>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Thanks Peter. We're back for the deep dive. Beth Phalen is joining us again and Ruya Barret who's the vice president of marketing for Dell EMC's data protection division. Thanks guys for coming on. Ruya let me start with you. Why are customers, what are they telling you in terms of why they're acquiring your data protection solutions? >> Well Beth talked a little bit about the engineering effort and collaboration we've been putting in place and so did Yang Ming with Vmware. So whether that's integration into vCenter or vSphere, or vRealize operations manager, vRealize automation or vCloud director. All of this work, all of this engineering effort and engineering hours is really to do two things deliver simply powerful data protection for VMware customers. >> What do you mean by simple? >> Simple. Well simple comes in two types of approaches, right? Simple is through automation. One of the things that we've done is really automate across the data protection stack for VMware, whereas 99% of the market solutions really leave it off at policy management, so they automate the policy layer. We automate not only the policy layer but the vProxy deployment, as well as the data movement. We have five types of data movement capabilities that have been automated, whether you're going directly from storage, to protection storage, whether you're doing client to protection storage, whether you're doing application to protection storage, or whether you're doing hypervisor direct to application storage. So it really is to automate and to maximize the performance of to meet the customer's service levels. So automation is critical when you're doing that. The other part of automation could be in how easy Cloud is for the admins and users. It really has to do with being able to orchestrate all of the activities, you know, very simply and easily. Simplicity is also management. We are hearing more and more that the admins are taking on the role of doing the backups and restores so our efforts with VMware have been to really simplify the management so that they can use their native tools. We've integrated with VMware for the V admins to be able to take backup and restore just a part of their daily operational tasks. >> So when you talk about power, is that performance? You've referenced performance but is it just performance or is it more than that? >> That's also a great question Dave, thank you. Power really, in terms of data protection, is three-fold. It's power in making sure that you have a single powerful solution that really covers a comprehensive set of applications and requirements, not only for today, but also tomorrow as needs. So that comprehensive coverage, whether you're on premise or in the Cloud is really critical. Power means performance, of course it means performance. Being able to deliver the highest performing protection and more importantly restores, is critical to our customers. Power also means not sacrificing efficiency to get that performance. So efficiency we have the best source side deduplication technology in the market. That, coupled with the performance is really critical to our customers. So all of these, the simplicity, the comprehensive coverage, the performance, the efficiency, also drives the lowest cost to protect for our customers. >> All right. I want to bring Beth Phalen into the conversation. Beth, let's talk about Cloud a little bit. A lot of people feel as though I can take data, I can dump it into an object store in the Cloud, and I'm protected. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, we hear that same misconception, and in fact the exact opposite is true. It's even more important that people have world class data protection when they're bringing Cloud into their IT environment. They have to know where their data is and how is it protected and how to restore it. So we have a few innovations that are going on here. For a long time we've had our hyper Cloud extensions. You can do Cloud tearing directly from data domain, and now we've also extended what you can do if you're a VMware Cloud AWS customer so that you can use that for your Cloud DR configuration, fail over to AWS with VMware Cloud, and then fail back with Vmotion if you choose to, and that's great for customers who don't want to have a second site, but do want to have confidence that they can recover if there's a disaster. On top of that we've also been doing some really great work with VMware with VCloud director integration. Data protection as a service is growing like crazy. It's highly popular around the globe as a way to consume data protection, and so now you can integrate both your VMware tasks and your data protection tasks from one UI in the cloud director. These are just a few of the things that we're doing. Comprehensively bringing data protection to the cloud is essential. >> Great, okay. Dell EMC just recently made an announcement. The IDPA DP4400. Ruya, what's it all about? Explain it. >> Absolutely. So what we announced is really an integrated data protection appliance turn key, purpose built, to meet the specific requirements of mid-size customers. It's really to bring that enterprise sensibility and protection to our mid-size customers. It's all-inclusive in terms of capabilities so if you're talking about backup, restore, replication, disaster recovery, Cloud disaster recovery and Cloud long-term retention. All at your fingertips, all included, as well as all of the capabilities we talked about in terms of enabling VM admins to be able to do all of their daily tasks and operations through their own native tools and UIs. So it's really all about bringing simply powerful data protection to mid-size customers at the lowest cost to protect, and we now also have a guarantee under our future proof loyalty program, we are introducing a 55 to one deduplication guarantee for those exact customers. >> Okay. Beth, I wonder if you could talk about the motivation for this product. Why did you build it and why is it relevant for mid-size customers? >> So we're known as number one in enterprise data protection. We're known for our world class, best in the class, best in the world dedu capabilities, and what we've done is we've taken the learnings and the IP that we have that served enterprise customers for all of these years and then we're making that accessible to mid-size customers, and there are so many companies out there that can take advantage of our technology that maybe couldn't before these announcements. So by building this we've created a product that a mid-size company may have a small IT staff. Like I said at the beginning, may have VM admins who are also responsible for data protection. Now they can have what we bring to the market with best in class data protection. >> I want to follow up with you on simple and powerful. What is your perspective on simple? What does it mean for customers? >> I mean if you break it down, simple means simple to deploy two times faster than traditional data protection. Simple means easier to manage with modern HTML five interfaces that include the data protection, day to day tasks, also include reporting. Simple means easier to grow, growing in place from 24 terabytes up to 96 terabytes with just a simple software license to add at 12 terabyte increments. So all of those things come together to reduce the amount of time that an IT admin has to spend on data protection. >> So when I hear powerful and I hear mid-size customers I'm thinking, okay I want to bring enterprise class data protection down to the mid-size organization. Is that what it means? Can you actually succeed in doing that? >> If I'm an IT admin, I want to make sure that I can protect all of my data as quickly and efficiently as possible, and so we have the broadest support matrix in the industry. I don't have to bring in multiple products to support protection of my different applications, that's key. That's one thing. The other thing is I want to be able to scale. I don't want to have to be forced to bring in new products. With this, you have a logical five terabytes on prim. You can grow to protecting additional 10 terabytes in the Cloud, so that's another key piece of it, scalabililty. >> Petabytes, sorry, Petabytes. >> Petabytes. >> You said terabytes. (laughs) >> Of course, yes. What am I thinking? And then, last but not least, it's just performance. It runs on a 14G powered server. You're going to get the efficiency. You can protect five times as many VMs as you could without this kind of product. So all of those things come together for power, scalability, support matrix, and performance. >> Great, thank you. Okay, Ruya, let's talk about the business impact. Start with this sort of IT operations person. What does it mean for that individual? >> Yeah absolutely. So first, you're going to get your weekends back, right? So the product is just faster. We talked about it's simpler. You're not going to have to get a PhD on how to do data protection to be able to do your business. You're going to enable your V admins to be able to take on some of the tasks. So it's really about freeing up your weekends, having that sound mind that data protection is just happening, it works. We've already tried and tested this with some of the most crucial businesses with the most stringent service level requirements. It's just going to work, and by the way, you're going to look like a hero because with this 2U appliance, you're going to be able to support 15 petabytes across the most comprehensive coverage in the data center. So your boss is going to think you're just a super hero. >> Petabytes. >> Exactly. Petabytes, exactly. So it's tremendous for the IT user and also the business user. >> Wait, wait, what about the boss? What about the line of business? What does it mean to that individual? >> So if I'm the CEO or the CIO I really want to think about where am I putting my most skilled personnel, and my most skilled personnel, especially as IT is becoming so core to the business, is probably not best served doing data protection. So just being able to free up those resources to really drive applications or initiatives that are driving revenue for the business is critical. Number two, if I'm the boss, I don't want to overpay for data protection. Data protection is insurance for the business. You need it, but you don't want to overpay for it. So I think that lowest cost is a really critical requirement. The third one is really minimizing risk and compliance issues for the business. If I have the sound mind and the trust that this is just going to work, then I'm going to be able to recover my business no matter what the scenario, and that it's been tried and true in the biggest accounts across the world. I'm going to rest assured that I have less exposure to my business. >> Great. Ruya, Beth, thank you very much. Don't forget, we have an ask me anything crowd chat at the end of this session. So you can go in, login with Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook and ask any question. All right, let's take a look at the product and then we're going to come back and get the analysts' perspective. Keep it right there. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Red Had SUMMIT 2018, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello everyone, welcome back. This is theCUBE's exclusive live coverage here in San Francisco at Red Hat SUMMIT 2018. I'm John Furrier with my co-host John Troyer. Our next guest is Arkady Kanevsky, Ph.D, Director Software Development at Dell EMC, Service Provider Business Unit. Thanks for joining us, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me here. >> So we were just talking before we came on, obviously great, we're in the middle of the open here in the hall, in Moscone West. But you guys have a definition of service providers. It's very broad. It's obviously Dell EMC, you guys, Dell's tons of equipment that they sell, providing a lot of the equipment What does that, just take a quick second to describe who you guys are targeting, and your role here at Red Hat SUMMIT? >> Sure so we are a small portion within the Dell EMC portfolio and the organization I am in specifically creating a target and a solution for service providers. The service provider, you know the probably best known service providers are telecommunication service providers, AT&T, Verizon, Telestrom, you know all over the world. Very highly regulated areas, and have been around forever, and they are going through the major transformation right now from the 4G to 5G, network age, and so on. But we are also covering the much larger set of the providers. If you can think of the hosted service provider, managed service providers, those are the people who either have as a core of their business, providing the services for their customers. If you can think of the eBay, or Amazon, or Google, they have the services which are, they're running public cloud or not a public cloud for general sense, but for specific purpose which they're delivering, SalesForce, >> Yeah everyone's a service provider. If they're using cloud, they're some sort of service provider right? >> If they're delivering they're volume through the service, then they are the service providers. If you are, you know you have the businesses which are still doing the business the way they were doing before. Banks are not really service providers. They are not them, and yes they communicate with their customers through the portals, but that's not the purpose of their business. >> It's great now in 2018, we are gettin' some clarity on cloud right. We thought maybe it was all into public, now we see that actually there's a lot of use cases for smaller public clouds, hybrid clouds, private clouds depending on peoples needs. I'm curious how the service provider world, specifically like the MSBs, and the telcos of the world, are looking at how, what kinds of clouds they're going to provide, and maybe also how they partner with the bigger clouds. >> So there is a different angle there. So people, a lot of the work being done in a public cloud, initially when they try to do the development of their new application because it's the easiest way for them to do it, but once you hit the next level and you need to deliver it as a service in a special and more regulated environment, where we have certain strict security requirement. You want to protect access to the data. A lot of the time they kind of do the hybrid, go on the hybrid model because it's much more, they have better control of what they're doing. I mean some of the announcement and some of the demos, we showed that today in the keynote today and two days ago, we're clearly demonstrating this kind of approach. So we are partnering with Red Hat over developing the optimized platforms for the development and operation of those applications. All the way from RHEL Linux layer all the way up to OpenShift and beyond? >> All the way, we announced on Monday that we have our seventh joint version of Red Hat OpenStack already bundled. This is the first one where we start providing the workload optimized host, such that customer can choose to optimize from the hardware, to the operating system, to the OpenStack for their specific workload. We have a profile, pre-defined profile for NFE and we have a pre-defined profile for web based application, and of course it's open sourced, and extendible, flexible, and provide what customer expecting for their own use cases. >> How 'about the relationship between Dell, now Dell EMC, now Dell Technologies, and a variety of other things, the relationship with Red Hat. How long, how many years, how deep? How would you describe the relationship time-wise, and just duration, and depth? >> Very happy to, so we start our relationship 18 years ago, in 2001 was the first release of the laptops and the servers with a pre-installed program that on the factory, and Dell, at that time Dell was OEMing that solution for the customers. Over the years since that we started developing more and more solutions for different customer domain. We have HPC based solution, again URL based. We have SAP, we have Oracle, and variety of different Hadoop Open, Hadoop variation of the Hadoop, again on the base RHEL platforms. And most recently the OpenStack over the last five years. At the Dell Technology World last week, we announced all of the OpenShift on bare metal as a joint solution between the two companies. We have the OpenShift on OpenStack which we announced two years ago, still supportable and delivered to our customers. So the goal for us is to provide the flexibility and choices for the customers. >> What's the unique value for customers that you guys bring to the table? What's the unique value with the Red Hat relationship that's the most important? >> So the most important is the robustness of the integrated solutions, and the two companies together standing behind them. So they can go either to Red Hat or to Dell EMC and we together delivering of the solution. It is robust, it is still open and flexible, but it is also optimized all the way from hardware to the top layer of the software for their use cases. >> So customers are concerned, obviously we saw Spectre bug, and all this stuff going on with security. Red Hat customers, they're not micro-coders, I mean they have to upgrade. You guys have to take that responsibility at the hardware level, and some great certification, we know that. Going forward as the stacks become robust from, you know down to the chip level, up through applications, well you've got DevOps, you've got all these cool things happening. How are you guys keeping up with the pace to mitigate security risks and continuing the partnership? What's the story of the customer? What should they know about that particular piece? >> So obviously we are taking care of security on multiple layers from the micro-code, as you pointed out, in the solution partnering not only with Red Hat but with Intel and the hardware vendors to ensure that all of the mitigated, mitigation factors are put into place for security. But most importantly we are providing the tooling to make the benching and fixes in automated way without any disruption to the workloads which customer are running. Or minimizing the disruption for the workload so you can do all of your securities updates and for that matter, upgrades of the solution in such a way that you're minimizing the disruption for your customers. >> Okay so security, obviously hugely important. One of the themes of this event has been talking to the IT audience about kind of up-leveling digital, but you can call it digital transformation, but actually bringing more business value, and that's been really well received here as you realize all the demos, faster time to market, more business value, faster time to value. So as you talk with the customers here, and service providers. What are they asking you as a director of the software stack that has to, that you could look at as just the bottom of the stack, but in fact is hugely important to what they're doing. So what are you having to provide from the Dell side to help that acceleration? >> So the most important thing that our customer looking for is partnership. They're looking for us working with Intel, with Red Hat, and with partners specific to their area, to do together integration, and so we can provide the support and lifecyle of the solutions. >> John T: You're part of the rubber hits the road. They buy the unit, and the system, and the software from you. It better be all integrated and work. >> Correct, so again they go on this Oz with Red Hat because they want to have a flexibility so they can add more things, but what they're looking for, especially teleco providers, they would like Oz to partner all the way down to the next level-up with NFE lenders. The people who are providing them virtualized functions, so they can bring that to the solution and have level of confidence and you know peace of mind, that all of those pieces have been integrated together, validated together, and we have a continuous program where we take care of them of the full upgrade and lifecyle of not individual pieces, but the whole thing. >> Once your customers know about your relationship with Red Hat, want to get to the end of the statement, which is really even important. 'Cause I think this is important. We're seeing more and more security go from chip, to the OS, to the application layer. There's going to be more and more of that, and you got to evolve your relationship and technology. >> Yes. >> What should they know about Dell, Dell Technologies, Dell EMC, Dell proper and that's most important for them to understand, what you guys do for customers. >> So one of the most important things to understand, now we are Dell Technology. We have been Dell Technology for about a year and a lot of the integration pieces start being mature and now we can have a joint integrate solution. One of the big piece of the Dell Technology portfolio is RSA. They're probably the oldest and the most established security company in the world. And we are getting more and more integration of their tool sets into various solutions across the board. And that probably is the unique value which we as a Dell Technology can provide because we have individual pieces which are leaders in their specific field and we can put all of those pieces together to have the value to the customers through one place. >> That's exciting, well thanks for coming on and sharing the insight. We love Michael Dell, been a big fan, and Michael's been on theCUBE many times. He listens, he's probably watching right now. Hey Michael, how are you? Sorry I missed Dell EMC World, or Dell World, but John was there with Stu. Great to have you on. We've seen continuous success and a lot of skeptics on that merger, or the mergers, or the whole thing, and Pivotal just went public. Things are happening. >> Definitely, exciting time to live in. >> Yeah, thanks for coming on. More live coverage here in San Francisco at Red Hat SUMMIT 2018. I'm John Furrier, John Troyer, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (digital music)

>> Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's the cube. Covering VMWorld 2019 Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> It is 10 years and going strong for the cube coverage here at Vmworld, Vmworld 2019, we were here 10 years back, and looking forward to the next 10 or more. We're at Moscone Center North San Francisco, the cube with Dave Vellante, John Walls. We're joined now by Tom Barsi, who is the senior vice president, business development at Carbon Black Inc. Tom kind of required couple of weeks for you not much really going on in all serious.. >> Tom: Just a little bit (laughs) >> Yeah I mean big purchase VMware, I'm sure you're aware pick up Carbon Black making that announcement official this week. You were in the center of that, that discussion so if you would kind of give us a little behind the scenes peek, behind the curtain if you will of how those talks developed and really back to your relationship with VMware to begin with. >> Tom: Yeah >> Cause this goes back for a while. >> Tom: Needless to say a super, a super exciting week and accomodation of a lot of work amongst a army of people to get us to where we are and obviously announcement last week, around the acquisition of Carbon Black was huge but I think the announcement this week in terms of going into more detail that Sanjay and Pat went to in terms of combining the best infrastructure management with our best app reek cloud, native, modern, security platform with analytics combine that together, I think there is really an opportunity to transform the industry and currently we've been working with VMware for well over 2 years. So 2 years ago Vmworld we announced an exclusive partnership with VM where we integrated with Vmwares newly announced app defense product, which is really around securing cloud workloads, obviously their in a unique position to secure workloads because of where they sit, leveraging the infrastructure and knowing what's good and what should be running within those workloads so they've leveraged that and build app defense and for the first time we built that integration, exclusive integration and for the first time a security operation center has been able to have visibility into the hypervisor. So that's where we started to see that potential and the opportunity and it also gave us an opportunity to really start to work closely with the Vmworld team, understand their culture, understand their community, understand their leadership, their commitment to winning, understanding commitment to really sort of transform in security and it just became, we dated and it became just obvious that there is so much energy between our leadership and theirs, so much energy in terms of vision of you know, securing the world from, make them safe from cyber attacks and so it just made so much sense. So in Pat's words sure it de-risked the acquisition over a period of time but it also allowed us to really work closer together know what we're getting into and really getting super excited. So I can tell you the response from our employees has been overwhelming and their response here at Vmworld has been just amazing in terms of traffic and the partners, customers and all that. >> Dave: I asked Pat Gelsinger 5 years ago if the cube was security broken and he said "Yeah, it's broken" and I was like "what you going to do about it" stay tuned well, we've been tuned. I did an analysis of, and this may be, first of all Patrick is going to take over as to run Vmwares cloud security business? >> Tom: Correct. >> Dave: So when Patrick stated... >> John: Patrick Morelik >> Dave: Yeah, Patrick Morelik CEO of Carbon Black and Pat Gelsinger said that we want to be the cloud security company. >> Tom: Absolutely. >> Dave: Okay, so I love when they lace down aspirations like that, now this now may not be fair to you because you... >> Tom: We've been in the security, yeah. >> Dave: But there's a portfolio there that may not be as familiar with but I'll ask you anyway cause you're going to have to come familiar with it soon. So I did analysis of the Carbon Black acquisition, obviously app defense was in there but if you look at the VMware security portfolio, NSX has a micro segmentation. >> Tom: Absolutely. >> Dave: News case. Obviously, Air watch you know. >> Tom: Workspace One >> Dave: Competing with Workspace Once >> Tom: Absolutely >> Dave: Cloud Corio, E8 security bracket, Trinsic is another tuck in acquisition that VMware did so while their building up this portfolio, can you help us understand how that's shaping out and where Carbon Black fits. >> Tom: Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about first the opportunity here. The opportunity is to leverage infrastructure management and security portfolio that VMware has and then sprinkling the Carbon Black portfolio, capabilities across that infrastructures, so in betting NSX for network to end point. And embedding works in base one, which we've already done. Embedding it with integrating app defense, which we've already done. The ability to do agent less within the steer, super super powerful. Post close we'll be working on things like that, so basically by integrating across that portfolio you really have the ability to transform the entire security space, and I'll talk about that in a second. But what that means is basically by embedding security across that infrastructure management and eliminate a lot of complexity in the overhead in the bloat you're coming up with basically intrinsic security. The best thing from a human prespective to increase your immune system, you know, is or staying healthy is boosting your immune system and the best way, reason we're doing this, the best best way to secure enterprise is to integrate, embed security into the actual infrastructure and take the benefits of infrastructure management with security, combine it and eliminate a lot complexity, so let's talk just a second about being broken. It's hard for a security guy coming in and saying the industry is broken, I will tell you that but truth is it needs to be transformed there is just no question about it. So let's talk about it just from in point perspective, and then we'll get into the whole opportunity to extend that capability. You look at the end point from a enterprise customer perspective it's well documented that you know Legacy AV was built 20 years ago and not built for the modern tact factor so it's well documented, yes customers still have Legacy AV, it's not, you know it's 35% effective so what have customers done? They've gone and deployed EDR and point detection response, which is what Carbon Black strive has been a market leader hands down market leader in this space in terms of adding EDR's, yet another sensor. Then you want to have the ability to say look we got workloads and there's another sensor for that. Then you want to talk about, hey, vulnerability is coming out and we want to be able to query across the fleet to understand what vulnerabilities were in your environment, tanium like, right, there's a sensor for that. So you know what 2 and a half years ago our customers came back to us and said look we love you guys, what you guys are doing but there's too many sensors on the end point bloating and slowing my systems and my security teams is getting fatigue with all this point tools they said we need a integrated approach, in comes the Carbon Black clouds and that's we're we had the ability to integrate multiple services, NG, next-gen anti-virus, EDR, Life ops, the ability to query across. We've integrated App D for hard workload all those are shipping today, all those service on single, soft, light weight sensor and a modern cloud native SAS back in with analytics, so it's just super powerful and so now you're consolidating on that, you're getting more efficient, you're eliminating overhead and you're making the security operations team that much more effective, now, imagine taking that approach to the broken network and workload and exedra and extending that capability across the entire infrastructure and that really is what we're talking about in terms of teaming with VMware embedding our security capabilities across infrastructure a lot across NXS into work app D into workspace one which we're already doing and again eliminating a lot of that bloat and making our customers more secure and much more efficient. >> Dave: So there's another dimension to this acquisition which I like which is your SAS business, so I think it's about 38% of your revenue, I call it roughly 40% of your revenue, but growing very very rapidly, growing to 70% of the year. >> Tom: Exactly. >> Dave: So VMware has said that this acquisition along with pivotal is going to have add a billion dollars in, basically, mostly in all subscription revenue next year and three billion in year two and it's going to be accretive in cash flow deposit acquisition by year two so all very, VMware actually keeps well generally in acquisitions and so notwithstanding some weird stuff in the economy they usually hit their targets. >> Tom: Yes. >> Dave: You know they intend to be conservative so I really like that and that's clearly the direction you're moving. The other thing about this, a lot of people on Wall street said well it's maybe overpaid for stock and I want to get your opinion. Cause you're out competing everyday and cloud strike is obviously the comparison to use, okay. Say a company is a 16/17 billion dollar valuation you're valuation was 2.7 billion, you look at cloud strikes post IPO's, doc chart, it looks like a bathtub you know, it kind of goes like this and then goes like that because people start to realize wow this asset actually has you know a lot of intrinsic value upon attend it. So in comparing cloud strike with Carbon Black in terms of feature, function, capabilities you know execution and those technology. Is it really that much of difference 16 billion and 2.7 billion (laughs) >> Tom: You know I can't really comment on Crowdstrike's market cap, obviously I respect them as a competitor. >> Dave: Great, great job. >> Tom: I don't have to like them but I respect them as a competitor no question. >> Dave: What in terms of the function and the capabilities. >> Tom: In terms of the functionality look we've significantly close the gap and adding cloud workload capability with app D adding the query kit with live ops and extending that capabilities so from a feature functionality look at VMware is technology driven they kick tires and they do the diligence on technology that's the strength of VMware, they look deep and what they came away with was we have a super competitive platform, you're seeing it in our wins our growth rate you're seeing it with our wins and large customers that I can't really name so from a feature functionality perspective you know we're at parr in many ways we're better now, now if you look at where the market is going look Crowdstrike is going to be a great point product solution for end point. But we believe, that they're going to do phenomenally well but we believe there's an opportunity here, again to integrate infrastructure management that VMWare has security capability and deliver an end to end platform and truly transform across the entire infrastructure of an enterprise so that really where we see the opportunity and the opportunity for growth and then you want to look at our growth rate I mean to your point, VMware does an incredible job and you know you start talking about the reach of VMware and talk about the reach of DellEMC and it's super exciting. >> Dave: Yeah the VMware brain trust is very capable both from a strategy standpoint and a technical, strong, very strong engineering culture. >> Tom: Yeah >> Dave: You saw this with Airwatch so Airwatch when VMware required Airwatch VMware was struggling what was then the VDI business and airwatch wasn't you know number one in the market place but VMware like now crushes, people are making similar analogy with regard to Carbon Black do you think that's fair, I mean you think you can repeat that sort of momentum. >> Tom: Yeah you know I've obviously been very very close to this relationship and I have been sort of the number one fan and cheerleader of this partnership because I just believe in my soul that it's going to be transformative really is so to that point I you know I think and I've talked about it internally what they've done with my serie what they've done with aiwth now workspace one and the ability to take a business from me no revenues or couple hundred million and take them to two billion. I absolutely believe you will see, it's going to take a lot of work but we're going to see rejectorty I've been focussed on if there are gaps we're going to force it in or anything to accelerate the road map to allow us to win and then you're going to talk about the triple acceleration with VMWare and DeliMC so answer I say I truly truly believe that we can take our position to number two and really be number one >> John: Transformative in a significant way a significant word to use. What's that end product going to be that makes you looking at it at this visionary stand point that, this is a perfect marriage this is a fantastic opportunity. You're not you're selling hard >> Tom: Yeah >> Dave: It's a platform really >> Tom: Look it is a platform and at the end of the day we're focused on here as customers we're talking about how do we protect our customers and the best way to protect those customers is to embed the capability you know we did many years back Carbon Black we exposed our data and many of our partners, sometimes we compete with cisco or firehire a number of other players because customers demand the end to end visibility from network to end point. Can you imagine the kind of damage when you integrate Carbon Black and our modern platform are analytics and the ability to pull data from hypervisor the ability to pull data from NSX to ability to pull data from workspace one into a common console and then understand exactly what is happening from an attack perspective and then let's talk about okay, so now you have the visibility it's a 360 degree view of what happening in the network now you want to talk about the ability to orgistrate or imidiate like solve the problem. Well historically it's been security operations center over here and you got IT over there. And there's been this friction because Sycguys says take it down take the server down there's a problem and the IT guys ops, hey, I got run time I got to keep it up so now you have the opportunity again to leverage that management to identify a threat and the ability to seemlessly leverage VMware infrastructure's management tools to instantly reimmediate and orgistrate a problem without the conflict with IT and security operations. So we've actually seen an opportunity to eliminate our friction and create coloboration between those two. >> Dave: And security is broken, it is a do over and to talk to ops team they'll tell you, we're fighting everyday and bombs are dropping, we have to succeed everyday. The bad guy only has to succeed once so yeah they bring in all these tools and a lot of times they don't work together and they have a very hard time to just figure out okay, what do we prioritize on and obviously analytics helping that but yeah, you see that stats after you get infiltrated to whatever 300 days 250 days they even identify that you have been infiltrated and it's just a very complex environment so the do over is a platform that will give you end visibility and doesn't force you to different point tools and it has a comprehensive in a view of your >> [Tom[ That Right >> Dave: Infrastructure >> Tom: That's right and I do want to point out it doesn't mean that we're going to create this platform that's closed. A lot of competitors like to built closed platforms and Carbon Black has always been API driven like open, and the whole point of this openness is to, we collect this powerful end point data and we want to expose that data across the infrastructure so we're exposing it to the network security guys whether it be Vectra or Palato networks or FireMandion depending on who it is. We're exposing that data to splunk IBMQ radar and IBM rasilion and we're going to continue to do that, leverage this platform and all this powerful delimentry and we're going to continue to have this open platform and continue to work across the industry to make sure it's not just our platform from the MDM just across the ecosystem. >> Dave: Well it's something VMware has been strong if this heritage genaty, you know they help you know balance the score card >> Tom: Yeah >> John: It's been a understatement that it's been an exciting week for you, it's been a great two years it sounds like and we wish you success now it's on down the road like he said a lot of hard work still ahead of you. >> Tom: Absolutely, so congratulations on ten years, I look forward being here in year 20. (laughs) >> John: We'll be right back, we'll be right back just taking a break here on the cube we're at Vmworld 2019. Moscone center, San Francisco. (music)

(orchestral music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another Cube conversation, from our awesome studios in beautiful Palo Alto, California. With every Cube conversation, we pick a topic, find someone to talk about. The topic today is hybrid cloud. A lot of conversation. AWS introduced Outposts, we've got Microsoft Azure talking about centralize, as well as distributed cloud offerings. Oracle is doing the same thing. A lot of conversation about hybrid cloud and what it means. To have that conversation, we've got David Floyer with us. David is the CTO of Wikibon. David, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, Peter. >> David, let's start by saying, that there has to be a way of representing different options when we think about hybrid cloud. You've done a lot of research in this domain. How are you representing the continuum, the taxonomy of hybrid cloud for customers? >> On the slide, it shows that there are essentially, five different multiple clouds or hybrid clouds. From left to right, it's multi-cloud, and at the bottom of the slide, it says that this essentially a set of clouds, with an integrated network. And then the next is loosely-coupled hybrid cloud, and that adds in the data plane, where we look after storage, and data protection, data management, et cetera. The middle one is tightly-coupled hybrid cloud, and that's where the control plane, is now tightly integrated along with everything else. The next one is "true" distributed hybrid cloud, and those are the ones that you were talking about. Those are the AWS Outposts, the Azure Stack, the Oracle Cloud at Customer-type environments. Also, you could put IBM, some of IBM's recent announcements into that as well. Last but not least, and certainly one of the most interesting and different, is the autonomous stand-alone clouds, are going to be at the edge. They have to be autonomous, because they can't guarantee network availability to them. >> So, five classes of cloud, each distinguished by the degree, to which they share different types of resources, including state, integration, automation, and the degree to which the application is going to be common across each of these cloud types. >> That's correct. >> Have I got that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Obviously, while this is theoretical. >> Yeah. >> In a sense that we're trying to create some way, so understanding about how to represent these things. It's based on some practical observations, about where we are within the industry. >> Yeah. >> Let's start talking about multicloud. Who do you place into that bucket, of multicloud hybrid cloud styles? >> If we talk first of all about the cloud themselves, there would be clouds from AWS or Azure, or IBM or Google. Those are the clouds that you start with, you might have one on premise, but the connection between them is just on a network basis. The people who are doing that would be clearly, Cisco is one of the leading people in that area, where they already have a lot of enterprise equipment, and experience of dealing with clouds, across the whole of the area. They would be the people, that are going to be a foremost vendor, in connecting those different clouds together, on a network plane. >> Okay, let's move to the right, and talk about the loosely-coupled hybrid clouds. Now here we're having more than network, common network. We're having a common data plane, which really boils down to a common set of data services, that are rendered commonly. >> Right, yeah. >> Across different cloud instances. >> Right. >> Who's there? >> To do that, you've got to be able to have your data services, actually on each of the clouds. You have to have it in software on AWS, or Azure, or IBM, or whatever it is. Two of the people that's probably leading the charge in that area are IBM themselves. They've gone completely software, with all of their spectrum line of software in that area, and Pure. Pure Storage have been very aggressive again, in putting things up, so that they can be reflected in each of the clouds. >> And there's other vendors, that are coming in from a data protection standpoint. >> Sure. >> Data security standpoint, and they may-- Some people like Veeam. >> -not have the full set of services. >> Yes. But they are looking at how they can apply their services. >> Correct. >> Across multiple cloud instances. >> And there's a lot of vendors there. People like Veeam or Rubric, or Cohesity. DellEMC. >> Et cetera, yes. >> Okay, so let's move to the right. Now we've moved from loosely-coupled, to tightly-coupled hybrid clouds, where we're starting to share a common automation framework, more control, sharing control data so that we can start to understand, the state of applications in multiple different locations. >> Yes. >> Who's leading there? >> Some of the leads in this area, are some of the traditional ones, like IBM for example. IBM Sysplex, which came out what, 20 years ago. >> We're not. >> That is where you have state being, time and state being shared, across a whole number of different instances, or notion within that Sysplex. >> Yeah, let's talk about that specifically. So, we're talking about a global shared memory notion. >> Yes. >> More than just a name space, but actually-- >> Correct. >> -a control plane, that has global incite into where resources are, has names for them. >> Yeah. >> They may be multiple name spaces, but it's bringing a common set of controls to that global set of resources. >> Yes, and time is obviously a key aspect to help stay-- >> Well, it's got to be synchronized. >> Yes. >> Exactly. >> That's right. >> If we move to the right to true distributed hybrid cloud, in the tightly-coupled, we have a common control plane, but not necessarily common software. >> Correct. >> Common code. >> Correct. >> At the compile level. We're still utilizing distribution formats, maybe specific, et cetera. But now in a true hybrid, or true distributor hybrid cloud, it's common-common. >> Yes. >> Who's there? >> Yes, it's common code. It can run on any node without having to be recompiled, or retested. You know it's going to work. The people in there, are the people that we were talking about earlier. It's people like AWS with Outposts, Microsoft with Azure Stack, Cloud at Customer from Oracle. Three large vendors, who are using this to use a cloud first-type model, in which they can grow, the central cloud, as quickly as possible, add things to it, and push that down into the Cloud at Customer, or the Outposts, or the Stacks. >> To be clear, we're not talking about a common cloud experience, we're talking about absolute common cloud services. >> Correct. >> All the way down to the executables, so that the same software can run wherever it needs to run. >> Yes. >> Finally, let's move one step further to the right. This is the autonomous stand-alone clouds. >> Yes, this is at the edge. >> Who's there? >> This is the most different of all of these. It has to be autonomous. If you think about mobile vehicles or planes, or even think about a factory or a nuclear power plant. You have to be able to run that, assuming that the network is not going to get through. It's on the edge, so it's the most vulnerable to network. It has to be autonomous, therefore it has to be able to run by itself. That sort of cloud is mainly concerned with the state, the state of that edge. All of the devices in that edge, the windmills in that edge, or the factory robotics in that edge. In military terms, the automated units in that edge, or the drones. Whatever it is, you're concerned about the state of that. >> But specifically, sustaining local control of state. >> Correct. >> Against a common understanding. >> Yes. >> Of how these things interact with each other. >> Right. >> It brings almost a network realtime of flavor to it. >> It is realtime. It has to be realtime so it's a shared state across. For example, across the city, in terms of the traffic lights. You would see multiple of these small clouds, in different parts of a large city, for example. Which need to communicate with each other. So, you have devices, which have an inference code running on them, and they're dealing with the device, on to which it's attached. And then you have connecting all of those devices together, to make this overall system representation of the sate. >> Okay, so we've got five classes of hybrid cloud. How is a CIO going to use this taxonomy, to make better decisions? >> Clearly by making this decision, what we're doing from a taxonomy point of view, is making each one individual, and different from the others. There's no sharing between them. That means that from a description point of view, we can describe the whole of this industry. We can say how much is going on in each one, who are winners and losers in each one. >> We'll use this to size different classifications. >> Right, and give that-- >> Talk about leader, describe competition and all that stuff. >> Yes. >> But if I'm a CIO, do I think, oh, I got a business problem that's associated with applications, on various levels of common data sharing, control sharing, et cetera. Do I use this to help me chose the specific architecture that I use? >> The best way that I think that CIO's are going to use this to say, "Where am I aiming to be? What is most important to me and my business? If it is the edge, then how am I going to go through these? Because I'm not going to get to the edge on day one. How am I going to chose my vendors and my protocols, and my standards, and my data planes, and my control planes, such that I can get to that particular end point?" Within each one, you'd want to look at them individually, because you're going to put together a, first of all, in a multi-cloud environment. But you should be looking into the future, as to how you want to traverse across this, and who your major partners and vendors will be. Or, strategic partners and vendors. >> And we'll use this as you said, we'll use this specifically to size the market, describe the competitive factors, et cetera. >> Correct, yeah. All right. David Floyer, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thanks very much, indeed. >> Once again, I'm Peter Burris, and we have been talking about Cube conversations, related to true hybrid cloud taxonomies. Wikibon research. Thanks very much for watching, and until our next Cube conversation. (orchestral music)

[Narrator] Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Vmworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at Vmworld 2018, Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, hey Dave. >> Hey Lisa, how's it going? >> Great, this morning started off with tremendous amount of momentum from Pat Gelsinger, including a new tattoo that he debuted. 20th anniversary of VMware, 20th anniversary of the Rackspace, DellEMC partnership, please welcome to theCUBE a veteran and alumni, Peter Fitzgibbon, the VP and GM of the VMware practice at Rackspace. Peter it's great to have you back. >> It's great to be back here at Vmworld. >> And we're excited to welcome David Trigg to theCUBE, the Global Vice President of Market Development and Service Providers from DellEMC, welcome. >> Thank you, glad to but be here. So happy 20th anniversary to Rackspace and DellEMC. >> Thank you. >> Longstanding partnership, what's going on? A lot of momentum at Dell Tech World just, what, four months ago? What's some of the momentum that you guys have seen in your joint customer space this summer? >> Yeah, so at Dell Technologies World we launched our Rackspace private cloud, R by VMware, our Everywhere edition, as we're referring to it, which is extending Rackspace private clouds into customer data centers and colos. And since that announcement back at Dell Technologies World, we've seen fantastic adoption from both our existing installed base that's interested, and knows the Rackspace brand, and our fanatical experience, as well as new customers that know now we can service them in new locations. >> And then David, for you, Dell Technologies World was all about IT transformation, digital transformation, security transformation, and making it real. How is DellEMC working with Rackspace to help customers make these transformations a successful reality? >> Yeah, well one of the fist things, in my opinion, to highlight is the length of time that we have worked together, and through that length of time, Rackspace has made incredible investments in their skill set, their ability to manage infrastructure, you know, there's a lot of a deep knowledge there, so customers can feel very confident about the ability to provide the services. And as customers go through transformation, customers have more choices now, and more things, as we talk about the edge, and the core, and the cloud, they have to manage infrastructure in more places than they've ever had to manage before. So we're very proud of the relationship that we've had, the investments that they've made, because our customers are needing help in managing through, not only the transformations, but all of the choices that they have to make on where's the best place to put an application? Where's the best place to put a workload, and how do they manage the migrations and the modernization? So yeah, it plays very, very close into our transformation message, and quite frankly, we couldn't do it without partners like Rackspace. >> Let's talk a little bit more about that, because you're talking about more than just a storage partnership, right? Is that, >> Oh, yeah. >> A lot more to its, it's much more comprehensive, >> Absolutely. >> Sets of integration, practices, and areas of expertise, so let's double click on that a little bit. >> Yeah, there's a lot of skill sets that are required to even just do assessments, where I'm really understanding where do the applications go. Really then making sure that they understand, how do you support the infrastructure? How do you monitor the infrastructure and how do you make sure that it's running a lot? And again, Rackspace has made a lot of investments, is one of the best in the world in being able to do a lot of this. >> Let's talk a little bit more about that. Why Rackspace? >> Well, we are offering customers strategic flexibility, really. Whether they want to deploy in a Rackspace data center, a customer data center, get access to our deep expertise, not just a DellEMC, but our 150 plus VMware certified experts that our customers can now tap into, because this world gets more and more complex. And you saw the evening announcements this morning. It was like, how do our customers get the best value from those technologies, and not simply have shelf ware? Tap into Rackspace, with our partnerships with DellEMC and VMware to get the real value out of that expensive technology. >> So from a customer's standpoint, help us understand what's really going on. We asked the question a lot this week, is things like the AWS VMware partnership, is it a one-way trip to the cloud, or is it boom for the data center? And a lot of people are saying the latter. What are customers saying? What do they really want to do? >> Listen, customers are going to be living their data center for a long time yet to come. We've got legacy applications, they've got mainframes, we got client server applications, and then we have direct cloud-native applications, but there's a slew of applications in the middle where customers are kind of unsure about where to go, and they lean on a trusted partner like Rackspace, who really is cloud agnostic to help them figure out should they go public cloud? Should they be private cloud? Or are they in a hybrid cloud journey like everybody is on? So we want to be the Switzerland, where we can help people determine where they should go, and really offer unbiased expertise. >> So you guys announced, kind of along the lines of being Switzerland, at Dell Technologies World, Rackspace Private Cloud Everywhere, powered by VMware, Everywhere. I know you've got, what, five data centers in five continents. Talk about that Everywhere. How does it help customers to embrace the reality of multi-cloud, and to actually do so in a way that allows them to understand, working with you guys, where different applications should be placed at different times in the year? >> Yeah so, Everywhere is a natural evolution of what we've offered in our own data centers over time. So now deploying out in customer data centers and colos, well later this year, we hope to launch a formal VMware on AWS software as well. So Everywhere constitutes three parts, really, Rackspace data centers, customer data centers, to get as close to their data as needs be, and VMware on AWS as our product matures, as you saw from a number of announcements this morning. >> And to add on to John's question about the promise of the cloud, I think the original promise, and maybe the threat of the cloud was everything was going at the cloud. Well as we're learning through IoT and other new, emerging trends, that's not realistic. Customers really have to think about the edge, their own data center, because their own data centers are not going away. They have to think about the SLAs that they're providing to their end users, to their employees, and that's where you have to place the application, the workload in the right place to enable the best customer experience for their customers and their employees. And that's were a company like Rackspace, that can really get to the edge, the core, the cloud, by managing that infrastructure regardless. Obviously, the investments that VMware's making to help enable that as well, and being supported by a lot of the DellEMC stuff. It's an exciting time, I think. >> I Want to follow up on that, because Peter, off camera said cloud migration doesn't mean leaving your data center. >> Absolutely. >> This Gartner analyst came out, not that recently, but I think it was last year, and said that 80% of data centers will shut down by 2025, so that caused a lot of, right? Both eye rolling and no way, and et cetera. The Wikibon crew, which is affiliated with theCUBE, a sister company, sister division, just came out with a report that said true private cloud is going to be a $32 billion market this year. So that means on-prem cloud. >> Yep. >> So you have all these countervailing messages going on. Then you see, of course, the epitome of Andy Jassy up on stage today with Pat Gelsinger talking about hybrid cloud. What do you guys make of all of this? What's really happening and going to happen? >> I think customer data centers are going to live for some time to come, as people figure out where should the workload actually go? What can they do with that specific workload? Can they refactor it and rebuild it and go cloud-native? Great. Can they move to a hosted private cloud model with Rackspace rolling racks into a customer data center? Or is it a legacy application that really needs to be kept and maintained over time until the next disruption happens, where they really have to refactor it? >> Yeah, really, in that case there may be no business case. Why lift in and shift it, for what? Just to say, >> Exactly, they get it. >> Hey I'm in the cloud. >> Exactly, I think with cloud migrations, does not mean leaving your data center. I think that's going to continue for some time, where people can get the benefits from Rackspace, moving from a CapEX to an OpEx model with managed services, with industry leading SLAs, but still in their own data center, because they have applications running that cannot be moved. >> Well it's interesting, David to see this equilibrium that's kind of being reached, you know? A few short years ago, there was sort of antagonism between VMware and the AWS. You know, the whole book seller comment. Andy Jassy was like, pfft, on-prem cloud, there's no such thing, and now you see those worlds coming together, underscoring the reality that you can't just shove your business into the public cloud. You can't just move all your data there, and there may not be a business case, or an advantage of doing that. >> Right, right. >> What do you think? >> Well a lot of times the answer to the question in the, one, I'm not an analyst, so it's not my job to really predict where it's going to go. I mean, obviously we watch trends and look where it's going. You know, my job and our job is to help customers deal with the realities that they're dealing with right now, right? And they have data centers. They are thinking about the cloud. They are having to take care of the edge, right? And in time, we've seen some of those shifts, right? There was a lot of the, where are we going with the cloud? Where's it going to go? Are they going to shut down all their data centers? Regardless of that, we will adjust to the market and make sure that we're adjusting the market. But more importantly, we're going to do what's right for our customers, to help enable them to those journeys, and it's still yet to be proven. There's a lot of Predictions out there. Will they shut down all data centers? I'm sure there'll be some consolidation of it, but yeah, it's getting more complex. >> Okay, so VMware, Rackspace, DellEMC, you're not screwed, check. (David laughs) what about the edge? Help us unpack that a little bit, you know, whether VMware at the edge, Rackspace, DellEMC, what do you guys see evolving there? >> I think there's many definitions of the edge, and when you talk about it, everything's IoT initially, but even just deploying smaller data centers in customer locations in partnerships with these guys, to kind of meet customers where they are, and get smaller, roll in racks into different locations is continuing to be something that customers are looking for. >> So there's the hinterland edge, which is a bunch of devices, you know IP cameras, they're going to be instrument, most of the data's going to stay there anyway, but then I think you guys call it, I don't know, the core. There's a aggregation point, >> Well the core, >> if you will. >> which is typically what we refer to as kind of the customer data center, and then there's the cloud, right? So kind of the two different, customer data center versus the cloud, and then, truly, the edge, capturing, And it started, and we referred to everything from laptops, phones, as well as, really a lot of the sensors that are going to be out there, and your ability to have to process and analyze and react real time at the edge. And so a lot of use cases, public safety use cases, where, you know, when an event happens, that connection back to a place where you would analyze it. Obviously the autonomous cars, right? They can't have to connect to a data center every time it wants to make a left turn. So a lot of that ability has to be pushed out to the edge, but yet, then also being able to bring that data back, be able to manage that, and be able to update those computers, or those data centers. I mean, an autonomous car is basically a mini data center. Someone's got to manage that, patch that, make sure it's running, and manage that. So yeah, to your point, the edge is beginning to mean a lot of different things. There are the hinterlands, I think was the word you used, and some of those things, but then there are the more traditional work cases, and even just running a phone app is now considered an app, versus, you know, and that's were people start to really look at, is how do you deliver that experience on a phone, and that's an application. >> A lot of data. Well, I like to follow the data, you know? A lot of data at the edge. There's a lot of data, like I say, at the aggregation point, and then if you want to do some hardcore modeling, go to the cloud, and that cloud can be your own, on-prem data center. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> Yeah, there's just so much data being generated, and data is power, I think was one of the key taglines of DellEMC Worlds. And I was like, it truly is. Where the data is, is where the power is. So some has to be transferred back to the core. Some may be pushed up to the cloud for deep processing with AI and ML type processing, but there'll be data at all these different points. >> Well that's the other point, is it's just like the innovation engine no longer is Moore's Law in this industry. it's the data, applying machine intelligence, and then cloud scale. And then, you got to, as suppliers in this business, you better be playing in some way, shape, or form, in all three of those, right? >> Absolutely. >> So how, and speaking of that, I think Pat Gelsinger talked about it this morning in the context of superpowers. He talked about autonomous vehicles, AI machine learning, advanced analytics, IoT. How is DellEMC and their technology, Peter, helping to enable Rackspace to optimize your offerings to be able to take advantage of machine learning AI? To be able to deliver on customer expectations? >> Yeah, we're deeply partnered with these guys from those announcements you head earlier this year, that we're already investigating the different capabilities they're having from an AIML perspective, and really seeing what sort of technologies are they launching that we can then put into our private cloud practice, and offer to our customers. So it's our deep partnership allows us to kind of get a front seat at that and working closely to investigate and to do a lot of R&D with the new capabilities they're coming out with so. >> What superpower does that give Rackspace? In terms of differentiation? >> Uh, you've stumped me on that one. (laughs) >> Well customers have, we talked about, everybody wants flexibility. They also have choice. >> Yeah. >> What are some things that this 20 year partnership infuses into Rackspace to give you those differentiation points? >> Yeah, it's the deep partnership, and knowing, working so long together that we know who to pick up the phone to solve some of these complex problems. >> Yeah, and of us, from my perspective, we always start with out joint customers in mind first. So it's our job to bring the advance technologies, the advanced capabilities that we're making big investments in, and make sure that Rackspace is able to support and leverage those within their business so that we'd provide a better experience for the end customer, but then also making sure that we show Rackspace how they make money on that, and how they can run a business on that, that's really, is differentiated to your point. Because a lot of, you know, you painted a very pretty vision of what the world might look like. Most customers aren't there yet. Most customers aren't taking advantage of AI and deep learning. They're still dealing with some very traditional legacy issues, and it's that gap that becomes very, we love talking about the cool, new, exciting stuff, but for a lot of customers, they're stuck somewhere in the middle, and that's were partnerships like this, because you can not only help them with the legacy, old stuff. How do you migrate, and then how do you take advantage of the really new stuff? Or how do start at least thinking about that and exploring that and looking. A lot of the original IoT use cases, the ROI wasn't known. They're setting up projects, then they hoped they'd get a benefit out of it, right? And that's continuing to emerge and evolve as time goes on. >> Well it's hard, too. I mean, everybody's afraid of getting Uberized and disrupted, et cetera, et cetera, but they, at the same time, if you over rotate, to a new, you can spend bunch of money and not get any return. >> Yeah. >> Everybody's trying to get digital right, it seems, but it's unclear what that means. So they look to partners like you to help them figure that out. >> Well, it's a scary journey to your point, because they obviously have existing revenue streams. It's the inventor's dilemma, right? It's they have existing revenue streams, but how do they digitize their business? How do they reach customers in a different way? And so they don't become Uberized or Airbnbed, or whatever, what term you want to use. Every CIO, every executive is thinking about that. IT for a long time was about taking cost out of the business which, after a while, that's no fun, because that usually means head count reductions, that usually, I mean, that's not a fun conversation to have every single day. Now with the digital transformations mode, how do you generate new revenue streams? How do you, in a way, a lot of companies never, one of the most older industries, being taxis, a little bit not that exciting. It's gotten reinvigorated through some of these things. So it's kind of cool. >> Yeah, and you said digital transformation, right? What does that really mean? Cloud transformation, security transformation, app transformation, so there's many different factors. And companies like Rackspace can offer expertise in all those different areas, where some of our competitors may only hit on one of those. They're only a security company, or only a VMware shop, or only an AWS shop. >> Helping customers really glean the power from that data, because if they can't, it's not powerful. Gentlemen, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and talking with Dave and me. We appreciate hearing what's going on with Rackspace and DellEMC. >> Thanks guys. >> Thank you so much, I appreciate it. >> Thanks very much. I appreciate the time. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. For Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin. We're at VMworld day one. Stick around, we'll be back after break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D. C., it's the CUBE. Covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to the nation's capitol everybody. This is the CUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're here at day two covering Splunk's .conf user conference #splunkconf17, and my name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with with co-host, George Gilbert. As I say, this is day two. We just came off the keynotes. I'm over product orientation today. George, what I'd like to do is summarize the day and the quarter that we've had so far, and then bring you into the conversation and get your opinion on what you heard. You were at the analyst event yesterday. I've been sitting in keynotes. We've been interviewing folks all day long. So let me start, Splunk is all about machine data. They ingest machine data, they analyze machine data for a number of purposes. The two primary use cases that we've heard this week are really IT, what I would call operations management. Understanding the behavior of your systems. What's potentially going wrong, what needs to be remediated. to avoid an outage or remediate an outage. And of course the second major use case that we've heard here is security. Some of the Wall Street guys, I've read some of the work this morning. Particularly Barclays came out with a research note. They had concerns about that, and I really don't know what the concerns are. We're going to talk about it. I presume it's that they're looking for a TAM expansion strategy to support a ten billion dollar valuation, and potentially a much higher valuation. It's worth noting the conference this year is 7,000 attendees, up from 5,000 last year. That's a 40% increase, growing at, or above actually, the pace of revenue growth at Splunk. Pricing remains a concern for some of the users that I've talked to. And I want to talk to you about that. And then of course, there's a lot of product updates that I want to get into. Splunk Enterprise 7.0 which is really Splunk's core analytics platform ITSI which is what I would, their 3.0, which I would call their ITOM platform. UBA which is user behavior analytics 4.0. Updates to Splunk Cloud, which is a service for machine data in the cloud. We've heard about machine learning across the portfolio, really to address alert fatigue. And a new metrics engine called Mstats. And of course we heard today, enterprise content security updates and many several security-oriented solutions throughout the week on fraud detection, ransomware, they've got a deal with Booz Allen Hamilton on Cyber4Sight which is security as a service that involves human intelligence. And a lot of ecosystem partnerships. AWS, DellEMC was on yesterday, Atlassian, Gigamon, et cetera, growing out the ecosystem. That's a quick rundown, George. I want to start with the pricing. I was talking to some users last night before the party. You know, "What do you like about Splunk? "What don't you like about Splunk? "Are you a customer?" I talked to one prospective customer said, "Wow, I've been trying to do "this stuff on my own for years. "I can't wait to get my hands on this." Existing customers, though, only one complaint that I heard was your price is to high, essentially is what they were telling Splunk. Now my feeling on that, and Raymo from Barclays mentioned that in his research note this morning. Raymo Lencho, top securities analyst following software industry. And my feeling George is that historically, "Your price is too high," has never been a headwind for software companies. You look at Oracle, you look at ServiceNow, sometimes customers complain about pricing too high. Splunk, and those companies tend to do very well. What's your take on pricing as a headwind or tailwind indicator? >> Well the way, you always set up these questions in a way that makes answering them easy. Because it's a tailwind in the sense that the deal sizes feed an enterprise sales force. And you need an enterprise sales force ultimately to be pervasive in an organization. 'Cause you can't just throw up like an Amazon-style console and say, "Pick your poison and put it all together." There has to be an advisory, consultative approach to working with a customer to tell them how best to fit their portfolio. >> Right. >> And their architecture. So yes, the price helps you feed that what some people in the last era of enterprise software used to call the most expensive migratory workforce in the world., which is the sales, enterprise sales organization. >> Sure, right. >> But what's happened in the different, in the change from the last major enterprise applications, ERPCRM, and what we're getting into now, is that then the data was all generated and captured by humans. It was keyboard entry. And so there was no, the volumes of data just weren't that great. It was human, essentially business transactions. Now we're capturing data streaming off everything. And you could say Splunk was sort of like the first one out of the gate doing that. And so if you take the new types of data, customer interactions, there are about ten to a hundred customer interactions for every business transaction. Then the information coming out of the IT applications and infrastructure. It's about ten to a hundred times what the customer interactions were. >> Yeah. >> So you can't price the, Your pricing model, if it stays the same will choke you. >> So you're talking about multiple orders of magnitude >> Yes. >> Of more data. >> Yeah. >> And if you're pricing by the terabyte, >> Right. >> Then that's going to cross your customers. >> Right. But here's what I would argue though George. I mean, and you mentioned AWS. AWS is another one where complaints of high pricing. But if, to me, if the company is adding value, the clients will pay for it. And when you get to the point where it becomes a potential headwind, the company, Oracle is a classic at this, will always adjust its pricing to accommodate both its needs as a public organization and a company that has to make money and fund R & D, and the customers needs, and find that balance where the competition can't get in. And so it seems to me, and we heard this from Doug Merritt yesterday, that his challenge is staying ahead of the game. Staying, moving faster than the cloud guys. >> Yeah. >> In what they do well. And to the extent that they do that, I feel like their customers will reward them with their loyalty. And so I feel as though they can adjust their pricing mechanisms. Yeah, everybody's worried about 606, and of course the conversions to subscriptions. I feel as though a high growth, and adjustments to your pricing strategy, I think can address that. What do you think about that? >> It's... It sounds like one of those sayings where, the friends say, "Well it works in practice, "but does it work in theory?" >> No, no. But it has worked in practice in the industry hasn't it? So what's different now? >> Okay. So take Oracle, at list price for Oracle 12C, flagship database. The price per processor core, with all the features thrown in, is something like three hundred thousand, three hundred fifty thousand per core. So you take an average Intel high end server chip, that might have 24 cores, and then you have two sockets, so essentially one node server is 48 times 350. And then of course, Oracle will say, "But for a large customer, we'll knock 90% off that," or something like that. >> Yeah, well exactly. >> Which is exactly what the Splunk guys told me yesterday. But it's-- >> But that's what I'm saying. They'll do what they have to do to maintain the footprint in the customer, do right by the customer, and keep the competition out. >> But if it's multiple orders of magnitude different. If you take the open source guys where essentially the software's free and you're just paying for maintenance. >> (laughs) Yeah and humans. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Okay, that's the other advantage of Splunk, as you pointed out yesterday, they've got a much more integrated set of offerings and services that dramatically lower. I mean, we all know the biggest cost of IT is people. It's not the hardware and software but, all right, I don't want to rat hole on pricing, but that was a good discussion. What did you learn yesterday? You've sat through the analyst meeting. Give us the rundown on George Gilbert's analysis of .conf generally and Splunk as a company specifically. >> Okay, so for me it was a bit of an eye opener because I got to understand sort of, I've always had this feeling about where Splunk fits relative to the open source big data ecosystem. But now I got a sense for what their ambitions are, and what their tactical plan is. I've said for awhile, Splunk's the anti-Hadoop. You know, Hadoop is multiple, sort of dozens of animals with three zookeepers. And I mean literally. >> Yeah. >> And the upside of that is, those individual projects are advancing with a pace of innovation that's just unheard of. The problem is the customer bears the burden of putting it all together. Splunk takes a very different approach which is, they aspire apparently to be just like Hadoop in terms of platform for modern operational analytic applications, but they start much narrower. And it gets to what Ramie's point was in that Wall Street review, where if you take at face value what they're saying, or you've listened just to the keynote, it's like, "Geez, they're in this IT operations ghetto, "in security and that's a La Brea tar pit, "and how are they ever going to climb out of that, "to something really broad?" But what they're doing is, they're not claiming loudly that they're trying to topple the giants and take on the world. They're trying to grow in their corner where they have a defensible moat. And basically the-- >> Let me interrupt you. >> Yeah. >> But to get to five billion >> Yeah. >> Or beyond, they have to have an aggressive TAM expansion strategy, kind of beyond ITOM and security, don't they? >> Right. And so that's where they start generalizing their platform. The data store they had on the platform, the original one, is kind of like a data lake in the sense that it really was sort of the same searchable type index that you would put under a sort of a primitive search engine. They added a new data store this time that handles numbers really well and really fast. That's to support the metrics so they can have richer analytics on the dashboard. Then they'll have other data stores that they add over time. And for each one, you're able to now build with their integrated tool set, more and more advanced apps. >> So you can't use a general purpose data store. You've got to use the Splunk within data. It's kind of like Work Day. >> Yeah, well except that they're adding more over time, and then they're putting their development tools over these to shield them. Now how seamlessly they can shield them remains to be seen. >> Well, but so this is where it gets interesting. >> Yeah. >> Splunk as a platform, as an application development platform on which you can build big data apps, >> Yeah. >> It's certainly, conceptually, you can see how you could use Splunk to do that right? >> And so their approaches out of the box will help you with enterprise security, user, they call it user behavior analytics, because it's a term another research firm put on it, but it's really any abnormal behavior of an entity on the network. So they can go in and not sell this fuzzy concept of a big data platform. They said, they go in and sell, to security operations center, "We make your life much, much easier. "And we make your organization safer." And they call these curated experiences. And the reason this is important is, when Hadoop sells, typically they go in, and they say, "Well, we have this data lake. "which is so much cheaper and a better way "to collect all your data than a data warehouse." These guys go in and then they'll add what more and more of these curated experiences, which is what everyone else would call applications. And then the research Wikibon's done, depth first, or rather breadth first versus depth first. Breadth first gives you the end to end visibility across on prem, across multiple clouds, down to the edge. But then, when they put security apps on it, when they put dev ops or, some future big data analytics apps as their machine learning gets richer and richer, then all of a sudden, they're not selling the platform, because that's a much more time-intensive sale, and lots more of objectives, I'm sorry, objections. >> It's not only the solutions, those depth solutions. >> Yes, and then all of a sudden, the customer wakes up and he's got a dozen of these things, and all of a sudden this is a platform. >> Well, ServiceNow is similar in that it's a platform. And when Fred Luddy first came out with it, it's like, "Here." And everybody said, "Well, what do I do with it?" So he went back and wrote a IT service management app. And they said, "Oh okay, we get it." Splunk in a similar way has these depth apps, and as you say, they're not selling the platform, because they say, "Hey, you want to buy a platform?" people don't want to buy a platform, they want to buy a solution. >> Right. >> Having said that, that platform is intrinsic to their solutions when they deliver it. It's there for them to leverage. So the question is, do they have an application developer kit strategy, if you will. >> Yeah. >> Whether it's low code or even high code. >> Yeah. >> Where, and where they're cultivating a developer community. Is there anything like that going on here at .conf? >> Yeah, they're not making a big deal about the development tools, 'cause that makes it sound more like a platform. >> (laughs) But they could! >> But they could. And the tools, you know, so that you can build a user interface, you can build dashboards, you can build machine learning models. The reason those tools are simpler and more accessible to developers, is because they were designed to fit the pieces underneath, the foundation. Whereas if you look at some of the open source big data ecosystem, they've got these notebooks and other tools where you address one back end this way, another back end that way. It's sort of, you know, you can see how Frankenstein was stitched together, you know? >> Yeah so, I mean to your point, we saw fraud detection, we saw ransomware, we see this partnership with Booz Allen Hamilton on Cyber4Sight. We heard today about project Waytono, which is unified monitoring and troubleshooting. And so they have very specific solutions that they're delivering, that presumably many of them are for pay. And so, and bringing ML across the platform, which now open up a whole ton of opportunities. So the question is, are these incremental, defend the base and then grow the core solutions, or are they radical innovations in your view? >> I think they're trying to stay away from the notion of radical innovation, 'cause then that will create more pushback from organizations. So they started out with a google-search-like product for log analytics. And you can see that as their aspirations grow for a broader set of applications, they add in a richer foundation. There's more machine learning algorithms now. They added that new data store. And when we talked about this with the CEO, Doug Merritt yesterday at the analyst day, he's like, "Yes, you look out three to five years, "and the platform gets more and more broad. "and at some point customers wake up "and they realize they have a new strategic platform." >> Yeah, and platforms do beat products, and even though it's hard sell, if you have a platform like Splunk does, you're in a much better strategic position. All right, we got to wrap. George thanks for joining me for the intro. I know you're headed to New York City for Big Data NYC down there, which is the other coverage that we have this week. So thank you again for coming on. >> Okay. >> All right, keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest, we're live. This is the CUBE from Splunk .conf2017 in the nation's capitol, be right back. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware, and it's Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas. We're at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Peter Burris. Mike Arterbury is here, he's the Vice President of Technology Alliances at DELLEMC, Mike, welcome to theCUBE. >> Dave, thanks. Peter, great to see you guys again. >> The Ecosystem is absolutely exploding. VMware is on fire, the data center is on fire, you know, the technology business is just, as Pat and Michael were saying this morning, this is going to be the most boring time ever, relative to the future. >> Right. >> What's happening in the Ecosystem, bring us up to date. >> Well I think as Michael and Pat have talked about this week, pretty proficiently, is the fact that technology transitions are all out in front of us right? It's a new world, the opportunity for both On-prem and Off-prem infrastructure is all out in front of the companies, the family of companies, and we're putting together some of the best offers, the best combinations of technology. The DELLEMC infrastructure, VMware, Infrastructure Management, and a host of ISVs that, whose workloads we combined with all of our infrastructure and platform technology, to drive customer outcomes. >> It, it-- >> Well actually, let me jump in on this real quick if I may. So one of the things about Ecosystems, is that there's a danger in the metaphor of the Ecosystem, because an Ecosystem evolves in response to a number of things. But Ecosystems in the Tech industry require care and feeding. They have to be set up, they have to, contracts have to be written, programs have to be put in place. This is really, really hard work, and it's undervalued by customers too much. So tell us, talk to us a little bit about the work that goes into forming an Ecosystem, sustaining an Ecosystem, and then creating new degrees of freedom, in some of these partnerships, as these new problems emerge, and these new types of complexities, and these interesting problems, get to be solved. >> Well, so I'll start at the start, which is, we've got the vestige of two great partnering companies, Dell classically, and EMC classically. EMC classically partnered much more deeply at a technology level, and Dell partnered at a go-to-market level right? They could monetize in a high-velocity way, these partnerships. When you put the two companies together, you get both the monetization and the technology, the deep technical alignment between the partner, and Dell, but you can start at the very simplest instantiation of a solution. A vSAN Ready Node, or a VxRail, a hyper-converged appliance. Basically we take VMware, goodness, in their storage, software-defined storage offer, and we combine that with a very tightly configured set of offers from our PowerEdge Server lineup, and our VxRail lineup, and we test the configurations, and we test them and tighten them, and test them and tighten them, so that we can give customers a very prescriptive understanding of what their outcome's going to be, when they deploy a hyper-converged offer, running on DELLEMC infrastructure. >> So for what that means, if I can, sorry Dave, what that means is that in your... So the partnership then becomes measured, not just in terms of whether the logos are together, but whether or not it's been engineered together. Whether it's been tested together-- >> Tested together, validated, you bet. >> Whether it's court regimes are put in place, and that's different from how we used to think about partnerships. >> Well, and that's a critical point, and Andy Jassy on stage this week, basically said, "Hey, this is not a Barney deal," Barney being I love you, you love me, let's do a press release. It's got substantive engineering going on, and so that's really what differentiates a core partnership that has teeth, versus one that's just what we call a Barney deal. But I wanted to ask you to go back to the sort of different cultural nuances that you mentioned, Dell, high-volume, high-velocity, EMC, very high-touch, bring those two worlds together. Are there inherent conflicts there, or were you able to, are you in the process of sort of re-engineering how you form those partnerships? >> You know, interestingly enough, in the 2000s, I managed the partnership between Dell and EMC from the Dell side, and we created a lot of good customer outcomes, by combining their storage platforms, our go-to-market prowess but, but it was all learnings that we could transform the business with, when we actually did a hard-core marriage between the two companies. So I would tell you then, it was two companies trying to play nice together. Now, it's one company, and we're playing really effectively together so-- >> Well, I tell ya something there, I talked to Chad about this at a show recently, and asked Michael Dell about it as well. If you look back, that was an epic partnership that you entered, and the outcomes were tremendous, and I argued that in fact, if Michael had had a mulligan, that he would've just bought EMC sooner, and drive the, drove that integration sooner, he essentially said, "Yeah I wish I could've "Bought EMC sooner." But I think that to your point, you had, you know a partnership, and now that you're one company, you can really drive some outcomes that you couldn't through you know, smaller tuck-in acquisitions are you seeing that? >> Absolutely, so what we have today, because of the combination, because of the marriage, is one portfolio. Compute, storage, networking, combined with the goodness from our family of offers, whether it's VMware or Pivotal, you heard a great announcement about Pivotal today, and what they're doing with Kubernetes. So we're going to be able to combine all of those things, the breadth of our portfolio, in a way that we never could before when it was a partnership based on siloed offerings. Now we can really build solutions, and we've got a whole family of products, which we call Ready Solutions, that combine cross business unit portfolios, and our family of products as well. >> So can you talk about the scope of some of the technology partnerships, maybe get specific on, on some of the ones that you're exited about, I mean, I know you're excited about them all but-- >> Sure, sure-- >> In the time we have maybe you could address it-- >> So principally, I would start with VMware. While VMware is a family member of ours, we still manage the relationship much like we would a partnership, where you have to play team ball, and drive your technologies together, and test them, and ruggedize them. But once you get past the infrastructural software of virtualization, customers don't stop at virtualization, they run workloads on that virtual infrastructure, so you look at SAP, and what we're doing with Hanna, and IoT, and Leonardo. You look at what we're doing frankly, with Microsoft, what we're doing with some of the public Cloud providers, in connecting both our infrastructure on premises, with the capabilities of the Public Cloud, in a way that leverages the most appropriate Cloud to run a particular piece of software, and a particular workload in. Those workloads are going to gravitate towards the best usage model for a customer, but we want to have a full compliment of offering so that we can offer the right Cloud for the right customer at the right time, and the right price. >> So I got two quick questions for you, and one draws off of what you just said, and that is the, I really like that notion of technology partnership, and go-to-market partnership, and the expertise at EMC, and the expertise at Dell. Customers want invention, which is the engineering element, the technology partnership. But they also want the innovation side, which is, it's been applied to my business, and I'm adopting it, and it's creating business value for me, and I'm finding, are you finding, that as Dell broadens it's, or DELLEMC broadens this notion that even the technology partnerships are becoming informed by the innovation, or the go-to-market partnerships, so that it's making the technology side that much more successful? >> Absolutely, so we want, every day in the hardware business you have to fight commoditization, you fight that by simply adding value right? It could be business model value, it could be technology value. We add innovation everywhere we can. So those combinations both of our technology, and our partners technology, but in a way that doesn't just combine it, it doesn't make it any easier to buy, it makes it easier to operate. It makes it easier to understand, it makes it easier for a seller to sell it, and a customer to buy it and consume it. So you'll hear Chad talk about an easy button a lot. That is our mission in solutions, is to combine those things in a way that makes it easy for everyone. >> So here's the second question I have. And it's going to be a challenge out to you, because increasingly as companies become more digital businesses, and recognize the role that these technologies play in driving their business models and their go forward, they are struggling with this question of partnership. They are still driving with procurement, driving with taking cost out, et cetera, when in fact, they have to find ways to drive with partnership and strategy, and whatnot. What can DELLEMC do to train this industry about how to do partnership better? >> Well, I think you demonstrate the value that you create for a customer, for a partner, for a seller in these combinations. If you can show that you create real value through your innovation, through your great partnering, then that's value that any one of those constituents can align to. You create value, you let them harvest that value, and they will come back to you again, and again, and again. >> So we have to go Mike, but last question is, how do you see, or do you see your Ecosystem of technology partners sort of reforming, not only to the new DELLEMC, but also to this new Cloud reality, that I'm not going to put everything in the Cloud, I'm going to bring the Cloud model to my data? >> Right, I think VMware's going to play a pivotal role in that right, because they are the-- >> Unintended right? >> They are unintended. They are the kings of workload management today, and what customers really want, from the Public Cloud, or the Private Cloud, is a way to move those virtual machines around in a very seamless way. So at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter where you operate that workload, you're going to operate it in the location that it best serves your mission as a customer. And so I think they're going to play a very instrumental role in how we do that going forward. >> Mike Arterbury, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. But really Peter, to your point, this is hard work, and customers generally undervalue it, but they expect it, and it adds a lot of value, so thanks very much for sharing your perspectives. >> Thank you guys. >> Your welcome, alright keep it right there everybody, we're going wall to wall, this is day two, two sets here at SiliconANGLE, theCUBE, and WikiBond. We'll be back, right after this short break. (alternative music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2017, bought to you by VMware, and its Ecosystem partner. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live on day one of VMworld 2017, our eighth year here. Really excited to be here, I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Dave Vellante, and we're very excited to be joined by our guest, Matt Waxman, CUBE alumni. >> Thanks for having me. >> You are the VP of Product Management at DELLEMC, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thanks very much. >> And another CUBE alumni, Jason Buffington, Principal Analyst, but we're calling you the Expert Extraordinaire, the Vintage Expert Extraordinaire in Data Production. >> I love that, that's so cool. >> The B, double E, you'll have to change your business cards. >> I'm on it. >> So, so guys DELLEMC was just named in 2017, a leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for data center backup and recovery. How is the backup and recovery market changing as customers are moving from virtualization to the Cloud? >> That's a great question you know, I think data protection has never been hotter. As a market you know, you really, you talk to customers, whether they're on a Cloud journey, whether they're trying to simplify their infrastructure, whether they're trying to go to converge and hyper-converge, data protection is at the center of all of that, and I think we see that reflected right, in the way that we've evolved our product lines, our use cases are all tilting more and more towards how do we integrate data protection into the stack, into the flow? >> And you just had the big announcement this morning following along the VMware Cloud for AWS, tell us a little bit more about the data production element of that-- >> Yeah, we were extremely happy to be part of that announcement, and partnering really closely with VMware. It's been in the works for a long time, so it's been hard to keep it quiet, but you know, everyone that's moving their workloads to the Cloud, if they're going to move production apps, they need to have protection. And so we worked very closely to integrate the solution in. It's leveraging our data protection software, as well as our data domain and recover point capabilities in there, and it's, it's integrated right into the management stack, so it's super easy for customers to just turn on, pay by the drip, and go. >> So Jason Buffington, may you can set the context for monitoring this market for a long time, as we just established. When you look back at the virtualization trend, it exploded onto the scene, and it dramatically changed the backup requirements, customers said whoa, I have to change what I do, how I backup, my resources, rethinking backup, and you seem to see that again now with Cloud. So maybe take us back, and take us through this journey as to where we came from, where we are today, and what's changing in data protection as a result. >> Sure. The journey's actually pretty similar. Each time we've had a major platform shift, the first things that people typically do with a new platform is not go jump on with their most mission-critical applications. It typically starts with data protection right? Even invert 15 years ago, the first things to go on were not my mission-critical databases, it was you know, I'm not sure I want to run in production VM's yet, but I wouldn't mind failing over to it. Or I wouldn't mind putting test data into it, I wouldn't mind backing up to it right? And then what happened was, people started running in VM's and they said you know what, this stuff runs pretty well, they're in a recovered state, maybe I don't want to go back. Maybe I could run production apps in that virtualized state. And then we're seeing the same thing in Cloud, it's just happening at a much faster rate, where again, data protection using Cloud infrastructure is a great way to kind of test the waters, and dip your toe in, and people are seeing yeah, this stuff runs pretty well in the Cloud, maybe I could run production. And so that's kind of the context of where we are. I like what you said Matt, about every time that people have made those other changes, data protection's always been there. The way we try to describe it is, every time that you modernize production, you must also modernize protection right? So whether it's going to Cloud, whether it's N-Point or ROBO, or SAS, or IS, every time that your production infrastructure takes a leap up, protection has to be right behind that. And so this is just following that same curve. >> So one of the things that I found interesting Jason, in some of the, the stuff I wrote about you over the weekend was your research shows that availability, and data production are not ITs problem, it's a business problem. How do you, as a trusted advisor, work with companies to help align business and IT with respect to that, as Pat Gelsinger said this morning, as companies are moving from data centers to centers of data, what's that IT business alignment conversation like, and do you facilitate that? >> So it starts when everything turns into numbers right, so if you think about head versus heart right? The heart is that IT implementer. A lot of the folks that are here this week, and they're thinking about technologies, and widgets and features. But if you want to have a data protection conversation, and all you're talking about is RTO, and RPO, and those kind of things, that doesn't move upstream. That's not a business-level conversation. So when you can convert that into, what is my cost of down time? What is my cost of lost productivity? Think about the availability issues with lost customer confidence, and lost brand recognition. When you convert downtime, and business impact into actually something that's quantifiable from a head level, from that executive level, okay now this is a problem to be solved. Then we can have an honest conversation that what are the myriad of technologies you should be using to address that. But it starts with, get out of the weeds, get out of the system logs, and let's talk about the user experience, and the mandates around data. Then you can have a business-level conversation. >> Now Matt, your talking about data protection being a fundamental part of the infrastructure solution, as opposed to what I like to say, a bolt on right? For years data protection, and Jason you know this well. It was an afterthought. Oh, hey, we got to protect this app now, let's bolt on some, some backup software, or some other infrastructure. EMC and now DELLEMC as a company, has a vast portfolio, you acquired a lot of companies. So how did you go from... Convince us, how did you go from that bespoke set of products, to kind of the seamless, not a bolt on, but integrated part of the business? Maybe you can discuss that a little bit. >> Yeah, it's a great question, and you know, what I think it all starts with and ends with, is back to Jason's point about the business. It's the application right? And so getting closest to the data source, whether that is an off-the-shelf application, a mission-critical app, or whether it's a homegrown app, whether it's a Cloud native app, and on, and on, and on, and on you go. Getting really tight with that data source I think, is the lynch pin to a integrated data protection strategy. So that's, that's where we spent a lot of our time, is getting a lot of IP, a lot of automation, a lot of integration into the application stack. And that's where we've been able to really build that transformative approach to data protection. >> Another question I had is, you kind of have the incumbent's dilemma. You've got the big install base. And yet as these new waves come in, you have to adapt to them. You walk around the floor and you see, everybody's now talking about Cloud, and Multi-Cloud, and you know, all these new start-ups coming in. How do you keep pace with them from both a technology and a brand standpoint? >> Yeah, yeah I mean I think one of both the opportunities, and the challenges, and the data protection space is the breadth of it right? Because there's new applications that pop up every day. There's new infrastructure components, and from a protection standpoint, we've got to enable our customers to protect all of that. So how do you do that in a simplistic way? Having appliances right? We introduced an appliance back at DELLEMC World in May, which has been fantastic for us. Customers wanting to consume an outcome, as opposed to building it themselves. Delivering a Cloud service like the VMware Cloud on Amazon, where I can go to a service catalog, and just pick that protection level. I think that's the way that we see customers wanting to take all of the technology components, and start to consume them in ways that's a lot more aligned with their business needs. Agile right, scalable, so forth. >> Pow on to that one. I think one of the big challenges we're going to see when we talk about Cloud, and data protection, and this evolution moving forward from your evolution I think, is the right way to think about that is, every time we saw a platform shift in the past, there was always the presumption that you would mostly leave that last platform of IT behind, and you'd move to this new scenario right? So for the last 10 years, the question has been around how virtualized in your data center can you get right? And so there were two major problems to solve. How fast can you get the VM back up and running again? And how efficient can you hold that data? And so certainly from a DELLEMC perspective, day domain was part of that hero scenario. From a data center-centric virtualization story. The challenge with the Cloud story that we're moving towards is, it's not so much that we're going to leave the data center behind and move to the Cloud right? There's not one Cloud, you're not going to leave the data center behind, so there's not a single-hero scenario, like there was last time right? So some data is going to be in IAS, we saw that this morning in the AW (mumbles) announcements. Some data's going to be in SAS and that's totally okay right? Some data will still live one or more data centers, and so that means you have to have a data protection answer, actually you need to have a data protection answer to each and every one of those scenarios. How are you going to protect Office 365? How are you going to protect IAS-Hosted VMs? How are you going to do the best on Data Center, how are you going to do it on ROBO I mean, each one of those requires different arrows in the quiver, and I think that's the interesting challenge. What we've seen in the past is, every time that there's been this major platform shift, it kind of forces a reset of the leader board on the data protection vendors right? Because typically the secret sauce that you used last time, doesn't propel you forward. I think this time what you've got is, you've got, or DELLEMC has momentum right? Because they're the dominator from the last generation, and because we're not leaving the data center behind, that's a position of strength to build from, as opposed to in the past, you always leave the old guys behind, and some new startup's always seem to take over. >> Well, you've always been on the leader board, you know, I mean data domain at 90 or whatever, two-thirds of the purpose build backup appliance with your data protection software, you're always up there in the Gartner Magic Quadrants. What gives you confidence that you can ride this next wave, and stay there? >> Yeah, I mean from an innovation standpoint, these are areas we've been working on for literally years right, so Cloud for us, is not something that's brand new, we've been working, and had solutions out there for a number of years now. Same thing with hyper-converged right, when VxRail came to market, we were there, day one with data protection. So we've had a really strong pipeline I think, of innovation in these spaces. I think honestly, if I look at the next major wave of trend here, if you take the Cloud trend at a macro level, it's really about decentralization. How do you scale IT? Well, you start to push the ownership, and to a self-service model right, to the end-user, and data protection's going to go the same way Dave, you used the integrated word. Well, if I'm an end-user, I want to trigger my own protection copies, I want to recover them on my own. Self-service is the way to really scale IT. Data protection's following the same path. >> Excellent, well guys speaking of momentum, we wish you a very exciting event here. We thank you so much for joining, congratulations on the announcement. >> Thanks very much. >> Thanks for sharing your insights. And we want to thank you for watching for my co-host Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin, stick around, we'll be right back from VMworld 2017. (alternative music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering Informatica World 2017. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back, everyone. We're live in San Francisco for CUBE's exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2017. I'm John Furrier, SiliconANGLE. Our next guest, Anil Chakravarthy who's the CEO of Informatica, CUBE alumni multiple times, but the chief executive officer leading the charge of a great private company doing very well. Welcome back to theCUBE. >> It's great to be here, John. Thanks very much. >> We've got a couple of things to talk about, but I want to just jump in. Behind us you see the new logo, Informatica. Really kind of the last leg of the stool, if you will, you guys have gone private, >> Yep. >> Great product work over the years. You know I've been pretty complimentary of you guys, although we've had a critical analysis session yesterday. But all the big bets were very well done playing off. You've got a great product team, great leadership team, new CIO hire. But the last leg of the stool is the brand. >> Anil: That's right. >> You guys haven't been showboating much. Now you got to kind of brag and be humble about it and get the word out. New marketing program, what's that all about? >> Yeah that's exactly right. So you just said, the transformation that we are going through, three big steps is the transformation. The product portfolio transformation, we've been talking about that. This is all driven by cloud, by big data, and machine learning, and all of that. Then the transformation of the business model, from license to subscription and cloud services. And now the brand transformation. And we see the brand transformation as actually catching up to where the company actually was. We were just talking about that right before we got started. We actually have done a lot of things. Like for instance, did you know that we are doing 1 trillion transactions a month in the cloud? I mean, very few people knew about that. >> Yeah, what's more impressive on that, I found that out earlier it was 1 billion in January. >> Anil: It's unbelievable. It's-- >> I mean how do you do that? It's a growth hockey stick, straight up. >> It's a hockey stick, it's huge, it's huge growth, and that's driven by the fact that we are the leader in cloud data management for the biggest ecosystems, for Salesforce, for Amazon, for Azure, and that drives a lot of the data volume across the cloud. >> Before we get in the keynotes, on that note, one of the big bets you know I've been very impressed on is the cloud play, right? The data architecture of things, the winning formula. But you got cloud presses, you had Amazon Web Services. Google just announced span or horizontally scalable database, generally available. You were on the of the three data partners on the front end of that. >> Anil: That's correct. >> And part of the launch of Google. >> That's correct, yeah. >> I didn't know that. >> So you know, the way we think of the world is from our customer's perspective. It really is the best way to think about it is as the enterprise cloud. Put it together. All the data you have in the enterprise that you have generated over the years, that's still very valuable data. And then the data you have in the cloud. And you can't think of those two things as separate. For instance, you could have customer data, the same customer. John, you're the customer of a retailer. Some of that data about you is in their on-premises systems, and some of the data may be in a cloud system, but it is all interconnected data and you can't have two separate silos. We believe that we are the only ones that can really manage that. And that's why we are supporting every major cloud platform or cloud system, just like we are supporting every major on-premises system. >> Yeah, you guys call it Switzerland. It was a great way to describe it. But really to me it puts bigger than that, is that you guys make data ready. And that's really the value of what I call the tier two data layer that's building, where you've got stuff in memory, I get that, it's some odyssey streaming stuff, and things going on there. But now, then you have third tier, archive, but data tier two is just like all the data: IoT, structured data. That's growing, but the cost of storage is getting lower and lower. Now companies are incented to store. How is that impacting your business? We heard that at DellEMC World over and over and obviously they're in the storage business, but the tier two storage is significantly growing. >> Well data is still growing at over 25% a year. That's a huge number given all the way the size that you have, so it's going to be within by 2020, it'll be over 15 zetabytes, and a zetabyte, for those of you who are interested, is 10 to the 21. That's a huge amount of data. And what we're seeing is, the value comes from being able to first of all see your way through the data, being able to understand what data is valuable and what's not, and then connect the data. If you have customer data, product data, location data, et cetera, being able to put all of that together. That's really where the value comes from. >> So I've got to ask you about your keynote. You talk about the digital transformation's unfolding and data is the critical foundation for digital transformation. Okay, we've heard digital transformation. I mean, I'm not to say it's played, I know you guys have your theme, but this business transformation going on. So digital transformation is a known trend, but it kind of is played in my mind. I want to know what's different about Informatica now. Why is it unfolding now versus two years ago when we started talking about digital transformation? What's the most relevant thing now? >> Well I think the biggest relevance is, two years ago, as you exactly said, people were talking about digital transformation. Now they're doing digital transformation. Now you're seeing, you know, we talk about our own customers like Tesla or GE or Amazon doing it, but lots of other customers are actually doing the digital transformation. Now when you first take the first step toward the digital transformation, that's when you realize, my data, I got to fix the data foundation. If I can't have a data foundation, then I just, you know, everybody cares about a good customer experience. If I can't tell all the interactions a customer has with my company, and that data is in different places, there is no way I can provide a good customer experience because the customer knows what they're doing with me and I don't know what they're doing with me. And that's really the foundation for the data foundation. >> I want you to take a minute to just re-explain that because this is something comes up all the time and I get different answers and people have different definitions. What does it mean to have a digital data foundation and what are some of the impacts to the customers when they do have that? >> Think of it the simplest way. Let's say you have a customer and a lot of the new customers are like that. You are a bank, and you have a customer who doesn't want to talk to anybody. They only want to do everything through a mobile application. They want to file a loan application through the mobile, they want to check their balance through mobile, they want to deposit a check through mobile, et cetera, et cetera. If they have a problem, they might talk to somebody through a chat on a mobile, but they don't really want to talk to a live person. And this is, by the way, a common scenario now. Now they are doing probably 20 different things through the mobile. But when you get into your back end, that's the front end. You can put 20 things on the mobile, but the back end you've got 20 different things. But you have to have a single picture across those 20 things. When did the customer interact with us? What did they do? What is the pattern of that customer? How do you profile what the customer is doing? If you don't have that picture, everything that you do with the customer is going to just appear disconnected to them. It's going to frustrate them even more. And that's really the reason we have to have the data foundation. >> Okay, so, that's kind of a data layer, I get that, and believe me, horizontally-scalable data, making it accessible only helps the apps. The question to you is, your reaction to people saying, "Hey, Anil, I got to be innovative. "I got to free the data up and I got to let it grow "and you know a thousand flowers bloom, all this goodness. "But hey, I got to control it." So that's a huge issue. I've got governance, I've got compliance, there's laws now. So am I stuck in the mud? I want to be innovative and go fast, but now I've got to govern it and control it. How do you answer that question? >> You can do both now and that's the reason why we're announcing CLAIRE and all these innovations that we announced this. The advent of machine learning and metadata let's you do both. You basically say, look, I can use all these new technologies to find out what data I have. It's not going to slow you down. In fact, if you set up something like an intelligent data lake, because it has the metadata layer, you are actually opening up the data you have to the end user without having to come through IT for every piece of data, which means they can go faster. That's where the innovation happens. So you can do both. >> John: So it's a control catalog, basically. >> It's exactly right. It's a controlled catalog and you basically get to define different levels of trust. You can say, this data is curated data, it's trusted data and we can vouch for it. And maybe other data that's just shared collaboratively, and you can just flag it and then that way the user knows, okay here's data that I'm getting from a central system and this is what I need to use when I'm talking about something like revenue. And I'm tying something like a trend of what's going on. I might be able to use other data and that's the key there. >> Talk about the trend around CLAIRE. A lot of buzz here at the show. CLAIRE stands for clairvoyant. It's got the word AI in it. It's a name. SAP's got Leonardo, Salesforce has Einstein, all these different terms, but it's a clever way to point to AI, augmented intelligence, and machine learning. >> Anil: Correct. >> What does that mean for Informatica as a company? Certainly it kind of humanizes it. >> Anil: Correct. >> Shows the access of data should be democratized. What does it mean for you guys and the customers? How does that play out in your mind as the CEO? What do you see CLAIRE doing? >> Well the three big points I'll make about CLAIRE. First of all, when we built CLAIRE, we did not invent the artificial intelligence or the machine learning. A lot of that is already available. So we took a lot of the best algorithms in machine learning and applied them to metadata and applied them to data management. That's the secret sauce. It's not the building the AI itself, it's the use of the AI for data management. That's number one. Second, we defined CLAIRE very clearly and we said it's not a product. It's an engine, it's an AI-powered engine. In fact, I call for CLAIRE, I say it's cloud-scale, AI-powered real time engine, that's CLAIRE. Right, so it's an acronym, but it's the engine that powers other products. The third big thing is we're telling customers, you're going to get the benefit of CLAIRE, but you don't need to deploy CLAIRE. When you buy any of our products that are powered by CLAIRE or any of our solutions that are powered by CLAIRE, that will automatically come in there. So it means once you have any product like our enterprise information catalog or our secured source or data governance, you're starting to use CLAIRE and then you can use CLAIRE for other use cases as well. >> What's been the reaction? You know, and obviously you get nervous, CEO, probably got these things out there, probably wonder what the reaction is. What's your take on the reaction? >> People are very intrigued. I know that's what they, they look at CLAIRE and go, what is CLAIRE? How are you guys using it? I think people are asking us, tell us a little bit more about how AI is being used in the world of data and data management. So it's absolutely the reaction we wanted. >> So I got to ask you this question. I asked Mark Hurd the same question at the Oracle media day a few weeks ago. I want to ask you the same question. Everyone's number one at everything now. You guys are number one in six quadrants. Oracle's number one, the Dell E's. Everyone's number one at something. So the question really is, not so much about being number one, congratulations, you've got some magic quadrant wins that was highlighted in the keynote. But you guys are going through a transformation. You're telling your customers that they're going through a transformation. Wouldn't it make sense that the transformation scoreboard looks different than the old way? And I want to get your thoughts on this because, not that we have the answer, but there's one answer in customer wins, but as this new world transforms and unfolds, what's the scoreboard look like? How, because it's not as clean to say, this is the category, you're starting to see a little blending, as you mentioned how data is evolving. What's the new scoreboard look like? >> Is it the scoreboard for us or for the customer? >> John: You guys, the industry. How do I know if you're doing well? Obviously customer wins is obviously number one. >> Yeah, I think the best way to. I'll give you a couple of metrics, financial and nonfinancial, okay. From a nonfinancial perspective, as you said, a couple of key metrics. One is customers. How many new customers, how many new customers, reference customers do we have? Second one that you want to look at is just mind share or when people think about digital transformation, do they think of, hey, Informatica, they have a key role in my digital transformation. Just looking at mind share and so on, because that's a good leading indicator. In terms of the nonfinancial, or the financial metrics for us, obviously as more customers do what we call enterprise cloud data management, you're going to see our subscription revenue grow dramatically and you know, that's something that when you look at our subscription revenue, you'll see that impact of the enterprise cloud data management. >> And you guys made the move to subscription, obviously went private. Bruce Chizen and Jerry Held, your board members talked about this. You can do a lot of things 'cause it doesn't, it impacts the P&L but that it's still baking out, it's evolving, you're private, not public, but you want to get it right before you go public. >> That's correct. >> How do you feel about the progress on that front now? >> Oh we're making fabulous progress. We're very pleased with where we are. From my perspective, we are ahead of where we thought we would be by this time. I think customer buying behavior has converged really nicely with where we are in terms of where we want to go. So I think that's definitely been a big plus. >> Sally Jenkins, your new CMO, you got to feel good about her coming on the board-- >> Anil: Oh she's done a great job. >> High impact. She said on theCUBE that you guys are the hottest privately held pre-IPO startup. >> Anil: That's right. >> Twenty years in the making, whatever. I mean, but you guys are private. >> Billion dollar startup. >> But you act like a startup, which is why we like you guys a lot. You guys are like a very hustling like a startup. But now you're growing and you're getting beyond the 200 million, over a billion dollars now. When's the IPO coming? >> Yeah, I mean, you know look, I can tell you the factors that will be the lead to the perfect timing for the IPO. When those factors come together, I don't have a crystal ball right now, but I can tell you it weighs both on us and the market. From our perspective, we are making this big shift in the business model. We want to make sure that we can say, hey look, now the shift is very clear and stable and we can see where they where you know we'll be able to project out our own forecast for the next three, four quarters. So that's one key indicator for us. The second key indicator that we look at is the total revenue growth of the company and what percent of the growth of the revenue is recurring revenue for us. So we're going to be looking at those two factors. And of course from the market perspective, we want to make sure that the market wants to, continues to be. >> If you wait four years til we have a new president, and then heard all the politics from the Kara Swisher thing was, got a lot of people stirred up, in the conversation. But in all seriousness now, you also have private equity so you have to make the company worth money after they go public so you've got to have some growth left in you, right, I mean you guys are, you feel good about the? >> Oh we really do because you know, we look, that's where these six categories that we talked about make a lot of sense. You look at data integration, data quality, master data management, these are all categories that are well established. We know the patterns and we are seeing very good growth in those categories. Then you look at the new categories: cloud, big data management, data security. Those are all coming into their own right now. So that's why when you look at our portfolio, you go, wow, there are some that you already have great, well established and going well. These other ones, they're well established but they also have a lot of promise and future growth. >> Great chatting with you. You're a great, insightful, and inspiration. You guys have done a great job. But I've got to ask you the question because I think you have an interesting role. I mean, you have, you're acting like a startup, but you're not a startup. You went private from a public company. You've got a great board of directors. You've got Jerry Held and Bruce Chizen on there, but you've also got private equity sharks on the board. So, that's my definition, I won't say you said that. >> No, no, but I was actually in the private equity world, to my pleasant surprise, I've seen the whole spectrum of investors and our guys on the board are very much growth-oriented. They know that the value gets created for them through growth so it's well aligned. >> Yeah, but you're not sitting back having pizza and drinking wine. These PE guys, they're financially driven. >> Anil: That's right. >> So the question is, advice to other startups, whether they're venture backed or other companies going through innovation strategy. How do you manage the success of having such good product excellence? I know you've got good people, so that's an easy one answer. How as a CEO do you maintain the disciple to have the cadence of the financial performance? Because those guys look, they're probably not going to give you, hey how we doing? Numbers matter, but you're transforming technology and products. >> That's right, so what we do is-- >> How do you do it? >> We have a scorecard which has both the short term and the longterm metrics and we look at both of those. You know, we do monthly business reviews. So the pulse of the company has definitely quickened. We're operating at a new level of intensity. But when we look at the scorecard, it's not just the immediate financial metrics. It's things like, for example, are we building the back end infrastructure to be a subscription company? That doesn't get done in a month. >> John: That's an IT challenge, right? >> That's an IT challenge, a process challenge, it takes 12 months, 18 months, the kind of things that you talk with Graeme about. But that is an example of, you can have a scorecard. You don't necessarily have to look at a scorecard just for the short term metrics. You look at it for both short term and what makes you successful over the longterm. And that's, you know, that's what we're doing is just keep our eye on the ball, focus on a few things, both short term and longterm, and make sure we're doing them well. >> How about customer wins? To me, that's the scoreboard ultimately as we look at it at our team. How are you doing on customer wins? Can you share some, I see you have a lot of great customers. I met a few last night, obviously big wigs, big names. >> Anil: Yeah, exactly. >> What are some of the big wins look like and why are you winning? >> Well you know, we have 7,000 plus customers. We have a great customer base. Just at this show we've had 85% of our sessions here at the show have had customer or partner speakers. That gives you a sense of customers want to talk about us. A couple of ones that I would highlight for example, which are fairly recent for example, Amazon is one. They just spoke at the show and in fact the CMO of Amazon was here, Ariel Kelman. And he spoke about he is a customer of Informatica and how he's using Informatica for his own marketing systems and the marketing data analytics that he is doing. Another example is Tesla. You know, we talked about them at the show. >> I got a test drive on Friday with one. >> There you go, exactly, and then they are using us for the Tesla and the Solar City acquisition and driving synergies there. So lots of great examples. >> John: Tough customers, by the way, very, very finicky. >> Oh they are very demanding, very demanding customers and we are really proud to be serving them. >> Okay, final question, Anil. What's next? How do you look forward. Obviously this event, congratulations on getting the branding out. Peggy and the team did a great job. Sally and the team did a great job. What about next? What's next? >> Yeah, you know, what's next for us is simply work with customers to first of all get our story out, understand their priorities, and make sure that they understand that we can be a great partner for them. So we believe that this is the beginning of that journey. We talked about digital transformation and how we help them. Now we take the show on the road to our customers, make sure that we help them at their pace to transform. >> So bring the message out, build the brand. >> Absolutely. >> That's the key priority. >> And then continue. >> Product side, what's going on the products? >> Well on the product side, for instance, you saw a teaser of all the big trends. Machine learning, cloud, big data, security, all of these have full-fledged roadmaps that we're going to be working on over the course of the next six months. >> Anil, great to see you. Congratulations, you can tell, you're still intense. You've got the intensity, it's not going to stop by the way. >> Anil: No it's not. >> It's not like you're not going to get more intense as you guys grow. And congratulations. >> Thank you for having me on your show. >> We are here live in San Francisco for Informatica World 2017 with the CEO here, Anil Chakravarthy, inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Stay with us for more coverage from Informatica World after this short break. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vega, it's theCUBE. Covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas where IBM InterConnect 2017. It's theCUBE's coverage of IBM's Cloud Show, Cloud and Data Show. I'm John Furrier, and my Co-Host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Abby Kearns, Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Welcome, thank you. >> Thanks for joining us. So, Cloud Foundry, you're new as the executive role. Sam had moved on to Microsoft. >> Abby: Google. >> Google, I'm sorry, Google. He was formerly at Microsoft. Former Microsoft employee. But at Google, Google Cloud Next was a recent show. So you're new. >> I'm new. >> John: To the reins, but you're not new in the community. >> I've been a part of the community for several years. Prior to joining the Foundation a year ago, I was at Pivotal for a couple of years. So I've been part of the Cloud Foundry community for several years and it's a technology that's near and dear to my heart. And it's a community that I am very passionate about. >> And the emergence of Cloud Foundry, I think about it, it's really kind of changed the game. It's really lifted all the boats, if you will, rising tide floats all boats. IBM uses it, you've got a lot of customers. Just go down the list of the notable folks working with Cloud Foundry. >> Well, I look no further than those that are on our Board and those that represent the strategic vision around the Cloud Foundry, so IBM, Pivotal, but DellEMC and Cisco and SAP and VMware and Allianz and Swisscom and, you know, of course Pivotal. And I think all of them really bring such a broad perspective to the table. But, then broadening beyond that community, our community has grown so much since. So, a lot of people don't realize that Cloud Foundry has only been an open source project for just a little over two years. So, January 2015 marked when it become an official open source project. Prior to that it was part of Pivotal. And in that a little over two years, we've grown to nearly 70 members in our community. And our disk x high continued to grow, and bring more perspectives to the table. >> So, what has been the differences. A lot of people have taken a different approach, on. For Bluemix, for instance, they have good core at Cloud Foundry. Is it going the way you guys had thought, as a community that this was the plan all along? Because you see people really kind of making some good stuff out of the Cloud Foundry. Was that part of the plan? This open direction? >> Well, I think part of the plan was really coalescing around a single vision of that abstraction. And what's the whole vision of Cloud Foundry? It's to make, allow developers to create code faster. In whatever realm that takes. And our industry is evolving and it's evolving so quickly, and exciting, all of these organizations. These enterprise organizations that are becoming software companies. And how, I mean, how exciting is that? As we think about the abstraction that Cloud Foundry can provide for them, and the automation it can provide and allows them to focus on one thing, and one thing only, creating code that changes their business. So, we're really focused myopically on ensuring the developers have the ability to quickly and easily create code and innovate quickly as an organization. >> So, on the development side. I mean sometimes standards can go, fall down by forcing syntax or, you know, forcing certain things. You guys had a different approach. Looking back now, what were the key things that were critical for Cloud Foundry to maintain its momentum? >> I think a couple of things. You know, obviously, it's a complex distributed system, but it's put together amazingly well. Quality was first and foremost, part of its origins. And it's continued to adhere to that quality and that control around the development process, and around the release process. So, Cloud Foundry as an open source project is very much a governance by contribution. So we look for those in the organizations and different communities to be part of it, and contribute and so we have the full time committers. That are basically doing this all day, every day. And we have the contributors that are also part of the community providing feedback and value. >> And there was a big testimonial of American Air Lines on stage. That's a big win. >> Abby: Yes, it is a big win. >> John: Give some color on that deal. >> I can't give you any details on the deal that IBM has. >> But that's a Cloud Foundry, IBM. >> But it is Cloud Foundry, yes. >> You guys were part of the Bluemix thing. >> Yes. >> Okay. >> And American Airlines is a company that I have a lot of history with. They were a customer of mine for many years in the early 2000s, so I'm thrilled to see them innovating, and taking advantage of a platform. >> So, help us unpack this conversation that's going on around PaaS, right. Some people say, oh PaaS is passe. But, it's development tools and it's programming. And it's a platform that you've created. So, what do you make of that conversation? What is it, what implications does it have to your strategy and your ecosystem strategy? >> Well, I for one don't like the term Paas anyways. So, I'm happy to say, PaaS is passe. Because I do think it's evolved. So, when I talk about Cloud Foundry, I talk about it as a cloud application platform. Because at the end of the day, our goal is to help organizations create code faster. You know, the high degrees of automation, the abstraction that the platform brings to the table, isn't just a platform, it is an enabler for that development. So we think about what that means. It's can I create applications faster? Do I have proliferation of services, to your ecosystem point, that enable those applications to be, to grow and to scale, and to change the way that organization works? Because it's a technology enabled business transformation for many of these organizations. >> John: It's app driven too, that's the key to success. >> It's app driven, which is why we talk so much about developers, is because that's the key. If I'm going to become a software company, what does that mean? I am writing code, and that code is changing the way I think about my business, and my consumers. >> And the app landscape has certainly changed with UX creativity, but now you've got IoT, there's a real functional integration going on with the analog world going digital. It's like whoa, I've gotten all this stuff that's now instrumented connected to the internet. IoT, Internet of Things. That's going to be interesting. Cloud has to power that. >> I think it does, because what is IoT reliant on? Applications that take advantage of that data. I mean that's what you're looking to gain. You're looking to have small applications streaming large amounts of data from sensors, be it from cars or be it from a manufacturing plant, if you're thinking industrial IoT. So Cloud Foundry provides the platform for many of these applications to be developed, created, and scaled. At the level that companies like GE and Siemens and others are looking to build out and tackle that IoT space. >> It's open. I mean we can all agree that Cloud Foundry's the most open platform to develop applications on. But, you're. Developers have choices. >> Yeah. >> You're seeing, you know, infrastructure as a service, plus, and you're seeing, SaaS kind of minus emerge. How should we be thinking about the evolution. You said earlier it evolved. Where is it evolving to? Obviously you've bet on open. Good bet, all right. Other, more proprietary. I don't even know what open is anymore, sometimes. (laughter) But, we can agree that Cloud Foundry is open. >> We're open. >> But how should we be thinking about the evolution going forward? >> Well, that's the beauty of open, right. Like, what is open source? Open source brings together a diverse set of perspectives, and background to innovate faster. And that's where we are. We're seeing a lot of technology evolve. I mean, just think about all the things that have evolved in the last two years. Where we've had technologies come up, some go down, but there is so much happening right now, because the time is now. For these companies that are trying to develop more applications and are trying to figure out ways not only to develop these applications, but develop them as scale, and really grow those out and build those, and IoT, and you're getting more data. We're having, capturing those data, and operationalizing that data. And it comes back to one thing. Applications that can take advantage of that. And so I think there is the potential as we build out and innovate both the ecosystem, but the platform will naturally evolved and take advantage of those wins from these organizations that are driving this to scale. >> So scale is the lynch pin, right? And if you think about traditional PaaS environments, if I can use that term, they're limited in scale and obviously simplicity. Is that another way to think about it? >> Well, I think the platform. I think about it this way. The platform enables you to run fast. You know, you're not running fast with scissors. You want to be able to run fast safely. So, it provides that abstraction and those guardrails so you can quickly iterate and develop and deploy code. If I look at what let's do HCSC is a company. They went from developing an application. It took them 35 people and nine months to create an app, right? Now, with Cloud Foundry, they're able to do it with four people in six weeks. It changes the way you work as an organization. Now, just imagine as you scale that out, what that means. And imagine the changes that can bring in your organization. When you're software centric, and you're customer first, and you're bringing that feedback loop in. >> Now, you guys do a lot of heavy lifting on behalf of the customer, but you're not hardening it. Hardening to the point where they can't mold it and shape it to what they want. That's kind of what I'm. >> No, we want to give. We want to abstract away and automate as much as possible for things you care about. Resiliency, auto-scaling, the ability to do security and compliance, 'cause those are things you care about as an enterprise. But, let's get that, let's make that happen for you, but then give the control to the developer to self-provision, to scale, to completely deploy and iterate. Do continuous delivery. All of those things that allow you to go from developing an app once a year to developing an app and iterating on that app constantly all the time. >> So Abby, I want to ask you, kind of take a step back. And look at the community trends right now. You see Open Stack has trajectory, it's becoming more an infrastructure as a service. Settling in there. That's gone through a lot of changes. Seeing a lot of growth in IoT which we talked about. You starting to see some movement in the open source community, CNCF has got traction, the Linux Foundation, Cloud native you've got Kubernetes. I call it the Cold War for orchestration, you know, going on right now, and it's. So it's really interesting time. Microservices are booming. This is the Holy Grail for developers for the next gen. It's going to be awesome. Machine learning. Everyone's getting intoxicated on that these days. So, super cool things coming down the pike. >> For sure, I think we're in the coolest time. >> What's going on in the communities? Is there any movement, is there trends, and is there a sentiment among the developer communities that you see that you could. Any patterns developing around what people are gravitating to? >> I think developers want the freedom to create. They want the ability to create applications and see those come to fruition. And I think. I think a lot of things that were new and innovative a couple of years ago, and even now, are becoming table stakes. For example, five years ago, having a mobile app as a bank was new and interesting and kind of fun. Now, it's table stakes. Are you going to go bank with a bank that doesn't have one? Are you going to bank with a bank that doesn't have it? It becomes table stakes. Or who doesn't, if you don't have fraud detection, which is basically event driven responses, right. So, you think about what table stakes are, and what, as we think about the abstraction moving up, that's really where it's going to get interesting. >> Yeah, but open source communities are going to move to these new ground. What I'm trying to get at is to see what's happening, what's the trend in the developer community? What's hot, what's fashionable? Is there new projects popping up that you could share that you think is cool and interesting? >> Well, they're all cool and interesting. >> John: You'd rather not comment. >> (laugh) I think they're all cool and interesting. I think you know, CNCF is a sister organization underneath the Linux Foundation. I, you know. >> John: They kind of inherit that from KubeCon, Kubernetes Con. >> Yeah, I think they're doing interesting things. I think any organization that's promoting cloud native application architecture and the value of that, you know, we all deserve to be part of the same conversation, because to your point earlier, a rising tide lifts all boats. And if every organization is doing cloud native application architectures, and cloud native solutions, it's going to be super interesting. >> I mean we certainly were just at Strata Hadoop, we ran our own event last week called Big Data SV, and it's very clear to us that the big data world and industry and cloud are coming together, and the forcing function is machine learning, IoT and then AI is the, you know, appeal. That's the big trend that kind of puts a mental model around it. But, IoT is driving this data and the cloud horsepower is forcing this to move faster. It seems to be very accelerated. >> But, it also enables so much. I mean, if you can operationalize this data that you're aggregating and turn it into actionable apps that do things for your business, save money, improve logistics, reach your users better and faster, you start to see the change and the shift that that can bring. You have the data married with the apps married with the endpoint sensors, and all of the sudden, this gets to be a really interesting evolution of technology. >> All right, so what's your 100 day plan. Well, you're already in a 100 day plan already. So what's your plan for this year? As new Executive Director for Cloud Foundry, what's on the agenda, what's your top three thing you're going to chip away at this year for objectives? >> Developers, developers, developers. Does that count as top three? >> More, more, more. (laughter) Increase of developer count. >> Just really, reaching out to developers and ensuring that they're able to be successful in Cloud Foundry. So I think you'll hear more from us in the next couple of weeks about that. But, >> John: So proof points basically. >> The proof points, but just ensuring they can be successful. Ensuring that scale is affable for them. And then really our summits are even changing. We have actually added developer tracks to our summits to make them a place not only where you can learn about Cloud Foundry, but also where you can work with other developers and learn from them, and learn about specific languages. But also, how to enable those into cloud native application architecture. And I think our goal this year was to really enrich that development community, and build that pipeline and help fill those gaps. >> And celebrate the wins like American Airlines of the world, and as IBM and others are successful, then it gets to be less. You don't want to have cognitive dissonance as a developer, that's the worst thing that developers want to make sure they're on a good bus. To you know, with good people. >> Well, you've got, you've obviously got some technology titans behind you. IBM, you know, the most prominent, I would say. But obviously, guys like VMware and Cisco and others, but you're also got a number of practitioner organization. Guys like Allianz. >> Abby: Allianz, yeah. >> VW, Allstate I think was early on in the program. >> JPMC, City Bank. >> Yeah, I don't want to. I shouldn't have started, 'cause I know I'd leave some out. (laughter) You're the Executive Director, so you have to fill in the gaps. But so, that's somewhat unique in a consortium like this. Somewhat, but that many is somewhat unique. Is there more traction there? What's their motivation in your. >> Abby: As a user? >> Yeah. >> Well, to your other point. We're an open source, right. What's the value? Me, if I'm an enterprise, and I'm looking to take advantage of a platform, but also an open source platform. Open source allows me to be part of that conversation. I could be a contributor, I could be part of the direction. I can influence where it's going. And I think that is a powerful sentiment for many of these organizations that are looking to evolve and become more software-centric, and this is a good way for them to give back and be part of that momentum. >> Yeah, and cloud's exploding. More open source is needed. It's just a great, great mission. Congratulations on the new job, and good luck this year. We'll keep in touch. >> Thank you. >> John: And certainly see you at the Cloud Foundry Summit. That's in San Francisco again this year? >> Santa Clara. June 13th through 15th. >> So every year you guys always have the fire code problem. (laughter) >> Well, I think, and I'm going to go on record now, and officially say this, this will be our last year there. Which I think everyone's excited about, because I think we're all over Santa Clara right now. (laughter) >> All right, well we'll see you there. Abby Kearns, Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation. Here inside theCUBE, power in the cloud. This is theCUBE's coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. Stay with us, more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)