll put HPE in there, they're going to require organic investment to get back to growth, so we're watching these factors very, very closely. Okay, got to wrap up here, so we're seeing IT spending growth coming in as high as potentially 7% this year, and it's going to be powered by the same old culprits, cloud, AI, automation, we'll be doing an RPA update soon here, application modernization, and the new work paradigm that we think will force increased investments in digital initiatives. The doubling of the expectation of work from home is significant, and so we see this hybrid world, not just hybrid cloud but hybrid work from home and on-prem, this new digital world, and it's going to require investment in both cloud and on-prem, and we think that's going to lift both boats but cloud, clearly the big winner. And we're not by any means suggesting that their growth rates are going to somehow converge, they're not, cloud will continue to outpace on-prem by several hundred basis points, throughout the decade we think. And AWS and Microsoft are in the top division of that cloud bracket. Security markets are really shifting and we continue to like the momentum of companies in identity and endpoint and cloud security, especially the pure plays like CrowdStrike and Okta and SailPoint, and Zscaler and others that we've mentioned over the past several quarters, but CSOs tell us they want to work with the big guys too, because they trust them, especially Palo Alto networks, Cisco obviously in the mix, their security business continues to outperform the balance of Cisco's portfolio, and these companies, they have resources to withstand market shifts and we'll do a deeper drill down at the security soon and update you on other trends, on other companies in that space. Now the database world, it continues to heat up, I used to say on theCUBE all the time that decade and a half ago database was boring and now database is anything but, and thank you to cloud databases and especially Snowflake, it's data cloud vision, it's simplicity, we're seeing lots of different ways though, to skin the cat, and while there's disruption, we believe Oracle's position is solid because it owns Mission-Critical, that's its stronghold, and we really haven't seen those workloads migrate into the cloud, and frankly, I think it's going to be hard to rest those away from Oracle. Now, AWS and Microsoft, they continue to be the easy choice for a lot of their customers. Microsoft migrating its software state, AWS continues to innovate, we've got a lot of database choices, the right tool for the right job, so there's lots of innovation going on in databases beyond these names as well, and we'll continue to update you on these markets shortly. Now, lastly, it's quite notable how well some of the legacy names have navigated through COVID. Sure, they're not rocketing like many of the work-from-home stocks, but they've been able to thus far survive, and in the example of Dell and VMware, the portfolio diversity has been a blessing. The bottom line is the first half of 2021 seems to be shaping up as we expected, momentum for the strongest digital plays, low interest rates helping large established companies hang in there with strong balance sheets, and large customer bases. And what will be really interesting to see is what happens coming out of the pandemic. Will the rich get richer? Yeah, well we think so. But we see the legacy players adjusting their business models, embracing change in the market and steadily moving forward. And we see at least a dozen new players hitting the radar that could become leaders in the coming decade, and as always, we'll be highlighting many of those in our future episodes. Okay, that's it for now, listen, these episodes remember, they're all available as podcasts, all you got to do is search for Breaking Analysis Podcasts and you'll you'll get them so please listen, like them, if you like them, share them, really, I always appreciate that, I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and really would appreciate your comments and always do in my LinkedIn posts, or you can always DM me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com, and tell me what you think is happening out there. Don't forget to check out ETR+ for all the survey action, this is David Vellante, thanks for watching theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Stay safe, we'll see you next time. (downbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, David Vellante here and welcome to the special CUBE conversation with a colleague and friend of mine, Randy Seidl is a accomplished CEO, he's an executive, sales pro, and he's a founder of the Sales Community, this newly formed social network, Randy, good to see you again, welcome. >> Hey, great to see you, it's been a lot of great years, great relationship with you and congratulations with all your success with SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. I was remembering back, I think it's been probably since 1985, so 35 years ago when we were both Cub Scouts, I was at EMC, and you were at IDC. >> Yeah, I mean, first of all, I love where you are, your man-cave there, we heard you held a great little networking event that you do periodically with some of our joint colleagues. And yeah, wow, we were both in our twenties, I was a young pop and Dicky Eagan, and Jack and Mike, and they would have me talk to you guys, you know, sort of brief you on the market, what little I knew now looking back. But wow, Randy, I mean. >> We knew! >> Right, I mean, and then just the whole thing just took off, but we had a good instinct, that storage was going to matter, everything back then was mainframe and IBM was the king of the world, and then you guys just crushed it. Wow, what a run, amazing. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So tell me about Sales Community. What are you trying to accomplish with this new social network? >> Well, it was kind of really my COVID moment. I was talking to Peter Bell I know, you know well as well, and it was right in the beginning of COVID we were kind of comparing notes and long story short, he said, hey Randy, you do all this work with these technology companies, and channel partners, and use your customers, CIO, CTO, CSOs, but you're really not doing much for those that you know the best, which are really technology sales professionals, CROs, STRs kind of up and down the food chain. And that really got me thinking, then he introduced me to one of his companies that sells to CROs and I was going through with them and they were kind of calling me on the carpet saying, okay, do I really know these people? I'm like, oh my gosh! They basically just said, I'm a dope, I haven't really done anything here. So, one thing led to another and ended up developing a Sales Community, a big thing and big help for me was talking to probably 150 or so during the course of the summer, CROs, VPs of sales, Reps STRs to really kind of help get some feedback from them in terms of I caught now they call product-market fit, but kind of what they think it's missing, what's needed, what are their teams need, what do they want? So, it's kind of all a perfect storm, which to be honest without COVID probably wouldn't have created Sales Community. >> Well, I joined and it was a great onboarding experience and love participating with colleagues. I mean, sales is hard, I mean, you've got your ups and your downs and you just got to keep pressing on, but who's participating in Sales Community. >> We're targeting STRs on up to CROs and the kind of the tagline is learn more so you can sell more. We have a lot of great different kind of content areas and we're going to kind of bob and weave based on the feedback that we get, but we've got some great virtual events and interviews. We have an executive coach, Tony Jerry, who's doing nine sessions on designing your life. We did a recording, a live session last week on personal goal setting. We did one yesterday, it was a live session that'll be posted shortly on strategic health. Next one's on branding, so that's not necessarily specific to tech sales, but kind of adding value. We also have Dave Knorr, another executive coach doing a weekly interview series that we're calling tech sales insights with some of the leading CROs, CEOs, Jim Sullivan, who I know you know well, he's going to be the first one, it's going to be next Wednesday, he runs a NWN and he's done a lot of great things and a lot of other great leaders from there. Also still on the interview virtual events side, Michael Cotoia from Tech Target he's going to do a CMO insights series. His Tech Target International editors are also going to do regional ones. So CIO interviews from AMEA, Asia Pac, Latin America, Australia, also on the CSO side, we have somebody focused on doing a CSO interviews, Paul Salamanca of channel interviews, I think this channel, by and large gets missed a lot. CEO's and then Steve Duplessie, I know you know well as well is going to do and focus on CIO, sub-CIO insights, but basically creating virtual events and interview series that are really targeted at people that we sell to. So that covers the kind of virtual event and interview side. And I maybe more quickly go through some of the other key segments. So another one is a content library. There's the guy who's a STR at ServiceNow went through, send me note the other day that said, hey, I found out you have some great feedback on prospecting cold calling, I shared it with my team helped me a lot. So a lot of good things in terms of content library, also opportunity to network. So you could be say selling to Fidelity, you could send a note to the community and members and say anybody else trying to sell the Fidelity, let's network, let's compare notes, also great opportunities for channel partners. So channel partner could raise their hand and say, hey, I know Fidelity, let me help with you. A lot of sharing of best practices. And also just in terms of communication, slack channels, and then opportunities to create round tables. So you might have CROs from startups that want to have maybe six to 10 of them get together. So they can kind of commiserate, ask questions, you could have CROs, companies that are maybe transforming going from on-prem to kind of SAS model. So a lot of different great things, ultimately really to serve the folks in the tech Sales Community. >> Yeah, it sounds like, I mean, first of all tons of content, the other thing I like about it is we all read books on sales, some of them are so like gimmicky, some of them are inspirational. Some of them have really great suggestions. Some of them can be life changing, but what's always been missing in my opinion, is this notion of a network, a social network, if you will, where people can help each other, you just gave a ton of good examples. So you're really trying to differentiate from a lot of the things that have worked over the years, but have really sort of one way communication, some sales guru either training or you're reading his or her book. >> Yes, and we're also fortunate on the content side, we have some of the best kind of consulting sales methodology companies that love what we're doing. So they're likewise providing a lot of content and as you said, it's crazy. You think of any other industry, restaurant, hotel, lawyers, landscape, they have these big, kind of user groups, even technology companies user groups within the larger field of technology sales enterprise B2B sales, there's really nothing that looks like this that exists. So far the feedback's been great. >> Well, so just to what you're describing, I mean, I've known you for a long, long time, and one of the principles of great salespeople is, you help others, right? You make as many friends as you can, and you're the master of that. But essentially you're bringing a lot of the things that have worked, a lot of the principles that have worked in your career to this community. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, I mean, especially I think some of the younger sales folks, it's not kind of off the cuff as we know, but it's really kind of training, being disciplined, being prepared, what are you going to do, how are you going to do it in this COVID moment? You know, I'm seeing lots of friends where the companies that have great relationships, they can do really well and kind of lean in a lot. If you're kind of cold calling and this environment, and it's tough, so kind of, how can you be best prepared, how can you do the best homework? How can you have the kind of right agenda, when you're going to do the sales calls? And then it's not really as much follow up, but really follow through in terms of what you do afterwards. So kind of what is the training? What can you do, how can you do it? And, you know, it's crazy, a lot of companies spend lots of money on training, but if you think about it they're really tied in specifically to tech sales, hopefully this will be great. Plus being able to just kind of throw out questions here and there works out well as well. >> Well that's what I'm looking forward to, say, hey, I got some challenges, how do others deal with this? You know, one of the things that is, I think, paramount to being a great salesperson is the attitude you hear it all the time. How do you stay pumped up? (laughing) Like I said before, we've all been through ups and downs, and what do you tell people there? >> In terms of staying pumped up, interestingly enough, the session we did yesterday on strategic health, probably plays a key role. So yeah, there's the work aspects and how are you going to focus and wake up and get fired up. But ultimately, I think you really got to take several steps back and saying are you taking care of yourself? Are you sleeping, are you eating and drinking correctly? Are you drinking enough water, are you exercising? So, in this moment, I think that's probably something that gets missed a lot in terms of getting fired up. And then ultimately just being excited about kind of what you're doing, how are you doing it, taking care of the customers and serving those around you. And you had mentioned in terms of giving it back, but a lot of us that have been around, love the idea of kind of paying it forward, helping out others and seeing a lot of the great younger folks really rise up and become stars. >> I think that's one of the most exciting things is somebody has been around for awhile. Like (laughing) we all get cold calls and say, hey, how you doing today? You know, (laughing) you really had that dead air, and you actually want to reach out and help these individuals. A lot of times they'll call you, they have no idea what you do, well I've read your website, and I think we'd be a great fit for, you know, something that would not be a great fit. So, there's a level of preparation we always talk about in sales, you got to be prepared, but there's also sometimes... I was talking to a sales pro the other day, you know, sometimes you can over prepare he said, I've been on sales calls, I prepare for hours and hours and hours, and then they get there, and it was just a lot of wasted hours. I probably could have done it in 15 minutes. I mean, so there's a really a balance there. And it comes with experience, I guess. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know how anybody could prepare hours and hours, so that's a whole different subject to think. >> Well, he said, my technique now is just 15 minutes before the call I'll jump on and just, you know, cram as much as I can. And it actually, it worked for him. So, different approaches, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. The other thing I'd like to mention is the advisory board I'm fortunate to have a work with, and be friends with several of the best in industry like you. So if anybody goes to the website, you can click on an advisory board and there's a 200 plus and haven't count them exactly. But you know, some of the best in technology, we've got them sorted on the sales side and the channel side, the consulting side, the coaching side, analyst side, but, really just such a tremendous each head of talent that can really help us continue to go and grow and pivot and you're making sure that we are serving our Sales Community and making sure everybody's learning more so they can sell more. And then I guess I should add onto that also, earning more and making more money. >> So I got to ask you where you land on this. I mean, you're a sports fan, I am too and for a while there once the "Moneyball" came out, you saw Billy Bean and it was this sort of formulaic approach. The guy, you know, we would joke the team with the best nerds would win. But it seems like there's an equilibrium. It used to be all gut feel and experience, and then it became the data nerds. And it seems like in our industry, it's following a similar pattern, the marketing ops, Martech, becoming very, very data driven. But it feels to me, Randy, especially in these COVID times that there really is this equilibrium, this balance between experience, and tribal knowledge, gut feel, network, which is something you're building and the data. How do you see that role, that CRO role, that sales role evolving, especially in the context of what I just talked about with the data nerds? (laughing) >> Yeah, absolutely, I think I heard two points there since you brought up Billy Bean, I forgot the guy's name, but in the movie is kind of nerd. I've got Jesse and Tucker who have been tremendously helpful for us putting together a Sales Community. But to answer the question on the CMOs side, the CMOs out there frankly not going to like this answer, but I think more and more, you see CMOs and CROs kind of separated and it's kind of different agendas, my belief is that eventually the CMO function or marketing is really going to come under sales and sales are really going to take a much more active role in driving and leveraging that marketing function in terms of what's the best bang for the buck, what are they doing, how are they doing it? And I've got a lot of friends, I won't name names, but they're not on the sales side and they're doing what they can, but they just see what I'd call it kind of wasted money or inefficiencies on the marketing side. So, if I maybe I spin that a different way, I think given kind of analytics and those companies that do have best practices, and I write things on the marketing side, you know, they're going to continue to go and grow, you know, on cert with the right sales team. So I think that you bring up a great point and that area is going to continue to evolve a lot. >> Does that principle apply to product marketing? In other words do you feel like product marketing should be more aligned with engineering or sales and maybe sales and finance, where do you land on that? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of old school, so I go back to Dick and Jack and Roger and Mike Rutgers, and you all in terms of, hey, you have those silos, but you get everybody at the table, kind of what we're working well together. It is interesting though in today's world, the PLG, Product-Led Growth models, where a lot of companies now are trying to get in maybe almost like a VMware, maybe BMC did in the early days where you're kind of getting into the low level developers and then kind of things bubble up so that you think Product-Led Growth model, having a lower cost insight sales model, works when I'll say the kind of the product sells itself. But I would argue, that I think some of those PLG led companies really miss out on leveraging the high end enterprise relationships, to kind of turbocharge and supersize and expedite larger sales deals, larger (indistinct). >> Well, and you mentioned earlier a channel you said a lot of times that's overlooked and I couldn't agree more, channel increasingly important. That's where a lot of the relationships live, it gives you scale, it just gives you a lot of leverage, maybe you talk about the importance of channel and how it relates to Sales Community. >> Yeah, I mean, it's interesting they're really unto themselves, there's some things that are channel channel, but if you think about, you know, go to market tech sales, pick the company on average is probably half of the business goes through the channel. And it used to be way back when just kind of fulfillment, but now the best companies really are those that have the right relationships, that are adding value, that can help on the pre sales, that can help on the post sales, that can help kind of cross sale. You know, if I'm a customer, I don't want to deal with whatever five or 10 different vendors if I can have a one stop shop with one bar solution provider, partner, SI, or whatever you want to call them, you know, that certainly makes life a lot easier. And I think a lot of companies almost been kind of a second class citizen, but I think those companies that really bring them into the fold as really partners at the table, whether it be an account planning sessions, whether you're doing sales calls, but kind of leveraging that I call it a variable cost kind of off balance sheet, sales force really is where the future is going to continue to go. >> So you've been a successful individual sales contributor. You've been a CEO, you've run large sales organizations. I mean, you basically ran sales at HP for Donna Telly, and so you've seen it all, and you've been helping startups. When you look at hiring sales people, what are the attributes that you look for? Is it intelligence, is it hard work, is it coach ability? What are some of the things that are most important to you, and do you apply different attributes in different situations? What are your thoughts on that? >> Great question in a little plug, maybe for a recruiting business, top talent recruiting, (laughing) but one of the key things that we do, which I think is different from others in the recruiting side is the relationships. So a lot of people don't dig in, when we're talking to candidates, they say, well, nobody really asked me this before. And I would argue a key differentiator, and this is way before COVID, but especially now with COVID is okay, who do you have relationships with? So I could be talking to a candidate that maybe somebody is hiring, wants to cover financial services in New York. And then I'll say, okay, well, who do you know what City JPB Bay and I'll know more people than they know. And I'll probably say, just so you know, that's weird me up in Boston. I know more than the council you probably know the best. So really trying to unearth, really kind of who has the right relationships and then separate from that in terms of a reference check, being able to reference checks sooner in the process with somebody that know well firsthand, as opposed to second hand. And a lot of times I've seen even some of the larger, more expensive recruiting firms, you're kind of wait until somebody is the final say, when do an offer, then they do a reference check and they do the reference check with somebody that they don't know. And to me, I mean, that's totally useless which quite with LinkedIn today, I could be say if we're looking at you for candidate, maybe a bad example, but I don't know, we probably have a 1000 in common, and from those, we probably have 200 that we both know, well, that I could check. And when you do reference checking, it's not a maybe it's either, hey, the person is a yes, or the person's a no. So trying to do that early in the process, I think is a big differentiator. And then last and probably third piece I'd highlight is, if it's a startup company, you can't get somebody that's just from a big company. If it's a big company role, you can't get somebody that just from a small company, you got to really make sure you kind of peel back the onions and see where they're from. And you could have somebody from a big company, but they were kind of wearing a smaller division. So again, you have to kind of, you can't judge a book by the cover. You got to kind of peel back the onion. >> So Randy, how do people learn more about Sales Community? Where do they go to engage, sign up, et cetera? >> Absolutely, it's salescommunity.com. So it should be pretty straight forward. A lot of great information there. You can go subscribe, and if you like it spread the word and a lot of great content and you can ping me there. And if not I'm randy@salescommunity.com. So love to get any feedback, help out in any way we can. >> Well, I think it's critical that you're putting this network together and you are probably the best networker that I know I've seen you in action at gatherings and you really have been a great inspiration and a friend. So, Randy, thanks so much for doing the Sales Community and coming on theCUBE and sharing your experience with us. >> Great, thanks Dave, appreciate it. >> All right you're very welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Commvault Future Ready 2020 brought to you by Commvault. >> Hi and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Future Ready. I'm Stu Miniman and I'm joined by David Vellante here. Of course, we just had the keynote for Commvault Future Ready, Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO. Dave, he's been there a little bit over a year. We've been watching the transformation of Commvault as they are trying to go much deeper in the cloud. Of course, the space, data protection overall, backup and recovery, been a super hot one. Especially, if you talk about everybody accelerating what they're doing with the cloud, Dave, from an end user standpoint, as well as for Commvault. So why don't we start with the company first, as I said, the move to subscription, the move to cloud, a lot of change needed, and that's one of the reasons they brought Sanjay into the company. Of course, he'd been at Puppet before that, he was the CIO of EMC before that. So Dave, tell us your thoughts lately on Commvault. >> Okay, so Commvault, obviously Stu, has been around for a long, long time, and it's kind of a diversified player in the data protection space. I've always felt like they've had a more diversified sort of vision and portfolio. Sanjay took over, what was it February last year, right? So he kind of came in and inherited a company in transition. And transitioning from what has largely been a legacy sort of on-prem, perpetual software licensed business to now one that's transferring into a subscription based model, obviously a large maintenance base. I think about 60% of their revenues comes from services, and most of that is maintenance, okay? So he's inherited that, and then they're going into a subscription model. So that's going to hit the income statement, and then boom COVID hits. So Sanjay is getting it all from all sides, but Commvault is a 670, roughly, million dollar company on a trailing 12 month basis. And the market cap's in the 1.7, 1.8 range, so they trade at about 2.7 times revenue. So that's much better than a hardware company, but it should be better than that as a software company. So the challenge that he has is, okay, how do we get the company growing again? How do we transition to that subscription based model? The good news on Commvault is their balance sheet is tremendous. I mean, they have no debt, no debt. I mean, several hundred million dollars in cash, over 300 million and zero debt, which kind of interesting to me, Stu. Because many companies during this COVID pandemic have tapped the credit markets, Commvault has chosen not to. Maybe they should right now with such low interest rates, and maybe that can help get the growth engine going. But I think they're very conservative in that standpoint and obviously very proud of their balance sheet, but with the likes of Cohesity and Rubrik, and I know we're going to talk about that pouring money into the market, trying to attack them, and we'll talk more about their position relative to those guys, you might like to see 'em raise a little bit of money or take on some debt and really go after some of those opportunities that you referred to upfront, it is a hot market. >> Yeah, well, Dave, you talk about some of the newer entrants raised just insane amounts of money when you talk about that space. Not only Cohesity and Rubrik, but also talked about Veem. Of course, we've watched Veem go from a change in ownership and how much money they have. And from a revenue standpoint, Veem actually might be bigger than Commvault at this point, I believe, right? >> Yeah, I think so. I mean, they're billion dollar bookings, they say. I mean, I believe it, but they're a privately held company. Commvault, we can tell actually what their numbers are. Guaranteed Cohesity and Rubrik are losing money. So their cost of acquiring a customer is huge. Commvault is, let's face it, it's servicing its install base, and it's mining that. And that's why it's, it's cashflow positive. I mean, it's a very healthy company financially. The challenge that, again, Sanjay has is how do you get growth? They're a company, as I said earlier, in transition. Let me share with you, if I may, some data from our friends at ETR. What we're showing here is the fundamental methodology of ETR, which is that net score, Stu. We talk about that all the time, ETR is, as I say, our data partner, Enterprise Technology Research. Every quarter, they go out and they say, "Based for each company and their various segments, "are you adopting new?" That's the lime green, that's the 2%. "Are you increasing spending?" That's the 30%, and this is from the July survey so this is relative to the first half. "Are you flat?" You can see that fat middle 56%, and then you can see decrease is 7% and that's in the pink, and then 5% replacing. So good news here is more people are spending more, more customers spending more, than are spending less. Net score's the red subtracted from the green, so it comes out at roughly 20%, which is that's certainly not terrible. It's a legacy company that's been around a long time. So you would see a company that's a newbie, that's hot. We'd always talked about UI path automation anywhere, Snowflake, they're in the 70% range, but they're much, much smaller companies but they're growing very, very rapidly. So this is respectable and very common for a company that has been around as long as Commvault. >> Yeah, thanks so much for sharing that data, Dave. Of course, as you said, huge customer base, they've been around for awhile. I remember when we first did Commvault GO two years ago, very excited, very engaged user base. There was a good strategy discussion and an understanding for what Commvault needed to do to get to the cloud, but there was an understanding that they couldn't keep doing with the same team what had brought them to the place before. You always say, Dave, what got you to where you were isn't going to get you to where you need to go. Talk a little bit about the keynote. Last year at Commvault there were a couple of big pieces. Number one, is they really had their first SaaS offering with Metallic. And what the momentum has been on Metallic is, first of all, they made a big partnership announcement with Microsoft ahead of this event. Multi-year, Metallic has a few different solutions. One of them, of course, is to work on Office 365, so when we go to SaaS and we go to the cloud, we understand that data protection isn't something that just comes inherently. Some people thought, "Oh hey, I did it "in my own data center, but once I go to the cloud, well, "I'm sure it just takes care of things "like data protection and security." The answer is I still need to think about it, and the ecosystem has helped filling that gap. So Metallic was the first step and what we saw, Dave, really looks like a holistic refresh of the product line. Commvault back in recovery, Commvault disaster recovery, Commvault complete data protection, all aligning themselves to be more to what you were talking about, going to that full ratable model, and the other piece was Hedvig. So Hedvig software company, helping them to be in more cloud-native environments. And they launched a Hedvig X, so it's the full integration of that solution. Less than a year from the acquisition to fully integrating it and making it an offering that's ready for what they're doing. >> Is that they're cloud play? Actually Hedvig is sort of in that space, right? As with cloud you think subscription, but also Commvault is basically putting its stack in the cloud, right? And taking advantage of cloud services, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, Dave. Metallic, specifically is built for the cloud. >> So let's talk a little bit about cloud, I have some other data here. And the cloud, if you pull up that next slide, the cloud has been eating away at on-prem vendors. We know it's been growing at 2000, 3000 basis points higher than the on-prem business. But what this slide shows is that same net score methodology that we talked about before, but it's filtering, you can see in the left hand side here, it's filtering on AWS, Google and Microsoft. So there's 585, AWS, Google and Microsoft customers in the ETR dataset. There's like about 1200 in the overall survey this quarter. And this shows the over time the net score of Commvault in those accounts, so you can see, as I was saying, go back to 2018, you can see prior to Sanjay taking over this thing was dipping and dipping, losing momentum coming into kind of the April survey and then July survey of 2019, and it's kind of bouncing off the bottom now. So it seems like they're making some progress there, and what we want to see is that momentum continue to grow. Again, net score is a measure of spending velocity. So what you want to see is as that transition occurs more sort of a net score increases over each quarter. >> Yeah, well, Dave as you mentioned earlier, there absolutely are some headwinds potentially there, but it looks like Sanjay, at least, has stopped some of the bleeding on this and, stated goal of course, to return to growth. And so we would want to see that go from just up one or 2% to be able to track with the cloud. Probably a good time for us to talk a little bit about the competition, Dave, because if you talk just in cloud markets, are you tracking along with the cloud? So the hyperscales themselves, of course, growing at very huge percent. A company that's been around as long as Veritas isn't necessarily going to be doing 35 to 70% growth as you would see from AWS or Azure. But what do you see out there for some of the competition in general, who were some of the key players that we need to look at? >> Yeah, so I mean, think about the backup guys. I mean, the traditional space, you've mentioned Veritas. Veritas, by the way, in the ETR survey data is not playing well, they're in the red. They've been losing share, the share donors, as they say, you've got some big players, Dell EMC, obviously, kind of living off the data domain base. Remember Dell EMC fell behind, prior to the Dell acquisition, they weren't investing heavily in the data protection business. They were kind of living milking off that data domain base. Back when you were there, they had the networker and they had Avamar, and so there was a bifurcated thing. Frank Slootman came and he tried to clean some of that up, but then he was onto his next big thing, of course, it was ServiceNow. And so, you know, Dell is a big footprint, obviously, but they're very hardware centric, as you know, so they have a big hardware agenda. IBM with Spectrum Protect, Veem was hurting them. They did the deal with Catalogic to kind of stop the bleeding, he kind of did. Again, big install base, and then you got the sort of newcomers. Veem is not really a newcomer anymore. I think they've been around for 15 years, big acquisition. Decent momentum in the market, especially started the Microsoft base, and they're kind of everywhere, so you see them. And of course you see Cohesity and Rubrik spend a lot of money, as you said. And it's interesting, let me pull up this next data point. In the ETR data set this past quarter you saw Cohesity actually overtake Rubrik. Rubrik was very, very strong earlier on. They're kind of neck and neck in this chart, what this chart shows is not net score, it's now market share. Now market shares, not real market shares, Stu. I have to be cautious here because it's not like IDC tracks market share. What it is is pervasiveness in the dataset. So in other words, within this segment, the number of mentions of the vendor divided by the total mentions in the segment, okay? So it's really pervasiveness or presence in the data set. And what this shows is you can see we've got 65 Commvault customers in the survey, and it shows the impact of Veem, Rubrik and Cohesity in the Commvault base. And you can see up through, let's see, that's the recent surveys is you see the increases up to the increasing red line is Veem, and then you got the Rubrik line and then the Cohesity line, but they're all recently, since the October 19th survey, down, trending down. So that says to me that Commvault is holding serve within its own base and actually doing better as these guys are declining in this base. You can see the comment that ETR made, "Rubrik, Cohesity and Veeam are all seeing "market share declines in shared accounts with Commvault," so that's good news. I think this is very important, Stu, and here's why. Is Commvault has got to hunker down and maintain those customers. It does not want to be a share donor much in the same way that Veritas has been. So that's a quick scan of the competitive marketplace. And again, from my standpoint, I'd like to see Sanjay maybe get a little bit more aggressive. I liked the acquisitions. Hedvig, it's great, deal with actually some more subscription, but I'd like to see them go hard after a cloud native. I have to dig into that, maybe you can comment, but really cloud native and multicloud across clouds being able to have that same experience on-prem as I do in the clouds at very high performance, very low latency. >> Yeah. Well, Dave, first of all, one thing, talk about the competitive win rate. That's something you always look at is how are you doing against the competitors? Not only did Sanjay come in, but you saw changes along how the channel chief, I believe, and the salespeople. So definitely reinvigorating that piece of it, as well as, Dave we saw, in the keynote. So the portfolio is updated, an aggressive engineering investment, some through acquisition, some through changing the code and moving in these environments, leveraging partnerships, great to see the Microsoft one, love to see something along the lines of Google. We understand Amazon, you play in that ecosystem, it is challenging to necessarily partner deeply with AWS, unless you're one of a few strong players in the marketplace, but working closer in cloud. And Dave, one thing I'd point out, last year, one of the things that really impressed me at Commvault GO is they did have some good developer actions. So when you talk about cloud native, of course, enabling developers is one of the key things. Like many companies out there, inside the company you've got developers, so how are you unleashing that? So Hedvig, a good acquisition along those lines, but you know, in the middle of the show floor, they had people that you set up with whiteboards and just go at it. So, you know, reminds me of days past when you used to have these engineering-driven shows where you could go in and really understand that. So helping to developers, enable them, backup and recovery just needs to tie into all my DevOps and IT Ops and all my other environments to make things just more automated because also you talk cloud native, Dave, automation has to be a big piece of it. And to your point, we actually have really good guests coming on the program. Not only will we have Sanjay, relatively fresh off the keynote, I've got a panel with the product people to really dig in and understand that. We'll poke and prod at some of the cloud native pieces and understand where that's going, got their head of strategy also on the program. >> Yes, I think you're making a great point about automation. Just speaking about M&A for a moment, I like M&A, I like growth through M&A, I'm comfortable with that as long as it fits into the portfolio. Your point about automation, I see opportunities there for M&A, things like visibility, observability, obviously hot analytics, automated operations, IT Ops, anything that sort of removes labor and complexity and gives me visibility across clouds. That I think is something that could be interesting, again, as long as it fits into the portfolio. I'll say this, I mean, Sanjay was at EMC and knows M&A because I've no doubt they were bringing all their M&A candidates to Sanjay and saying, "Okay, what do you think of this tech, do you use it?" Probably kick the tires a little bit, so he, I'm sure, was a part of those. I'm sure he saw the good, the bad, and the ugly. You were there, EMC was pretty good at acquisitions, but then it got a little out of control. >> And Dave, talk automation, Sanjay came from Puppet. Puppet was one of the early companies along helping people move along from those manual tasks to how can we automate those? So, absolutely, Sanjay now a little over a year in there, starting to see from the product standpoint, and expect to see some of the trailing results as to how that moves forward. >> And then again, blending that, if it's a tuck in or whatever, maybe there's some big chess move out there. I would just suspect given Commvault's conservative nature you wouldn't see that. Although, they could do it. I mean, at their revenue level, their balance sheet would allow them to raise some debt, if they wanted to do that now would be the time to do it. But it's interesting, everybody's doing it and they're not. So I kind of liked the contrarian play. Given the opportunity in the market, given the TAM expansion through, beyond backup into data management, and it's a cloud and multicloud, I do think there's maybe an opportunity for them to be a little bit more aggressive. >> All right, well, Dave, thanks so much for helping us dig in and kick off our coverage. >> You're welcome, Stu. >> All right, stay with us. We have a bunch of interviews here for Commvault Future Ready. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe its the Cube, covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience brought to you by HPE. >> Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante and welcome back to the Cube's coverage of HPE's Discover 2020 the Virtual Experience the Cube. The Cube has been virtualized We like to say Am very happy to welcome in Neil McDonalds, he's the General Manager for Compute at HPE. Great to see you again Neil, wish we were face to face, but this will have to do. >> Very well, it's great to see you Dave. Next time we'll do this face to face. >> Next time we have hopefully next year. We'll see how things are going, but I hope you're safe and your family's all good and I say it's good to talk to you, you know we've talked before many times you know, it's interesting just to know the whole parlance in our industry is changing even you know Compute in your title, and no longer do we think about it as just sort of servers or a box you guys are moving to this as a service notion, really it's kind of fundamental or, poignant that we see this really entering this next decade. It's not going to be the same as last decade, is it? >> No, I think our customers are increasingly looking at delivering outcomes to their customers in their lines of business, and Compute can take many forms to do that and it's exciting to see the evolution and the technologies that we're delivering and the consumption models that our customers are increasingly taking advantage of such as GreenLake. >> Yes so Antonio obviously in his Keynote made a big deal in housing previous Keynotes about GreenLake, a lot of themes on you know, the cloud economy and as a service, I wonder if you could share with our audience, you know what are the critical aspects that we should know really around GreenLake? >> Well, GreenLake is growing tremendously for us we have around a thousand customers, delivering infrastructure through the GreenLake offerings and that's backed by 5,000 people in the company around the world who are tuning an optimizing and taking care of that infrastructure for those customers. There's billions of dollars of total contract value under GreenLake right now, and it's accelerating in the current climate because really what GreenLake is all about is flexibility. The flexibility to scale up, to scale down, the ability to pay as you use the infrastructure, which in the current environment, is incredibly helpful for conserving cash and boosting both operational flexibility with the technology, but also financial flexibility, in our customer's operations. The other big advantage of course at GreenLake is it frees up talent most companies are in the world of challenges in freeing up their talent to work on really impactful business transformation initiatives, we've seen in the last couple of quarters, an even greater acceleration of digital transformation work for example and if all of your talent is tied up in managing the existing infrastructure, then that's a drain on your ability to transform and in some industries even survive right now, so GreenLake can help with all of those elements and, with all of the pressure from COVID, it's actually becoming even more consumed, by more and more customers around the world it's- >> Yeah right I mean that definitely ties into the whole as a service conversation as well I mean to your point, you know, digital transformation you know, the last couple of years has really accelerated, but I feel yeah, I feel like in the last 90 days, it's accelerated more than it has in the last three years, because if you weren't digital, you really had no way to do business and as a service has really played into that so I wonder if you could talk about yours as a service, you know, posture and thinking. >> Well you're absolutely right Dave organizations that had not already embarked on a digital transformation, have rapidly learned in our current situation that it's not an optional activity. Those that were already on that path are having to move faster, and those that weren't are having to develop those strategies very rapidly in order to transform their business and to survive. And the really new thing about GreenLake and the other service offerings that we provide in that context is how it can accelerate the deployment. Many companies for example, have had to deal with VDI deployments in order to enable many more of their workforce to be productive when they can't be in the office or in the facility and a solution like GreenLake can really help enable very rapid deployment and build up but not just VDI many other workloads in high performance Compute or in SAP HANA for example, are all areas that we're bringing value to customers through that kind of as a service offering. Yeah, a couple of examples Nokia software is using GreenLake to accelerate their research and development as they drive the leadership and the 5G revolution, and they're doing that at a fraction of the cost of the public cloud. We've got Zanotti, which has built a private cloud for artificial intelligence and HPC is being used to develop the next generation of autonomous software for cars. And finally, we've got also Portion from Arctic who have built a fully managed hybrid cloud environment to accelerate all the application development without having to bear the traditional costs of an over-provisioned complex infrastructure. So all of our customers are relying on that because Compute and Innovation is just at the core of the digital transformations that everybody is embarked on as they modernize their businesses right now and it's exciting to be able to be part of that and to be able to do there, to help. >> So of course in the tech business innovation is the you know the main spring of growth and change, which is constant in our industry and I have a panel this week with Doctor Go talking about swarm learning in AI, and that's some organic innovation that HPE is doing, but as well, you've done some, M&A as well. Recently, you guys announced and we covered it a pretty major investment in Pensando Systems. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what, that means to the Compute business specifically in, HPE customers generally. >> So that partnership with Pensando was really exciting, and it's great to see the momentum that its building in delivering value to our customers, at the end of the day we've been successful with Pensando in building that momentum in very highly regulated industries and the value that is really intrinsic to Pensando is the simplifying of the network architecture. Traditionally, when you would manage an enterprise network environment, you would create centralized devices for services like load balancing or firewalls and other security functionality and all the traffic in the data center would be going back and forth, tromboning across the infrastructure as you sought to secure your underlying Compute. The beauty of the Pensando technology is that we actually push that functionality all the way out to the edge at the server so whether those servers are in a data center, whether they're in a colocation facility, whether they're on the edge, we can deliver all of that security service that would traditionally be required in centralized expensive, complex, unique devices that were specific to each individual purpose, and essentially make that a software defined set of services running in each node of your infrastructure, which means that as you scale your infrastructure, you don't have a bottleneck. You're just scaling that security capability with the scaling of your computer infrastructure. It takes traffic off your core networks, which gives you some benefits there, but fundamentally it's about a much more scalable, responsive cost-efficient approach to managing the security of the traffic in your networks and securing the Compute end points within your infrastructure. And it's really exciting to see that being picked up, in financial services and healthcare, and other segments that have you know, very high standards, with respect to security and infrastructure management, which is a great complement to the technology from Pensando and the partnership that we have with Pensando and HPE. >> And it's compact too we should share with our audience it's basically a card, that you stick inside of a server correct Neil? >> That's exactly right. Pensando's PCIe card together with HPE servers, puts that security functionality in the server, exactly where your data is being processed and the power of that is several fold, it avoids the tromboning that we talked about back across the whole network every time you've got to go to a centralized security appliance, it eliminates those complex single purpose appliances from the infrastructure, and that of course means that the failure domain is much smaller cause your failure demands a single server, but it also means that as you scale your infrastructure, your security infrastructure scales with the servers. So you have a much simpler network architecture, and as I say, that's being delivered in environments with very high standards for security, which is a really a great endorsement of the Pensando technology and the partnership that HPE and Pensando will have in bringing that technology to market for our customers. >> So if I understand it correctly, the Pensando is qualified for Pro-Lite, Appollo and in Edgelines. My question is, so if I'm one of those customers today, what's in it for me? Are they sort of hopping on this for existing infrastructure, or is it part of, sort of new digital initiatives, I wonder if you could explain. >> So if you were looking to build out infrastructure for the future, then you would ask yourself, why would you continue to carry forward legacy architectures in your network with these very expensive custom appliances for each security function? Why not embrace a software defined approach that pushes that to the edge of your network whether the edge are in course or are actually out on the edge or in your data centers, you can have that security functionality embedded within your Compute infrastructure, taking advantage of Pensandos technologies. >> So obviously things have changed is specifically in the security space, people are talking about this work from home, and this remote access being a permanent or even a quasi-permanent situation. So I wonder if we could talk about the edge and specifically where Aruba fits in the edge, how Pensando compliments. What's HPE's vision with regard to how this evolves and maybe how it's been supercharged with the COVID pandemic. >> So we're very fortunate to have the Aruba intelligent edge technology in the HPE portfolio. And the power of that technology is its focus on the analysis of data and the development of solutions at the site of the data generated. Increasingly the data volumes are such that they're going to have to be dealt with at the edge and given that, you need to be building edge infrastructure that is capable enough and secure enough for that to be the case. And so we've got a great compliment between the, intelligent edge technology within the Aruba portfolio, with all of the incredible management capabilities that are in those platforms combined with technologies like Pensando and our HPE Compute platforms, bring the ability to build a very cohesive, secure, scalable infrastructure that tackles the challenges of having to do this computer at the edge, but still being able to do it in both a secure and easily managed way and that's the power of the combination of Aruba, HPE Compute and Pensando. >> Well, with the expanded threat surface with people working from home organizations are obviously very concerned about compliance, and being able to enforce consistent policies across this sort of new network, so I think what you're talking about is it's very important that you have a cohesive system from a security standpoint you're not just bolting on some solution at the tail end, your comments. >> Well security, always depends on all the links in the chain and one of the most critical links in the chain is the security of the actual Compute itself. And within the HPE compliant platforms, we've done a lot of work to build very differentiated and exclusive capability with our hardware, a Silicon Root of Trust, which is built directly into Silicon. And that enables us to ensure the integrity of the entire boot chain on the security of the platform, drones up in ways that can't be done with some of the other hardware approaches that are prevalent in the industry, and that's actually brought some benefit, in financial terms to our customers because of the certifications that are enabled in the, Cyber Catalyst designations that we've earned for the platforms. >> So we also know from listening to your announcements with Pensando just observing security in general, that this notion of micro-segmentation is very important being able to have increased granularity as opposed to kind of a blob, maybe you could explain why that's important you know, the so what behind micro-segmentation if you will. >> Well it's all about minimizing the threat perimeter on any given device and if you can minimize the vectors through which your infrastructure will interact on the network, then you can provide additional layers of security and that's the power of having your security functionality right down at the edge, because you can have a security processor sitting right in the server and providing great security of the node level you're no longer relying on the network management and getting all of that right and you also have much greater flexibility because you can easily in a software defined environment, push the policies that are relevant for the individual pieces of infrastructure in an automated policy driven way, rather than having to rely on someone in network security, getting the manual configuration of that infrastructure, correct to protect the individual notes. And if you take that kind of approach, and you embed that kind of technology in servers, which are fundamentally robust in terms of security because of the Silicon Root of Trust that we've embedded across our platform portfolio whether that's Pro-line or Synergy or BladeSystem or Edgeline, you get a tremendous combination, as a result of these technologies, and as I mentioned, the being Cyber Catalyst designation is a proof point of that. Last year there we're over 150 security products, put forward for the Sovereign Capitalist designation, and the only a handful were actually awarded I think 17, of which two were HPE Compute and Aruba. And the power of is that many organizations are not having to deal with insurance for Cybersecurity events. And the Catalyst designation can actually lead to lower premiums for the choice of the infrastructure that you've made to such as HPE Compute, has actually enabled you to have a lower cost of insuring your organization against cybersecurity issues, because infrastructure matters and the choice of infrastructure with the right innovation in it is a really critical choice for organizations moving forward in security and in so many other ways. >> Yeah, you mentioned a lot of things there software defined, that's going to enable automation and scale, you talked about the perimeter you know, the perimeter of the traditional moat around the castle that's gone the perimeter, there is no perimeter anymore, it's everywhere so that whole you know, weakest link in the chain and the chain of events. And then the other thing you talked about was the layers you know very important when you're talking to security practitioners you know, building layers in so all of this really is factoring in security in particular, is factoring into customer buying decisions. Isn't it? >> Well security is incredibly important for so many of our customers across many industries. And having the ability to meet those security needs head on is really critical. We've been very successful in leveraging these technologies for many customers in many different industries, you know, one example is we've recently won multiple deals with the Defense Intelligence Systems Agency, who you will imagine have very high standards for security, worth hundreds of millions of dollars of that infrastructure so there's a great endorsement, from the customer set who are taking advantage of these technologies and finding that they deliver great benefits for them in the operational security of their infrastructure. >> Yeah what if I could ask you a question on the edge. I mean, as somebody who is you know, with a company that is really at the heart of technology, and I'm sure you're constantly looking at new companies, M&A you know et cetera, you know inventing tech, but I want to ask you about the architectures for the edge and just in thinking about a lot of data at the edge, not all the data is going to come back to the data center or the cloud, there's going to be a lot of AI influencing going on in real time or near real time. Do you guys see different architectures emerging to support that edge? I mean from a Compute standpoint or is it going to be traditional architectures that support that. >> It's clearly an evolving architectural approach because for the longest time, infrastructure was built with some kind of hub you know, whether or not some data center or in the cloud, around all of the devices at the edge would be essentially calling home, so edge devices historically have been very focused on connectivity on acquisition of data, and then sending that data back for some kind of processing and action at some centralized location. And the reality is that given the amount of data being generated at the edge now given the capability even of the most modern networks, it's simply not possible to be moving those kinds of data volumes all the way back to some remote processing environment, and then communicating a decision for action all the way back up to the edge. First of all, the networks kind of handle the volume data's involved if every device in the world was doing that, and secondly, the latencies are too slow. They're not fast enough in order to be able to take the action needed at the edge. So that means that you have to countenance systems at the edge that are not actually storing data, that are not actually computing upon data, and in a lot of edge systems historically, they would evolve from very proprietary, very vertically integrated systems to Brax PC controller based systems with some form of IP connectivity back to, some central processing environment. And the reality is that if you build your infrastructure that way, you finish up with a very unmanageable fleet, you finish up with a very fragmented, disjointed infrastructure and our perspective is that companies that are going to be successful in the future have to think themselves as an edge to cloud approach. They have to be pursuing this in a way that views, the edge, the data center, and the cloud as part of an integrated continuum, which enables the movement of data when needed you heard about the swarm learning that you talked about with my colleague Doctor Go, where there's a balance of what is computed, where in the infrastructure, and so many other examples, but you need to be able to move Compute to where the data is, and you need to be able to do that efficiently with a unified approach to the architecture. And that's where assets like the HPE Data Fabric come into play, which enable that kind of unification across the different locations of equipment. It also means you need to think differently about the actual building blocks themselves, in a lot of edge environments, if you take a Classic 19 interact mode Compute device, that was originally designed for the data center it's simply not the right kind of infrastructure. So that's why we have offerings like the Edgeline portfolio and the HPE products there, because they're designed to operate in those environments with different environmentals than you find the data center with different interfaces to systems of action and systems of control, than you'd typically find in a data center environment yet still bringing many of the security benefits and the manageability benefits that we've talked about earlier in our conversation today Dave. So it's definitely going to be an evolving, a new architectural approach at the edge, and companies that are thoughtful about their choice of infrastructure, are going to be much more successful than those that take a more incremental approach, and we were excited to be there to help our customers on that journey. >> Yeah Neil it's a very exciting time I mean you know, much of the innovation in the last decade was found inside the data center and in your world a lot of times you know, inside the server itself but what you're describing is this, end-to-end system across the network and that systems view, and then there's going to be a ton of innovation there and we're very excited for you thanks so much for coming on the Cube it was great to see you again. >> It is great to be here and we're just excited to be here to help our customers, and giving them the best volume for the workloads whether that's taking advantage of GreenLake, taking advantage of the innovative security technologies that we've talked about, or being the edge to cloud platform as a service company that can help our customers transform in this distributed world from the edge to the data center to the cloud. Thanks for having me Dave. >> You very welcome, awesome summary and its always good to see you Neil. Thank you for watching everybody this David Vellante, for the Cube our coverage of the HPE Discover 2020 Virtual Experience, will be right back to the short break. (soft upbeat music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's Cuban sites, powered by ET are in this breaking analysis, we want to accomplish three things. First thing I'll do is we'll recap the current spending outlook. Next, we want to share some of the priorities and sentiments and the outlook that we're hearing from leading tech execs that we've been interviewing in the past couple of weeks on the remote cube. And finally, we'll take a look at really what's going on in the market place, a little bit of a look forward and what we expect in the coming weeks and months ahead. Now, as you know, E. T. R was really the first to quantify with real survey data the impact of covert 19 on I t spend. So I just want to review that for a moment. This CTR graphic right here shows that results from more than 1200 CIOs and I T practitioners. That shows that they expect their I t spending how they're they're spending on the change in 2020 now, look at the gray bar shows a very large number of organizations that they're plowing ahead without any change. In overall, I spend about 35% now shown in the green bars before 21% of respondents are actually increase their budgets this year. And the red bars, of course, they show the carnage. Really, 28% of customers are expecting a decrease of more than 10% year on year. Now, as we've reported, the picture would look a lot worse were it not for the work from home infrastructure, offset by E spending on collaboration tools and related networking security. VPN, VD I interest infrastructure, etcetera. Now remember each year launched this survey on March 11th and ran it through early April. So it caught the change in sentiment literally in real time on a daily basis. And that's what I'm showing here in this graphic. What it does is it overlays key events that occurred during that time frame and what E. T. R did was they modeled and rear end the data excluding the responses prior to each event. So, of course, the forecast got progressively worse over time. But as you can see on the Purple Line. There was a little bit of an uptick in sentiment from the stimulus package, and it looked like, you know, there's another. It looks like there's another economic cash injection coming soon. Now, as we've reported, the card forecast calls for around 4% decline in I t spend from 2020. That's down from plus 4% prior to Corona virus. It's ER has now entered its self imposed quiet period for two weeks. But what we're doing here is showing some of the sectors that we're watching closely for big changes. We're gonna drill into these over the next several weeks. Now, of course, is we've reported we're seeing a substantial cut in I t spend across the board. Capex will be down. We would expect sectors like I t consulting and outsourcing to be way, way down as organizations put a lot of projects on the back burner. But there are bright spots is shown here in the green. One that we really haven't highlighted to date is cloud really haven't dug into that and also data center related services around Cloud Cloud, we think, is definitely going to remain strong and these related services to get connect clouds via Coehlo services and really reducing latency across clouds and on Prem, we think will remain strong. Now I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about some of the learnings and takeaways from our conversations with CSOs over the past couple of weeks. One of the great things about the Cube is we get to build relationships with many, many people. Over the past 10 years, I've probably personally interviewed close to 5000 people, so we've reached out to a number of those execs over the last couple of weeks to really try and understand how they're managing through this cove in 19 Crisis. So let me summarize just some of the things that we heard. And then I'll let the execs speak to you directly first, of course, like tech execs, are there half full people perpetual optimist, if you will. It was interesting to hear how many of the people that I spoke with, that they actually had early visibility on this crisis. Why? Because a lot of our operations, we're actually in China and other parts of Asia, so they saw this coming to an extent, and they saw it coming to the U. S. And so you know, there were somewhat ready and you're here. They all had on air of confidence about their long term viability and putting their put their employees ahead of profits. But the same time, once they see that their employees are okay, they want to get them focused and productive. Now what they've also done is they've increased the cadence and the frequency of their communications. Yeah, and most, if not all, are trying to get back with a free no strings attached software and other similar programs. But the bottom line is, they really don't know what's coming. They don't know when this thing will end. They don't know what a recovery really is gonna look like when people are going to feel safe traveling again what the overall economic impact is gonna be. So I think it's best summarized to say they're hoping for the best, but planning for the worst. But let's listen to this highlight clip that we put together of five execs that I talked to along with John Furrier Melissa DiDonato of Susa. Frank Sluman, who had snowflake and he's formerly the chairman and CEO of service. Now Jeremy Burton is the CEO of a company called Observe. He used to be the CMO of Dell and EMC. Before that, brand products Sanjay Poonam as the CEO of VM Ware and ST ST Vossen heads up Cisco's collaboration business. Roll the clip. >>What keeps me up at night now and how I wake up every morning is wondering about the health of my employees, that a couple of employees, one that was quite ill in Italy. We were phoning him and calling and emailing him from his hospital bed. And that's what's really keeping me going. What's inspiring me to leave this incredible company is the people and the culture that they built that I'm honoring and taking forward as part of the open source value system. My first movers, Let's not overreact. Take a deep breath. Let's really examine what we know. Let's not jump to conclusions. Let's not try to project things that were not capable of projecting death hard because, you know, we tend to have sort of levels off certainty about what's gonna happen in the next week in the next month, and so on. All of a sudden that's out of the window creates enormous anxiety with people. So, in other words, you've got a sort of a reset to Okay, what do we know? What can we do? What we control, Um, and and not let our minds sort of, you know, go out of control. So I talk to are people time of maintain a sense of normalcy focused on the work. Stay in the state in the moment. And ah, I don't turn the news feed off. Right, Because the hysteria you get through that through the media really not helpful. Just haven't been through, you know, a couple of recessions where, you know, we all went through 9 11 You know, the world just turn around and you come out the other side. And so the key thing is, you said it very much is a cliche, but you gotta live in the moment. What can I do right now? What can I affect right now? How can I make sure that you know what I'm working on is a value for when we come out the other side. And when you know more code balls come along. I think you'd better reason about that with the best information you have at the time. I always tell people the profits of VM Ware wheat. If you are not well, if your loved ones not well, if you take a picture of that first, we will be fine. You know this to show fast, but if you're healthy, let's turn our attention because we're not going to just sit in a little mini games. We're gonna so, customers, How do we do that? A lot of our customers are adjusting to this pool, and as a result they have to, you know, either order devices, but the laptop screens things were the kinds to allow work for your environment to be as close to productive as they're working today. I do see some, some things coming. Problem right? Do I expect the volumes off collaboration to go down? You know, it's never going to go back to the same level. The world as we know it is going to change forever. We are going to have a post code area, and that's going to be changed for the better. There's a number of employees who have been skeptical, reticent, working from home were suddenly going to say just work from home. Thing is not so bad after all. >>So you can hear from the execs who all either currently or one point of lead large companies in large teams. They're pretty optimistic now. The other thing that's Lukman told me, by the way, is he approves investments in engineering with no qualms because that's the future of the company. But he's much more circumspect with regard to go to market investments because he wants to see a high probability of yield from the sales teams before making investments there. I also want to share some perspectives that I've learned from small early stage companies, and we've all seen the Sequoia Black Swan memo and you might remember there onerous rest in peace, good times the alert that they put out in 2008. It basically they're essentially advising companies to stop spending on non essential items. By the way, another slew of society also somewhat scoffed at this advice, and he told me on the Cube, you should always stop spending money on non essential items. At any rate, I've talked to a number of early stage investors and portfolio companies, and I'll share a little bit of their play Bach playbook that they're using during this crisis, and it might have some value to the cut, cut cut narrative that you're hearing out there. I think the summary for these early stage startups is first focus on those customers that got you to where you are today. In other words, don't lose sight of your core. The second thing is, try to hone your go to market and align it with current conditions. In other words, paint a picture of the ideal customer and the value proposition that you deliver specifically in the context of the current market. The third thing is, they're updating their forecast more frequently and running sensitivity analysis much more often so that they can better predict outcomes. I e. Reset. You're likely best case and worst case models. The third is essentially reset your near term and midterm plans and those goals and re balance your expense portfolio to reflect these new targets. And this is important by the way, to communicate to your investors. When I've seen is those companies with annual recurring revenue there actually in pretty good shape, believe it or not, in almost all cases, I've seen targets lowered. But there are some examples of startups that are actually increasing their outlook. Think, Zoom, even those who is not a startup anymore. But generally I've seen resets of between 5 to 10% downward, which you know what often is in pretty much in line with the board level goals. And I've seen more drastic reductions as well of up to 50% now. So we've heard some pretty good stories from larger tech companies and some of these VC funded startups. Now I want to talk about small business broadly and what we're hearing from small business owners and also the banks that serve them. Look, I'm not going to sugar coat this many small businesses, as you well know, in deep trouble. They're gonna go out of business. They're laying off people on. There are a number of unemployed the aid package that the government's putting forth the small businesses. It's not working its way through the banking system. Not nearly fast enough, despite the Treasury secretaries efforts, The bottom line is banks don't want to make these loans to small businesses. Right now, there's too much that they don't understand. They're making no money on these loans they're being overwhelmed with. Volume will give you some examples. Bank of America, when the small business payroll program first hit signal that would Onley help companies with both ah banking relationship and an existing lending relationship with the bank UPS is another example said it was only gonna directly help companies with over 500 employees. And for small businesses, it was outsourcing that relationship to another firm, which, of course, meant you had to go through a new rectal exam, if you will, with that new firm. In a way, you can't blame the banks. They're being asked to execute on these programs without clear guidance on how they're supposed to enforce guidelines. And what happens if they make a mistake? Is the federal government gonna pull their guaranteed backing? What are those guidelines? They seem to be changing all the time. And what's the banks, liability and authority to enforce them? Why don't I spend time talking about this? Well, nearly half of US employees work for small businesses, and nearly 17 million workers as of this date have filed for unemployment, and I'll say the banks got bailed out in the financial crisis of 2008 and they need to step up, period, and the government needs to help them, all right. The other buzz kill data that I want to bring up is our national debt. Now many have invoked that there's no such thing as a free lunch, including the famous Milton Friedman, the Economist who I'm gonna credit. Others have said it, but I'll give it to him. Why? Because he espoused controlling the money supply and letting the market's fix themselves bailouts. The banks, airlines, Boeing, automakers, etcetera, those air antithetical to his underlying philosophy. Currently, the U. S national debt is $24 trillion. That's $194,000. Protects player Americans. Personal debt is now 20 trillion. Our unfunded liabilities, like Social Security, Medicare, etcetera now stands at a whopping 139 trillion. And that equates to about 422,000 per citizen. Think about this. The average liquid savings for US family is 15 K, and the U. S debt is now 111% of GDP. So we've been applying Kenzie and Economics for a while now. I'm gonna say it seems to have been working. Think about the predictions of inflation after the 8 4000 and nine crisis. They proved to be wrong. But my concern is I don't see how we grow our way out of this debt, and I worry about that. I've worried about this for a long time, but look, we're knee deep into it and it looks like there's no turning back so well, I'll try to keep my rhetoric to a minimum and stay positive here because I think there is light at the end of the tunnel. We're starting to see some some good opportunities emerging here just in terms of flattening the curve and the like. One of the things that pretty positive about is there gonna be some permanent changes from Cove it. It's kind of ironic that this thing hit as we're entering a new decade decade and as I said before, I expect digital transformations to be accelerated because of this crisis and the many companies that have talked digital from the corner office. But I haven't necessarily really walked the walk, I think will now I think is going to be more cloud more subscription less wasted labor, more automation, more work from home unless big physical events, at least in the next couple of years. So that's kind of the new expectation. As always, we're going to continue to report from our studios in Palo Alto and Boston, and we really welcome and appreciate your feedback. Remember, these segments are all available as podcasts, and we're publishing regularly on silicon angle dot com and on wiki bond dot com. Check out ctr dot plus for all the spending action, and you can feel free to comment on my LinkedIn post or DME at development or email me at David Volante Wiki. Sorry, David Vellante is silicon angle dot com. This is Dave Volante for the Cube Insights powered by CTR. Thanks for watching everyone. We'll see you next time. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to the special Cube remote conversation. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. We're here in our Palo Alto studio. We do all of our digital events. We do all of our content, original content here in studio. Of course, we can reach anyone around the world through our remote technology. And we like to bring experts in, to talk about some of the cutting edge issues and one of the most important things that I've been really doing a lot of thinking on lately and putting it into practice is, the role of individuals in groups in digital and since we're using software, this is becoming a really critical dynamic for the concept of engagement. Which is the holy grail of digital marketing. And now with the Coronavirus you're going to see a lot of events being canceled. You're going to see new norms being formed around how people engage, how they bond and ultimately, how they get work done. So we got a great guest J Metz, who has got a Ph.D in Communications Technology. Dr. Jay Metz, thank you for taking the time to jump on our remote interview. >> Hello. >> So I got to ask you, you know, we were talking before you came on you've got your doctorate and going back thirty years ago, you were doing a lot of pioneering work with others in academic circles around group behavior, software and you know, for us old guys but you rolled back the clock back then, you're talking message groups, you're talking about, you know, online tech systems. But the world is pretty similar evolved evolution in terms of those same concepts. Now more than ever, you're seeing Facebook breaking democracy, the government wants to try and create an e-democracy model. How do you do voting? All these things now are cutting edge issues and certainly with the Coronavirus, you're looking at people wanting to take content and posting it on the internet. It sounds so easy but it's now, it's going to be different. So, I got to ask you, you know, how do you see this world because you've done a lot of thinking on this? You know networks, you know technology and digital. How do you see the role of content and people and groups forming on the internet? >> Well I think that the role of technology hasn't really changed all that much when it comes to slowest moving piece, which is human nature. When we were, as you pointed out we were talking about this a long time ago way back before there were pretty pictures to look at on computers, you know. We had, we had IRC Chat, we had Bitnet Relay, we had Minitel in France, we've had different places had different forms of communicating through the use of computer. And at the time, they were really curious as to what was going to wind up happening. Were you going to get, you know, a bunch of freaks running things? Or are you going to get people you know, effectively isolated from society? All these questions that we're kind of asking nowadays. We still had them back then and we don't have a new answer. The same problem exists, even if there are prettier pictures to look at on the screen. >> David Vellante put and I put out a post, he actually did an interview, an article, where we talk about digital events and his advice was, "Don't just think about the software, "think about the outcome." So I have to ask you, when you start looking at digital interactions and human behavior, you're looking at stuff from whether it's visualization, Sigchi did a ton of work going back to the 80s to today. You're seeing, you're getting group theory coming in. The outcome is just people either getting something done, finding what they're looking for, making new friends and connecting. Digital is not just the software, there's a human component. Can you share your view about you know, the role of engagement, how content in groups, group social formation, social capital, social organizations can emerge from this new dynamic that is going to be forced upon us as we start thinking about virtual and work remotely and everything else. >> Well, I always felt that engagement was sort of a misnomer, to be honest. I always felt that engagement really had to do with the way that participation was counted. And participation is not necessarily an indication of how closely somebody feels to somebody else. How much of a part of the group they actually feel. And we start to look at group dynamics, as we start to look at the communication part, we look at the actual points on the graph as individual elements of participation, as if that's a good thing or tells us something. It doesn't tell us where the vector spin is going, right? Is it going in a positive way? Is it going in a negative way? And the reality as I've been able to find out over the last several decades and I can't believe I said that out loud. But the reality over time and this was always back to you know, before the radio even, I mean. This is a common theme in human nature. How people form groups through the use of technology is relatively consistent. And it has to go through the nature of the medium as it pertains to making our conversations either delayed by time or increased by time. So that synchronicity makes a huge difference as to what we call engagement and what kind of meaning we can apply to it. >> I want to get with you on asynchronous versus synchronous. Now that's an important concept and you know, the cloud native technologies are all asynchronous and horizontally scalable. These are the benefits of large scale systems now. But i get to your point about participation, you mentioned about engagement. Conventional wisdom says that, "Hey I need a lot of "people in the funnel. "I want more people, "what are the numbers? "We have a million views?." You're kind of saying it's kind of going the other way. That's actually not good engagement in digital or in these kind of group formations. Can you explain that? >> Well I mean, we just don't know. So when I was, when I was doing way back when I was doing my dissertation, I thought the same thing. I thought that if I could find out how much somebody participated in a group, I would be able to determine how closely affiliated they feel to that group. And it turns out, that's just not the case. What I found out especially in the short term, was the participation inside of a group usually was indicating that they disagree with the group, not agree. So if you only stop there, you won't get the full story. And what we'll find out is over time, there is an evolutionary approach to this, more about a fractal way of recursively coming in and an iterative approach to being part of a group, bringing yourself into it, letting the group accept you, that kind of a thing. And it simply isn't true that because I have X number of views or this level of rewatches on my videos, that that means that they were either each participating or even affiliated with what I got. Are they part of my group or not? I can't tell simply by the number of views. That's what I mean. >> Yeah, great great stuff. I want to get your thoughts on, and we, I saw your comments on my LinkedIn post, I just posted on my plane ride back from Washington, D.C. But I want to get your reaction to a couple edits here. So I wrote, "In the age of digitals, "not the individual that makes a change, "it's the group or mob. "Often groups are where "individuals voices are processed, "refined, and validated as a collective. "And then, "New social constructs "emerge in digital, "where we interact as "individuals within groups." With digital now pervasive, and certainly everyone working at home, this is going to be highlighted a lot. Can you comment and your reaction to those statements? What's your thoughts? >> Well think about the way we start conversations digitally versus in person, right? So, our idea and this goes to what you said you want to get to regarding synchronicity. So, when we have conversations in a group, in a face to face environment, it is a lot more dynamic, it is a lot more chaotic. There's a lot more complexity and the adaptive system of the group emerges in it's own particular pattern. That same adaptive system does exist inside of the digital world but it is highly regulated. It's regulated by the kind of software and platform that we use. So we will get different types of that group evolution based upon what the actual software will allow us to do. Just like Twitter has a different engagement level. And I use that in a sense of how we interact. It has a different interaction level than the way LinkedIn does. So for example, I could not have responded to you on LinkedIn the way we did because you couldn't have even posted the message on Twitter the way you did on LinkedIn. And the way that we handle the individualism is going to be handled in such a way that we have a more paced turn taking approach to doing things. So, it's not going to be a complete collective and it's not going to be complete individualistic approach depending upon which platform we're using for communication. >> Yeah, one of the beautiful things about the internet is you've seen the evolution, there has been pros and cons. A lot of value has been created. You got the website, you can self-serve yourself. Social networks, you meet some friends, you get some connections. But as we start to see more digital connection, people being connected together or individually if you will, the progression of learning has been somewhat nonlinear. You go to Google type something in, you pop to a webpage or you and I see each other on Twitter, I jump into Discord, talk to my gaming friends, next thing I'm on LinkedIn. I'm kind of popping around in a very nonlinear way. Creates for a very asynchronous kind of consumption or communication pattern. Could you talk about the difference between or the value or the pros and cons between asynchronous communication and consumption of that content and synchronous. >> Well, I think that ultimately, the concept of time is an underrated approach to evaluating how successful something is or is not. So, the time between the way that we communicate and our expectations of it makes a huge difference. If I were to have a, even a slice of a five second delay between your question and my answer, like we are doing some sort of satellite messaging, it would be very disruptive to our flow, right? We would not be able to bond in quite a way. And yet, if I write something that's five seconds after you posted, wow, that's amazing, right? So, our expectations for how time plays a role in the development of our relationship makes a huge difference. But you also sort of talking about the idea of multitasking and the content switching that we do from place to place whether it be gaming in Discord and whether it be in storage or it's, you know, my background or whether it be networking or whether it be medicine or whatever the concept that we have to involve, that probability to content switch even with the same people in the room, the "digital room", that still winds up being a place inside of our head because we've conceptualized those time elements quite differently based upon where we're actually having the conversation. And so ultimately, at the very end of the day, it's a complex system that we tend to forget that we're even doing naturally. We just, we just do. >> It's interesting. You may talk earlier about adaptive and what not. I was talking with a friend this past weekend, we're talking about the difference in organism and a mechanism. You know, organisms are self healing, they repair. You don't have, if people act as a group, there's kind of that, kind of group feel like a social organism versus a mechanism. Software today feels like a mechanism. I got a chat window open, you can't see me. You're like "Hey you're there?", and I'm like, I could be making coffee, doing whatever. I'm not really present. So, you start to see what organism and mechanism concepts and then the notion of presence and commitment. If I'm face to face, that's value and time matters, and presence matters. I'm looking over there, talking to you. So presence and commitment are also concepts. So talk about those two things. You got being an organism, a social organism, social being versus a mechanism, it's like a software and then, you know, the commitment and presence dynamic. What's your view of those things? >> So you brought up the idea of linearity earlier and non-linearity. And when you look at something called, Complex Adaptive Systems, we take very static rules and they don't have to be a lot of rules, just a couple rules and just like the mechanisms that you're talking about. They can be very simple but, you know, in a stasis way and the human nature is to work around it. So our organistic, (laughs), you know what I mean. >> Yeah. >> That element that we bring to the table, tends to wind up working within that rule set or without that rule set and depending on what our particular needs are. But what happens in that parlance is called emergence. In other words, the process is called, autopoiesis, a technical term that means a pattern self-emerges from the mixture of a static mechanical element, those rules of communication and the way that we dynamically as organisms tend to work within and without those rules. And a pattern will emerge as a result. >> I want to get your thoughts on a digital event building out with the next generation kind of constructs for, how people can actually use the digital network, Zoom, Keynotes, Breakouts and then the other community aspect of it. But I want to get your thoughts on the role within groups, online groups. One is a group that self forms, has roles and responsibilities, there's decision making, there's group interaction, there's a dynamic kind of organism feel to it. Versus a mob, people just kind of gather up, grass roots Where it's just more free and loose. Can you talk about how you see those differences 'cuz you, you know, people could just gather publicly and chat. It could be self governed in some way but there's no real roles, no decision making, it's more mob like. And then, social constructs around decision making and group formation and decision making. >> In reality, it doesn't, if all things were being equal in terms of amount of time they had spent, the human element of forming groups does not change. The social development of groups has been something that's been studied since the 1840s in academia. And when you look back at that, those as basic ground rules of how groups form, they really haven't changed all that much. The facilitation of that may have changed. But have you ever gone to a group where the first meeting will have all whole bunch of people show up, and the second, people a lot less and by the third time it's already dead? You know, that game of life that we're familiar with with the whole, you know, software program, well that's very true. That's a good metaphor for the way that humans form groups in the first place. Just because it doesn't necessarily form in a digital way, it doesn't mean that was the nature of that particular way. It means that, that particular group itself, that participation, that affiliation, didn't happen in the timeframe necessary to keep it going. And I really think and I really believe that understanding the nature of the people involved, the marriage with the content that they are for and the medium that provides that facilitation is what will provide the idea of whether or not the entire group digital or other wise lives or dies. >> That's great insight J. I really appreciate that. You know, final question on this whole digital shift. The Coronavirus is forcing people to stay at home, events are being canceled. And you've been following theCUBE, you kind of know what SiliconANGLE and theCUBE have been doing. We would go to events where people would be there, physical spaces, and we would interview people in our authentic way and face to face and bond and but gather the data from the guests and distribute it digitally to our audiences. We've been doing that for 10 years. Now what's interesting though is the worlds now changed. There's no more venue. But the people running these events still want to take content value but now they got to digitally distribute it to where the people are in digital streams or digital space. Okay, or cyber space. So, this has been a real challenge for us people that are used to relying on the venue to handle a lot of the structural things. Decisions, stage, boom, breakouts, areas for hallway tracks, happy hour, networking. So, the venue handled all that. Now you have a flip of the script where it's still content value but the distribution to digital is chaotic and distributed. There's a group challenge, right? So, the question I have for you based on your expertise, how should people be thinking about the complexity to do a digital event 'cuz you got to have content, you have a digital stage, you need distribution, but you need to have the humans involved because they are the consumers and the actors. What your view of this and if we run a team together trying to figure this out, what we would say to people to help them along? >> I think, so there's a short game and there's long game here. And the long game is that, there are elements to digital forms of communication in asynchronous method just to use the terminology we've been doing. There are realities that cannot be met, the same way that you met in a face to face. And those are ages ago they used to be called, social context cues. But effectively the richness of a face to face just simply cannot be held in an asynchronous format for long. So, the long term game here, the long game is that, this is temporary setback because you still need to be able to do things that you can't normally do just through you know, watch pre-recorded content. Even if it winds up being a recorded content that will be a pre-recorded at some point. You're watching it live, you're still going to view it that way, right? If I watch a webinar live, hell, I have produced dozens and dozens of these things. I'm always aware that this is basically being viewed as if it were a, you know, pre-recorded content. On the short term now to answer your question, what has to happen is that, we have to look at a multi-pronged communication approach. How do I get that synchronicity of communication? How do I get people to feel like they've been heard? That's the problem. When your in a face to face situation in conferences you know you've been heard. In the hallways, in the walkways you would stand up and you would do a question. You know that. That's is one of the biggest problems we have to solve digitally because ultimately, I'm broadcasting something to you and it's a very different communication style than if we're having a interpersonal communication. >> Yeah, and you know one of the things over the years with the internet, the content acquisition which was the primary use case of an event. You go and learn. That can be done online. So, we've seen the progression of the networking peaks, the face to face value, meeting new people. My friends is there, I haven't seen him in a while. Or we work remotely and we see each other and we have beers together or we're bonding. So, is that's just really hard to replicate in software. It really really is. It can be a big challenge. >> Oh, without question. I mean, but at the same time think about reality of how much time you spend with people that you don't normally spend time with at the conferences. Entire friendships had been based on 30 minute conversations spread out over three conferences, right? I mean, you'll go and you'll dinner with one group of people, one conference and then you won't see them again for another three conferences. You go back to that fourth conference and, "Hey we're back "to where we left off "and we're good friends and "that'll never really change." So, we're able to kind of fill in the blanks mentally and emotionally in that sense. The question is, can we do that through the use of a digital technology or to your other point that you mentioned earlier, do other forms whether it be the politics that come out on Twitter or the you know, the other groups we're associated with, but they are worthy, God help us the cancel culture that's coming up. Will that affect everything digitally, that you can skip over when you're actually in a face to face situation. Those are questions that I don't have an answer to. >> Yeah I mean, we're looking at it hard. We think content is key, content value. And again, timing is critical. I like your perspective on timing. There's a time series involved. And there's asynchronous, right? So, it being there. You know, content with, you know, people who are heard or participating, contribution, forming bonds, and interacting. The digital venue that has to facilitate a community loop in, right? So, it's a really complicated but new emerging trend. We're really watching this closely and we really appreciate your insight. Thanks for taking the time. >> My best. >> J Metz, Dr. J Metz here, helping me unpack and sitting back in looking at the philosophy but really the practice of 30 years of internet and online research and sociology around the role of people, individuals in context to groups, this is a big discussion as people start to figure out and operationalize what is the right mix for digital and virtual with physical of spaces. And certainly, we think events will come back soon. But J, thanks for giving us the time and we'll talk to you later. >> Thanks for the invite. >> I'm John Furrier here at theCUBE studios for remote interview with Dr. J Metz talking about the social theory around digital groups. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube. Covering AWS re:Invent 2019 brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello there and welcome back to theCube's live coverage here in Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent 2019. This is theCube's seventh year covering re:Invent. They've been doing this show for eight years, we missed the first year, I'm John Furr, and my co-host David Vellante. We're here extracting the signal from the noise, and we're here with an amazing guest, our friend, she's been here with us from the beginning of theCube, since inception. Always great to get to comment with her. Sandy Carter Vice President with Amazon Web Services. >> Thank you. >> Now in the public sector handling partners. Great to see you, thanks for coming on again and sharing your content. >> So great to see you guys, so dressed up and looking good guys, I have to say. (laughs) >> You're looking good to, but I can't help but stare at our other guest here, the IoT suitcase. >> First, tell us-- >> Yes. >> About the IoT suitcase. >> Well we, in public sector we have a partner program, and that program helps entrepreneurs. And we're really keen on especially helping female entrepreneurs. So one of our entrepreneurs created this suitcase, that's an IoT based suitcase, you can put your logo's and that sort of thing on it, but more importantly for public sectors, she created this safety ring, John. And so, if I touch it I've de-activated it, but if I touch it, it will call the police for me, if I'm being assaulted. Or if I'm having an emergency, I can touch it and have an ambulance come for me as well. And the really cool thing about it is she worked backwards from the customer, figuring out like how are most people assaulted, and if you have an emergency and you fall, what's the best way to get ahold of someone. It's not your phone, because you don't always carry it, it's for a device like this. >> Or a bigger device that you can't, or you leave on the table somewhere, but that's you know it's attractive. >> It's awesome. >> And it's boom, simple. >> And it's pink. (laughs) >> What I love fast about re:Invent as an event is that there's so much innovation going on, but one of the areas that's become modernized very rapidly is the public sector. Your now in this area, there's a lot of partners, a huge ecosystem going, and the modernization effort is real. >> It is. >> Could you share some commentary on what's going on. Give people a feel for the pace of change, what's accelerating? What are people doubling down on, what are some of the dynamics in public sector? >> Yeah, so if you know public sector, public sector actually has a lot of Windows or Microsoft workloads in it. And so we're seeing a lot of public sector customers looking to modernize their Windows workloads, in fact we made several announcements just yesterday around helping more public sector customers modernize. For example, one is Windows Servers 2003, and 2008 will go out of support, and so we have a great new offering, with technology, that can help them to not re-factor, but actually abstract those layers and move quickly to 2016 and 2019, because both of those will go out of support in January. >> A lot of people don't know, and I've learned this from talking with Andy Jassy in the keynote, as well as hearing from some other folks, is that you got, Amazon runs a lot of Windows. >> Oh, we have 57% Windows workloads on AWS in terms of market segment share. Which is 2x the next nearest cloud provider, 2x. And most customers choose to run their Windows workloads on us, because we are so innovative, we move really fast. We're more reliable. The latest public data from 2018 shows that the nearest cloud provider had seven times more downtime. So if your in public sector or even commercial, who can afford to be down that long, and then finally, we have better security. So one of the things we've been focused on for public sector is FedRamp solutions. We know have over 90 solutions that are FedRamp ready. Which is four times more than the next two cloud providers. Four times more than the two combined. >> That's interesting, so I got to ask the question that's popping up in my mind, I'm sure people are curious about. >> Yeah. >> I get the Windows working on Amazon, and that makes a lot of sense, why wouldn't you want to run on the best cloud. The question I would have is, how would the licensing work, because, that's seems to be lock-in spec, Oracle does it, Microsoft does it, does license become the lock-in. So, when something expires, what happens on the licensing side. Licensing is really tricky, and in fact, October 1st, Microsoft made some new licensing changes. And so, we have some announcement to help our customers still bring their own licenses, or what we call fondly, BYOL over to AWS, so they don't have to double invest on the license. >> So you can honor that license on AWS. >> Yeah, and you have to do it on a dedicated host. Which at midnight madness, we announced new dedicated host solution, that's very cloud-like. Makes it as easy to run a dedicated host instance as it is an EC2 instance. So, wicked easy, very cost effective if your moving those on-premises workloads over. >> I just want to point out John, something that's really important here is a lot of times, software companies will use scare tactics, to your point. They'll jack up the cost of the license, to say, ah you got to stay with us, if you run on our hardware or our platform, you pay half. And then they'll put out, "Oh, Amazon's twice as expensive." But these are all negotiable. I've talked to a number of customers, particularly on the Oracle side, and said, no, no, we just went to Oracle and said look, you got a choice, I either give us the same license price or we're migrating off your database. Okay, all right. But some of it is scare tactics, and I think you know increasingly, that's not working in the marketplace. So I just wanted to point that out. >> So what's the strategy for customers to take, I guess that's the question. Because, certainly the licensing becomes again like they get squeezed, I can see that. But what do customers do, is there a playbook? >> Well there is, and so the best one is you buy your license from Microsoft, and then using BYOL, you can bring that over to AWS. It's faster, more performance, more reliable, that sort of thing. If you do get restricted though John, like they are doing for instance with their end of support, you could run that on Azure, and get all the security fixes. We are trying to provide technical solutions, like the ability to abstract Windows Server 2003 and Server 2008 as it goes out of support. >> I mean certainly in the case of Oracle, it used to be you know 10-15 years ago, you didn't have a choice. Instead of one RDBMS, and now it's so much optionality in databases. >> And I will also tell you that we have a lot of customers today, who are migrating from SQL server, or Oracle over to Aurora. Aurora, is equally as performant, and a tenth of the cost. So we actually have this team called the database freedom team that will help you do that migration. In fact I was talking to a very large customer last night, and I was explaining some of the options. And their like, "Let's do the Aurora thing." Let's do it two-step. Let's start by migrating the database over, Oracle and SQL and then I want to go to Aurora. It's like database built for the cloud, it's faster and its cheaper. So why wouldn't you do that? >> Yeah, and I think the key is, to my question about a friction. What's frictionless? How can they get it done quickly without going through the trip-wires of the licensing. >> Certain workloads are tough, right. You know if you're running your business on high transaction volume. But a lot of the analytics stuff, the data warehouse, you know look at Amazon's own experiences. You guys are just ticking it off, moving over from Oracle to Aurora, it's been fun to watch. >> I want to get you guy's perspective Dave, you and Sandy, because I think you guys might have good insight on this, because everyone knows that I'm really passionate about public sector, I've been really enamored with Teresa's business from Day one, but when she won the CIA deal, that really got my attention. As I dug into the Jedi deal, and that all went sideways, it really jumped out at me, that public sector is probably the most transformative market, because they are modernizing at a record pace. I mean this is like a glacier moving market. They don't really have old ways, they got the beltway bandits, they got old procurement, old technology, and like literally in a short period of time, they have to modernize. So they're becoming more enterprise like, can you guys, I mean pros in the enterprise, what's your take? It just seems like a Tsunami of change in the public sector, because the technology is driving it. What do you guys think about this? Am I on or off base? What are some of the trends that are going on? >> I mean I have a perspective, but please. >> No, okay. So I'll start. So I see so much transformation regardless of what industry your looking at. If you're looking at Government for example working with SAP NS2, we just actually took 26 different flavors of SAP ERP for the Navy, and helped them to migrate to the cloud. For the US Navy, which is awesome. Arkis Global, did the same thing for the UK. We actually have Amazon Connect in there, so that's like a cool call center driven by Machine Learning, and the health care system for the UK. Or you can even look at things, like here in the U.S. there's a company that really looks at how you do monitoring for the children to keep them safe. They've partnered up with a National Police Association, and they are bringing that to the cloud. So regardless of education, non-profits, government, and it's around the world, it's not just the US. We are seeing these governments education, start-ups, non-profits, all moving to the cloud, and taking their own legacy systems to Linux, to Aurora, and moving very rapidly. >> And I think Andy hit on it yesterday, it's got to start with top-down leadership. And in the government, if you can get somebody whose a leading thinker, CIO, we're going cloud first. Mandate cloud, you know you saw that years ago, but today, I think it's becoming more mainstream. I think the one big challenge is obviously the disruption in defense and that's why you talked about Jedi, in defense it's very high risk, and it needs disruption, it's like healthcare its like certain parts of financial services are very high risk industries, so they need leadership, and they need the best platform underneath in a long term strategy. >> Well Jedi actually went different. It was actually the right call, but I reported on that. But I think that what gets me is that Cerner on stage yesterday, on Yaney's keynote highlights that it's just not inefficiencies that you can solve, there's multiple win-win-win benefits so in that health care example, lower the costs, better care, better, the providers are in better shape, so in government in public sector, there's really no excuse to take the slack out of the system. >> Yeah. >> Well, there's regulation though. >> Yeah, and Dave mentioned cloud first strategies, we're also seeing a lot of movement around data. You know data is really powerful. Andy mentioned this as well yesterday, but for example in our partner keynote where I just came from. We had on stage Avis. Now, Avis, not public sector customer, but what they're doing is, the gentleman said, was that your car can now talk to you, and that data is now being given to local state officials, local city officials, they can use it for emergency response systems. So that public and private use of data, coming together, is also a big trend that we're seeing. >> I think that's a great example, because Avis I think what he said is a 70 year old company, I think the fleet was 18 billion dollar fleet. >> 600,000 vehicles. >> 600,000 vehicles, 18 billion dollars worth of assets, this is not a born in the cloud start-up, right. That's essentially transformed the entire fleet and made it intelligent. >> Right, and using data to drive a lot of their changes. Like the way they manage fuel for 600,000 cars, and the way they exchange that with local officials is helping them to you know not just be number two, but to start to take over number one. >> But to your point, data is at the core, right. >> Yeah. >> If you are the incumbent and you want to transform, you got to start with the data. >> Sandy, I want to get your reaction to two memes that have been developing on theCube this week. One is, if you take the T out of Cloud Native, and it's Cloud Naive. (Sandy laughs) The other one is, if your born in the cloud, that's great, your winning, but at the price of becoming re-born in the cloud. This is the transformation. Some are, and they're going to not have a long shelf life. So there's a real enterprise and now public sector re-birth, re-borning in the cloud, the new awakening. This is something that is happening. You're an industry veteran, you've seen a lot of waves, what's the re-born, what's this getting back on the cloud, really happening. What is going on? >> It's really interesting, because now I'm in the partner business, and one of our most successful programs is called our partner transformation program. And what that does, is it's a hundred day transformation program to get our partners drinking our own champagne, which is to be on the cloud. And one of the things, we know we first started testing it out, we didn't have a lot of takers, but now, those partners who have gone through that transformation, they're seeing 70% year to year growth, versus other apion partners, even though they're at an advanced layer, they're only seeing 34% growth. So its 2x of revenue growth having transformed to the cloud. So I think, you know back to your question, I think some of this showing the power. Like, why do you go to the cloud, it's not just about cost, it's about agility, it's about innovation, it's about that revenue growth, right. I mean 2x, 70% growth, you can't sneeze at that. That's pretty impactful. >> And you know this really hits, something of passion for me and Dave and our team is the impact on a society. This is a real focus across all generations now, not just millennials, and born in the web, into older folks like us, who have seen before the web. There's real impact, mission driven things. This is a check for good, shaping technology for good. Educate you guys have. This is a big part of what you guys are doing. >> Absolutely, this is one of the reasons why I really wanted to come work in the public sector, because it's fun helping customers make money, and we still do that. But it's really better, when you can help them make money and do great things. So you know, making with the Mayo clinic, for example, and some of these non-profit hospitals, so they can get better data. The GE example that Andy used yesterday, that data is used in public sector. Doing things, like, I know that you guys are part of re-powered tech. You know we brought a 112 unrepresented minorities and women to the conference. And I have to tell you I got goosebumps when one person came up to me and he said, it's the first time he stayed in a hotel, and he's coming here to enhance his coding. You don't realize when I go back to my country, you will have changed my life. And that's just like, don't you get goosebumps from that, versus it's great to change a company, and we want to do that, but it's really great when you can impact people, and that form or fashion. >> And the agility makes that happen faster, its a communal activity, tech for good is here. >> Absolutely, and we just announced today, right before this in the partner's session, that we now have the public safety and disaster response competency for our partners. Because when a customer is dealing with some sort of disaster or emergency they need a disconnected environment for a long periods of time. They need a cloud solution to rally the troops. So we announced that, and we had 17 partners step up immediately to sign up for that. And again, that's all about, giving back, helping in emergency situations, whether it's Ebola in Africa or Hurricane Dorene, right. >> Well, Sandy congratulations, not only have you a senior leader for AWS doing a great job. >> Thank you. >> Just a great passion, and Women in Tech, Underabridged Minorities, you do an amazing job on Tech for Good. >> Thank you. Well it's such an honor to always be on the show. I love what you guys do. I love the memes, I'm going to steal them, okay. >> Can I ask you another question? >> Absolutely. >> Before you wrap. You've had an opportunity to work with developers, you've experienced other clouds. Now you're with AWS and a couple of different roles. Can you describe, what's different about AWS, is it cultural, is it the innovation, I mean what's tangible that you can share with our audience in terms of the difference. >> I think it's a couple of things, the first one the way they we hire. So we hire builders, and you know what it really starts from that hiring. I actually interviewed Vernor the other day, and he and I had a debate about can you transform a company where you have all the same people, or do you need to bring in some new talent as well. So I think it's the way we hire. We search for people that not only meet the leadership criteria, but also are builders, are innovators. And the second one is, you know when Andy says we're customer obsessed, we're partnered obsessed. We really are. We have the mechanisms in place, we have the product management discipline. We have the process to learn from customers. So my first service I launched at AWS, I personally talked to 141 customers and another 100 partners. So think about that, that's almost two hundred almost fifty customers and partners. And at most large companies, as a senior executive you only spend about 20% of your time with customers, I spent about 80% of my time here with customers and partners. And that's a big difference. >> Well we look forward to covering the partner network this year. >> Awesome >> Your amazing, we'll see Teresa Carson on theCube here at 3:30. We are going to ask her some tough questions. What should we ask Teresa? >> What to jest Teresa? Where did you get those red pants? (everyone laughs) >> She's amazing, and again. >> She is amazing. >> We totally believe in what you're doing, and we love the impact, not only the technology advancement for modernizing the public sector across the board. But there's real opportunity for the industry to make, shape technology for betterment. >> Yeah. >> You're doing a great job. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. I think we should start another hashtag for theCube too, is #technologyforgood. >> Awesome. >> What do you think? >> Let's do it. >> I love that. >> But Jonathan been doing a lot of work in that area. >> I know he has. >> We love that. #technologyforgood, #techforgood. This is theCube here live in Las Vegas for re:Invent. I want to thank Intel and AWS, this is the big stage. We had two stages, without sponsoring our mission we wouldn't be here. Thank you AWS and Intel. More coverage after this short break. (dramatic music)