(upbeat synth intro music) >> Hey everyone and welcome to Detroit, Michigan. theCUBE is live at KubeCon CloudNativeCon, North America 2022. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, this event, the keynote that we got out of a little while ago was, standing room only. The Solutions hall is packed. There's so much buzz. The community is continuing to mature. They're continuing to contribute. One of the big topics is Cloud Native at Scale. >> Yeah, I mean, this is a revolution happening. The developers are coming on board. They will be running companies. Developers, structurally, will be transforming companies with just, they got to get powered somewhere. And, I think, the Cloud Native at Scale speaks to getting everything under the covers, scaling up to support developers. In this next segment, we have two Kube alumnis. We're going to talk about Cloud Native at Scale. Some of the things that need to be there in a unified architecture, should be great. >> All right, it's going to be fantastic. Let's go under the covers here, as John mentioned, two alumni with us, Madhura Maskasky joins us, co-founder of Platform9. Sirish Raghuram, also co-founder of Platform9 joins us. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to have you guys here at KubeCon on the floor in Detroit. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Excited to be here >> So, talk to us. You guys have some news, Madhura, give us the sneak peak. What's going on? >> Definitely, we are very excited. So, we have John, not too long ago we spoke about our very new open source project called Arlon. And, we were talking about the launch of Arlon in terms of its first release and etcetera. And, just fresh hot of the press, we, Platform9 had its 5.6 release which is its most recent release of our product. And there's a number of key interesting announcements that we'd like to share as part of that. I think, the prominent one is, Platform9 added support for EKS Kubernetes cluster management. And, so, this is part of our vision of being able to add value, no matter where you run your Kubernetes clusters, because, Kubernetes or cluster management, is increasingly becoming commodity. And, so, I think the companies that succeed are going to add value on top, and are going to add value in a way that helps end users, developers, DevOps solve problems that they encounter as they start running these environments, with a lot of scale and a lot of diversity. So, towards that, key features in the 5.6 six release. First, is the very first package release of the product online, which is the open source project that we've kicked off to do cluster and application, entire cluster management at scale. And, then there's few other very interesting capabilities coming out of that. >> I want to just highlight something and then get your thoughts on this next, this release 5.6. First of all, 5.6, it's been around for a while, five reps, but, now, more than ever, you mentioned the application in Ops. You're seeing WebAssembly trends, you're seeing developers getting more and more advanced capability. It's going to accelerate their ability to write code and compose applications. So, you're seeing a application tsunami coming. So, the pressure is okay, they're going to need infrastructure to run all that stuff. And, so, you're seeing more clusters being spun up, more intelligence trying to automate. So you got the automation, so you got the dynamic, the power dynamic of developers and then under the covers. What does 5.6 do to push the mission forward for developers? How would you guys summarize that for people watching? what's in it for them right now? >> So it's, I think going back to what you just said, right, the breadth of applications that people are developing on top of something like Kubernetes and Cloud Native, is always growing. So, it's not just a number of clusters, but also the fact that different applications and different development groups need these clusters to be composed differently. So, a certain version of the application may require some set of build components, add-ons, and operators, and extensions. Whereas, a different application may require something entirely different. And, now, you take this in an enterprise context, right. Like, we had a major media company that worked with us. They have more than 10,000 pods being used by thousands of developers. And, you now think about the breadth of applications, the hundreds of different applications being built. how do you consistently build, and compose, and manage, a large number of communities clusters with a a large variety of extensions that these companies are trying to manage? That's really what I think 5.6 is bringing to the table. >> Scott Johnston just was on here early as the CEO of Docker. He said there's more applications being pushed now than in the history of application development combined. There's more and more apps coming, more and more pressure on the system. >> And, that's where, if you go, there's this famous landscape chart of the CNCF ecosystem technologies. And, the problem that people here have is, how do they put it all together? How do they make sense of it? And, what 5.6 and Arlon and what Platform9 is doing is, it's helping you declaratively capture blueprints of these clusters, using templates, and be able to manage a small number of blueprints that helps you make order out of the chaos of these hundreds of different projects, that are all very interesting and powerful. >> So Project Arlon really helping developers produce the configuration and the deployment complexities of Kubernetes at scale. >> That's exactly right. >> Talk about the, the impact on the business side. Ease of use, what's the benefits for 5.6? What's does it turn into for a benefit standpoint? >> Yeah, I think the biggest benefit, right, is being able to do Cloud Native at Scale faster, and while still keeping a very lean Ops team that is able to spend, let's say 70 plus percent of their time, caring for your actual business bread and butter applications, and not for the infrastructure that serves it, right. If you take the analogy of a restaurant, you don't want to spend 70% of your time in building the appliances or setting up your stoves etcetera. You want to spend 90 plus percent of your time cooking your own meal, because, that is your core key ingredient. But, what happens today in most enterprises is, because, of the level of automation, the level of hands-on available tooling, being there or not being there, majority of the ops time, I would say 50, 70% plus, gets spent in making that kitchen set up and ready, right. And, that is exactly what we are looking to solve, online. >> What would a customer look like, or prospect environment look like that would be really ready for platform9? What, is it more apps being pushed, big push on application development, or is it the toil of like really inefficient infrastructure, or gaps in skills of people? What does an environment look like? So, someone needs to look at their environment and say, okay, maybe I should call platform9. What's it look like? >> So, we generally see customers fall into two ends of the barbell, I would say. One, is the advanced communities users that are running, I would say, typically, 30 or more clusters already. These are the people that already know containers. They know, they've container wise... >> Savvy teams. >> They're savvy teams, a lot of them are out here. And for them, the problem is, how do I manage the complexity at scale? Because, now, the problem is how do I scale us? So, that's one end of the barbell. The other end of the barbell, is, how do we help make Kubernetes accessible to companies that, as what I would call the mainstream enterprise. We're in Detroit in Motown, right, And, we're outside of the echo chamber of the Silicon Valley. Here's the biggest truth, right. For all the progress that we made as a community, less than 20% of applications in the enterprise today are running on Kubernetes. So, what does it take? I would say it's probably less than 10%, okay. And, what does it take, to grow that in order of magnitude? That's the other kind of customer that we really serve, is, because, we have technologies like Kube Word, which helps them take their existing applications and start adopting Kubernetes as a directional roadmap, but, while using the existing applications that they have, without refactoring it. So, I would say those are the two ends of the barbell. The early adopters that are looking for an easier way to adopt Kubernetes as an architectural pattern. And, the advanced savvy users, for whom the problem is, how do they operationally solve the complexity of managing at scale. >> And, what is your differentiation message to both of those different user groups, as you talked about in terms of the number of users of Kubernetes so far? The community groundswell is tremendous, but, there's a lot of opportunity there. You talked about some of the barriers. What's your differentiation? What do you come in saying, this is why Platform9 is the right one for you, in the both of these groups. >> And it's actually a very simple message. We are the simplest and easiest way for a new user that is adopting Kubernetes as an architectural pattern, to get started with existing applications that they have, on the infrastructure that they have. Number one. And, for the savvy teams, our technology helps you operate with greater scale, with constrained operations teams. Especially, with the economy being the way it is, people are not going to get a lot more budget to go hire a lot more people, right. So, that all of them are being asked to do more with less. And, our team, our technology, and our teams, help you do more with less. >> I was talking with Phil Estes last night from AWS. He's here, he is one of their engineer open source advocates. He's always on the ground pumping up AWS. They've had great success, Amazon Web Services, with their EKS. A lot of people adopting clusters on the cloud and on-premises. But Amazon's doing well. You guys have, I think, a relationship with AWS. What's that, If I'm an Amazon customer, how do I get involved with Platform9? What's the hook? Where's the value? What's the product look like? >> Yeah, so, and it kind of goes back towards the point we spoke about, which is, Kubernetes is going to increasingly get commoditized. So, customers are going to find the right home whether it's hyperscalers, EKS, AKS, GKE, or their own infrastructure, to run Kubernetes. And, so, where we want to be at, is, with a project like Arlon, Sirish spoke about the barbell strategy, on one end there is these advanced Kubernetes users, majority of them are running Kubernetes on AKS, right? Because, that was the easiest platform that they found to get started with. So, now, they have a challenge of running these 50 to 100 clusters across various regions of Amazon, across their DevTest, their staging, their production. And, that results in a level of chaos that these DevOps or platform... >> So you come in and solve that. >> That is where we come in and we solve that. And it, you know, Amazon or EKS, doesn't give you tooling to solve that, right. It makes it very easy for you to create those number of clusters. >> Well, even in one hyperscale, let's say AWS, you got regions and locations... >> Exactly >> ...that's kind of a super cloud problem, we're seeing, opportunity problem, and opportunity is that, on Amazon, availability zones is one thing, but, now, also, you got regions. >> That is absolutely right. You're on point John. And the way we solve it, is by using infrastructure as a code, by using GitOps principles, right? Where you define it once, you define it in a yaml file, you define exactly how for your DevTest environment you want your entire infrastructure to look like, including EKS. And then you stamp it out. >> So let me, here's an analogy, I'll throw out this. You guys are like, someone learns how to drive a car, Kubernetes clusters, that's got a couple clusters. Then once they know how to drive a car, you give 'em the sports car. You allow them to stay on Amazon and all of a sudden go completely distributed, Edge, Global. >> I would say that a lot of people that we meet, we feel like they're figuring out how to build a car with the kit tools that they have. And we give them a car that's ready to go and doesn't require them to be trying to... ... they can focus on driving the car, rather than trying to build the car. >> You don't want people to stop, once they get the progressions, they hit that level up on Kubernetes, you guys give them the ability to go much bigger and stronger. >> That's right. >> To accelerate that applications. >> Building a car gets old for people at a certain point in time, and they really want to focus on is driving it and enjoying it. >> And we got four right behind us, so, we'll get them involved. So that's... >> But, you're not reinventing the wheel. >> We're not at all, because, what we are building is two very, very differentiated solutions, right. One, is, we're the simplest and easiest way to build and run Cloud Native private clouds. And, this is where the operational complexity of trying to do it yourself. You really have to be a car builder, to be able to do this with our Platform9. This is what we do uniquely that nobody else does well. And, the other end is, we help you operate at scale, in the hyperscalers, right. Those are the two problems that I feel, whether you're on-prem, or in the cloud, these are the two problems people face. How do you run a private cloud more easily, more efficiently? And, how do you govern at scale, especially in the public clouds? >> I want to get to two more points before we run out of time. Arlon and Argo CD as a service. We previously mentioned up coming into KubeCon, but, here, you guys couldn't be more relevant, 'cause Intuit was on stage on the keynote, getting an award for their work. You know, Argo, it comes from Intuit. That ArgoCon was in Mountain View. You guys were involved in that. You guys were at the center of all this super cloud action, if you will, or open source. How does Arlon fit into the Argo extension? What is Argo CD as a service? Who's going to take that one? I want to get that out there, because, Arlon has been talked about a lot. What's the update? >> I can talk about it. So, one of the things that Arlon uses behind the scenes, is it uses Argo CD, open source Argo CD as a service, as its key component to do the continuous deployment portion of its entire, the infrastructure management story, right. So, we have been very strongly partnering with Argo CD. We, really know and respect the Intuit team a lot. We, as part of this effort, in 5.6 release, we've also put out Argo CD as a service, in its GA version, right. Because, the power of running Arlon along with Argo CD as a service, in our mind, is enabling you to run on one end, your infrastructure as a scale, through GitOps, and infrastructure as a code practices. And on the other end, your entire application fleet, at scale, right. And, just marrying the two, really gives you the ability to perform that automation that we spoke about. >> But, and avoid the problem of sprawl when you have distributed teams, you have now things being bolted on, more apps coming out. So, this is really solves that problem, mainly. >> That is exactly right. And if you think of it, the way those problems are solved today, is, kind of in disconnected fashion, which is on one end you have your CI/CD tools, like Argo CD is an excellent one. There's some other choices, which are managed by a separate team to automate your application delivery. But, that team, is disconnected from the team that does the infrastructure management. And the infrastructure management is typically done through a bunch of Terraform scripts, or a bunch of ad hoc homegrown scripts, which are very difficult to manage. >> So, Arlon changes sure, as they change the complexity and also the sprawl. But, that's also how companies can die. They're growing fast, they're adding more capability. That's what trouble starts, right? >> I think in two ways, right. Like one is, as Madhura said, I think one of the common long-standing problems we've had, is, how do infrastructure and application teams communicate and work together, right. And, you've seen Argo's really get adopted by the application teams, but, it's now something that we are making accessible for the infrastructure teams to also bring the best practices of how application teams are managing applications. You can now use that to manage infrastructure, right. And, what that's going to do is, help you ultimately reduce waste, reduce inefficiency, and improve the developer experience. Because, that's what it's all about, ultimately. >> And, I know that you just released 5.6 today, congratulations on that. Any customer feedback yet? Any, any customers that you've been able to talk to, or have early access? >> Yeah, one of our large customers is a large SaaS retail company that is B2C SaaS. And, their feedback has been that this, basically, helps them bring exactly what I said in terms of bring some of the best practices that they wanted to adopt in the application space, down to the infrastructure management teams, right. And, we are also hearing a lot of customers, that I would say, large scale public cloud users, saying, they're really struggling with the complexity of how to tame the complexity of navigating that landscape and making it consumable for organizations that have thousands of developers or more. And that's been the feedback, is that this is the first open source standard mechanism that allows them to kind of reuse something, as opposed to everybody feels like they've had to build ad hoc solutions to solve this problem so far. >> Having a unified infrastructure is great. My final question, for me, before I end up, for Lisa to ask her last question is, if you had to explain Platform9, why you're relevant and cool today, what would you say? >> If I take that? I would say that the reason why Platform9, the reason why we exist, is, putting together a cloud, a hybrid cloud strategy for an enterprise today, historically, has required a lot of DIY, a lot of building your own car. Before you can drive a car, or you can enjoy the car, you really learn to build and operate the car. And that's great for maybe a 100 tech companies of the world, but, for the next 10,000 or 50,000 enterprises, they want to be able to consume a car. And that's why Platform9 exists, is, we are the only company that makes this delightfully simple and easy for companies that have a hybrid cloud strategy. >> Why you cool and relevant? How would you say it? >> Yeah, I think as Kubernetes becomes mainstream, as containers have become mainstream, I think automation at scale with ease, is going to be the key. And that's exactly what we help solve. Automation at scale and with ease. >> With ease and that differentiation. Guys, thank you so much for joining me. Last question, I guess, Madhura, for you, is, where can Devs go to learn more about 5.6 and get their hands on it? >> Absolutely. Go to platform9.com. There is info about 5.6 release, there's a press release, there's a link to it right on the website. And, if they want to learn about Arlon, it's an open source GitHub project. Go to GitHub and find out more about it. >> Excellent guys, thanks again for sharing what you're doing to really deliver Cloud Native at Scale in a differentiated way that adds ostensible value to your customers. John, and I, appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks so much >> Our pleasure. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Detroit, Michigan at KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2022. Stick around, John and I will be back with our next guest. Just a minute. (light synth outro music)

>> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California, theCUBE Studios, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, we're here with Reinhardt Quelle who's the principle engineer, Cloud Platforms and solutions Group at Cisco. Reinhardt, thanks for coming in, good to see you. >> Reinhardt: Thanks for having me. >> So, technical conversation around Cloud is something that we love having. We've seen the evolution over the past decade, Cloud 1.0, compute, storage, greenfield, cloud opportunities, great SaaS applications being built, you've built apps for over a decade, SaaS apps. >> That's right, I've been delivering applications, both to data centers and then of course, later into Cloud for a number of years. >> So you got some scar tissue. You have some successes, you've had some struggles, probably with on-prem, but the world's changed a lot and again, we've been covering this a couple years now. We saw public Cloud, all the benefits, no questions, great, you can lift and ship stuff up there, no problem, but the complexity's still there and now the trend is everything's shifting back to on-prem with Cloud. So now the hybrid model has been validated, Amazon Outpost, Anthos in Google, Azure Stack from Microsoft, clearly this mold, all the cloud vendors are telegraphing, they are doing it, this is a reality, this has been validated. >> Yeah, I think that's no surprise to those of us who've been deploying for a number of years. We've always had data centers where we're running our applications in data centers, and yes we started taking that into the Cloud, but there was always components of our infrastructure that continued to run on-prem, whether for historical reasons, for data gravity reasons, policy reasons, any number of reasons, but what we did learn was how to operate our applications differently and so for the last number of years, we've been moving a lot of the advantages of that Cloud back to on-prem. >> So I want to get your thoughts as principle engineer and look at the overall Cisco holistic portfolio of products because Cisco is a standard in the enterprise, every big company has Cisco gear at some level form of another. You've been dealing with networking for years, but now that networking becomes so much more acute issue because you still got to move packets around, another abstraction layer does networking, security, networking, all tie in to the growth area that is now this next generation of Cloud, Cloud 2.0, intelligent edge, data center on-prem, what's the Cisco story? Why Cisco, why now? What's the story? >> Well the amusing thing, of course, is the Cloud doesn't exist without networking. The very first thing when you set up an Amazon-- a compute in Amazon, you set up a virtual private network and you start deploying into that network, so it's always been true that networking is at the core of Cloud. And so the complexity that we're seeing over time is that the workloads are everywhere. The workloads aren't just in my data center and I'm not paying attention to data center networking or just cloud networking, it's connecting them together, securing them, making sure that they're fast and well managed. And so it's always been true that networking's at the core of this and as the edges get blurry, as we move workloads from one place to the other, all of the things that Cisco does are on managed networks, programmable networks, secure networks, all become even more important. >> And everything's amplified, too, in terms of its purpose. You're seeing automation is a big trend that's impacting the infrastructure and app developers. You've deployed SaaS apps within Cisco for over a decade, you've seen your share of successes and its issues but now as the data becomes critical, you got security perimeter issues are gone, and you got Surface here with industrial in IOT it's only getting more complex. So the complexity never went, but it's still complex these are the same problems. What's changed, what's the-- what's going on? >> Well so one of the things that's changed is that we've-- and this is something we can credit the Cloud providers for doing it is we've learned to treat our infrastructure in a different way. I mean the way we deploy and manage everything including networks compute, even applications. Operating the cloud demanded that we automate those things. Demanded the way, when you're managing now, fleets of thousands or tens of thousands of machines at scale in the cloud and when your call provider won't promise you that any machine won't go away at any moment you get good at replacing machines. And now we take those same tools, concepts, ways of operating that we did on the cloud and we apply them on print. Yeah, so a big part of what Cisco has been doing across our entire portfolio is ensuring that every piece of it from networking storage security is programmable and drivable through automation. >> You and I were talking before we came on camera and I wrote this down a phrase you like to use is, referring to Cisco, why Cisco is, We bring cloud innovation on-prem, what do you mean by that? >> Well really it's taking these new way of doing things, these new opportunities. Yeah, when we talk about-- we've had some funny conversations with our security guys, for example, we're historically in security we would have some policy, we would deploy applications against that policy once every six months or twelve months we would audit against that. Well one example of bringing the cloud innovation on-prem is the way you deploy that software, or deploy a new policy is via software. So auditing that is checking your code before you commit it, this says what it's going to do. Running reporting on the things that you've deployed so that you can see. So its taking these advantages of automation, and observability, and things like code review that are just normal practice in software development and apply them to infrastructure. And so, again, what Cisco is doing is making sure that all of our infrastructure can be-- can be programmed in that way, providing tools that allow us to program the things like Network Services Orchestrator or CloudCenter Suite that allow us to deploy applications or networks or whatever else as software entities . >> How about the reality of the person who's been innovating in the cloud and their reaction when they come back on prem they go, okay I've been doing this in the cloud and I turn around and I see all this. Is this the cloud innovation dynamic that you're referring to? Is it the realization that I had some innovation in the cloud, agility, automation and then trying to figure it out, or applying it, or both what's the reality when someone goes wow, I'm on-prem now, what's that innovation layer? >> Well there's several realities, depending on who you are and where you're coming from. One of my first roles at Cisco was, I was working on the Webex operation team and that-- the way we ran that operations was typical of the time it was built. And we did an acquisition that to accompany-- of a company that had been operating in Amazon and when they saw the way we that had to deploy and manage their application and infrastructure they were horrified. It's like, what do you mean I can't deploy a server in five minutes, what do you mean I can't manage the workflow in this way? So for them it was a shock and horror that they didn't have this infrastructure and that's when we deployed our first private cloud and Webex was to support that style of deployment. The flip side of that is the people who are operating those existing data centers with those existing workflows, their world changed, I mean they had to learn new ways of doing things, they had to learn new ways of managing their infrastructure, coding skills were a requirement not something that a few guys did, scripting in the background. So it was like, there's a lot of change to the people and to the way we did things but really it's a matter of bringing those, you know, bringing the cloud, bringing software development to operations, bringing software programmable to, hard programmability, to hardware. >> Yeah, I mean that's a great point. We cover that a lot on theCube, but I think one of the things you pointed out is the realization that, okay, great, new way of doing things, innovation. But as you kind of pointed out, there's a double edged sword there. The command and control of the network, which has been an old style tactic which doesn't go away, you still need to have control of certain things and on-premise, you certainly can control it on-premise, on cloud you think you control it through software, but this is the deep dive on tech conversation I want to have with you because we're talking about app deployment, Kubernetes management and the reality, I have my own gear on-site, as well as I'm maybe serverless into the cloud, this is the new reality. That you have to manage the controls. Take us through the-- those layers. App deployment, Kubernetes, and the reality of managing infrastructure on a future basis. >> Sure so, it's-- when we think about the application deployment it's very easy to kind of think about it in terms of the layers, and the programmable layers that you provide and I'll just touch--we won't go into detail on the products, but ultimately, today for an application-- someone deploying an application increasing that means push an application into Kubernetes, in other words I'm going to package my application's container, I'm going to hand it to Kubernetes through Kubernetes API and I'm going to expect Kubernetes to do the deployment and management of that. Okay, so that just makes the problem for the guy one layer below you, where's Kubernetes come from? It's like who deploys and manages Kubernetes? And so there's a number of different solutions and the public cloud you can use, you know, AKS, or Google's Kubernetes service, or Amazon's, any of these, but on-prem, where's it come from, who's going to manage it for you, who's going to create that? So Cisco's container platform is a product to deploy and manage Kubernetes to offload that from the developer, I mean, from the operations guy or the platform manager. Of course, that deployer of Kubernetes expects programmable infrastructure, how are you going to be able to deploy a VM or manage hardware that runs below that? >> Back to your innovation message. It's the innovation they want >> Well ultimately the guy wants the simple push the button and get the application deployed, that means someone has to get this layer deployed and well to get that layered deployed, what's there? So we continue to support virtualization managers, whether VMWare or our own cVim, Cisco Virtual Infrastructure Manager. All of these products its like, how do I manage this pool of hardware to provide that next layer of service? So, but in every case the programmability of the infrastructure or as far down as you can go becomes paramount, so, you know, when the guy racks a piece of hardware in the data center he doesn't want to think about how does this read card need to get configured, right? He just wants to rack it, plug it in, and then turn it over to software as quickly as possible. >> And that's the cloud innovation on-prem that you're referring to, that's making it cloud-like operations for Agility Automation, provisioning. >> Consistency, reliability, observability, give you an example of that, I mean when we, when we were talking originally when we were starting these cloud deployments and we had this conversation with Infosac about which application lives in which zone and how do you manage that? And we were like, well the zoning processes that's used in the past don't apply anymore. The way we manage that thing is with security groups, and the security groups are created this way. Here's the software, here's the software. When I'm talking software, I'm talking about configuration and scripts in this case, Ansible, Chef, Puppet whatever, that generate those security groups that generate those rules and it's like, it changes the way the security guy interacts with your team. It's no longer, file a ticket to review your app and app deployment and have a new ticket to do a deployment, it's something that they can do in real time. We're talking about moving these processes left, you know, moving that audit to the system all the way back into the software development stage and then giving the tools to verify that afterwards. And their eyes literally popped open, it was like, you mean at any moment at any time I can say show groups and see what the security posture is right now. And it's like, yes! An that's what sold them on letting us behave in this new way, was the ability to audit in realtime. >> Yeah, and this is a major advantage. This brings up the question that comes us all the time, and I want to get your thoughts on this because this shapes into the overall cloud architecture, cloud portfolio, and in this case with Cisco products is workload portability. It used to be, oh the one way trip to the cloud, not anymore, it's not a one way trip to the cloud, it's now bi-directionally on-premise, been validated by LPOST, Anthos, and Azure Stack, this is going to be an operating model to your point about the cloud innovation now workload portability, I think that's been validated so I think we recognize, the industry recognizes that it's not just public cloud everywhere, it's hybrid. This has been validated. You agree. >> Absolutely we-- there were many things that we never did move to the cloud, never would move to the cloud. Whether it's for policy reasons, or the quantity of data that we had, or systems that weren't available on the cloud, for example DevTest Labs, that have soundproof rooms, it's all audio equipment. We sell phones, we have to test those phones, those aren't ever going to be on the cloud, they're going to be in their soundproof rooms so we can test the audio pairing. There's stuff like that that always lives unrolled. There's a myriad of-- >> Compliance resources also requires-- >> Compliance things, whether its a FedRAMP compliance, this data has to be in this country, well US in that case, European privacy things. It could be-- I was talking to one bank a number of years ago now that worked-- we're deploying, we're talking about deploying Kubernetes from, it's like what applications are you deploying? Why do they need to be here, well, they're building-- they've got a mobile first application they want to use all the latest and greatest ways to build and deploy that application. But the data that that application is accessing is in the mainframe. It hasn't moved in ten years, twenty years, it's not going to move anytime soon. So you put the application next to the data that it needs. An IoT, it might be control devices, or video devices, or any number of things that's like, I think there's a trend overall, it's less about workload portability for a lot of people or being able to move workloads, it's saying, where's the best place for this particular workload to run, and so then provide the appropriate infrastructure to run that workload. And that's where we get back to saying, wait a minute I want to use containerization, I want to use orchestration systems, I want to use all these modern tools for doing this, but still put the workload where it needs to be. >> That is a profound statement, I want to just quickly unpack that a little bit because that really is the heart of the issue, cloud innovation. The workloads are going to be defining the requirements it needs, whether it's cloud selection or where it resides on-prem with what resources underneath it. That's not saying a company has to decide that because of that workload that the entire company has to use that 'cause the choices now because of the levels or granularity that cloud brings, the applications can get almost custom built or-- well not custom built but a specific hardware and compute to serve their needs. So if its a-- you're soul sourcing a set of resources for the workload. That's not saying that the infrastructure has to be that for everything, it's just the whole single cloud versus multi cloud dynamic. >> Yeah I mean, in fact, one of the things we're seeing more and more in our customers is, like, they don't have one cloud, they have multiple clouds, for multiple purposes. On-prem there's not one big private cloud that runs everything, there's lots of Kubernetes clusters and one of the things that a product like CCP does is allow you to deploy and manage multiple Kubernetes clusters for multiple purposes. Multiple problem domains, multiple political domains, financial domains, who's paying for this thing? Well, it's easy if you just buy the servers that are appropriate to your department and you run it. You still get to take advantage of all the way you deploy and package and run these applications, which is just hands down better than we ever did before. And that's some of the innovation we have. Now once you start doing this, once you start deploying these applications in multiple places, in multiple-- well, where are your security borders, where are your perimeters, how do you secure any of this, how do you connect all this stuff? How do you visualize all this stuff? And so, as you look at our products from, you know, we talked a little bit about the infrastructure pieces of that, you know the, Kubernetes deploying to an infrastructure manager, deploying ultimately to hardware, every layer of that. You know, UCS and CVIM and CCP, all of those layers are there and programmable. Okay, now we're deploying workloads, now I've got to connect the things together, how do I monitor it, how do I-- and so that's why you see products like Stealthwatch Cloud, and AppD, and the other applications to do monitoring and security across a now fully distributed application. >> You know, sometimes it's hard for me as a cube host to kind of get the story out about certain trends, especially when big players like Cisco, a lot of people know that I'm pretty bullish on Cisco, I've been very vocal about the Cisco opportunity with respect to cloud and critical, by the way in some areas and I think I would probably advise certain things to be certain ways. But one of the things, I think, is a great opportunity that you guys have, and you're kind of getting at, I want to just get your reaction and thoughts on this, is that what you're talking about here is an environment that's going to be constantly dynamic. That's constantly changing. And being complex is not going away, abstracting away the complexity is the game. But Cisco has always been successful in multi environments, different environments because networking has always been about diversity of networks. Campus this, and SD-- so it's not a new concept for Cisco to deal with this concept of multiple environments. Do you agree with that? What's your reaction to that? How would you answer that? Is that something you think Cisco's dominating in? Is that reason why Cisco is serving all these choices? What's your thoughts on that? >> I would have to say that overall the integrating lots of disparate things. Connecting lots of disparate things is in Cisco's DNA, I mean from our original routers and switches at the very beginning it was always multiple things connected to each other often multi-vendor working across standards and across standard things. When we talk about Kubernetes we're not talking about the Cisco Kubernetes we're talking about Kubernetes, the real thing, the actual Kubernetes, we're talking about-- and we're talking about ceiling, we're talking about openstack a standard, we're talking about-- so across all these boards connecting and integrating disparate things, is kind of what Cisco does. >> And so if you're deploying applications you've done that and certainly your customers are, they're never going to have one general purpose situations that's going to be scenarios, right? And certain things will be guiding principles, some will be governors that will then dictate things that might not be classic cloud native. Can you talk about that and give some examples why that's important and the reality of the statement. >> Yeah so, just use one example of an application, Webex teams our enterprise chat application, for example, that is your classic microservices modern cloud native application. There are three ways of deploying applications in that platform that are appropriate for the three different things. We got the services themselves, the media bridges, or the switching engines that runs these containers in a container orchestration fabric. There's the VM base things that are things like media bridges that don't run in containers very well, not because of the problem with the containers, but because of the overlay networks the containers bring with it and the way you route data to those. And we got physical machines. Now when we're actually running certain things on physical machines and so all of these exist in any kind of, even a brand new modern application so even within a single product family there's not one true way of doing things, what's the appropriate way to deploy this application. What's the right deployment target for this thing and how do I connect these things. >> You measure InfoSec so politics might be a driver that have nothing to do with technology, could be a human capital, resource issue, it could be something scalable. >> And the politics or even or can be even these temporal things, it's like, look I can spend, you know, three weeks trying to convince an InfoSec to do things in a particular way or it can just deploy somewhere where it makes them happy and move on, move on to the next problem and then later when they catch up with the way we're doing things, we may move it later. The other thing about timing on all this is the story is changing constantly when we deployed that application, we did not use Docker containers. And everybody says, why aren't you using Docker? Because Docker didn't exist three years ago! It's like the decisions we were making at that time are changing ever more rapidly. And the reality for our enterprise customers is that you don't just forklift one and then replace it with another one, you tend to manage them all in parallel even as you're making transitions, you know, eventually you kind of get rid of the old stuff, maybe, the mainframe still exists >> Mhmm. >> But in general for most of our enterprise customers it's not and or it's not on-prem or on the cloud, it's not containers or visible machines, its and, I'm running all of the above. >> And to your point about the docker not being around when you guys were doing that, that's going to be a concept that's going to be applied down the road, hey that wasn't around when we set the architecture, so as an enterprise, your customers that you talk to, what is the guiding principle? What is the preferred architecture? Again, a lot of choices you guys are trying to make your portfolio fit the bill. What are some of the decisions they have to make? So, to future-proof because they don't want to foreclose an opportunity and or create technical debt for that matter. Why would they do that? So they kind of have to be holistic in their thinking. >> Yeah, future proof is always-- is a funny concept because the reality is, that the... The way you do things will change. You didn't make something that was future proof, you built an environment that allowed you to do this way and that way. So if you take a look at the way we deployed, for example, our infrastructure in general we start with the UCS substrate, we can run Oracle on bare-metal on those things when we need to. We can run virtualization on top of that, and run a layer of vms on top of that. We can run containers, now I've got choices. Common substrate, common way of managing those things but at least three different ways of deploying on those. So ultimately we're looking for standard practices that enables me to have to do the and to where I can run things side by side and can connect things, I can secure things over the top but run all of the above. And it's really a matter of building things that have kind of clean our connectural layers where one thing consumes the other and then be able to mix and match and plug them together Lego style as it were. >> This a great chat, and really reminds me of the conversations that we'll be having here in theCube. We've been doing a series with engineering leaders and you know, you mentioned foreclose in the future, future proofing which is kind of a buzz word. The conversation happening in the technical circles is about technical debt and I think, you know, I've always seen that enterprise you know, cost of ownership, you know, and the shark fin, the iceberg and what you don't see. Certainly that's been a paradigm that's been known but now you're getting into this notion of not just so much future proofing, it's really the balance of technical debt because you know something new is coming. This is a modern concept that takes costs of ownership and future proofing and kind of puts it to reality because you're essentially taking on some sort of technical debting from point A to point B, but you don't want to take on too much that you can't pay it back if new technology comes in. So this is what's been going on in some of the you know, top customers that we've been talking to. A new management concept, this is kind of a modern new management discipline. Your thoughts and reaction to that? >> So there's at least two different vectors that talk about on it. So, one of the things is, how do I take these older applications, these older ways of managing things and incrementally improve them. Because we can actually make it-- it is easier today to deploy a process running on a machine than it ever was before. Five years ago I would have a ticket, some guy would go and then install software manually, today we don't do that, we use configuration management, puppet and chefs, ansible, etc. We improve the way I do those things incrementally rather than just forklift them. I'm not rewriting these applications and saying okay, we're going to make these into cloud native applications and microservices and bla, bla, bla and replatform them. No I incrementally improve the way I operate that thing. Even if its just deploying the hardware more consistently underneath or improving this layer. So I incrementally reduce my debt by applying, again, deploying some of these new cloud... Cloud innovations, they're grown out of the cloud to the existing ways of doing things. But the other point I'll make on a lot of this, is that, certainly for our team, and for a lot of the customers I talk about we don't just arbitrarily go and replatform things, right? It's like if the thing is working, let it continue to work. Don't deploy the new thing alongside it. You know, we're more concerned about delivering new features, new capabilities, new things. And we do that, and we concentrate our efforts and our engineering efforts on that and not constantly rewriting the past. >> A container can certainly help you there too. >> Absolutely. Containers are beautiful tool for that, for encapsulating dependencies around a thing. And so you'll find in many cases we have applications that are not ready to deploy to run in Kubernetes with a schedule that's going to move it around but I can still take advantage of the container packaging and run it on a physical box with a normal Linux operating system and containerize it. So it's usually valuable. >> Reinhardt, I want to get your thoughts on one last talking track, that is relevant to something that we've been covering. Stu Miniman, co-host of theCube with me on many of these events around networking, we both love networking, both networking nerds. Always joke about how networking is where you go to find out about the state of the industry is. Look at what's going on with the network. Because network ultimately tells the truth. Movin' things around, security people go to the network. You start to see, everything's revolving around the network now, more than ever. I mean, still, it's been that way forever. But you made a comment before we went on camera you said, just adding another layer of networking. If you think about what you just said, the networking paradigm is just kind of slowly moving to another layer. So networking is happening, it's just happening differently. So as the dev ops innovations in the cloud happens it's really a network innovation. 'cause security pivots off the network data used applications, instrumentations, on the network data, everything's around networks. >> It's intrinsically tied. In the past we had a machine, a physical machine had a network interface, singular, and a network identity an address. VMs, multiple network interfaces, multiple on every VM. Kubernetes, an IP address per application, right? And it's like the networking space is exploding as we move up. And yes, we now have a network connectivity and management problem that's over of magnitudes more complicated than it was before because now, individual workloads have IP addresses. And by the way I'm deploying workloads in multiples. I don't run a single application, I run a pool of applications, each one has an address. And so yeah networking is-- continues to be intrinsic and it just moves up. >> And it's fascinating too, you know, we always speculate about looking for that new technology, the new protocol, something new, the shiny new toy. But if you think about it, all the science and intellectual property has been built already. It's usually a combination of a couple different things. In network theory, in network management, the concepts are still around. It's being applied differently now. >> Or sliced into smaller, you know, smaller, the bites are smaller that you're dealing with, right? Everything has an IP address, we got thousands of IP addresses now that we're managing. Having IP address management problems, we have other things to manage now. >> The game is still the same. >> The game is still the same, it's still TCP IP networking. >> So final question, bottom line, why Cisco and the cloud networking as it comes together? As this stuff starts to modernize, hybrid is certainly reality hardcore, as people are doing today. Multi cloud is also another reality right around the corner. Why Cisco? Why Cisco's products and portfolios for the cloud? >> Well fundamentally, as we said earlier, the cloud has a networking problem. Networking underpins everything that we do. The networking, from physical networking the compute has to run on something. So networking, compute, orchestration systems for all of that, security that overlays all of that. I think Cisco uniquely has all of the components that it takes to build a modern infrastructure stack, and in fact deploy applications to that. I think, the breath of knowledge and capabilities Cisco has across those is unique. And then, also, I would say, Cisco's experience. We have many-- several of the world's largest SaaS applications in the Cisco family. Things like umbrella, DNS security, or Webex, web conferencing, we also have deep expertise in running applications and that's within the Cisco domain of expertise. >> Certainly in good position, I really I'm really bull-ish on what you guys can do. I think the network is where the trust is, it's where the data is, that's where the action is, and I think that's the cloud 2.0 equation. Thanks for coming in. Thanks for the insight. Reinhardt Quelle, principle engineer, Cloud Platforms of Cisco here sharing his insight on this Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. (electronic music flourish) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando Florida. Joining me, my co-host for this segment Dave Vellante sitting in for John Furrier and happy to welcome to the program Jeff Eckard, who's the Vice President of Storage Solutions at IBM. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, good to see you guys. >> All right, and 26,000 people here. It'd been many years since I'd been to Cisco Live. There's some things that are same, many of the same faces, but a lot of new jobs, a lot of buzz going on. What's your impression been of the show this week? >> Yeah, it's been an interesting, great show for IBM and our presence, but it's a very large ecosystem of Cisco partners, a lot of their, our joint end users and a lot of focus on multi-cloud. You've consistently heard that as a theme from Cisco as well as IBM since last fall at their partner forum and they've continued it here with a lot of focus on being able to take tools and capabilities and enabling enterprises to manage data where they want to manage it. And it's really interesting, from traditional systems vendors like Cisco, to see that focus particularly around developers. >> It's been fascinating for me to watch. Jeff, you and I have some background in the storage and storage networking piece, specifically, where it was like, OK, where I sit in the stack and I've got a couple of integrations, and we work on our standards here. It's much broader. >> Oh, absolutely. The things that we're working on. We're talking about cloud. There's a lot of software that flows. Data and applications are critically important. Talk a little bit about some of that transformation and how you're seeing the expansion, and-- >> Yeah, no, it's a interesting time. If you think about the opportunities and challenges facing all enterprises, data is at the core of digital transformation, digital enhancement, whatever term you wanna use with it. Typically, it's focused in on wanting to provide realtime insights so that you make better decisions against threats or opportunities. Being able to deliver personalized services to your clients, and then also improving your internal processes and business outcomes. And so data is core for digital transformation, and you kinda see, kind of this web of what we're talking about here and then what we're doing with clients as well. >> You know, Jeff, you talk about multi-cloud, you've been in the business for a while, and throughout your career you've tried to help customers simplify their lives, and everybody felt, I thought, OK, I'm gonna put stuff in the cloud, it's gonna get simpler, and now you see this spate of clouds, whether it's infrastructures of service, private clouds, SaaS, and complexity is, in some regards, never have been higher, particularly as it relates to the data. >> That's right. >> You've gotta figure out, where do you put this stuff? How do you protect it, what about governance? Even if you think security's better in the cloud, it might be different for every cloud. So how is IBM approaching, generally in your team, specifically approaching simplifying the complex of this multi-cloud world? >> Sure, so from an IBM Perspective, at the top level we approached it with innovative technology and a lot of industry expertise, whether it's in financial services or healthcare, cloud and what we do with the public IBM cloud is really important around the services we provide there, data and AI, and then as you come down from that, modern infrastructure is key because modern infrastructure supports the data. So when you look at 80% of enterprises are intending to be multi-cloud. Something like 70% already are, right? Because of what you referenced with the consumption of SaaS. So, multi-cloud is the defacto operating model for applications and then, therefore, for the data. So from an IBM storage and SDI perspective, we kind of view... There are three primary adoption patterns that we're seeing with our clients. The first is around modernizing traditional applications or workloads, which also drags modern infrastructure, flash-based systems, leveraging more of storage efficiency technologies, like compression and dedupe, being able to protect that data, whether it's in a traditional VMware environment or the emerging containers environment. So, yeah, data's at the core. The partnership that we have with Cisco around VersaStack enables us to support traditional private clouds, whether those are built on the VMware set of tools or now, as last week we announced, the VersaStack for IBM Cloud Private. IBM Cloud Private is an enterprise platform for developers to leverage microservices and containerized IBM Middleware Services, whether that's WebSphere or MQ or Microservices Builder, as well as a whole catalog of open source technologies and tools to get agility out of the DevOps process and then also layer on analytics on top of that. >> So customers, they're gonna want consistency across all those clouds. So what role do you guys bring? Are you trying to be a platform of platforms, or is that too aspirational? Obviously, you can't have 100% market shares, so that's not practical. But to the extent that people adopt your technologies, is that how we should be thinking of about it? >> Well, so IBM Cloud Private is an open platform. It's built on Docker runtimes and Kubernetes orchestration. It's open to where you can leverage things like Red Hat OpenShift if you've chosen them for your containers platform, and then we also support the traditional Private Clouds with VMware. So, there's a whole set of tools in there. What we're trying to do from a data management perspective is protect it, whether that's backup and recovery, morphing into this new category of secondary data reuse. So, for instance, from a traditional workflow of just doing backup and recovery, we can now take native format copies of the data, whether that's in Oracle or SQL Server database, et cetera, and take that data to the Public Cloud, where different personas and use cases can act on that data. So you can spin up a VM from that Native format within our tools in the IBM cloud. So that's from a data protection standpoint. On data management, we have, later this year, we'll talk more formally about programs that we have around metadata management. That's where you can index and classify, for instance, unstructured or structured data, and act on that in terms of, where was it last accessed? Who should be accessing it? Is it personally identifiable information? Do I wanna run analytics on it? So the metadata management is an opportunity to plug in to broader IBM things, whether it's Watson data platform or information governance catalogs, to provide that kind of uber across cloud infrastructure management. >> And that's a machine sort of intelligence, automation component, that scale, right? >> It could absolutely be used for augmented intelligence, artificial intelligence, some of the machine learning pieces as well. >> Jeff, Jeff, I'm wondering if you could give us a little insight of some of the places that customers are falling down. We were just talking to a systems integrator before you came on and he said, "Well, sometimes I take a virtualized environment "and I move it and it's not really geared "for this modern platform." Containerization can help in a lot of these environments, so when you talk about the pattern we've seen that works many times is you modernize the platform, and then I can modernize the application, start pulling things apart, start refactoring, start playing with some of these environments because I can't just... Lift and shift can help, but it can't be that's the only move. There's a lot of work that needs to get done, and a lot of time that's underestimated. >> Right, well it's not a panacea, but there is a key tool called Transformation Advisor that is part of the IBM cloud platform. It's intended to assist with the challenge that you just stated, which is, OK, how do I take a traditional workload, determine if it's ready to be containerized, and then start the process of containerization. You can go back to some of the VM migration pieces, too. There's a whole set of tools that enterprises have used. Transformation Advisor is one tooling example of what we can do in the platform. And then we obviously have services through Global Services that can help at a large scale for enterprises to kinda make that step. >> You bring up a good point there, 'cause we always struggle with some of these tool transformations, but if you go back to virtualization it was really some of the organizational things that had to shift. Wonder if you can talk about some of the things that are changing here. This show, we've spent a lot of time talking about Cisco's moving up the stack, network people are much more closer tied to some of those new application development, especially with things like intent-based networking. >> Well, it's a interesting reminder that we get often from clients, 'cause you're really touching at some of the remember the operational steps, things like containerization are interesting new technologies, and there's a lot of advantages to them. But just going back a minute, of the heritage with what we've been doing with Cisco around VersaStack, leveraging it on a VMware environment, we hear a lot from customers that their operational practices really are set around Vmware and the VMware tooling. So one of the things that we did with IBM Cloud Private is, it can run on top of VMware. So as customers want to take a kind of transitive step towards microservices, they can continue to leverage their operational practices around VMware. So it's important to, it sometimes takes enterprises a little bit longer than you may guess, right, to embrace the new set of things. Our product portfolio and our directions are set where they can leverage some of the operational pieces they already have. >> Well, just for our viewers who may not know, I mean, the recent history of IBM and Cisco is quite interesting. IBM at one point purchased a company called BNT, which got sold as part of the X86 sale to Lenovo. That opened up a huge opportunity for IBM and Cisco to partner because it was very clear swim lanes. And that sorta catalyzed a relationship that from your standpoint, VersaStack was sort of the first instantiation of that relationship. So, take us through, sort of, where you guys are in the partnership and where you see it going. >> Sure, yeah, so VersaStack, for folks who may not be familiar, it's a Converge System, right? So it's IBM storage, flash or otherwise, leverages Cisco UCS servers, and then their Nexus and MDS Switching. So it's integrated, validated as a single solution to, as the name implies, to be very versatile and provide agility and flexibility. And so, through our routes to market, either with distribution or resellers or system integrators, it is a way that we can address platforms that matter to our joint customers. We've talked about IBM Cloud Private. A lot of heritage around VMware and SQL server and Oracle and a lot of focus around SAP HANA. So, we typically will partner around which enterprise platforms are we going, and then we also partner, in general, around MDS Switching with Cisco, and we'll talk more about that in months to come as we enhance that relationship. >> So, the solutions part of your title, you just mentioned VMware, Oracle, SAP HANA, there may be others. How do you guys approach solutions? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, so a solution, at a PetaLogic level, is a successful repeatable outcome. And what we focus on, then, are the integrations that matter. Those could be, integrations with IBM tools, like we talked about with IBM Cloud Private. Could be the integrations that we do jointly with Cisco through the validated design process for some of these applications or databases. And so we have teams that do the validation work and figure out how we marry IBM capabilities with ecosystem capabilities. And there's a whole, whether we're automating private clouds or accelerating workloads including the partnership that IBM and Cisco have with Horton Works. And then in industry context as well, particularly in healthcare and financial services. We'll pick the platforms that really matter and then do the integrations that enable us to take, whether it's our systems or our software or IBM level capabilities to market. >> I wanna come back to this simplicity theme, specifically in the context of data protection. With all this multi-cloud, data protection has become a really hot topic. You guys have dramatically simplified your data protection offering with Spectra Protect Plus. Talk about data protection, how it's changing from where it used to be just, OK, it's a virtualized world. We kind of understand the challenges of virtual data protection. That has played itself out, and now there's a whole new wave coming. What's your perspective on this? >> Well, I don't know if the virtual is play, I mean, the virtualized environment is still kind of paying the freight, if you will. >> Yeah, played out in terms of-- >> Yes, no, no, yeah, right. >> We understand what had to change. >> Right. And customers have made that change >> Yeah, and your simplicity point on that is really key. So one of the enhancements that we announced last year at VMWorld was Spectrum Protect Plus. So that's an agent list, OVA based, VM based backup and recovery tool. And it's very simple to use. The trick is that we've focused its capabilities around secondary data re-use. So I mentioned earlier, that whole workflow has evolved to where the data has increasing value beyond its primary use, right? So backup and recover, but then we can leverage those native format copies. Spectrum Protect Plus is available either on a bring your own license or a monthly subscription in the IBM cloud, other clouds over time. And so we enable enterprises to not only do the traditional backup and protection, but very simply, move that data to either a secondary or tertiary data center, if that's still a part of their backup architecture, or into the public cloud. And so the simplicity factor comes in, again, that it's agent lists. There's a catalog of where all your copies are, and you can reuse that data for whether it's DevOps or DevTest or analytics purposes. >> OK, so that's helpful. So what I'm trying to get to was sort of the enablers, maybe from a technology standpoint, because in the virtualization world, it was all about efficiency because you didn't have the underutilized physical resources anymore. >> Yep, right. >> All the servers utilized 10%. (chuckles) Well, I got rid of a lot of those physical servers, and the one job that needed that power was backup, so I needed a new way to approach it. What I'm hearing is, in this multi-cloud world, it's a focus on simplicity. I'm inferring from that, a cloud-like experience, maybe some other capabilities that you guys are-- >> Yeah, so. >> Doing away with. >> The containers are a progression. I mean, VMware came around to maximize your CPU and storage utilization. Containers provide yet another level of efficiency on top of that. They bring with them the need for changes in your data protection. And so we, at Think in March, we talked about our directions around container aware data protection and container aware snapshots. Most vendors will use snapshots and then volume level controls of how we've traditionally done backup. We have a progression, and we'll talk more about it later in the year, of how we do snapshots, again, that are container aware. They leverage our tools, such as Spectrum Copy Data Management, Spectrum Protect Plus, integrate with our arrays. But they'll bring the same level of capability that we've had traditionally in a virtualized environment to also support data protection in a container world. >> Well, it's an interesting landscape right now in data protection. >> Oh, it's awesome! There's so many new tools, and it's great to be able, (Dave chuckling) like we talked about earlier, to partner with Cisco around some of this as well. >> Great, Jeff, I wanna give you the final word, as if, for those that couldn't make it to the show, either share key conversation you're having, you're hearing from customers, or a big takeaway from the show that you'd like to share. >> Sure, yeah, we've had a lot of customers come up and wanna know, OK, well, how do you start, right? And we talked about, there are three primary adoption patterns, whether it's modernizing, and typically it will start with modernizing traditional workloads. 70% of private cloud usage is for that particular use case. Well, you can pretty quickly show them, then, the progression to, OK, they wanna be more agile. They wanna go cloud-native. From that private cloud infrastructure, you can do that, and then you can have a consistent way that you interact around services in the public cloud. And so that's what we've been talking to clients about. They wanted to know, how do I start with what I have, and then how do I get to this better future? And how do I leverage your tools and capabilities? And so whether that's with IBM systems components or what we do with our partnership with Cisco, we're showing them how we, collectively, can help them on that journey. >> All right, Jeff, I really appreciate all the updates. Dave, thanks so much for joining me for this segment. >> Yeah, thank you. >> We still have a full day here, three days wall-to-wall coverage of theCUBE, Cisco Live 2018. Thanks so much for watching. (techno musical flourish)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you be Veritas. (light music) >> Welcome back to the Aria Hotel and Veritas Vision 2017. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stewart Miniman. Rama Kolappan is here, he's the Vice, worldwide Vice President of Product Management and Global Alliances. Rama, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. So, 360 is a big topic of conversation. It's a fundamental, strategic evolution for Veritas. Why is 360 Data Management needed? >> So, 360 Data Management is an integrated set of products and solutions, if you will, that helps you with data protection, also with copy data management use cases. If you want to move the data and workload for some of the resiliency services as well, and if you, if a customer is also looking for any of the data visibility, which is a very important part of the 360 Data Management. So, we can offer all of it as part of one platform. So it is a very powerful integrated solution set, if you will. >> So we should think of it as a platform, not a product. Everybody talks about platforms today, the API Economy, Platforms beat Products is sort of the mantra, right? Is that the right way to think about it? >> Correct. And, also, we make sure that the different solutions, which is part of 360 Data Management Suite, works with each other, right? For example, if you actually back up your data, you should be able to use the same copy to do a DevTest. So we have a solution called Velocity that is part of our copy data management solution. It should be used, you should be able to use the backup data to do your disaster recovery if you can, right. >> So how does that resonate with customers? I mean, I get the platform perspective, certainly from a vendor view, you got to have the platform. Do the customers see it the same way? Or do they just want to buy products? >> No, so it is a suite, right? And what customers want, especially enterprise customers, they're looking for, to partner with a vendor, like, for example, us. One is for data protection, primarily, in many cases. Once you protect your data, they're looking for instead of finding the products to use, I can use the same data and how can I get value out of it? So I need to have the visibility about the data itself, so we have our InfoMap solution as part of 360 DM suite, to give you the visibility of what that data is with all the metadata information through that, and once they back up the data, they also have other things to do with respect to moving your data, moving your workload, and especially with the cloud adoption, many of them are going through the transformation. There are some pre-consolidation cloud adoption, and so on, so forth, and they need to move their data and workload, say, from on-prem to cloud, and you can also do it from cloud to cloud also, which is coming soon. So, some of those challenges are very critical, and they are looking for someone like Veritas who can offer that solution for them, which is essentially protect it, move your data, workload, be able to do copy data management on it for DevTest use cases, be able to provide visibility, and the digital compliance is a big factor, which I haven't even gone deeper into. There are lot of solutions to offer for the customers. >> Rama, take us inside how 360 Data Management fulfills the vision that was laid out a year ago. I think back to early in my career it was, like, it was the hardware, you know, you follow the Tick-tock of Intel. Today, software, we can usually talk a little bit further about the roadmap but, you know, customers are going to hold you well, "Can I use it now?" Do you have all those pieces, you know? What kind of pieces have been filled in this week, and, you know, where are the pieces where it's more aspirational than where we are today? >> I'm surprised you remembered the Tick-tock Model, which is essentially go through the process and architecture change, alternating with Intel, right? That's the model, I was there for like nine years or so. >> Marching to the cadence of Moore's law, that's what we used to do as an industry. >> Exactly. So, for 360 Data Management, we announced it last year at Vision and at that point, we are putting in the solutions and the use cases together. And what we did, we worked really hard the past one year to make sure that we put these solutions together. One, they should work with each other. Two, we have a tighter integration. And three, we should be also adding more solutions together and we made it also easier for a customer to buy, it's one SKU, right? So, you don't need to have multiple SKUs to do 10 different things. It's much easier to buy. It'll do all the things that an enterprise customer want with all the stuff that I talked about earlier, and from there on, they should be also, we should be able to also cater to some of the newer problems that customers have, which is, essentially, we launched CloudPoint, for example, which does a snapshot management, and we're adding more capabilities to it, and going forward, you will see that the 360 Data Management will evolve to cater to the customer needs. We always place customer in the forefront and make sure that their needs are met first, and that's the stuff that will design the solution, based on their needs. >> We spoke to Mike Palmer this morning and one of the things he said that kind of matured a little bit is, "That interaction with the cloud, when you get down into it, it's nice to talk about public clouds and people use many clouds but they're all a little bit different." So, maybe take us inside, there's a couple announcements you made, maybe give us a little bit of color on that and, you know, come on, tell us how is it working with all these big players? >> So, I run the technology alliances team here as well, so my team works with the various cloud vendors, which is essentially Azure through IBM to Google, AWS, and so on, so forth, right? So we are already working with AWS on multiple product integration, deeper integration. With Azure we are making sure that from some of the roadmap, like when recently we launched EnterpriseWorld, to make sure that it supports Azure, and then also we launched the VIP release that happened very recently. Support for Azure, as well. And we make sure that the other products that I talked about have the cloud as a significant piece of it, part of the roadmap. We have other vendors that are, we have partners that we are working with like IBM, Google, et cetera. They have their own strengths and we are initially going to go, we already sell on a backup as part of our, with IBM. We've been doing that business with them for more than 10 years, right? So there's a lot of moving parts in the sense that they are coming up with a lot of innovation. We are coming up with a lot of innovation and we make sure that we deliver what the customers want with those cloud vendors. And a very simple example is that if you want to do a data and workload migration on-prem to cloud, we can help with that very critical use case for anyone who's going through, looking at cloud transformation and journey to cloud. And, likewise, basic use cases also like backup to cloud, backup in cloud, disaster recovery, migration, DevTest, and these use cases is what we target, and it is part of the 360 Data Management suite itself. >> Can I ask you, it's kind of a wonky question, but it's something I'm curious about, and we talked to Mike Palmer a little bit about it, the challenge of integrating to various cloud services, in the non-trivial nature that, his answer was actually quite interesting. He said, "Listen, it was a lot harder "when we had a gazillion OS's, a lot easier now." But I want to understand that better. So, when you look at, and I am going to pick AWS only because I know it a little bit better and their services, but when you look at the myriad of data, sort of services that they have, are you just targeting the data stores? Like, an S3 or an EBS or a Glacier, or do you have to also think about integrating with other data types, DynamoDB, Kinesis, RedShift, Aurora, et cetera, et cetera. How far do you have to go, and what are the complexities of doing that? >> It's a very interesting time, right. There are various cloud service providers who are there, and each of them have their own services and their own storage, right? So, there's no one standard. S3 has been a standard for last one or two years or so. What we are doing is that we're looking at the portfolio, and we look at the use cases for what we are trying to solve for the customers in the cloud and based on that, we actually have some basic use cases which you don't need a full integration. You need some integration with some of those services, which is where we have people that are doing a lot of closer integration with AWS, and other service providers as well. Going forward, we will be using some of those, you mentioned about many DynamoDB, and other services that they have, machine learning services that they have. >> Stu: Sure. >> And different cloud providers have their own strengths and where they, what they offer. So, we will be looking to integrate with our existing portfolio with some of those services so that it is beneficial for customer. For example, if a customer wants to use only AWS, we are tightly integrated so that they get the best experience in AWS, same thing with Azure, same thing with Google cloud, same thing with IBM cloud, same thing with Oracle public cloud. So, that's our direction. First things first, get all of these basic use cases catered to for the customer. Going forward, have a tighter integration with their services. >> And your value in that chain is visibility and management. It's not so much optimization of that service, is it? >> So, I wouldn't call it as optimization of services. We focus a lot on the data visibility. I think in the keynote, and in my keynote, you might have heard also, is that some of the things that customers, we talk with customers a lot and we find that many of the, many times, they don't know what they have it. Everyone knows that it's called dark data, right. We provide the visibility so that they know what data they have before they do any migration. They know what needs to be migrated. And, as you all know, there are different storage tiers in cloud, like your S3, S3IA. You have your Glacier and it is expensive to bring data back from, say, Glacier to any other storage tier all on-prem. So, you need to have the visibility before you send the data out, right? So, we helped with that as well. So, visibility plays a very critical role in so many areas, not even just cloud but also on-prem as well. >> Rama, 360 Data Management's vision was laid out a year ago. A lot of the pieces are in place now. How are you tracking success, you know? Can you give us how many customers you're doing or just kind of growth, adoption, and how should we be looking forward to kind of measure and say how good this is doing? >> So, we actually launched 360 Data Management not too long ago. In the sense we put the package together, program together, and, as part of it, we saw extremely a lot of good traction not just from one geo, we actually saw a lot of traction in Asia Pacific, in MER, in Americas as well. A lot of the customers are looking for, I mean, there are three tiers to it, as well. We have bronze, gold, silver, right? And we see equal traction across the board. And, right now, I can't give you the numbers numbers, but, having said that, we see a lot of traction from customers on adoption and we have a huge pipeline where customers are very interested. These are backup customers who are looking to do many other things like resiliency services, like copy data management, and so on, so forth. So, the 360 Data Management really solves the problem, what they're looking for. >> Yeah. Can you give us a little color to that packaging and pricing? It's a subscription model to my understanding. >> It is a subscription model but-- >> Which is a little different than if you have a traditional and, you know, what are you seeing, what's the feedback been from customers? >> So, it is a subscription model when we went to market. We are going to be offering as a perpetual as well. So there is a gold, silver bronze tier, I had mentioned it. We have a Backup, InfoMap, and also EBFile as part of the bronze. And then you have, we have P as part of the silver plus bronze together and then in the gold, we have Access, also, as part of the solution. So, they can pick what they want and from our... Going forward, we do hear feedback from customers that they want perpetual as well. So, we already, we heard them. We'll make it happen. >> How about the small, midsize business, what are you, what are you doing for them? And can you talk about that a little bit? >> I'm glad you asked that because a lot of the 360 Data Management is centered around net backup, right? And with net backup, adark, all the good releases. There are also a lot of SMB and mid-market customers, and we have a solution called BackupExec, and I'm sure most of you are aware of BackupExec, it's been there for many years. So, BackupExec solves their problem and within BackupExec, we make sure that there are a lot of SMB customers who have like three or four backup products. And we want to make sure that there's one product that can protect the physical, virtual, and cloud environments. So, BackupExec does that. >> Last question. So, the ecosystem, it's evolving. You guys have great ambitions. Microsoft was here, had a big, big presence. Maybe just general thoughts on the ecosystem and, specifically, your relationship with Microsoft and other cloud suppliers. >> So, we work very closely from a strategic level with the CSPs. We call them the Cloud Service Providers. With Microsoft, we are doing a lot of, not just product integration for Azure, we'll also be supporting many things for AzureStack going forward. We're working with them on that. Also, I mentioned about BackupExec, we're also going to market. We are spending a significant amount of money to define the goal, to go to market with them, with their partners, and so on, so forth. Not just for BackupExec but across for all other products. That said, we also have other partners from the Cloud Service Provider point of view. There is a lot of effort happening from product integration, defining goal market, and as we define that, we're also engaging with their channel partners, who are also our channel partners, to help with the goal market. >> Cool, alright. Well, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, Rama. Really great to meet you and great to talk to you. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Be right back. (light music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017. Brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. >> I'm Stu Miniman, here with my cohost Keith Townsend, and you're watching wall to wall coverage of VM World 2017 on the Cube here in Las Vegas. You know, third day of programming. We've done so many interviews. A lot of people went to parties last night, you know up early for lots of executive meetings, but you know we go strong through the whole show because we've got great guests, so happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Peter FitzGibbon, Vice President and General Manager with Rackspace, and welcome back to the program Ajay Patel with VM Ware. >> Great to be here. >> Alright, so Peter, you know, Rackspace, interesting transformation over the last few years. You know we've had the Cube at OpenStack for a bunch of years. I've heard almost no discussion of OpenStack this week at the show. >> Man: I'm not complaining. >> I talked to Rackers though, at Reinvent. You have, you know, kind of reinvented the business there, but the VM partnership is one that's been going on for many years. Some people I talk to don't understand. I mean this is a sizable business that you've been doing. I said, you know, let's measure the Rackspace managed VM Ware business against the entire revenue stream of OpenStack outside of what RackSpace does, you know, and it's an interesting comparison. >> So RackSpace continues through the multi cloud company, offering our customers the choice and flexibility they want, so our OpenStack practice continues to grow strong and we continue to invest there, as we do in our VM Ware practice, which we have a great partnership with. Ajay and his team, over the last 10 plus years. >> Also for us, the partnership's only growing stronger. If you walk around WM World with all the banners, you've walked into the airports, the investment RackSpace is making around VM Ware technology, I couldn't be much more happier, so thank you for that. >> So Peter, to Stu's point, RackSpace has been part of the VM Ware community for a long time. I've run into a couple of Rackers on the show floor, talked through kind of what they're doing with their feet on the ground, great work. Can you talk through the relationship with the customer to this point? I mean RackSpace is known for fanatical support. How has that conversation changed over the past three years or so as we've gone through this changing VM Ware strategy to where we're at today? >> Yeah, we're continuing to try to support the customer on whichever technology they really want to land on, so it starts with the planning and analysis phase that we sit with customers and analyze their work loads and try to figure out what's the best fit for them outside of determining is it OpenStack, is it VM Ware? Is it our fanatical support on top of AWS? From a VM Ware perspective, we're really helping people to determine how to move out of the data center, or at least not extend the data centers as they have them right now. We recently launched our RackSpace private cloud powered by VM Ware Cloud foundations. It went to general availability last week, so that's a global effort that we're discussing with our clients and it's proving a very attractive options for those looking for an alternative to their own private cloud and moving to hosting private cloud model. >> Peter, that operating experience is one of the things that customers have been challenged with, and RackSpace, you know, known for, you know, they know how to do this. Talk to us about some of this journey as to how your customers are seeing things. You know RackSpace has had a few different private cloud options you talk about. You've given your customers choice, but what's different now in 2017 and what's the mindset of your customers? >> Yeah, we continue to offer 24 by seven, 365 fanatical support. It's what we really see as our true differentiator in the market, or we have 150 certified VM Ware Rackers on the team that really go beyond, above and beyond every single day for these customers, and looking at not just how to migrate into our private cloud, but how to optimize them when we're there, when they've landed on a VM Ware private hosted cloud solution, how do we really optimize it and really get the full value of the technology? And these are expensive and difficult technologies to use, so you want to make sure people are really getting the true value out of NSX and VSAN, and now with VCF, which we're really excited about. >> Yeah, for us, it's, you know, as you were speaking, I mean the biggest challenge and the constraints exclude resources. Having 150 specialists out there with fanatical support with the great VM Ware technology. And in some ways the VM Ware cloud announcement is kind of making the awareness that you have a cloud stack, that you can now get through, you know RackSpace private cloud, so for us it's really all boats are rising as a result, and not having the skilled capability to then accelerate deployment and delivery and operations is pretty exciting. >> So Ajay, can you talk a little bit about working with RackSpace specifically because RackSpace has a tradition of having a very pronounced way of supporting customers, whether you're a Fortune 500 or you're a small ma and pa shop, RackSpace is going to come with full engineering might and help build the most reliable solution, and that comes with kind of, I imagine, a predisposed position on something like VCF, VM Ware Cloud Foundation. What has it been like to engineer? >> I'll speak the best thing from one of the joint customers that we had the opportunity to be on a panel with, Show Tell, right, and it was interesting to say how Show Tell said RackSpace is part of their operating team, so they enrolled up front in terms of having a partner who can help them with the choice, they made the selection based on the excellent support, but more importantly, they're just an extension of the operating team, and being able to have a single team manage both the on prem and the cloud without having to build a separate kind of cloud team, that was a critical piece of this decision, so kind of this common operating model, which they seamlessly augment with skillset, you know, that was really what resonated for Show Tell and was the reason they chose. >> The operating model is something I was just going to go to in terms of really helping people how they're going to live in this multi cloud world across multiple different technology stacks, and that's what our fanatical support is intended to be, to really be an extension of their, of a homegrown IT team so we can really get the full benefit of these complicated technologies. >> Alright, Peter, you talk multi cloud, and one of the things we talk to customers is a lot of times they say they have a cloud strategy, but how they got there wasn't necessarily as plan full as they might have liked. I had somebody writing for Wikibon a couple years ago said we have composite cloud because you kind of look at it and you always said, you know, do I have Amazon? Yeah, everybody does, you know. Oh I've got some app that somebody needed on GCP. RackSpace is a manage service provider for a lot of different pieces. How do you help customers get their arms around it, you know, and you know, maybe talk, the VM Ware on Amazon, the VMC stuff, how do you look at that in the future, how does that tie into kind of the skillset that your team has? >> So we often see customers coming in with that composite cloud situation where they're like we think we're multi cloud, but we're not truly because they don't have a defined strategy about why they put certain workloads in certain places, it just grew up organically, often through lines of business. VMC is a really exciting offer for us and we're going to be launching it in early 2018. It really gives more choice for customers in terms of where they're going to run their workloads, be it running them in different availability zones that RackSpace doesn't cover or potentially used as a DR solution. >> So let's dive into that composite cloud space, and I really love that comment. What, cloud, multi cloud is one of those things, you don't know you don't have a multi cloud until you don't know you don't have a multi cloud. What are some of the surefire indicators that customers are in where a composite cloud experience or environment versus a true multi cloud? Like what is that conversation like? >> Man: What's a good best practice, yeah? >> Well I think there isn't a lot of good best practices from our customers' point of view. I think they often come in and we lay out their, look at their architectures, look at their different applications, and they're often just, central IT doesn't know where most of it is running half the time, so it's really like okay, let's look at each part of this and decide for you what's the best fit, where should it go? Should we be putting something on Azure or Azure Stack? Should it be better suited to OpenStack? Or is it, they're very familiar with VM Ware and they want to continue to leverage VM Ware either on a host model or internally in their own data center. >> What we're learning is you just don't have visibility, so the biggest interest and the demand when we launched our cross cloud or cloud services, the notion of having visibility of what's running where. And the second question is how much is it costing me, and what can I move and what are the data security leakages that I want to put in place because these things weren't controlled. So those are kind of just knowing, right, knowing where your data is, knowing where your workloads are and how much they're costing you. That's the first baseline they're looking for help on. Once they've got that, then they're like okay, how do I still provide some level of self service and control to the end user while putting some structure by which I can go to a multi cloud strategy? So that's the journey we're just about to see with IT coming into play. >> Peter, I have to mention human interest viewpoint on the ecosystem. RackSpace, I think I understand better now than a few years ago what services you did. VM Ware just launched a bunch of SAS offerings. There were some launched last year. I can't count how many companies are helping people with cloud cost management, licensing, you know, you name it, 12 different aspects to take bites out of this giant elephant of multi cloud and do that. What are the biggest pain points you're hearing from customers? How do you help advise some of them and bring some of the pieces together? >> And it's not even what we see from a customer standpoint. You think of RackSpace, we have to integrate all of these clouds into our own internal system, so we get to experience it firsthand as the customer how we create unified billing systems, how we have unified monitoring, how we integrate all their own legacy systems to deal with these clouds, so we effectively learn from integrating into our own systems, then can advise our customers on the pain points we've seen and bring them on that journey to help them through their true multi cloud approach. >> So if we blow it out and a customer comes to you and they want a multi cloud strategy, and you know, you kind of show them the ugly, you show them the truth for where they're at, what's the next step, like from a practical tactical perspective? What's like step one to helping with SAS applications and for viability for each one of the RackSpace offerings? >> Yeah, so we have a framework which we call PADMO. It's plan, analyze, design, migrate, optimize. It took me a second to get the last part out, and trying to, that planning stage is really where we sit with the customer aside, okay, what does your environment look like and why is it that way? Were things made in a conscious decision or did it just happen organically? So we try to figure out what did they do intentionally and what, what just grew up organically? And move from there into designing or analyzing what's best fit for the different cloud strategies, then start designing it, migrating it, and then effectively optimizing it when they land on RackSpace and show the value of our 24 seven, 365 fanatical support. >> For us, it's about, for us the technology part, and we want to enable the core VM Foundation, but we also believe that network connectivity's the next big thing, so things like NSXT is something we're already having conversation with, like how are we going to stitch these clouds together, how do we make it more software defined so as we move towards this kind of policy driven, you know management abstraction, how do we then open up the different clouds and service that capability? So that's really the next journey for both of us from VCM, or VM Ware Cloud Foundation to the broader multi cloud strategy. >> And Ajay, your, you know, cloud provider partners, what about services? Is there any joint engagement or things that VM Ware helps write that are? >> So one of the big service for all, we're kind of coming together is around DR. Consistently the easy step to get to a hybrid or a leverage cloud is disaster recovery. What if we made that a native feature of the VM Ware stack? We could have our customer right click on a VM and protected by all these service provider clouds. That's an example of something we're kind of trying to generalize. Now on each of them, the complexity of operating it, the scale, the visibility, the service levels, those are unique to each partner, but we're trying to make sure that the platform gives you this basic capability to capture workloads. >> I feel like DR is essential to everyone's road map right now. Most of our customers, maybe all of our customers are requiring DR when they land on RackSpace, and we're really looking at that on our 2018 roadmap to see how we make DR, as a service, consistently part of the offering. >> So what works well and what doesn't work well? When you go through that initial setup complication, so DR's a great example of oh, this is low hanging fruit. We either don't have a DR that's working or we don't have DR at all, and there's kind of this, you know, when you whiteboard it, it works extremely well. What are some of the practical business challenges that you see customers experience on that journey? >> There's definitely some easy options to move first for customers. DR is a common one that we see, DevTest as well in terms of okay, how can you test out our environments and do it in a low risk way? There's always going to be those more core applications, those mission critical applications that people will wait till the end until they migrate, so let's migrate them to RackSpace private cloud and see how it operates, maybe as a DR environment, or as a DEV environment test environment, and then as they build confidence and see what fanatical support we offer, then they start moving more mission critical workloads. >> I share the same. Tier one usually is high availability, high design, high touch, tier two often ignored, too expensive, too hard. We're trying to go after the tier two or tier three apps and just provide a convenient cloud economics for protecting those workloads. >> Peter, I'm curious, how often are customers trying one thing and then moving into another? You know I get calls all the time, you know, data gravity of course is a big issue, but you know if I'm building an application, sometimes it's like oh wait, you know maybe this isn't the best place to live. Lots of customers, you know, will build one place and run production in another place. You know we've seen that. How much is mobility in turn, is lock in still a challenge? You know, how much, what's real and what's not? >> I think lock in is still a challenge, but we're certainly looking into how we're helping our customers move from one cloud to another. We continue work in our different business units across RackSpace, be it VM Ware, AWS, Azure Open Stack, and see how we can offer flexibility for customers. When they realize they've gone too far on one or another, we're not seeing specific use cases of everybody moving from one to another, it's more of a pick and choose, and so we're helping customers migrate from one to another as needed. >> So I'd be interested to know what, not percentage, what type of customer kind of has this hybrid IT or hybrid cloud approach in RackSpace where they build cloud native applications and then connect them to a VCF or VM Ware private cloud, and I think more specifically, I think the question that I would like to get at is that a real thing that, not necessarily real thing, is that impacting friction between the public cloud with cloud native applications and your ability to manage that and add that fanatical support in the developer looking to consume that, to integrate it to VM Ware? >> I'm not seeing that friction between the different technologies. I think, at RackSpace we try work across all of them to offer the choice to our clients and our customers as much as possible, make sure we really offer them the best choice and put the workloads in where they really are best suited to run. >> And opposition is you know container and micro sourced architecture are going to provide an excellent frameworks and tools. The maturity's still in the works, and our goal is to say can we make, you know, either VM or physical, be it the best place for deploying, and what are the tools and capability you need to provide? So for us, networking, security, those are kind of fundamental problems regardless if you're building a cloud native app or a traditional app, and how do we insert our value into the equation versus trying to own the whole solution, right? >> Peter FitzGibbon, thank you so much for getting the update on RackSpace. Ajay, always a pleasure. I'm trying to remember what the five time award is. We'll talk to John Furrier, make sure we have it ready for the next time we have you on. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. This is VM World 2017 and you are watching the Cube. >> Man: Thank you guys. (upbeat instrumental music)

>> Narrator: It's theCUBE covering Sapphire Now 2017 brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Welcome back everyone to our special Sapphire Now 2017 coverage in our Palo Alto Studios. We have folks on the ground in Orlando. It's the third day of Sapphire Now and we're bringing our friends and experts inside our new 4500 square foot studio where we're starting to get our action going and covering events anywhere they are from here. If we can't get there we'll do it from here in Palo Alto. Our next guest is Satyen Sangani, CEO of Alation. A hot start-up funded by Custom Adventures, Catalyst Data Collective, and I think Andreessen Horowitz is also an investor? >> Satyen: That's right. >> Satyen, welcome to the cube conversation here. >> Thank you for having me. >> So we are doing this special coverage, and I wanted to bring you in and discuss Sapphire Now as it relates to the context of the biggest wave hitting the industry, with waves are ones cloud. We've known that for a while. People surfing that one, then the data wave is coming fast, and I think this is a completely different animal in the sense of it's going to look different, but be just as big. Your business is in the data business. You help companies figure this out. Give us the update on, first take a minute talk about Alation, for the folks who aren't following you, what do you guys do, and then let's talk about data. >> Yeah. So for those of you that don't know about what Alation is, it's basically a data catalog. You know, if you think about all of the databases that exist in the enterprise, stuff on Prem, stuff in the cloud, all the BI tools like Tableau and MicroStrategy, and Business Objects. When you've got a lot of data that sits inside the enterprise today and a wide variety of legacy and modern tools, and what Alation does is, it creates a catalog, crawling all of those systems like Google crawls the web and effectively looks at all the logs inside of those systems, to understand how the data is interrelated and we create this data social graph, and it kind of looks >> John: It's a metadata catalog? >> We call you know, we don't use the word metadata because metadata is the word that people use when you know that's that's Johnny back in the corner office, Right? And people don't want to talk about metadata if you're a business person you think about metadata you're like, I don't, not my thing. >> So you guys are democratizing what data means to an organization? That's right. >> We just like to talk about context. We basically say, look in the same way that information, or in the same way when you're eating your food, you need, you know organic labeling to understand whether or not that's good or bad, we have on some level a provenance problem, a trust problem inside of data in the enterprise, and you need a layer of you know trust, and understanding in context. >> So you guys are a SAS, or you guys are a SAS solution, or are you a software subscription? >> We are both. Most of this is actually on Prem because most of the people that have the problem that Alation solves are very big complicated institutions, or institutions with a lot of data, or a lot of people trying to analyze it, but we do also have a SAS offering, and actually that's how we intersect with SAP Altiscale, and so we have a cloud base that's offering that we work with. >> Tell me about your relation SAP because you kind of backdoored in through an acquisition, quickly note that we'll get into the conversation. >> Yeah that's right, So Altiscale to big intersections, big data, and then they do big data in the cloud SAP acquired them last year and what we do is we provide a front-end capability for people to access that data in the cloud, so that as analysts want to analyze that data, as data governance folks want to manage that data, we provide them with a single catalog to do that. >> So talk about the dynamics in the industry because SAP clearly the big news there is the Leonardo, they're trying to create this framework, we just announced an alpha because everyone's got these names of dead creative geniuses, (Satyen laughs) We just ingest our Nostradamus products, Since they have Leonardo and, >> That's right. >> SAP's got Einstein, and IBM's got Watson, and Informatica has got Claire, so who thought maybe we just get our own version, but anyway, everyone's got some sort of like bot, or like AI program. >> Yep. >> I mean I get that, but the reality is, the trend is, they're trying to create a tool chest of platform re-platforming around tooling >> Satyen: Yeah. >> To make things easier. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> You have a lot of work in this area, through relation, trying to make things easier. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> And also they get the cloud, On-premise, HANA Enterprise Cloud, SAV cloud platform, meaning developers. So the convergence between developers, cloud, and data are happening. What's your take on that strategy? You think SAP's got a good move by going multi cloud, or should they, should be taking a different approach? >> Well I think they have to, I mean I think the economics in cloud, and the unmanageability, you know really human economics, and being able to have more and more being managed by third-party providers that are, you know, effectively like AWS, and how they skill, in the capability to manage at scale, and you just really can't compete if you're SAP, and you can't compete if your customers are buying, and assembling the toolkits On-premise, so they've got to go there, and I think every IT provider has to >> John: Got to go to the cloud you mean? >> They've got to go to the cloud, I think there's no question about it, you know I think that's at this point, a foregone conclusion in the world of enterprise IT. >> John: Yeah it's pretty obvious, I mean hybrid cloud is happening, that's really a gateway to multi-cloud, the submission is when I build Norton, a guest in latency multi-cloud issues there, but the reality is not every workloads gone there yet, a lot of analytics going on in the cloud. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> DevTest, okay check the box on DevTest >> Satyen: That's right. >> Analytics is all a ballgame right now, in terms of state of the art, your thoughts on the trends in how companies are using the cloud for analytics, and things that are challenges and opportunities. >> Yeah, I think there's, I think the analytics story in the cloud is a little bit earlier. I think that the transaction processing and the new applications, and the new architectures, and new integrations, certainly if you're going to build a new project, you're going to do that in the cloud, but I think the analytics in a stack, first of all there's like data gravity, right, you know there's a lot of gravity to that data, and moving it all into the cloud, and so if you're transaction processing, your behavioral apps are in the cloud, then it makes sense to keep the data in an AWS, or in the cloud. Conversely you know if it's not, then you're not going to take a whole bunch of data that sits on Prem and move it whole hog all the way to the cloud just because, right, that's super expensive, >> Yeah. >> You've got legacy. >> A lot of risks too and a lot of governance and a lot of compliance stuff as well. >> That's exactly right I mean if you're trying to comply with Basel II or GDPR, and you know you want to manage all that privacy information. How are you going to do that if you're going to move your data at the same time >> John: Yeah. >> And so it's a tough >> John: Great point. >> It's a tough move, I think from our perspective, and I think this is really important, you know we sort of say look, in a world where data is going to be on Prem, on the cloud, you know in BI tools, in databases and no SQL databases, on Hadoop, you're going to have data everywhere, and in that world where data is going to be in multiple locations and multiple technologies you got to figure out a way to manage. >> Yeah. I mean data sprawls all over the place, it's a big problem, oh and this oh and by the way that's a good thing, store it to your storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, data legs are popping out, but you have data links, for all you have data everywhere. >> Satyen: That's right. >> How are you looking at that problem as a start-up, and how a customer's dealing with that, and what is this a real issue, or is this still too early to talk about data sprawl? >> It's a real issue, I mean it, we liken it to the advent of the Internet in the time of traditional media, right, so you had you had traditional media, there were single sort of authoritative sources we all watched it may be CNN may be CBS we had the nightly news we had Newsweek, we got our information, also the Internet comes along, and anybody can blog about anything, right and so the cost of creating information is now this much lower anybody can create any reality anybody can store data anywhere, right, and so now you've got a world where, with tableau, with Hadoop, with redshift, you can build any stack you want to at any cost, and so now what do you do? Because everybody's creating their own thing, every Dev is doing their own thing, everybody's got new databases, new applications, you know software is eating the world right? >> And data it is eating software. >> And data is eating software, and so now you've got this problem where you're like look I got all this stuff, and I don't know I don't know what's fake news, what's real, what's alternative fact, what doesn't make any sense, and so you've got a signal and noise problem, and I think in that world you got to figure out how to get to truth, right, >> John: Yeah. And what's the answer to that in your mind, not that you have the answer, if you did, we'd be solving it better. >> Yeah. >> But I mean directionally where's the vector going in your mind? I try to talk to Paul Martino about this at bullpen capital he's a total analytics geek he doesn't think this big data can solve that yet but they started to see some science around trying to solve these problems with data. What's your vision on this? >> Satyen: Yeah you know so I believe that every I think that every developer is going to start building applications based on data I think that every business person is going to have an analytical role in their job because if they're not dealing with the world on the certainty, and they're not using all the evidence, at their disposable, they're not making the best decisions and obviously they're going to be more and more analysts and so you know at some level everybody is an analyst >> I wrote a post in 2008, my old blog was hosted on WordPress, before I started SilicionANGLE, data is the new developer kid. >> That's right. >> And I saw that early, and it was still not as clear to this now as obvious as least to us because we're in the middle, in this industry, but it's now part of the software fabric, it's like a library, like as developer you'd call a library of code software to come in and be part of your program >> Yeah >> Building blocks approach, Lego blocks, but now data as Lego blocks completely changes the game on things if you think of it that way. Where are we on that notion of you really using data as a development component, I mean it seems to be early, I don't, haven't seen any proof points, that says, well that company's actually using the data programmatically with software. >> Satyen: Yeah. well I mean look I think there's features in almost every software application whether it's you know 27% of the people clicked on this button into this particular thing, I mean that's a data based application right and so I think there is this notion that we talked a lot about, which is data literacy, right, and so that's kind of a weird thing, so what does that exactly mean? Well data is just information like a news article is information, and you got to decide whether it's good or it's bad, and whether you can come to a conclusion, or whether you can't, just as if you're using an API from a third-party developer you need documentation, you need context about that data, and people have to be intelligent about how they use it. >> And literacies also makes it, makes it addressable. >> That's right. >> If you have knowledge about data, at some point it's named and addressed at some point in a network. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> Especially Jada in motion, I mean data legs I get, data at rest, we start getting into data in motion, real-time data, every piece of data counts. Right? >> That's exactly right. And so now you've got to teach people about how to use this stuff you've got to give them the right data you got to make that discoverable you got to make that information usable you've got to get people to know who the experts are about the data, so they can ask questions, you know these are tougher problems, especially as you get more and more systems. >> All right, as a start up, you're a growing start-up, you guys are, are lean and mean, doing well. You have to go compete in this war. It's a lot of, you know a lot of big whales in there, I mean you got Oracle, SAP, IBM, they're all trying to transform, everybody is transforming all the incumbent winners, potential buyers of your company, or potentially you displacing this, as a young CEO, they you know eat their lunch, you have to go compete in a big game. How are you guys looking at that compass, I see your focus so I know a little bit about your plan, but take us through the mindset of a start-up CEO, that has to go into this world, you guys have to be good, I mean this is a big wave, see it's a big wave. >> Yeah. Nobody buys from a start-up unless you get, and a start-up could be even a company, less than a 100-200 people, I mean nobody's buying from a company unless there's a 10x return to value relative to the next best option, and so in that world how do you build 10x value? Well one you've got to have great technology, and then that's the start point, but the other thing is you've got to have deep focus on your customers, right, and so I think from our perspective, we build focus by just saying, look nobody understands data in your company, and by and large you've got to make money by understanding this data, as you do the digital transformation stuff, a big part of that is differentiating and making better products and optimizing based upon understanding your data because that helps you and your business make better decisions, >> John: Yeah. >> And so what we're going to do is help you understand that data better and faster than any other company can do. >> You really got to pick your shots, but what you're saying, if I hear you saying is as a start-up you got to hit the beachhead segment you want to own. >> Satyen: That's right. >> And own it. >> Satyen: That's exactly. >> No other decision, just get it, and then maybe get to a bigger scope later, and sequence around, and grow it that way. >> Satyen: You can't solve 10 problems >> Can't be groping for a beachhead if you don't know what you want, you're never going to get it. >> That's right. You can't solve 10 problems unless you solve one, right, and so you know I think we're at a phase where we've proven that we can scalably solved one, we've got customers like, you know Pfizer and Intuit and Citrix and Tesco and Tesla and eBay and Munich Reinsurance and so these are all you know amazing brands that are traditionally difficult to sell into, but you know I think from our perspective it's really about focus and just helping customers that are making that digital analytical transformation. Do it faster, and do it by enabling their people. >> But a lot going on this week for events, we had Informatica world this week, we got V-mon. We had Google I/O. We had Sapphire. It's a variety of other events going on, but I want to ask you kind of a more of a entrepreneurial industry question, which is, if we're going through the so-called digital transformation, that means a new modern era an old one movie transformed, yet I go to every event, and everyone's number one at something, that's like I was just at Informatica, they're number one in six squadrons. Michael Dell we're number in four every character, Mark Hurr at the press meeting said they're number one in all categories, Ross Perot think quote about you could be number one depends on how you slice the market, seems to be in play, my point is I kind of get a little bit, you know weirded out by that, but that is okay, you know I guess theCUBE's number one in overall live videos produced at an enterprise event, you know I, so we're number one at something, but my point is. >> Satyen: You really are. >> My point is, in a new transformation, what is the new scoreboard going to look like because a lot of things that you're talking about is horizontally integrated, there's new use cases developing, a new environment is coming online, so if someone wanted to actually try to keep score of who number one is and who's winning, besides customer wins, because that's clearly the one that you can point to and say hey they're winning customers, customer growth is good, outside of customer growth, what do you think will be the key requirements to get some sort of metric on who's really doing well these are the others, I mean we're not yet there with >> Yeah it's a tough problem, I mean you know used to be the world was that nobody gets fired for choosing choosing IBM. >> John: Yeah. >> Right, and I think that that brand credibility worked in a world where you could be conservative right, in this world I think, that looking for those measures, it is going to be really tough, and I think on some level that quest for looking for what is number one, or who is the best is actually the sort of fool's errand, and if that's what you're looking for, if you're looking for, you know what's the best answer for me based upon social signal, you know it's kind of like you know I'm going to go do the what the popular kids do in high school, I mean that could lead to you know a path, but it doesn't lead to the one that's going to actually get you satisfaction, and so on some level I think that customers, like you are the best signal, you know, always, >> John: Yeah, I mean it's hard, it's a rhetorical question, we ask it because, you know, we're trying to see not mystical with the path of fact called the fashion, what's fashionable. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> That's different. I mean talk about like really a cure metro, in the old days market share is one, actually IDC used a track who had market shares, and they would say based upon the number of shipments products, this is the market share winner, right? yeah that's pretty clean, I mean that's fairly clean, so just what it would be now? Number of instances, I mean it's so hard to figure out anyway, I digress. >> No, I think that's right, I mean I think I think it's really tough, that I think customers stories that, sort of map to your case. >> Yeah. It all comes back down to customer wins, how many customers you have was the >> Yeah and how much value they are getting out of your stuff. >> Yeah. That 10x value, and I think that's the multiplier minimum, if not more and with clouds and the scale is happening, you agree? >> Satyen: Yeah. >> It's going to get better. Okay thanks for coming on theCUBE. We have Satyen Sangani. CEO, co-founder of Alation, great start-up. Follow them on Twitter, these guys got some really good focus, learning about your data, because once you understand the data hygiene, you start think about ethics, and all the cool stuff happening with data. Thanks so much for coming on CUBE. More coverage, but Sapphire after the short break. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas. It's theCUBE. Covering DockerCon 2017, brought to you by Docker and support from its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and this is Silicon Angle Media's theCUBE, worldwide leader in live, enterprise tech coverage here at DockerCon 2017, Austin, Texas. Happy to have on the program, a guest that's been on before. Mazda Marvasti, he's the CEO of appLariat, and he's brought along a managed service provider of his, also a customer of his, Thomas Chamtie, who is the founder of KMicro Technologies. Gentleman, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you sir. >> Alright, so you're both from Orange County, come down here to Austin, I have some local friends of mine they're like, God all these tech conferences are coming down here. I'm like, this seems to be where open source kind of gathers. There's the OSCON coming in a couple weeks, I'll be back later this year for Cube-con, come there. First time for both of you. Just quick, how's the show been for you so far? >> It's been really well received in terms of our product announcement and our company, and not just open source, enterprise. Enterprise applications are all over the place. For us, doing a launch at DockerCon was very appropriate because our company is all about taking your existing applications, new applications and taking them through the journey of not just into the cloud, but into the container era, running on a modern container environment. So it's been well received so far. >> Mazda, it takes some really interesting stuff this week and even the last few months when I've been hearing the cloud space. We've been talking about micro services and cloud-native and everything like that. But customers have, you talk of the enterprise, they've got hundreds if not thousands of existing applications. Therefore, what about them? Ben Golub got on stage, said, "it's not a bimodal world, we need to give them platform, to be able to move forward." That ties into the vision of your company right? >> Oh absolutely. The real problems and the real opportunities are with the existing applications. How do you get those applications same kinds of capabilities that you're trying to give brand new applications being done with microservices. That's why Thomas with KMicro, they're a managed service provider that they're working with customers along the same journey. >> Thomas, before we get into the solution with appLariat, just give us the thumbnail, your background and your company. >> Basically, KMicro as a company is a three year old company, we do managed services for mid to large sized customers. I, myself have been doing IT for about 20 years. Not the fresh guy on the block. But we were introduced to appLariat, when we were looking to do a little project for a client of ours. They had a specific legacy application that they needed to modernize. We're looking for a solution for them that would help them modernize the application, at the same time stay up to date with the latest technologies. Docker seemed, in addition to containerizing, all their application was the solution, was the way to go for them. That's when we were introduced to appLariat and worked together on that project and we've been working with them since then. We love working with these guys, their solution seems to solve a huge issue for a lot of our clients and we look forward to actually doing that again and again for more clients. >> I mean, the challenge here is how does KMicro repeatably do that across customers? So you have consistency which is the same thing when you look at an enterprise. Yeah, I can hand craft an application so that it's containerized and I can deploy it. But how do I get repeatability and consistency across different teams across my applications? That's the scale issue, that you can't use muscle memory to move your applications into the cloud. >> Mazda you're totally right. I've watched the app modernization environment and when you go say, oh what's the killer app, what's the number one thing, it's custom. And that's not scalable, that's not repeatable. Maybe unpack for us a little bit about what you guys bring, that journey along there and how you fit in that spectrum. >> Again, the key is, not to be reliant upon software artists to sit there and script away per application, how does this thing get containerized? What you want to bring is automation and uniformity across these applications. So that you have the same type of consistency for the applications. Then not only that, but when you deploy it, how does the orchestrator manage those deployed containers? Because if you're not going to run it in on an orchestrator, it becomes really difficult to manage it. We use Kubernetes from the backend to actually orchestrate these containers but then you have to have a policy layer that manages that entire infrastructure. Kubernetes is great at knowing that to do, it just doesn't know when to do it. So we provide that when capability. Again, that's a solution that a managed service provider can essentially say okay, now I can repeatably do this across my customers and manage the environments in a similar manner. Versus having to do one-offs. That's what we're trying to get away from. >> Thomas, could you maybe, if it's possible, walk us through a little bit that project with the customer. How long it took, how many people were involved. Where some of the heavy lifting is there. Anything that you've done this, to say oh okay, here's what we've learned for the next time. >> So one of the clients is a GPS tracking company. And they have the DevOps team that were struggling maintaining their code. They have code all over the place. Mazda was more involved on this project than I might have been, so he'll chime in on that. But what we walked out at the end with this client, is that they had a platform that their DevOp could go to and test their code against without having to spend tremendous amount of time or effort into putting all the pieces together. The application will actually do all of that for you from A to Z. They didn't have to worry about storage or processing or memory or any of that stuff. It was just there for them to use. In a second, or a few seconds, they could just conduct an environment, test their code against it, and all was said, when they're done with it, it just shuts down. And it scales up as well, so if they needed to do some testing against an application or a code, they would do the test and then shut down the environment and they're ready to go. And move on. >> Right, the primary use case was that I'm spending way too much money on AWS for DevTest. Because developers would go spin up the VMs and use it to develop and do some unit testing and then the VMs will just live there. So ongoing, continuous basis. Once we put the AWS under a Kubernetes cluster, we're then able to manage the cluster size based on usage and availability, etc. Not only that but then the IT side of the house is able to govern that environment for the developers. The developers don't care to go provision machines or use iAds or anything like that. They just want to deploy their applications, be able to test it and go back and modify code. That's all they care about while IT cares about where does that code go, who looks at it, how does it get tested, what is the cost infrastructure for that. By using our product to manage that AWS cluster, they were able to save 50% on their AWS costs by just managing that DevTest environment. Now we're moving it into production. Those are the kinds of use cases that really you find containerization can bring. You talk about bringing new capabilities to the apps, but it also really goes to cost savings as well. And that was something that-- >> 50% probably conservative even, I would think. We had one of the keynotes case studies this morning, I think it was Visa, was like, 90% of my environment is being utilized less than 10%. >> Mazda: Underutilized, right. >> We know that, heck, I think back, we had server sprawl, we had vm sprawl, now we have cloud sprawl. Is it the whole API economy that allows your software to be able to plug into this, manage some of these environments? How much of it is just cloud, how much is it containers allowing us to do some of this-- >> So every layer we talk about is another layer of abstraction. Cloud is an abstraction, container is an abstraction. Orchestration is an abstraction. Every time you bring these abstractions, you're introducing inefficiency into the system. It brings efficiency in terms of how you develop, how much more secure your application is, how easily you can bring your applications up and down. It brings inefficiencies in terms of these things living on. In terms of sprawl along the cloud boundaries that your applications are running. We bring the efficiency in terms of policies. That says who gets to have what where? And when does it die? Because nothing should live forever. Unless it's your production app, it should not live forever. And when should it die? Expiring those applications and then reclaiming the environment to a smaller size so that your costs are lower or giving the resource to someone else who may need to use it. >> Mazda, Dockers made a real emphasis this week about the ecosystem. Can you talk about partnering with them, how easy it is to work with them, what you're seeing over the last year or so? >> Yeah, we're primarily using the open source Docker containerization mechanism. Because that's really prevalent in the marketplace. We found the same thing in terms of using Kubernetes. Customers are looking for having a degree of control. Close source at a level where your application is running at this point is becoming really difficult. For customers to be able to manage that ability to be able to say okay, I don't have control over this part of my environment, that doesn't make any sense to me. The open source community is really come along in terms of moving the enterprises into their direction. What we're doing is that we're leveraging those open source elements so at the end of the day, we are not in the interconnect between the customer and their applications. They can always go back to those open source tools to manage the applications however they want. We're providing the orchestration layer that sits on top of those open source tools, really unifying them and bringing them together. >> Thomas, what is this whole containerization, your partnership with appLariat mean to your business? How do you expect it to change what you guys are doing? >> There's a couple of things. One of them is modernizing the applications that we talked about a minute ago. But another thing that we wanted to bring on the table and use their solution for was disaster recovery. No one had thought of real time disaster recovery without the efforts of going through a whole bunch of configuration and maintaining, a whole bunch of things. Just to have disaster recovery for a company, no matter what cloud you're in, no matter what infrastructure you use, it doesn't matter. That's when appLariat, we think, is a really good platform that we're going to build on to actually provide what we call real time disaster recovery services for our clients. I think that'll take us, that'll be pretty good for our clients and it's going to help us grow our business as well. >> Yeah, that's another one of those areas where you see a lot of managed service providers providing disaster recovery services but what that means is that they'll provide you a location in the cloud for you to have your application and then services along the lines of people. In bringing those applications to run over there. Then when there is a disaster, have to go through a lot of manual effort to get that site up and running. So what we're talking about, is that if you have your applications already containerized, you can snap shot it anywhere. Once it's snap shotted, it can come up and go down very quickly. Having that ability in terms of being able to provide disaster recovery services on a containerized application is a whole new set of capabilities that now I think it's viable for our organizations. >> Let alone the cost savings as well. Like you were talking about. The cost savings are huge. I only need to speed up the environment when needed. It doesn't have to sit idle, sitting there, costing us money or costing the client money. >> Do you see passing that savings onto your customers? >> Absolutely, absolutely. That's one of the areas that was untapped in the past and with doctoring, containerizing applications technologies, this is the next thing. This is the future of doing disaster recovery. We see it that way. And then we look for-- >> Mazda, oh sorry. >> Yeah, no worries. >> Mazda, want to give you the final word. When people leave DockerCon 2017, what do you want them to know about appLariat and the solutions you're providing. >> What I want them to know is that you don't need to become a scripting ninja to be able to containerize our applications and bring cloud native capabilities to your existing applications. You don't need to become a scripting magician. You can take your existing applications through a very easy process, get them containerized, deploy it on Kubernetes without having to know anything about the underlying infrastructure that it actually takes for those platforms to run. On an ongoing basis, as newer technologies comes along, we'll be the abstraction layer in front of the application for those customers so that they don't need to bother. Do I need to make a bet on something? Do I need to learn new technologies, do I need to upgrade my people? Keep doing what you're doing, your existing CICD process stays as is, your existing developer work levels and skillset remains as is. Everything else should be abstracted and taken away from you. >> Mazda and Thomas, thank you so much for joining us, we'll be back with lots more programming, thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

theCUBE presents an exclusive on the ground conversation with Oracle CEO Mark Hurd.  Mark sat down with John Fourier at Oracle's redwood city campus. >> Hello everyone welcome to a special presentation of theCUBE. I'm John Furrier   the founder of SiliconANGLE and we're here with Mark Hurd the Co-CEO for a one-on-one exclusive conversation , Mark welcome to theCUBE on the ground welcome.    >> Thanks John >> OpenWorld we were there with theCUBE >> So at Oracle and we were on Howard Street , we talked to 48 folks from Oracle executives and we learned a lot and we've been there covering it for six years and one of the striking things was Oracle's cloud message wasn't really well received by the press in the sense of they consider you kind of not in the top two. It's Amazon , Amazon it's this, that & the other thing. You guys had been doing cloud for awhile and I want to explore that conversation with you about Oracle's cloud your business startup landscape competition but one of the things that struck me was your interview on CNBC with John Ford he said are you determined to be in the cloud and you kind of had a shock back response and said determined we're in the cloud we're winning and quoted some stats give us the update you guys are in the cloud we watched that we learned that it's end to end what's the current status of Oracle's cloud play right now.    >> Thanks John,  well I think the way I would describe it numerically is not only in the cloud were a multi-billion dollar player in the cloud and so we started really several years ago in the application part of the cloud or SAS we've had tremendous success across the pillars of our SAS products or the pillars of applications in the industry we've added a platform capability or paths to that portfolio and now we've added infrastructure as a service so we're actually the only player in the cloud now today in infrastructure in pass and platform and in application so a complete portfolio differentiated by its by its scope and also differentiated by each of the pieces we believe to be Best of Breed and it's resulted in bookings I think that's out in the marketplace but I'll reiterated today. We'll book more business in the cloud  than this year than anybody else in the industry.  >> One of the things about the cloud that people love is the fact that it's fast it's got great economics but it has a scale component that customers are attracted too,  yet a lot of the folks who provide cloud technologies have different approaches.  Larry Ellison was on stage at Oracle OpenWorld saying he's long in the cloud game and you've reiterated that. What does that mean you know and the business folks out there they love this but they don't want to have different technologies that become outdated they want to have just solutions so every vendor's got different approaches why is Oracle well-positioned for this long win or the long players Larry's and you talked about.  >> Well first John we've been in this business a long time and so the fact is I think nobody's provided solutions at the depth and breadth that Oracle has over the past 20-some years so we've got a lot of experience in this business and that experience really as at the enterprise level so experience is is deep. That said to your point most of our customers spend a lot of money on IT and most of them have to go do this themselves. One of the promises of cloud is all of the things you said plus the fact it's it's simpler it's easier and you're actually not you're actually moving your innovation from your IT budget to Oracle's R&D budget and that's very attractive not just economically, it is ,attractive economically to your point but it's very attractive now to get in an area like HR. We have almost 2,000 programmers coming to work every day feature stringing that application would you rather be doing that on your IT staff or have that done by 2,000 people coming every work today who's on our payroll not yours to drive your innovation. >> global. Cloud is a global phenomenon  >>  The other impact is Obviously the geographic regions is hear now that as a key table stakes but you know it also brings in some economics on the economy side. What's your take on the global economy outlook right now in the world right now and and how does that affect customers decisions and buying patterns you know right now >> If you look over and when you say right now I'll look at it over the past couple of years. Revenue growth across the global economy the S&P 500 is fairly flat so you've had about one percent revenue growth of the S&P 500 over the past five years or so. Earnings growth though is about 5% and you've seen that reflected a bit to a degree in the stock market and the run-up of the stock market over the past several years so with revenue flat and earnings up that tells you that people are cutting expenses people are being very careful what they spend in what they invest and that gets reflected in IT and you see this in the IT industry and some of the results of the companies in it so companies are very much being very careful what they spend. I think companies overall are comfortable with their cost structures. They wish they could grow faster and it becomes the reason why cloud not just as a technology but as a business approach in a business model is extremely attractive to our customers into the broader market >> So they were there see expenses they don't only have to spend aggressively but they need to perform as well so it's also top-line >> John, it's a bigger problem than that it's a bigger problem than that because I'm worried about cost but at the same time many of our customers face competition. They face competition from startups new entrants into their industries and so they have to be innovative so it can't be just cut cost for cutting costs sake because if they do they can easily get disintermediated from their customer from their market and therefore they wind up not being competitive so the attractiveness back to the point about innovation and cloud is yes it's it's lower cost it's better economically yes it's simpler but it also drives more innovation at the same time and it's really the combination of all these factors that do the trick >> I put a question on my Twitter feed and Facebook I was interviewing you and I got a question I want to read to you as it says 'Marks on the road constant of customers then coming back to the ranch to meet Larry and Safra and the teams,  what is he hearing what is the consistent need from his customers and CEOs he's talking to who position themselves'  what's the common thread what's the holy grail for the customer that you're hearing from from consistently in the pattern that you're seeing your customer visits?  >> Help us get from here to there and and I think when you know you're in our industry you get a lot of people talking about cloud you know let's go to the cloud well if you're if you're not in the tech industry and you hear that you're like what does that mean and and then more importantly how do I get there so it's easy for us to talk about you know where we are. Most of our customers are stuck in where they are today and most of that is an on-premise many of those are older applications their homegrown applications so the process of not just telling us telling them where they could go but how do I help you get there.  At Oracle again we feel uniquely positioned and we're not just big in the cloud multibillion-dollar cloud player but we have a heritage on-premise and I see that as a very very strong asset and the ability now to bring those two worlds together and help our customers operate some of their IT on-premise, some of their IT in the cloud and be able to work those move those workloads back and forth seamlessly. >> you know you understand the athletes world >>  Timing is everything you  play tennis, being at the right spot the right time is really the business focus with customers and so when they hear cloud or hey this is a new technology from Silicon Valley think how well is that real so this isn't not so much as scared of the Silicon Valley innovation you're seeing you know for Tesla innovating things like GM and Ford but a lot of mainstream businesses want to have an answer to their problems not so much the shiny new technology. How do you balance the timing of delivering new cloud technologies with that next big thing in R&D or what not I mean what's the secret and what do customers look for is the timing issue of having the right solution at the right time what's your philosophy on that what's your take on that >> Well of course you're right I mean the fact is you know as we sit here in the Silicon Valley we tend to invent words every couple of years they're gonna solve all of the customers problems cloud big data whatever it may be whatever your problem is we're gonna we have a solution for it and the reality is most customers want to solve their business problem they're concerned about growing their revenue they're just they're concerned about becoming more efficient with their processes and so therefore we have to help them get that done so to your point we have to come in with real solutions, our solutions are baked around things as simple as running your HR system. You know running running your core accounting your core ERP and your core sales organization and being able to be able to automate those applications. I think you'll see  a tremendous workload coming around dev test. You know 30% of all of IT for example today is really done in developing and testing applications, it's all done on premise, it's all done with very little governance around it,  that whole process. Think of that, if Enterprise IT is a billion dollars,  Dev-Test at 30% is let's see I think 300 million dollars. How efficient do you think that spend is? Let's pretend it was 50 percent efficient,  which I believe is very high. A hundred and fifty billion dollars of opportunity for our customers to no longer have data centers,  computers, operating systems, databases,  people and be able to move all that to the cloud be able to access all of that capability from the cloud build and test their applications directly from the cloud and if they even want they can move those workloads to their on-premise production for their on premise production applications. So these are tremendous opportunities to change the way we think of IT and your point the timing has to be right there has to be an openness and an excitement about embracing these opportunities and I think that time is now. >> on that because it can be scariest shit >> What are you hearing from customers into the cloud and and and they might hey Oracle you know all you know you have your stuff and I hear the shiny new toy in Silicon Valley new technologies but what's in it for me that's the customer I've but I think mentality what's in it for me my problems as you said what it what is that issue for that for customers for your standpoint how do you how do they get over that fear to take that leap will the parachute open when they go to the cloud that that's the kind of mindset the customer I hear and I thought to what >>   >> various different people that have >> Well I mean they're different opinions I think many of those initial perceptions are beginning to change so I think you're getting more customers more openness and we're sitting here in the United States I think if you went back to to Europe and Western Europe there was always concerns about various issues security etc data sovereignty many of those issues I believe we're beginning to tackle and to resolve. But at the end of the day that the the real excitement is about the core things we started with,  this just costs less, this is simply driving more innovation,  and it's easier at the end of the day, and those are three fantastic benefits for customers.  >> So now there's a new class of buyers entering the market your customers and some of them are younger and you know we see some of them don't have voicemail setup, they don't really use email. Is Oracle's success generational and how are you guys bridging the gap or if no how are you bridging the gap to reach these new demographic of buyers who understand mobile and cloud have some that love that some are kind of you know as I mentioned earlier crossing the chasm on their own but this new generation of buyers what are you seeing >> there are you seeing a new demographic >> are you seeing a new class of buyers?  >> So it's a complex issue you bring up because the new generation in people sometimes generalize about these generations called Millennials,  etc.   They are both employees and customers and to a large degree they interrupt much of the status quo they work differently they also buy differently. Now at the same time remember that our customers have multiple generations of workers and multiple generations of customers so this actually gets quite quite interesting.  So if you take workers somebody my generation I like to might think of self myself as young and I'm in the technology etc but that the actual data says I'm not and I still work I still work in a workflow basis I use pieces of paper like you have today and and I look at those pieces of paper.   Not my kids. They work differently. They also work more collaboratively they work in groups but now I'm still in the company and so are a whole lot of Millennials that work at Oracle so we have to put processes and tools together that not only deal with what I do but what they do and make sure that we can all then work together that's a lot of work that's a lot of technology and it's actually made the business problem that we're talking about harder. Same thing from a customer perspective those same employees that work differently, they buy differently and you better be prepared to engage them where they want to be engaged,  how they want to be engaged, and that gives an opportunity for Oracle to help our customers innovate to give them better applications, better tools to go >> meet those customers and employees. >> Brings up a great point I mean it gets getting more complex on the business logic and business model and also the consumption and technology but isn't IT supposed to get easier?  I mean it once was easy compared to what it seems to be now what's your take on that it's got to get simpler what's your strategy. >> part of the issue is the data set >>   First of all the part of the continues to grow so the data set continues to grow and that drives tremendous desire for more information this while in some degree more data creates complexity it also creates tremendous amount of insight. The things we can do today we would never have thought of 10 years ago I mean there are things think about, can you imagine the  world 15 years ago where we couldn't search for anything.   We didn't have,  think of all the tools we have today that we use every day that we didn't have think about it this way applications the average age of an application in this country is about 21 22 years old meaning they were built in 1993 1994 1995 pre-search pre-mobile pre- social pre everything,  that  we're used too, so as a result you have this really old infrastructure trying to support this this new world and that's part of the promise I think of these new applications. They're engineered with mobile integrated into the applications themselves,  they're integrated with collaboration tools from the ground up,  and this world will get continue to get easier.  >> One of the questions we're asking our on our wikibon analyst team to our surveys and our customers is which vendor will provide the value fastest for getting the most out of the data. This seems to be a question that's kind of buried a little bit in some of the conversations out in the marketplace but it seems to be consistent. The value of the data is seems to be really really important. Who's gonna build the tooling and the automation and the integration capabilities to maximize the data whether it comes from some integration on an iPhone or collaborative document or an ERP system it could cover them anywhere and or mixing and matching data that seems to be the focus what's your thoughts on that and getting the most out of the data and what is Oracle doing >> with that in that regard? >> Yeah well listen historically in our industry you basically had applications that produced data, you then taken that data extracted it from the transaction application and warehoused it or  marted or used whatever term you wanted to use, and then create a bunch of analytics through some very very experienced scientific users who then would distribute reports out to the rest of the company that's the history of sort of data analytics. I did that for a good part of the earlier part of my career and I would say things are changing now that those analytics have to have to move right next to the application itself, they have to become real-time,  they have to be integrated into the core applications.  So we see happening today in Oracle applications is no longer do you have to take data out of the application you have to integrate it directly into the application so you can now get real-time insights. The ability now to integrate structured data and unstructured data and do it in near real-time so that you can now make a decision on something based on early indicators and then merge it and integrate it with the core way that you run a company and that's how you'll see analytics evolve,  the ability to take massive amounts of unstructured data but it's not gonna be good enough just to analyze that unstructured data that's social data,  you're gonna have to be able to merge that data where the system that can now do something with it.  >> And customers telling you that there and you're hearing that from customers as well? >> to, I want data that allows me to make >> Listen the fundamentals come back the right decision at the right time with the right customer the right employee to optimize my business. How do I get through all of this massive amount of data that you've been talking about so that I can make the optimal decision at the right time to benefit my business. That's the key.   >> the trends in the industry that you're >> Let's talk about trends, competing in the technology landscape has been very robust over the past few years and specifically past three years. What's your take on the landscape now I mean obviously the table stakes that the bar that the bar to get into the game that they're at entry what is the technology landscape like today from your perspective as a CEO co-ceo of Oracle with your competitors and your customers >> Well I think the shift is significant to your point I think this forget the overused term of cloud but that method of computing at the application layer the platform layer and the infrastructure layer is clearly where this industry is  Oheaded I made a presentation at OpenWorld that I felt by 2025, I predicted that 80% of that workload will be in the cloud. And I think I associated I made this statement then that I may be slow,  it may go faster and and that shift has a seismic impact on on our industry and it will happen and the reason it will happen is because of the reasons I've keep coming back to it when the customer can get better economics,  the customer can get more innovation, and they can get something done more simply, they're gonna they're gonna go do it . That's gonna cause losers and that's going to cause winners and that's why we've made the investments we have,  that's why we've built out all the data centers around the world that we have,  it's why Oracle has rewritten all of its applications from the ground up hundred percent >> all of our products now have basically >> 100 percent all of our been cloudified, they've been rewritten from the ground up to be cloud ready. And it's critical for us John because we believe this is and Larry started on this a decade ago so this isn't something we we thought about like 18 months ago and said hey why don't we go do this this this this came back a long time ago even before the term cloud was popular so it's this is this whole method and approach to computing which which which is key and frankly we started out getting into the SAS business the applications business and it was clear when you're in the applications business to really do that right you had to be in the platform business and then really to be in the platform business you had to be in the infrastructure business and that's why when you look at the barrier to entry John the ability to build out all three layers of the cloud the ability  R&D wise to do that or from a financial capital perspective to acquire all that good luck trying to do that then to build the infrastructure the data center infrastructure and the capital and remember John you have to do all this in advance think of it as to get into the cloud business from a IT perspective it's like building a hotel and you have to build a hotel before you can rent a room nobody can stay in the hotel til it's built think of that on a much bigger scale as being what it takes to get into the global cloud business >> So it's not winner-take-all it's winner take most or >> listen I was public in my view that I >> They'll be a couple of winners I think think that they'll be probably a couple of application providers I predict Oracle will be one I don't know right now today there is no other company in the industry who has got a complete suite of SAS applications Oracle's the only one somebody eventually will get will get that done I believe and I believe you'll have a couple of providers in that part of the industry I think probably likely at the platform level you have a couple of platforms that survive you'll also find the ability for those platforms to work together and I think like anything you'll see a couple of providers two three providers at the infrastructure layer >> Is Oracle a one big cloud or is it a company of many clouds I mean saw an  acquisitions this week, AddThis, and  I saw the word datacloud  sounds good great good marketing data cloud but it makes sense it's social data you see marketing cloud and social cloud you get in your are they a collection of clouds or does it matter is it labeling as the long tail distribution?  >> are clearly a set of capabilities in the >>  Well it's branding I mean they Oracle public cloud. Those capabilities are a marketing cloud a sales cloud they are not if you will architected as separate clouds they are built on as I said earlier they are architected on the same platform everything is built on Fusion Middleware common platform common base common infrastructure that can work together. >> You talked about in your prediction here that you know all data >>   You talked about in your prediction here that all  enterprise data we stored in the cloud faster and cheaper you also announced that pricing was or might have been earlier that cheaper than glacier and Amazon is that consistent the trend that you see pushing the price down lower and lower for the data storage.  >> think at the infrastructure layer we've >>   Yes I mean I looked at that world as more of a commoditized world that you know basically the infrastructure is a service there you're selling compute and you're selling storage and we think that market will continue to decline in in price and we expect to be very aggressive with our pricing in that market >> the cycle cycle styves kenzan flow as >> I want to get a take on startups we've seen in the 90s when I did my first startup it was really hard to get into the business you're the provision of data center buy router,  buy a Sun box at that time was very expensive it was also hard to get customers if you were starting up an enterprise customer in this case and then the world shifted easy to get customers with open source what seemed to be shifting back around where it's hard for startups to get enterprise customers because of the scale and integration challenges and the SLA is and the global requirements compliance and the list goes on and on do you agree with that statement or do you see it differently that it's gonna be harder and harder for startups it might be easy to start building stuff but they actually come in and compete and win enterprise customers what's your take of the the appetite of >> and John you're talking about tech startups  >> or tech startups that sell say you know how cells store take and I've just invented an all flash array and it's kick-ass and it's gonna you know eat into Oracle Exadata and EMC and all these those guys and I'm gonna go sell it to GM or I have a software product that I want to sell to company so again getting into the enterprises used to be hard and then it got easy it seems to be getting hard again what's your take of the state of that >> a long a subject that's got that's got >> So again quite a bit to it I think first I don't think companies are gonna buy all stick on the application layer for a second and talk about application startups I don't think customers are gonna buy from a hundred different companies for their cloud applications I I think when you're looking at applications specifically you think about automating a vertical process but companies also have to work together horizontally not just vertically so I think in the end they will they will have fewer cloud providers I mentioned sort of to could a company have three or a four a couple best to breeds maybe but they're not going to have they're not gonna make the on-premise complexity and just move that complexity to the cloud this is an opportunity to make things simpler to your to your earlier point I think that's what will happen now we happen to be we acquire quite a bit as I know you know and so we actually get to look at a lot of startups and I would say you're right that that we see with many startups is they start off trying to as inexpensively as possible which is I don't think I try to do it as expensively as I could try to try to build a capability and then many run into problems with eventually scaling and being eventually being able to build out we see this as we as we are I think for startups one of the real attractiveness of the cloud is that no longer any of those costs you described a few minutes ago exist I can now go do the remember that dev test I talked about that dev test I talked about for the big company is the same thing you could do on the cloud you can go get Java you can get the Oracle database you can only use or pay for what you use no longer you have to buy a Sun server that you describe or get a license and you can build on the most industrial strength commercial capability in the world Oracle and you can do that now as a start-up and be enterprise-grade from the first piece of code you write. >> So being a world-class leader might be harder for start to crack that nut versus becoming part of an ecosystem >> think that's right I think what you said >> I is right and I was trying to address both I think as a start-up you have an opportunity to to build on on commercial-grade tools from from the beginning and I do think you're right that being part of an ecosystem almost assuredly will be necessary as this market matures.  >> week at CES before GM announcing >>  A lot of commentary this Lyft could deal with Lyft and big investments try to be like Uber and Tesla electronic cars to in-car entertainment so I'm going to say that the car is one big gadget smartphone Internet of Things device which is true that big data problem that brings up the question GM and Ford or incumbent leaders in Detroit and the automotive industry are shifting radically this digital transformation is that something that you see similar in other verticals that >>  Well I'll stick with that vertical for a second I mean that vertical has shifted dramatically over the years I mean it used to be those companies made money selling cars they no longer made money selling cars years ago they then made money on service now they don't make much money on service now it's going to become the services that sit in the car with those are entertainment services or whatever they may be and so it's gonna be very interesting in that industry how they innovate do they outsource those services to another technology company in the Silicon Valley or do those become the core differentiators of those companies and and it's it's going that disintermediation occurs industry by industry by industry we've now talked about tech and what the implications are for the cloud on tech same things occurring in virtually every vertical.  >>  So you said early it's you know they're an enabler or it's gonna freak people out it's it >> Well this is what happens with innovation when time comes this is why we've done Oracle what we've done.  We've moved as quickly to the cloud as we possibly could.  It doesn't mean our on-premise business isn't strategic and important to us of course it is and I think the combination of the two capabilities gives us a huge differentiator. But that said for us to move quickly was critical we think to our long-term success and that's why we've been as fast moving as we can and I believe that true in every industry.  If you spend doing words like balance protect all of those sort of verbs they don't lend themselves to long-term success.  >> Let's talk about the company now that you're leading with the team. The number one question I get to ask I was told to ask you was ask them how the Co-CEO job is going and I'd like to know what it's like in the day in the life of Mark Hurd with Safra Catz, Larry Ellison take us through some color around what goes on behind the curtain >>  No.  I think well first of all we've been together awhile so so this is not like a new new phenomena so we we think we have sort of a capability that we can do a lot of things at the same time I don't know that that there is a broader team in terms of experiences I'm not trying to say we're great or try to be arrogant about it at all but it gives us the capability to touch a lot of things at the same time.  I've been a CEO multiple times and I can tell you it's a lonely job it's a hard job and it has a lot of responsibilities associated with it the fact that you can get a team that brings with it different skills different capabilities and you get the right personalities that that blend together that's that's a blessing and if you can get it take it . >> That's not just at the top tier of the management team also it's a >> company's pretty strong you know it's a >> I'm glad you brought that up John because I get questions like that a lot about Larry or Safra or they get questions about about all that but the reality is we're 140 thousand people in this company so we're a we're a large company with an enormous number of talented people I mean Thomas Kurian who runs our software development organization John Fowler runs our hardware development organization Dave Donatelli are people running regions we have we have a lot of very very skilled people come our Chief Architect Edward Screven I mean we just have a lot of depth at >> oracle and so it's a lot bigger than >> And the newly hired Dave Donatelli who is a shark when it comes to infrastructure he is strong and how's he working out I mean how's the that's a big >> listen and Dave is really leading the >> I think Dave's done great I mean product management go-to-market efforts around all of our all of our systems team which is going through its own transformation because we see the way infrastructure is now being used today and it's going through a lot of changing and Dave's just a great addition to Oracle >> He should me he knows it he knows the EMC playbook and certainly they have their challenges so I ought to ask you a question another one is that the hardware middleware market is about integration you mentioned that horizontal integration how how challenging is that for you guys and is this part of the transformation message that you guys have done internally because you're asking customers to transform and so can you give an example where you've transformed yourself >> Well when you talk about the middleware market I actually you mentioned the middleware market at least in some of the transformation I actually think with all of the data that we described earlier the opportunity to integrate that data and to integrate that data in the cloud is a huge opportunity for us we introduced an Oracle OpenWorld integration cloud services Oracle integration cloud services and the opportunity now for us to bring that to market and bring that capability to customers you know fantastic opportunity >> Let's talk about competition my favorite subject HP split up EMC sold to Dell , IBM is trying to make a run at it what does all this mean for the marketplace and specifically customers because you know those are big those are big companies that are transitioning or struggling as I'm saying what should what does all that mean connect the dots for the industry dynamics for those >> Well I think the industry our industry is no different than any other industry it's looking for revenue growth it's got leaders that that are are being driven to to grow revenue to grow or means to grow cashflow and in many times when you realize you you can't do that or they they find that they they're not in a position to do that they change and and change is inevitable and that's all you're seeing here is the change of what we described earlier you've got a certain market that behaved a certain way for a long time that market is now interrupted it's going to cause certain people to fail it's going to cause certain people to combine and as a result that change is going to occur and if you're not able to do the things I described the things that Oracle's done so if you will cross the chasm then change is coming and I don't think >> you've seen the end of it John. >> And a lot of these folks made big bets years ago going back a decade what bets do you see not paying off and what bets should people be making to be competitive in this new era >> believe what I said about our strategy I >> Well I think if you're not first in the cloud to begin with you're not gonna be long for this industry point one point two if you don't have enough breath in the cloud and you're just a single player with a point solution you're probably not long for this world so in the end companies want more from fewer people they want help with innovation they want better economics and that's going to prove in the end to come from a few companies in my opinion I think you'll see the same cycle that we've seen before that you'll see companies that frankly remember if you went back to the 80s think about how many great companies were in this industry in the 80s when I started in the industry I'm shame to have to admit that a shame but I hate to have to admit I'm old enough so I started yeah and therefore you look good well they're all gone yeah I mean Wang is gone the Digital's gone Data General is gone this Prime Computer is gone I mean this happens a lot and and this is just us going back to the future where we've got an interruption in the industry it's gonna cause winners and losers and it's the reason John that we've made the investments we've we have we could have easily done none of this invested none of this capital and harvested our existing business and it would look great for a while yeah not long run.    >> Yeah and you and you guys invested in the future at the right time seems it's working great for you guys the numbers are good how do you invest in R&D of some of the numbers in the cloud in terms of revenue book asking . l >> don't we don't give out you know all of >> Welll we our data forward-looking projections but what we did in our last quarter was we talked about our growth in the cloud virtually double our bookings year-over-year we've now got a chance to be in the ball well I won't give numbers out right now because I was already gonna make a forward projection but think of us now as multiple billions of dollars in revenue in  PAS platform and SAS growing and as our revenue has grown John our growth rate has actually gone up we say one more time the revenues grown and the growth rate has increased and so I think this comes down to the fact that we've just gotten better and better at this we've added more people from a salesperson perspective more of our products have become available in the market to the point of the percent of our portfolio that's now available in the cloud and we've now got lots of references and so it's an exciting time for us >> I've got to ask about Amazon Web Services obviously they've been going to have to work with our database and saying they can suck all that in and it'll come up in a second but I interviewed the former CTO of EMC who's now doing a storage startup on his own and he had a comment and I said well  Amazon's winning he says well we always debate what inning are we in in the industry and  Dave Vellante and I'm my cohost argued that he thinks were in the seventh inning I think we're in the first inning and so the guests said no you guys were both wrong,   Amazon won Game one of the doubleheader Game two is about the enterprise and it's not even started so I wanna get your thoughts Amazon certainly did well and doing well and numbers are pretty clear with public cloud now they're aggressively moving into the enterprise and it's just different ballgame talk about the dynamics their vis-a-vis Oracle you're targeting much more business approach understanding the IT side of the business Amazon is kind of do-it-yourself you know launching new stuff every day what's the distinction between the two some love Amazon people love the success you know good job Amazon people you know we cover them we like them they have a good product but it's not the end game to your message what's the difference in the two >> All right I'm gonna stay away from all the baseball analogies I think that they nstarted out as a retailer they had an IT infrastructure to support a retailer I think very clever they needed a lot of IT capacity when retail season was at its height during the holidays they said we've got a bunch of used capacity during other parts of the  un year we'll go rent it to people so they can leverage it makes sense now as you start to move into other workloads as you start working into enterprise workloads and dealing with all of the issues that come up there are more complexities to come up I think that we are in the I'll just say early stages and and by the way remember one thing I mentioned to you I think earlier just before we started and started this interview it doesn't take much of a change in it to have a dramatic effect on the revenue of the industry so I mentioned earlier about this dev test thing 30% of the industry three hundred billion dollars if only 5% of that moves its 15 billion dollars 15 billion goes from somewhere some companies that are supplying that today to somebody else and that's the very beginning of this see I actually don't think very little of this workload today has moved compared to what it will be five to six to seven years from that so - from that just a sheer numerical dimension we're in the very beginnings the very early phases of this the ability to get the bulk of this market is the ability to move massive amounts of workloads from some of the most complicated jobs >> so we're just scratching the surface of what it means >> just beginning >> ok so talk about the customers that you have because you have a lot of customers you guys have a zillion customers Oracle is a dominant player for many many generations of IT and computing we've seen that but I'm sure some of them have Amazon presence or they're kicking the tires doing some shadow IT through some things how are you guys do that because you kind of partner with Amazon on one hand but you also have cuffs cuz you have customers there how is how is that conversation going with Oracle and Amazon you say hey whatever or is there >> no I think that customers can chose to take their Oracle licenses and run them on Amazon they can also get those same capabilities directly out of the Oracle cloud we can take jobs between Amazon and Oracle and have them work together so it's it's really the customer's choice as to what's best for the customer my general view would be that if a customer is doing a platform job writing an application in Java I'll probably get infrastructure from the same person I'm getting Java from so I'm more likely to buy that infrastructure from Oracle if I'm buying that application from Oracle or using that platform from Oracle but if a customer says I'd really like to do my platform job on Oracle and store some of that up on Amazon that's customer's choice >> Okay Amazon is on the list of competitors Larry said one of the things is seeing new competitors he's SAP and IBM now new names yes Amazon, Microsoft Azure seems to be doing well we don't see vmware on that list yet but i mean as you're speaking in a little bit of some of the other players market share and cloud people have different cloud visions Amazon certainly has their in incumbent business Microsoft's what's your take on them visa vie Oracle which one Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft for that >> I'd say Microsoft done a good job I think Microsoft has moved its it's estate to the cloud not very dissimilar from from Oracle their applications is Microsoft the competitor of Oracle I think the answer to that would be sort of but but in many cases not directly their applications are really different from our applications my guess is many of the people using infrastructure from Microsoft are using infrastructure because they use their IP and their platform and/or their applications so I think therefore they they're doing the job that strategically that you see Oracle's multiple billion dollar cloud business doing as well which is moving many of its core capabilities from on Prem to to to the cloud they also have the capability now to merge and on Prem business and a cloud business which again I think it's a really key differentiator as we move forward >> differentiation seem to be dependent >> It seems to be the upon what people had or have going on either past or present so with that there's different approaches so I got to answer the question I'm a customer pretend I'm a customer hey Mark how do I evaluate all this stuff in the day is this like I need a matrix of like who's got one no wonder one's got checkboxes what criteria should I use to decide who >> I think John it comes back to the core stuff of you know who's got the best stuff you know whose stuff really in the end does does the best job for you starting at the application layer through through the platform layer through through the infrastructure layer and then the fact that you can now get this stuff in the cloud is a huge advantage for all the reasons we've been talking about for the past past several minutes but it's still gonna be about who's got the best IP but whoever's got the best IP in the end probably matters - I mean you know performance security I can go through a lot of other issues John but let's start with who's got the best IP I promise you promise you we will perform from a performance perspective I promise you we will have the best security now that said so a customer has done a license on Amazon Web Services are certainly probably doesn't run as good as an Oracle listen I mean obviously I believe the IP you have I believe that we're pretty good at running Oracle workloads I actually believe we're the best in the world at running Oracle workloads and and and and and I think you're gonna see that get yet even better as we >> I can attest theCUBE  interviews on the 48 interviews we did it was pretty clear that Oracle is very well optimized for Oracle on Oracle no doubt and clearly the performances order of magnitude significant >> and our cloud will also be capable of >> But John let me add handling non Oracle workloads so you know we think in the end while we'd love the whole world to run on Oracle we believe there'll be a portion of the world that doesn't and the fact that you can run those capabilities on the Oracle cloud along with your Oracle workload becomes critical as well >> Yeah I want to drill down on that because one of the things that I've observed over the past decade and past five years in particular there's been kind of a Oracle huge community because you have huge customer base but it's always been like you know redstack its proprietary and it's kind of like some whether it's truthful not that's been kind of a narrative but now it's with my sequel you got a lot of open technologies this Oracle OpenWorld it became very clear that integration it's not about redstack anymore referring to Oracle's you know their boxes and brand it's Oracle runs great on Oracle but if you don't have Oracle  you can still be an Oracle customer so talk about that dynamic this is a significant opportunity for Oracle news business >> You know maybe the narrative is the way you describe the narrative and you lowered your voice you know I got a certain impression and from the words you said now that said Oracle's always run hybrid workloads multiple applications around the Oracle database SAP runs in the Oracle database lots of applications run on the Oracle database so I think Oracle's always been if you will open from that perspective while continuing to build a complete stack now I'd make the argument that the cloud in many ways is of any cloud provider is a proprietary stack I mean insert name here is what is by the way that you know what the middleware is that Salesforce uses or the database or the middleware that Workday uses or day you can go down company by company and and at the end of the day you really though don't know what's behind that it is really totally provided to you by that provider and that is what you see being shifted in the cloud you can make the argument and this gets very into another interesting debate much of IT has been the do-it-yourself sort of approach I'm gonna if I will as an IT staff become an R&D organization and if you're a CEO and not a tech CEO but as CEO of a company with an IT organization you have to ask yourself is that really what I want to do do I really want to glue an operating system to a server build anything from scratch sure support it and do all this work and and or would I rather have somebody do it for me now as long as the economics are right and as long as I have trust in that in that in that partner and I'm secure and all the things we've talked about but at the end of the day transferring a lot of work that doesn't give me a lot of economic value add and moving that as I've mentioned earlier to Oracle's R&D budget I think becomes really attractive for a whole suite of >> I think it's great I'll rephrase the question so Oracle has a business as great business and you have customers they have Oracle software and contract value increases they renew they buy a new license new technology you grow your customer base but with cloud native what we with the web skills you pointed out a lot of companies were successful building their own stuff because they didn't have the cash but they had expertise so they would build their own caching and myself and they support it and pick up that cost but now as IT moves to cloud native that's a huge deal they don't want the build there also I agree with you you're looking at me >> I will say this and I don't mean to interupt you but there still is quite a debate in big companies and this is one of these transitions we've talked about the transition really from a tech industry perspective but inside the customer inside IT organizations the cloud is a threat so when you when you look at it as like the mainframe guys many computers were threatened exactly yeah so I'm now in an IT organization you know this do-it-yourself thing this is quite a bit of job security I wrote this application I've got to glue this to this and this is all really complicated and if you talk to a CEO and not get a non tech CEO and you say listen you really don't want to mess with all this because this is really complex and I'm the only one that really knows how to do this this whole thing work we're gonna transfer that complexity to somebody else has its own degree of threat to IT organizations so that debate you described that debate today John is still not over >> I think the Holy Grail whoever can provide a cloud native scalable turnkey infrastructure will probably of course you're right win that business of course right >> this is why these these these moves to your point about what in inor we in or what phase are we in these things have have multiple episodes so >>  are we in that cloud native phase right now are we for the for the new customer comes to Oracle hey you know what I'm I'm growing I've been doing stuff in the cloud with Amazon I've been doing this over here got my bootstrap data center I really want to go to cloud in a big way and we're growing leaps and bounds >> I'll stick with what I said we're in the very beginning of this and and we're in the beauty of this that the amount of IT John the suite of applications you go to any of these big banks in the United States around the world they have just sores of applications most of which were homegrown many of which sit on those mainframes you say we're threatened 25 or 30 years ago this whole move is a big set of moves that will take you know several years and you know use my discussion of 10 years out where I think I'll had it it'll take time like that to move now what customers are gonna want again one more time is I'm not going to be able to take that whole on-prem capability and just say thank you move it over here it's not gonna work so therefore the ability to move this thing job by job and then to be able to coexist these hybrid environments over a period of time become a become a key issue for our customers >> move at their own pace basically not >> so have them happy for examples and I think devtest is a as as >> I think customers I give you much work as has to get done to do that is is a sort of an intellectual layup I I think you're gonna see a lot of devtest move quickly I think you're gonna see applications particularly those applications that don't differentiate the enterprise customer facing application that you think is your unique sacred sauce you may keep that as homegrown on-prem but those commercial applications that don't differentiate me I mean me being the company I will move to the cloud as as quickly as I can >> Great excitement at Oracle OpenWorld this year the theme of integration and we talked to some customers and they were excited by that it's a big problem so that's that's one thing I'd like to talk about the second thing is what confidence can you share with the customers around new growth stretch I was the organic M&A and  organic growth versus M&A your a big buyer you're not afraid to go out and pay a premium for world-class IP but also you're doing IP internally tie those two together integrations the big themes continue to advance the product side as well as the growth strategy around organic growth and buying companies that might fit into >> Sure we spend a fair amount of R&D starting with your second question when I came I think we started spending 3.8 billion and in R&D we'll probably spend 5.2 billion this year in R&D so we we are we invest but not all of it is date we have a few hundred million dollars of our as well so we spent R&D and in in addition to the D the way I like to think about the innovation of Oracle is it's the D it's the art and it's what we acquire and so we have not built everything we've had very much a buy and build strategy we bought in some capabilities that we weren't building and we've merged those to create the portfolio that we have today and yeah we're not gonna stop that's continuing that's the cadence of Oracle right just continue yeah I won't put anything but I will so stop and I will say that we're very focused and and and not at all hesitant when we see something that we think is strategic to us to bring it in and add it to the portfolio you mentioned something early I want to drill down and horizontal integration and growth and vertical integration sometimes people think that mutually exclusive horizontal industry standard commodity hardware was a rage with open-source that helped grow a lot of the market and the web-scale days now vertical integration where hey it works it's kick-ass high-performance you are I don't really care what's in there it works Oracle support set is also working Oracle was kind of people were kind of poopoo in this whole appliance thing go back up you know five years ago good call working so by the way that is the same strategy that's called the class hey so when you really look at vertical integration the cloud is the ultimate in vertical integration because somebody's done now all the work for you when you buy a I try to explain this to customers all the time that when when somebody buys an application in the cloud they have actually procured a hardware database middleware services a data center floor space security they've bought all of that at the same time and so this this shift to the cloud really is the ultimate testimony to to vertical integration and horizontal they're not mutually exclusive you don't see them that's why I mentioned earlier what I said about why I think there will not be a hundred cloud providers supplying to our customer because integration we just talked about it in the vertical sense we want an HR implication that's completely integrated or in the ERP application that's completely integrated but those applications have to work horizontally as well as vertically so I would actually like my ERP application to talk to my HR application it might be nice if my marketing service applications talk to my ERP applications so I really can't I don't want to spend a munch of money on my IT staff horizontally integrating a hundred clouds I'd like somebody to do that for me and that's why having you know Oracle having the suite that we have in terms of applications platform and infrastructure is so important and that's really the trick balancing both really making that happen it seems to be you've got to do both I mean I'm a firm believer that you really have to have that full suite of capability ok so David lanthum IKOS and she'd want to get a question and so I told him I'd read a question for him he says and this is around the on-prem thing your strategy to create seamless experience between on Prem off principle is obviously your customers can't get there overnight how far along on the completion bar are you and your customers to achieving that vision of integration of allogram and off Prem and off prep seamless experience between seamless experience between off Prem and on-premise solutions today you can have an Oracle job running in the cloud you can have an Oracle job running on-premise with Oracle Enterprise Manager you can manage both jobs seamlessly and move workloads back and forth between on Prem in the cloud and you can do that today if we talk a lot about you know mainframes minis going back and looking at history total cost of ownership is a word that's been used in the computer industry going back to technology is a great way to justify things so let's talk about total cost of ownership but also want to get your take on what does patchwork IT mean to you that notion of patchwork IT in context well you've got a lot of terms you'd like to use I I would stick strategically what I said earlier I I think of much of what happened over the last seven eight years as a lot of do-it-yourself work whether you want to call that whatever term you want to use it the whole view of it for example in this valley if you drove up and down one you would see a slew of companies who individually are trying to sell you an IT organization of a company a piece part be sort of like driving up and down and buying a muffler and then buying a bumper and buying all kinds of stuff and putting it together in your driveway this is really now a shift in the industry away from you know patching together all these systems that are extremely complex and moving to a simpler more fully integrated tested optimized environment and it completely increases the complexity of tossa cost of ownership you said increases the complexity decreases the complexity and decreases total cost of ownership even in the industry through many cycles of innovation does that mean I'm old here at the peak of your career thank you very much people are freaking out some people are winning and happy because they're on one side of the disruption era or the other what does this innovation cycle mean to you right now compare and share your color a personal opinion around what's going on right now in the industry compared to other ones and then and how big seismic differences are there or there is it a big shift little shift compare contrast this much I think it's so exciting I think the most exciting things have in our industry in a long time I think the fact is this industry isn't now in a position and evolving into a position where we can really help customers we can get them out of this very complex world that we the industry have created and and like many industries simplify the way our customers get access to a fabulous intellectual property and make it easier and I think this is an opportunity that if you're if you're in this game if you're not listen let's face it out of colleges we haven't there we haven't had the excitement in the tech industry in years the fact is now with a new game to play this is a tremendous change with tremendous set of winners and and you know frankly there's gonna be the losers involved at the same time that's what makes it exciting and cloud is the better mark security was huge an Oracle OpenWorld I gotta ask you this question this came from a source on our wiki bond team top killer tech announcement Oracle OpenWorld was was security but with the Isis Massacre and the France thing the encryption has become a bad word was debated about four years encryption was a top topic in in the conversation that was a key message at Oracle overall everything could be encrypted beyond on encryption all the time as Larry said you guys are talking about what is the state of security right now with encryption and Oracle does that change your security angle with the products or what's what's going on with security right now so we're talking very much now about enterprise applications and and you know I think there's the cloud of all you know we we talked about this little earlier about the perception that I'm now going to take my data that is is very safe in my data center and on prime which we could debate and I'm now gonna move it to a cloud and therefore I feel vulnerable I feel vulnerable that my data is now in the hands of some other entity and and for us I think one big advantage Oracle has is the fact that that we're very good at data we've managed data since the beginning of the company I mean our first customer was yeah well in the CIA was our first customer they remain a customer today and so security has always been at the core of Oracle's DNA now the one of the reasons we have an encrypted database is four years is because when you encrypt them it the performance of the database actually slows so it's been years of evolution years in terms of Exadata development in terms of all the memory that's now I won't go into all the details of the technology but now we can fully encrypt the database and get incredible performance so what you have no hidden performance no I'm not you ready in great job none none incredible performance and the same theme you have an encrypted database now let me tell you what that means that means that when when a customer's HR data is in our cloud our people that are moving around the customers data don't see the customers data they see frankly gibberish they have files the key to that encrypted data can sit with the customer so when that those files come back across the network the customer can decide when where to use the key to open to open that encrypted file so therefore when you're in the Oracle cloud and I listen I encourage everybody ask our competitors how they deal with this ask ask them what their options are how do they deal with that data is is somebody whose nature or provider are there are there people looking at the customers data as they move files around well we've decided that we think the most important thing we can do is secure that data so let's pretend and by the way I don't think this would ever happen but if somebody actually got access to those there's nothing to have access to it's all encrypted talk about the implications for cloud on a global basis data sovereignty is a huge issue with cloud yeah does this impact at all there's a help it does no it does and so that's it's the reason we've had to one of one of the reasons that we've put data centers in many locations as we have so we do have customers that by law have operate in Germany and in the UK and employee data can't be of a UK employee cannot be in Germany and vice versa well we have we now have the ability because of our data center capability in Germany and our data center in the UK to actually make that capability work and so this this issue of data sovereignty like security is a big issue and you're helping the data sovereignty problem with this Robert yes we've had to address it we've had to address it we've had to embrace it and we've had to help it and it's the same thing with security so now you can have a fully secure capable capability in you know 19 20 different countries to help deal with that with that with that data sovereignty and security issue Barker thanks taking the time here for the cube 101 conversation thank you very much thanks John appreciate it you're watching special one-on-one exclusive conversation with Mark Hurd CEO of Oracle here on the cube on the ground here at Oracle's headquarters you