(bright music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's virtual coverage of Discover. We're going to dig into the most pressing topic, not only for IT, but entire organizations. And that's cyber security. With me is Sunil James, senior director of security engineering at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Sunil, welcome to theCUBE. Come on in. >> Dave, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >> Hey, you talked about project Aurora today. Tell us about project Aurora, what is that? >> So I'm glad you asked. Project Aurora is a new framework that we're working on that attempts to provide the underpinnings for Zero Trust architectures inside of everything that we build at HPE. Zero Trust is a way of providing a mechanism for enterprises to allow for everything in their enterprise, whether it's a server, a human, or anything in between, to be verified and attested to before they're allowed to access or transact in certain ways. That's what we announced today. >> Well, so in response to a spate of damaging cyber attacks last month, President Biden issued an executive order designed to improve the United States' security posture. And in that order, he essentially issued a Zero Trust mandate. You know, it's interesting, Sunil. Zero Trust has gone from a buzzword to a critical part of a security strategy. So in thinking about a Zero Trust architecture, how do you think about that, and how does project Aurora fit in? >> Yeah, so Zero Trust architecture, as a concept, has been around for quite some time now. And over the last few years, we've seen many a company attempting to provide technologies that they purport to be Zero Trust. Zero Trust is a framework. It's not one technology, it's not one tool, it's not one product. It is an entire framework of thinking and applying cybersecurity principles to everything that we just talked about beforehand. Project Aurora, as I said beforehand, is designed to provide a way for ourselves and our customers to be able to measure, attest, and verify every single piece of technology that we sell to them. Whether it's a server or everything else in between. Now, we've got a long way to go before we're able to cover everything that HPE sells. But for us, these capabilities are the root of Zero Trust architectures. You need to be able to, at any given moment's notice, verify, measure, and attest, and this is what we're doing with project Aurora. >> So you founded a company called Scytale and sold that to HPE last year. And my understanding is you were really the driving force behind the secure production identity framework, but you said Zero Trust is really a framework. That's an open source project. Maybe you can explain what that is. I mean, people talk about the NIST Framework for cybersecurity. How does that relate? Why is this important and how does Aurora fit into it? >> Yeah, so that's a good question. The NIST Framework is a broader framework for cybersecurity that couples and covers many aspects of thinking about the security posture of an enterprise, whether it's network security, host based intrusion detection capabilities, incident response, things of that sort. SPIFFE, which you're referring to, Secure Production Identity Framework For Everyone, is an open source framework and technology base that we did work on when I was the CEO of Scytale, that was designed to provide a platform agnostic way to assign identity to anything that runs in a network. And so think about yourself or myself. We have identities in our back pocket, driver's license, passports, things of that sort. They provide a unique assertion of who we are, and what we're allowed to do. That does not exist in the world of software. And what SPIFFE does is it provides that mechanism so that you can actually use frameworks like project Aurora that can verify the underpinning infrastructure on top of which software workloads run to be able to verify those SPIFFE identities even better than before. >> Is the intent to productize this capability, you know, within this framework? How do you approach this from HPE's standpoint? >> So SPIFFE and SPIRE will and always will be, as far as I'm concerned, remain an open source project held by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It's for the world, all right. And we want that to be the case because we think that more of our Enterprise customers are not living in the world of one vendor or two vendors. They have multiple vendors. And so we need to give them the tools and the flexibility to be able to allow for open source capabilities like SPIFFE and SPIRE to provide a way for them to assign these identities and assign policies and control, regardless of the infrastructure choices they make today or tomorrow. HPE recognizes that this is a key differentiating capability for our customers. And our goal is to be able to look at our offerings that power the next generation of workloads. Kubernetes instances, containers, serverless, and anything that comes after that. And our responsibility is to say, "How can we actually take what we have and be able to provide those kinds of assertions, those underpinnings for Zero Trust that are going to be necessary to distribute those identities to those workloads, and to do so in a scalable, effective, and automated manner?" Which is one of the most important things that project Aurora does. >> So a lot of companies, Sunil, will set up a security division. But is the HPE strategy to essentially embed security across its entire portfolio? How should we think about HPE strategy in cyber? >> Yeah, so it's a great question. HPE has a long history in security and other domains, networking, and servers, and storage, and beyond. The way we think about what we're building with project Aurora, this is plumbing. This is plumbing that must be in everything we build. Customers don't buy one product from us and they think it's one company, and something else from us, and they think it's another company. They're buying HPE products. And our goal with project Aurora is to ensure that this plumbing is widely and uniformly distributed and made available. So whether you're buying an Aruba device, a Primera storage device, or a ProLiant server, project Aurora's capabilities are going to provide a consistent way to do the things that I've mentioned beforehand to allow for those Zero Trust architectures to become real. >> So, as I alluded to President Biden's executive order previously. I mean, you're a security practitioner, you're an expert in this area. It just seems as though, and I'd love to get your comments on this. I mean, the adversaries are well-funded, you know, they're either organized crime, they're nation states. They're extracting a lot of very valuable information, they're monetizing that. You've seen things like ransomware as a service now. So any knucklehead can be in the ransomware business. So it's just this endless escalation game. How do you see the industry approaching this? What needs to happen? So obviously I like what you're saying about the plumbing. You're not trying to attack this with a bunch of point tools, which is part of the problem. How do you see the industry coming together to solve this problem? >> Yeah. If you operate in the world of security, you have to operate from the standpoint of humility. And the reason why you have to operate from a standpoint of humility is because the attack landscape is constantly changing. The things, and tools, and investments, and techniques that you thought were going to thwart an attacker today, they're quickly outdated within a week, a month, a quarter, whatever it might be. And so you have to be able to consistently and continuously evolve and adapt towards what customers are facing on any given moment's notice. I think to be able to, as an industry, tackle these issues more and moreso, you need to be able to have all of us start to abide, not abide, but start to adopt these open-source patterns. We recognize that every company, HPE included, is here to serve customers and to make money for its shareholders as well. But in order for us to do that, we have to also recognize that they've got other technologies in their infrastructure as well. And so it's our belief, it's my belief, that allowing for us to support open standards with SPIFFE and SPIRE, and perhaps with some of the aspects of what we're doing with project Aurora, I think allows for other people to be able to kind of deliver the same underpinning capabilities, the plumbing, if you will, regardless of whether it's an HPE product or something else along those lines as well. We need more of that generally across our industry, and I think we're far from it. >> I mean, this sounds like a war. I mean, it's more than a battle, it's a war that actually is never going to end. And I don't think there is an end in sight. And you hear CESOs talk about the shortage of talent, they're getting inundated with point products and tools, and then that just creates more technical debt. It's been interesting to watch. Interesting maybe is not the right word. But the pivot to Zero Trust, endpoint security, cloud security, and the exposure that we've now seen as a result of the pandemic was sort of rushed. And then of course, we've seen, you know, the adversaries really take advantage of that. So, I mean what you're describing is this ongoing never-ending battle, isn't it? >> Yeah, yeah, no, it's going to be ongoing. And by the way, Zero Trust is not the end state, right? I mean, there was things that we called the final nail in the coffin five years ago, 10 years ago, and yet the attackers persevered. And that's because there's a lot of innovation out there. There's a lot of infrastructure moving to dynamic architectures like cloud and others that are going to be poorly configured, and are going to not have necessarily the best and brightest providing security around them. So we have to remain vigilant. We have to work as hard as we can to help customers deploy Zero Trust architectures. But we have to be thinking about what's next. We have to be watching, studying, and evolving to be able to prepare ourselves, to be able to go after whatever the next capabilities are. >> What I like about what you're saying is, you're right. You have to have humility. I don't want to say, I mean, it's hard because I do feel like a lot of times the vendor community says, "Okay, we have the answer," to your point. "Okay, we have a Zero Trust solution." Or, "We have a solution." And there is no silver bullet in this game. And I think what I'm hearing from you is, look we're providing infrastructure, plumbing, the substrate, but it's an open system. It's got to evolve. And the thing you didn't say, but I'd love your thoughts on this is we've got to collaborate with somebody you might think is your competitor. 'Cause they're the good guys. >> Yeah. Our customers don't care that we're competitors with anybody. They care that we're helping them solve their problems for their business. So our responsibility is to figure out what we need to do to work together to provide the basic capabilities that allow for our customers to remain in business, right? If cybersecurity issues plague any of our customers that doesn't affect just HPE, that affects all of the companies that are serving that customer. And so, I think we have a shared responsibility to be able to protect our customers. >> And you've been in cyber for much, if not most of your career, right? >> Correct. >> So I got to ask you, did you have a superhero when you were a kid? Did you have a sort of a, you know, save the world thing going? >> Did I have a, you know, I didn't have a save the world thing going, but I had, I had two parents that cared for the world in many, many ways. They were both in the world of healthcare. And so everyday I saw them taking care of other people. And I think that probably rubbed off in some of the decisions that I make too. >> Well it's awesome. You're doing great work, really appreciate you coming on theCUBE, and thank you so much for your insights. >> I appreciate that, thanks. >> And thank you for being with us for our ongoing coverage of HPE Discover 21. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE. The leader in digital tech coverage. We'll be right back. (bright music)

(bright music) >> In 2009, Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist said that statisticians would be the sexiest job in the coming decade. The modern big data movement really took off later in the following year, after the second Hadoop World, which was hosted by Cloudera, in New York city. Jeff Hama Bachar, famously declared to me and John Furrie, in "theCUBE," that the best minds of his generation were trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads. And he said that sucks. The industry was abuzz with the realization that data was the new competitive weapon. Hadoop was heralded as the new data management paradigm. Now what actually transpired over the next 10 years was only a small handful of companies could really master the complexities of big data and attract the data science talent, really necessary to realize massive returns. As well, back then, cloud was in the early stages of its adoption. When you think about it at the beginning of the last decade, and as the years passed, more and more data got moved to the cloud, and the number of data sources absolutely exploded, experimentation accelerated, as did the pace of change. Complexity just overwhelmed big data infrastructures and data teams, leading to a continuous stream of incremental technical improvements designed to try and keep pace, things like data lakes, data hubs, new open source projects, new tools, which piled on even more complexity. And as we reported, we believe what's needed is a complete bit flip and how we approach data architectures. Our next guest is Zhamak Dehgani, who is the Director of Emerging Technologies at ThoughtWorks. Zhamak is a software engineer, architect, thought leader and advisor, to some of the world's most prominent enterprises. She's in my view, one of the foremost advocates for rethinking and changing the way we create and manage data architectures, favoring a decentralized over monolithic structure, and elevating domain knowledge as a primary criterion, and how we organize so-called big data teams and platforms. Zhamak, welcome to the cube, it's a pleasure to have you on the program. >> Hi David, it's wonderful to be here. >> Okay. So you're pretty outspoken about the need for a paradigm shift, in how we manage our data, and our platforms at scale. Why do you feel we need such a radical change? What's your thoughts there? >> Well, I think if you just look back over the last decades, you gave us a summary of what happened since 2010. But even if we got it before then, what we have done over the last few decades is basically repeating, and as you mentioned, incrementally improving how we manage data, based on certain assumptions around, as you mentioned, centralization. Data has to be in one place so we can get value from it. But if you look at the parallel movement of our industry in general, since the birth of internet, we are actually moving towards decentralization. If we think today, like if in this move data side, if we said, the only way web would work, the only way we get access to various applications on the web or pages is to centralize it, we would laugh at that idea, but for some reason, we don't question that when it comes to data, right? So I think it's time to embrace the complexity that comes with the growth of number of sources, the proliferation of sources and consumptions models, embrace the distribution of sources of data, that they're not just within one part of organization. They're not just within even bounds of organizations. They're beyond the bounds of organization, and then look back and say, okay, if that's the trend of our industry in general, given the fabric of compensation and data that we put in globally in place, then how the architecture and technology and organizational structure incentives need to move, to embrace that complexity. And to me, that requires a paradigm shift. A full stack from how we organize our organizations, how we organize our teams, how we put a technology in place to look at it from a decentralized angle. >> Okay, so let's unpack that a little bit. I mean, you've spoken about and written today's big architecture, and you've basically just mentioned that it's flawed. So I want to bring up, I love your diagrams, you have a simple diagram, guys if you could bring up figure one. So on the left here, we're adjusting data from the operational systems, and other enterprise data sets. And of course, external data, we cleanse it, you've got to do the quality thing, and then serve them up to the business. So what's wrong with that picture that we just described, and give granted it's a simplified form. >> Yeah. Quite a few things. So, and I would flip the question maybe back to you or the audience. If we said that there are so many sources of the data and actually data comes from systems and from teams that are very diverse in terms of domains, right? Domain. If you just think about, I don't know, retail, the E-Commerce versus auto management, versus customer. These are very diverse domains. The data comes from many different diverse domains, and then we expect to put them under the control of a centralized team, a centralized system. And I know that centralization probably, if you zoom out is centralized, if you zoom in it's compartmentalized based on functions, and we can talk about that. And we assume that the centralized model, will be getting that data, making sense of it, cleansing and transforming it, then to satisfy a need of very diverse set of consumers without really understanding the domains because the teams responsible for it are not close to the source of the data. So there is a bit of a cognitive gap and domain understanding gap, without really understanding how the data is going to be used. I've talked to numerous, when we came to this, I came up with the idea. I talked to a lot of data teams globally, just to see, what are the pain points? How are they doing it? And one thing that was evident in all of those conversations, that they actually didn't know, after they built these pipelines and put the data in, whether the data warehouse tables or linked, they didn't know how the data was being used. But yet they're responsible for making the data available for this diverse set of use cases. So essentially system and monolithic system, often is a bottleneck. So what you find is that a lot of the teams are struggling with satisfying the needs of the consumers, are struggling with really understanding the data, the domain knowledge is lost, there is a loss of understanding and kind of it in that transformation, often we end up training machine learning models on data, that is not really representative of the reality of the business, and then we put them to production and they don't work because the semantic and the syntax of the data gets lost within that translation. So, and we are struggling with finding people to manage a centralized system because still the technology's fairly, in my opinion, fairly low level and exposes the users of those technology sets and let's say they warehouse a lot of complexity. So in summary, I think it's a bottleneck, it's not going to satisfy the pace of change or pace of innovation, and the availability of sources. It's disconnected and fragmented, even though there's centralized, it's disconnected and fragmented from where the data comes from and where the data gets used, and is managed by a team of hyper specialized people, they're struggling to understand the actual value of the data, the actual format of the data. So it's not going to get us where our aspirations, our ambitions need to be. >> Yeah, so the big data platform is essentially, I think you call it context agnostic. And so as data becomes more important in our lives, you've got all these new data sources injected into the system, experimentation as we said, the cloud becomes much, much easier. So one of the blockers that you've cited and you just mentioned it, is you've got these hyper specialized roles, the data engineer, the quality engineer, data scientist. And it's a losery. I mean, it's like an illusion. These guys, they seemingly they're independent, and can scale independently, but I think you've made the point that in fact, they can't. That a change in a data source has an effect across the entire data life cycle, entire data pipeline. So maybe you could add some some color to why that's problematic for some of the organizations that you work with, and maybe give some examples. >> Yeah, absolutely. So in fact initially, the hypothesis around data mesh came from a series of requests that we received from our both large scale and progressive clients, and progressive in terms of their investment in data architecture. So these were clients that were larger scale, they had diverse and rich set of domain, some of them were big technology, tech companies, some of them were big retail companies, big healthcare companies. So they had that diversity of the data and a number of the sources of the domains. They had invested for quite a few years in generations, of they had multi-generations of PROPRICER data warehouses on prem that were moving to cloud. They had moved through the various revisions of the Hadoop clusters, and they were moving to that to cloud, and then the challenges that they were facing were simply... If I want to just simplify it in one phrase, they we're not getting value from the data that they were collecting. They were continuously struggling to shift the culture because there was so much friction between all of these three phases of both consumption of the data, then transformation and making it available. Consumption from sources and then providing it and serving it to the consumer. So that whole process was full of friction. Everybody was unhappy. So it's bottom line is that you're collecting all this data, there is delay, there is lack of trust in the data itself, because the data is not representative of the reality, it's gone through the transformation, but people that didn't understand really what the data was got delayed. And so there's no trust, it's hard to get to the data. Ultimately, it's hard to create value from the data, and people are working really hard and under a lot of pressure, but it's still struggling. So we often, our solutions, like we are... Technologies, we will often point out to technology. So we go. Okay, this version of some proprietary data warehouse we're using is not the right thing. We should go to the cloud and that certainly will solve our problem, right? Or warehouse wasn't a good one, let's make a data Lake version. So instead of extracting and then transforming and loading into the database, and that transformation is that heavy process because you fundamentally made an assumption using warehouses that if I transform this data into this multidimensional perfectly designed schema, that then everybody can draw on whatever query they want, that's going to solve everybody's problem. But in reality, it doesn't because you are delayed and there is no universal model that serves everybody's need, everybody needs are diverse. Data scientists necessarily don't like the perfectly modeled data, they're for both signals and the noise. So then we've just gone from ATLs to let's say now to Lake, which is... Okay, let's move the transformation to the last mile. Let's just get load the data into the object stores and sort of semi-structured files and get the data scientists use it, but they still struggling because of the problems that we mentioned. So then what is the solution? What is the solution? Well, next generation data platform. Let's put it on the cloud. And we saw clients that actually had gone through a year or multiple years of migration to the cloud but it was great, 18 months, I've seen nine months migrations of the warehouse versus two year migrations of various data sources to the cloud. But ultimately the result is the same, unsatisfied, frustrated data users, data providers with lack of ability to innovate quickly on relevant data and have an experience that they deserve to have, have a delightful experience of discovering and exploring data that they trust. And all of that was still amiss. So something else more fundamentally needed to change than just the technology. >> So the linchpin to your scenario is this notion of context. And you pointed out, you made the other observation that "Look we've made our operational systems context aware but our data platforms are not." And like CRM system sales guys are very comfortable with what's in the CRMs system. They own the data. So let's talk about the answer that you and your colleagues are proposing. You're essentially flipping the architecture whereby those domain knowledge workers, the builders if you will, of data products or data services, they are now first-class citizens in the data flow, and they're injecting by design domain knowledge into the system. So I want to put up another one of your charts guys, bring up the figure two there. It talks about convergence. She showed data distributed, domain driven architecture, the self-serve platform design, and this notion of product thinking. So maybe you could explain why this approach is so desirable in your view. >> Sure. The motivation and inspirations for that approach came from studying what has happened over the last few decades in operational systems. We had a very similar problem prior to microservices with monolithic systems. One of the things systems where the bottleneck, the changes we needed to make was always on vertical now to how the architecture was centralized. And we found a nice niche. And I'm not saying this is a perfect way of decoupling your monolith, but it's a way that currently where we are in our journey to become data driven, it is a nice place to be, which is distribution or a decomposition of your system as well as organization. I think whenever we talk about systems, we've got to talk about people and teams that are responsible for managing those systems. So the decomposition of the systems and the teams, and the data around domains. Because that's how today we are decoupling our business, right? We are decoupling our businesses around domains, and that's a good thing. And what does that do really for us? What it does is it localizes change to the bounded context of that business. It creates clear boundary and interfaces and contracts between the rest of the universe of the organization, and that particular team, so removes the friction that often we have for both managing the change, and both serving data or capability. So if the first principle of data meshes, let's decouple this world of analytical data the same to mirror. The same way we have decoupled our systems and teams, and business. Why data is any different. And the moment you do that, so the moment you bring the ownership to people who understands the data best, then you get questions that well, how is that any different from silos of disconnected databases that we have today and nobody can get to the data? So then the rest of the principles is really to address all of the challenges that comes with this first principle of decomposition around domain context. And the second principle is, well, we have to expect a certain level of quality and accountability, and responsibility for the teams that provide the data. So let's bring products thinking and treating data as a product, to the data that these teams now share, and let's put accountability around it. We need a new set of incentives and metrics for domain teams to share the data, we need to have a new set of kind of quality metrics that define what it means for the data to be a product, and we can go through that conversation perhaps later. So then the second principle is, okay, the teams now that are responsible, the domain teams responsible for their analytical data need to provide that data with a certain level of quality and assurance. Let's call that a product, and bring product thinking to that. And then the next question you get asked off at work by CIO or CTO is the people who build the infrastructure and spend the money. They say, well, "It's actually quite complex to manage big data, now where we want everybody, every independent team to manage the full stack of storage and computation and pipelines and access control and all of that." Well, we've solved that problem in operational world. And that requires really a new level of platform thinking to provide infrastructure and tooling to the domain teams to now be able to manage and serve their big data, and I think that requires re-imagining the world of our tooling and technology. But for now, let's just assume that we need a new level of abstraction to hide away a ton of complexity that unnecessarily people get exposed to. And that's the third principle of creating self-serve infrastructure to allow autonomous teams to build their domains. But then the last pillar, the last fundamental pillar is okay, once he distributed a problem into smaller problems that you found yourself with another set of problems, which is how I'm going to connect this data. The insights happens and emerges from the interconnection of the data domains, right? It's just not necessarily locked into one domain. So the concerns around interoperability and standardization and getting value as a result of composition and interconnection of these domains requires a new approach to governance. And we have to think about governance very differently based on a federated model. And based on a computational model. Like once we have this powerful self-serve platform, we can computationally automate a lot of covenants decisions and security decisions, and policy decisions, that applies to this fabric of mesh, not just a single domain or not in a centralized. So really, as you mentioned, the most important component of the data mesh is distribution of ownership and distribution of architecture in data, the rest of them is to solve all the problems that come with that. >> So, very powerful. And guys, we actually have a picture of what Zhamak just described. Bring up figure three, if you would. So I mean, essentially, you're advocating for the pushing of the pipeline and all its various functions into the lines of business and abstracting that complexity of the underlying infrastructure which you kind of show here in this figure, data infrastructure as a platform down below. And you know why I love about this, Zhamak, is, to me it underscores the data is not the new oil. Because I can put oil in my car, I can put it in my house but I can't put the same code in both places. But I think you call it polyglot data, which is really different forms, batch or whatever. But the same data doesn't follow the laws of scarcity. I can use the same data for many, many uses, and that's what this sort of graphic shows. And then you brought in the really important, sticking problem, which is that the governance which is now not a command and control, it's federated governance. So maybe you could add some thoughts on that. >> Sure, absolutely. It's one of those, I think I keep referring to data mesh as a paradigm shift, and it's not just to make it sound grand and like kind of grand and exciting or important, it's really because I want to point out, we need to question every moment when we make a decision around, how we're going to design security, or governance or modeling of the data. We need to reflect and go back and say, "Am I applying some of my cognitive biases around how I have worked for the last 40 years?" I've seen it work? Or "Do I do I really need to question?" And do need to question the way we have applied governance. I think at the end of the day, the role of the data governance and the objective remains the same. I mean, we all want quality data accessible to a diverse set of users and its users now know have different personas, like data persona, data analysts, data scientists, data application user. These are very diverse personas. So at the end of the day, we want quality data accessible to them, trustworthy in an easy consumable way. However, how we get there looks very different in as you mentioned that the governance model in the old world has been very command and control, very centralized. They were responsible for quality, they were responsible for certification of the data, applying and making sure the data complies with all sorts of regulations, make sure data gets discovered and made available. In the world of data mesh, really the job of the data governance as a function becomes finding the equilibrium between what decisions need to be made and enforced globally, and what decisions need to be made locally so that we can have an interoperable mesh of data sets that can move fast and can change fast. It's really about, instead of kind of putting those systems in a straight jacket of being constantly and don't change, embrace change, and continuous change of landscape because that's just the reality we can't escape. So the role of governance really, the modern governance model I called federated and computational. And by that I mean, every domain needs to have a representative in the governance team. So the role of the data or domain data product owner who really were understands that domain really well, but also wears that hats of the product owner. It's an important role that has to have a representation in the governance. So it's a federation of domains coming together. Plus the SMEs, and people have Subject Matter Experts who understand the regulations in that environment, who understands the data security concerns. But instead of trying to enforce and do this as a central team, they make decisions as what needs to be standardized. What needs to be enforced. And let's push that into that computationally and in an automated fashion into the platform itself, For example. Instead of trying to be part of the data quality pipeline and inject ourselves as people in that process, let's actually as a group, define what constitutes quality. How do we measure quality? And then let's automate that, and let's codify that into the platform, so that every day the products will have a CICD pipeline, and as part of that pipeline, law's quality metrics gets validated, and every day to product needs to publish those SLOs or Service Level Objectives, or whatever we choose as a measure of quality, maybe it's the integrity of the data, or the delay in the data, the liveliness of the data, whatever are the decisions that you're making. Let's codify that. So it's really the objectives of the governance team trying to satisfies the same, but how they do it, it's very, very different. And I wrote a new article recently, trying to explain the logical architecture that would emerge from applying these principles, and I put a kind of a light table to compare and contrast how we do governance today, versus how we'll do it differently, to just give people a flavor of what does it mean to embrace decentralization, and what does it mean to embrace change, and continuous change. So hopefully that could be helpful. >> Yes. There's so many questions I have. But the point you make it too on data quality, sometimes I feel like quality is the end game, Where the end game should be how fast you can go from idea to monetization with a data service. What happens again? And you've sort of addressed this, but what happens to the underlying infrastructure? I mean, spinning up EC2s and S3 buckets, and MyPytorches and TensorFlows. That lives in the business, and who's responding for that? >> Yeah, that's why I'm glad you're asking this question, David, because I truly believe we need to reimagine that world. I think there are many pieces that we can use as utilities are foundational pieces, but I can see for myself at five to seven year road map building this new tooling. I think in terms of the ownership, the question around ownership, that would remain with the platform team, but I don't perhaps a domain agnostic technology focused team, right? That there are providing a set of products themselves, but the users of those products are data product developers, right? Data domain teams that now have really high expectations, in terms of low friction, in terms of a lead time to create a new data products. So we need a new set of tooling and I think the language needs to shift from I need a storage bucket, or I need a storage account, to I need a cluster to run my spark jobs. Too, here's the declaration of my data products. This is where the data file will come from, this is a data that I want to serve, these are the policies that I need to apply in terms of perhaps encryption or access control, go make it happen platform, go provision everything that I need, so that as a data product developer, all I can focus on is the data itself. Representation of semantic and representation of the syntax, and make sure that data meets the quality that I have to assure and it's available. The rest of provisioning of everything that sits underneath will have to get taken care of by the platform. And that's what I mean by requires a reimagination. And there will be a data platform team. The data platform teams that we set up for our clients, in fact themselves have a fair bit of complexity internally, they divide into multiple teams, multiple planes. So there would be a plane, as in a group of capabilities that satisfied that data product developer experience. There would be a set of capabilities that deal with those nitty gritty underlying utilities, I call them (indistinct) utilities because to me, the level of abstraction of the platform needs to go higher than where it is. So what we call platform today are a set of utilities we'll be continuing to using. We'll be continuing to using object storage, we will continue to using relational databases and so on. So there will be a plane and a group of people responsible for that. There will be a group of people responsible for capabilities that enable the mesh level functionality, for example, be able to correlate and connect and query data from multiple nodes, that's a mesh level capability, to be able to discover and explore the mesh of data products, that's the mesh of capability. So it would be a set of teams as part of platform. So we use a strong, again, products thinking embedded in a product and ownership embedded into that to satisfy the experience of this now business oriented domain data teams. So we have a lot of work to do. >> I could go on, unfortunately, we're out of time, but I guess, first of all, I want to tell people there's two pieces that you've put out so far. One is how to move beyond a Monolithic Data Lake to a distributed data mesh. You guys should read that in the "Data Mesh Principles and Logical Architecture," is kind of part two. I guess my last question in the very limited time we have is are organizations ready for this? >> I think how the desire is there. I've been overwhelmed with the number of large and medium and small and private and public, and governments and federal organizations that reached out to us globally. I mean, this is a global movement and I'm humbled by the response of the industry. I think, the desire is there, the pains are real, people acknowledge that something needs to change here. So that's the first step. I think awareness is spreading, organizations are more and more becoming aware, in fact, many technology providers are reaching to us asking what shall we do because our clients are asking us, people are already asking, we need the data mesh and we need the tooling to support it. So that awareness is there in terms of the first step of being ready. However, the ingredients of a successful transformation requires top-down and bottom-up support. So it requires support from chief data analytics officers, all above, the most successful clients that we have with data mesh are the ones that, the CEOs have made a statement that, "We'd want to change the experience of every single customer using data, and we're going to commit to this." So the investment and support exists from top to all layers, the engineers are excited, the maybe perhaps the traditional data teams are open to change. So there are a lot of ingredients of transformations that come together. Are we really ready for it? I think the pioneers, perhaps, the innovators if you think about that innovation curve of adopters, probably pioneers and innovators and lead adopters are making moves towards it, and hopefully as the technology becomes more available, organizations that are less engineering oriented, they don't have the capability in-house today, but they can buy it, they would come next. Maybe those are not the ones who are quite ready for it because the technology is not readily available and requires internal investments to make. >> I think you're right on. I think the leaders are going to lean in hard and they're going to show us the path over the next several years. And I think that the end of this decade is going to be defined a lot differently than the beginning. Zhamak, thanks so much for coming to "theCUBE" and participating in the program. >> Thank you for hosting me, David. >> Pleasure having you. >> It's been wonderful. >> All right, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back right after this short break. (slow music)

from London England it's the cube covering Koopa inspire 19 emia taught to you by Koopa hey welcome to the cube Lisa Martin coming to you from London I'm at Koopa inspire 19 pleased to be joined by one of Koopas spent setters hit me here is alla Williams the managing director and chief procurement officer at Barclays al welcome to the cube Thank You Lisa thanks for having me so Barclays is a three hundred plus year old Bank three hundred and thirty five years I think I also was was headquartered in London I didn't know this until he did some research Barclays is the pioneer of the ATM yes and a credit card in the UK credit card why first credit card in the UK and the pioneer in inventor of the ATM correct yes so when we think of an organization that is three hundred and thirty five years old we think how agile is that organization how transformative can it be talk to me about what it's like at Barclays from a digital perspective before we get into some of the procurement stuff which or not but tight and culture like that's a great question right could you think about a three hundred thirty-five year old Bank how innovative could it can it be right how agile can it be and the market in the the sector we work in requires us to be very agile because banking is a disrupted sector especially on the retail and consumer side expectations around technology and mobile capabilities and digital transformation are the most significant they've ever been in this sector and so for Barclays it's it's absolutely key that we deliver on those capabilities both in terms of our front office for our consumers and our corporate clients as well as for our own employees within the bank how influential is the consumer side because as consumers we are so used to being able to get anything that we want we can buy products and services we can pay bills with a click or swipe on the on the business side it's harder for businesses to transform and innovate it's a lot of other risks and security issues how influential is Barclays Barclays is your retail your consumer business in terms of your b2b work and that's a great question because I think the the experiences that shape people's expectations come from their interactions in retail and consumer when it comes to b2b and traditionally business-to-business commerce and financial transactions haven't been nearly as sophisticated streamlined or frictionless you know as you would in a consumer model so the expectations are built on the consumer side in consumer to business type models and then the business and business models been playing catch-up for the last several years as a result talk to me about now the role of finance leaders I was reading surgery that Kupa did recently have 253 uk-based financial decision makers and a big number of them I think it was 96 percent said we don't have complete visibility of all of our spent there's a big opportunity there to work with a company like Cooper but talk to me about how the role of the chief procurement officer is changing you've been doing it for quite a while you're a veteran right some of the trends that you have seen that you've really jumped on and said this is the direction we need to be going in right so I've been the chief procurement officer of Barclays for two and half years and the CEO of a large global technology company for nine years before that so I think the the the role of the chief procurement officer has changed significantly over the course of the last say 10 years five years two years we're at a point now where the chief procurement officer is seen as a source of and the organization of procurement is seen as a source of innovation it's seen as a source of capacity creation for the the the organization for the company and it's also seen as sort of a steward of the portfolio of spins for that particular organization to ensure we're maximizing the utility and value of that spend and of that supply chain so the expectations for procurement have tripled quadrupled or more fold in the last you know four or five years some of the interesting things that we're hearing from Koopa and from their customers and partners today is beyond simply initiative to simply but beyond you know dramatically improving procurement and invoicing and dispensing and leveraging the platform as one source for visibility of all that spent but it's being transformative to completely other areas like I was hearing a story of a customer who redefined procurement and is actually positively impacting corporate sustainability yes Wow so talk to me a little bit about I know one of the things that you really thrive on is competition how are you leveraging that and maybe your old American football days to build and maybe foster a sense of collaborative competition within your team to transform procurement at Barclays yes so I think that whether it's in sport or whether it's in business I think the concept of teams is key and effective teams are built on trust they're built on empowerment they they're built on collaboration open communication limited asymmetry and information as it's passed and that's all about kind of driving agility for whether you're on this on the football field American footballer or other football or on or in a business environment of business context so you know it's really and as a CEO and for all of the leaders on my team it's also about being a player coach and knowing when you need to be a player when you need to sort of roll up sleeves contribute in a particular area or particular solving a particular problem but more importantly when you need to be coached and and help those players sort of and those team members in on the team sort of step up to the challenge and coach them to be more success see Bennet Berkeley's a couple years now talk to me about your use case the purpose has with Koopa what are you guys doing together and what are some of the transformations that both internally and externally you've been able to achieve yeah so the relationship with coop has been great again I joined to make a couple of years ago one of the sort of first pillars associated with our overall transformation journey of centralizing procurement from five different procurement or six different procurement organizations really to moving to strategic locations to building out a new organization structure and operating model for for procurement I won't go into all that but one of the key pillars was around technology and we didn't have a common procure-to-pay or source to pay capability that extended or threaded throughout the bank for managing and supply chain so early on when I joined Barclays partnered partnering with Koopa working both of our teams working very effectively together to deploy sort of country by country and region by region we're now in 11 countries with the Koopa source to pay platform we're going to point to six more by the end of this calendar year and over 95% of our spend is flowing through Koopa as a multinational banks so it's been a significant component of our overall transformation journey for for Barclays and part of that transformation journey the technology piece is important that all a lot of its cultural we talked about a history of a three hundred and thirty-five year old organization but also going from five different procurement organizations down to one using a central platform that's challenging to get folks on board right being comfortable with change is your spirit of competitiveness was that a facilitator of getting adoption so that you could get them well I think so I mean I think to get the most out of teams and the most out of any organization large or small you need to galvanize around a common set of goals and objectives the the adage we ought to be pulling on the rope together to achieve achieve the end result and I think in the case of the sort of our Koopa journey both in terms of its strategy and overall deployment it was something more or less our entire procurement organization was able able to galvanize around and in feel like they were a part of and it it created an identity for us within Barclays as a procurement organization as well and kind of put his front and center with our business units and our stakeholders in a way we had we'd never been before so in terms of procurement having a seat at the board table is that something now that you have the ability to do with Barclays and be much more of a strategic driver of business yeah and look at Barclays compared to some of my other experiences it's not an it's not an issue of not having a seat at the table we might have a seat at too many tables sometimes there's a lot of attention on procurement within Barclays to help it deliver on its strategic objectives so with that seat comes a lot of responsibility so I often will coach my teams to ensure that they understand kind of that that that component of it's not just about having a seat at the table it's about what we're going to contribute what are we going to do differently when we're at that table when we're helping shape the decisions for the organization and what are the accountabilities and responsibilities that will pick up as a result and deliver on those promises that's absolutely critical one of the things that was talked about this morning is to trust Rob Bernstein talked about it they also had a guest speaker Rachel Botsman who's a trusted expert it was such an interesting conversation you know we talked about any chuck event that the cube goes to you always talk about trust got to have trust in the data you gotta have trust in your suppliers but what they were talking about here was really being an enabler of trust but cooper really working to earn the trust of its customers tell me about how has earned your trust and also allowed you to have those better discussions at the board table so that you have marked trusted relationships with your executive and your peer team yeah I mean it all starts for Barclays at the very top of the house in front office because we're in the business of trust I mean Bank a bank is in the business of trust that's what we deliver and promise to our consumers and our corporate clients and I think you know within procurement we need to make sure we're sort of delivering on that same promise around around trust and building trust with our teams and with our suppliers in the case of Kupa frankly it was about asking them to ensure they appropriately set expectations with me with my team in terms of what we could or couldn't do with the capability right don't over promise and under deliver but actually be very prudent and practical about what we're gonna be able to get done and then deliver on those promises to the best of your ability but if something and I always do if something goes so not according to plan right it's be open communicative and direct with the issue and how we're going to address it that to me is how we build trust in any team and that's how we built trust with Kupa through our transformation over the last two years that's critical mister your point no deployment probably ever goes perfectly according to plan there are always things that happen whatever it is software hardware is that we're talking about and I think for companies to address that confront it help the customer through those challenges to me that's more valuable I'm saying everything went beautifully was flawless that's not reality right I completely agree and I think that's that's what separates good from great companies to write is their ability to build that trust whether it be within their supply chain with their clients with their employees and look it's it's a journey it's not something you're one and done and you can say okay we've got the trust you can lose it as easy as you can obtain it and you have to keep a focus on on those trusting relationships should think about that we've earned this trust but we have to focus on it so we don't lose it so we grow X having the focus on that because you're right whether it's a deployment of software it's not one and it's the same thing with any sort of trusted relationship right it's maintaining that it's ensuring that there's value right being delivered on both sides that's right tell me a little bit about your ability Barclays ability as a spend setter in this program that Cooper has to influence technology directions like they talk a lot about the community all the insights that they're able to deliver to the community because of the community as Burton is able to be a strategic her gir with Cooper rather than just a customer yeah Phil we are I mean Rob and his team Raja Ravi the entire crew are very receptive and they're very collaborative in hearing from an organization like Barclays now look I'll be the first to admit Barclays and in banking and banking specifically in the UK it's a different animal than many other companies and sectors that kupo would work in so what might work for other companies doesn't always work for us and kind of flipping that around there's certain things that we need from Koopa that that we've been able to partner with them to deliver over the course of the last two years and the relationship of coop has been fantastic they hear us they listen to us they help us understand what the solution can do what it can't do or won't be able to do in the near term and then how do we augment that in the right way so we don't create cottage industries of activity with Impa cure med when we could be leveraging the capability of ghupat to deliver on those services right so you mentioned a little bit about what's next for you guys in terms of rolling out the deployment a little bit more broadly last question for you is some of the news that came out today with the expansion of Koopa pay with American Express for example and just some of the other innovations that Koopa is making what are some of your thoughts what are some of the things that excite you about the direction are going in well yes so on the Koopa pay front I'm actually going to be on stage with Ravi tomorrow talking about Koopa pay because Mark Lee card is also a key component of that capability for the first virtual card that they integrated probably I believe it was yeah and and so so I think about payments is sort of the one not the only but one of the next frontiers from a source to pay or a procurement perspective and it's about how do we innovate in the payment space to get away from having that through the old traditional methods of adding suppliers you know detailed information to our vendor masters so that we can then eventually get an invoice and then reconcile payment remittance to invoices and sort of work through there's a lot of cost in that a lot of time and very little speed we want to move the dial on speed the value we want to move the dial on efficiencies and eventually get to a point where we can offer things like early payment discounts so by having control over our our payment process and that's where Koopa pay and the Barclaycard partnership with Koopa pay is really played a key role in making that happen so in q1 we made our commitment to deploy Koopa pay in q1 after we're through some of our deployments through the rest of this year on the base of the platform and look forward to continuing that journey next year on the payment side one last thing that just popped up I was doing some research and the b2c side is transformed much faster a lot of demand from the consumers we talked about that a moment ago do you see what the direction could the pay is going in with Barclays card for example as bringing in some of the consumer implements to start facilitating the acceleration that's needed there and I think yes I think that's exactly right because again when you think about the consumer side of payments or use it we're all using our phones we're using other digital means we're using wearables we're using different ways of buying and paying especially in retail and the first question we have to ask ourselves why can't those innovations be applied in a b2b space now kupah pay is I think a start of sort of that journey and certainly not the end you know destination but certainly I think it sets us off in the right direction yeah we as consumers are quite demanding yes I'll thank you for doing you on the cube ensuring the Barclays spends that our success rate good luck tomorrow in your keynote thank you for having me thank you pleasure I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube from cuca inspire London 19 thanks for watching

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering Kubecon and CloudNativeCon brought to you by Redhat, a CloudNative computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are here in San Diego where we are keeping CloudNative classy. I'm Stu Miniman, and my cohost is John Troyer, and we are happy to welcome back to the program, our host, Dan Kohn, who is the executive director of the CloudNative computing foundation, or the CNCF. Dan, thank you so much for having us. >> Thrilled to be back again. >> All right, and, yeah, so our fourth year doing this show, the big shows-- >> Dan: Nothing's really changed. You just tear right along the same level. One year to the next, you can just confuse them pretty easily.. >> So, you know, Dan, we actually did a prediction show yesterday, and I said, maybe it's my math background, but I look back two years ago, it was four thousand, then eight thousand, now twelve thousand, so I predict Boston must be sixteen thousand because I was used to those standardized tests, but with the growth, you never know, and it is very difficult, you know, we talk about planning, we've talked, this facility was booked before-- >> Dan: Two years ago. >> --the curve really started taking off. So, help us set the stage a little bit, we're getting towards the end of the event, but you know, tons of day zero things, so many sessions, so many people, there were pre-show events I heard that started like the end of last week, so, it's a small city in this community in so many pieces, and the CNCF helps enable all of it. >> It does, and what's fun for us is just that, the community is out there adopting these technologies and contributing to it and growing, and being able to come together, this is always our biggest event in North America but also in Europe and China. It's just a really nice snapshot of the point of time, in saying, okay, where are things, how many companies are interested in having sponsor booths, how many developers are there, how many track, but, I think maybe my favorite anecdote from Kubecon CloudNativeCon San Diego is that there was a, so we offer, a CFP track, a call for proposals that's extremely competitive, only 12% of the talks get accepted. And then we have a maintainer track, where the different providers can have either an intro, a deep-dive, or both. So the deep dive for the project Helm, which is not even a graduated project yet, I mean, it's very widely used, package manager for Kubernetes, but the deep dive for Helm had more than 1600 people inside their session, which is more than we had at all of attending Kubecon 2015 and 2016 combined. >> So, Dan, one of the words that gets mentioned a lot in this space, and it has lots of different meanings, is "scale". You know, we talk about Kubernetes built for big scale, we're talking about Edge computing which goes to small scale. This event, you look at the ecosystem. There's a thirty foot banner with all of the logos there, you look at the landscape-- >> Dan: They're not that big, either. >> --there are so many logos on there. Actually, I really thought you had an enjoyable yet useful analogy in your opening keynote. You talk about Minecraft. I've got a boy, he plays Xbox, I've seen Minecraft, so when he pulls up the little chart and there's like, you know, all of these little things on the side, my son can tell you how they're used and what you can build with them, I would be completely daunted looking at that, much like many of the people coming to this show, and they look around and they're like, I don't even know where to start. >> And that was fun keynote for me to put together, because I did need to make sure, both on the Minecraft part, that all the formulas were correct, I didn't want anyone... But then I drew the analogy to Kubernetes and how it is based on a set of building blocks, hundreds of them, that have evolved over time, and for that, I actually did some software archeology of reaching out to the people who created the original IPFW, Linux firewall 20 years ago based on PSD and then the evolution since then, made sure that they were comfortable with my description of it. But now, bringing it out to Kubecon, CNCF, we have a lot of projects now, so we're up to 43. When we met in Seattle four years ago, it was 2. And so it's definitely incumbent on CNCF to do a good job, and we can probably do an even better one on trying to draw this trail map, this recommended path through understanding the technologies, deciding on which ones people might want to adopt. >> Yeah, I think that would be really interesting. In fact, the words trail map kind of came up on Twitter, today, I saw. And one of the things that struck me was how the first rule of Kubecon is, well, Kubernetes is not maybe in the center of everything, it's underneath everything, but, like you said, 42 projects in the CNCF, many more projects, open-source projects, of course, from different vendors, from different coalitions, that you can see here on the show floor as well, if not in a session, so, without giving a maybe a CNCF 101, what does the path forward look like in terms of that, the growth of projects within the CNCF umbrella, the prominence of Kubecon, are we headed towards CloudNativeCon? >> Well, we've always been calling it Kubecon CloudNativeCon, and we could reverse the names, but I don't see any particular drive to do that. But I would really emphasize, and give credit to Craig McLuckie and some of the other people who originally set up CNCF, where Google had this technology, if they'd come to the Linux Foundation and said, we want to call it the Kubernetes Foundation, we probably would've said yes to that. But the impact, then, would be that all of these other technologies and approaches would have come in and said, we need to become part of the Kubernetes project, and instead, there was a vision of an ecosystem, and the reality is that Kubernetes is still by far the largest project. I mean, if you look at the total number of contributors, I believe it's approximately the same between Kubernetes and our other 42 projects combined. So, and of course, there's overlap. But in that sense, in some ways, Kubernetes sort of represents the sun, and the other projects are orbiting around it, but from the beginning, the whole idea was to say that we wanted to allow a diversity of different approaches, and CNCF has had this very clear philosophy that we're not king makers, that if you look at our landscape document, where we look at different functions like key management or container run times or databases or others, there can be multiple CNCF hosted projects in each box. And so far at least, that approach seems to be working quite well. >> Yeah, Dan, having been to a number of these, the maturity and progress is obvious. Something we've said is Kubernetes is really table sticks at this point, no matter where I go, there is going to be Kubernetes, and therefore, I've seen it some over the last year or so, but very prominent on this show, we're talking about work loads, we're talking about applications, you know, it's defining and explaining that CloudNative piece of it, and the tough thing is, you know, modern applications and building applications and that AppDev community. So, you know, speak a little bit-- You've got a very diverse audience here, talk about the personas you have to communicate with, and who you're attracting to this. I know they put out lots of metrics as to the surveys and who's coming and who's participating. >> Well, we do, and we'll be publishing those, and I love the fact. I think some people misunderstand in the thinking that Kubecon CloudNativeCon is all infrastructure engineers, and something like a third or more of the attendees are application developers, and so I do think there's this natural move, particularly towards AppDev. The difference is that on the infrastructure side, there's just a really strong consensus about Kubernetes, as you're saying, where on the application development side, it's still very early days. And I mean, if anything, I think really the only area that there is consensus on is that the abstractions that Kubernetes provides are not the ones that we want to have regular application developers at most enterprises working with, that they shouldn't actually need to build their own container and then write the YAML in order to configure it. Brian Liles hit that point nicely with his keynote today around Rails. But so we can agree that what we have isn't the right outcome, we can agree that whatever are the winning solutions are very likely underneath going to be building those containers and writing the YAML. But there are so many different approaches right now, at a high layer on what that right interface is. >> Yeah, I mean, just, one example I have, I had the opportunity to interview Bloomberg for the second time. And a year ago, we had talked very much about the infrastructure, and this year we talked about really, they've built internally that PaaS layer, so that their AppDevs, they might know that there's Kubernetes, but they don't have to interface with that at all. I've had a number of the CNCF end user members participate, maybe, speak to that, the community of end users participating, and end user usage overall. >> Yeah, so when we first met in Seattle four years ago, we had three members of our end user community. We appreciated them joining early, but that was a tough call. But to be up to 124 now, representing almost every industry, all around the world, just a huge number of brand names, has been fantastic. What is interesting is, if you go talk to them, almost all of them are using Kubernetes as the underlying layer for their own internal PaaS, and so the regular developers in their organizations can often just want to type get push, and then have the continuous integration run and the things built and then deployed out and everything. But it's somewhat surprising there hasn't yet been a level of consensus on what that sort of common PaaS, the common set of abstractions on top should be. There's a ton of our members and developers and others are all working to sort of build that winning solution, but I don't have a prediction for you yet. >> And of course, skill interoperability and skill transferability is going to be key in growing this ecosystem, but I thought the stats on you know, the searches you can do on the number of job openings for Kubernetes is incredible. >> Yeah, so on the interoperability, we were very pleased to announce Tuesday that we've now passed 100 certified vendors, and of all the things that CNCF does, probably even including Kubecon, I might say that that certified Kubernetes program is the one that's had the biggest impact. To have implementations from over 100 different organizations that you can take the same workloads and move them across and have the confidence, those APIs will be supported, it's just a huge accomplishment, and in some ways, up there with WiFi or Bluetooth or some of the best interoperability standards. And then you mentioned the job support, which is another-- >> Yeah, I want to transfer engineers too, as well as workloads. >> --area that we're thrilled, and we just launched that, but we now have a couple hundred jobs listed on it and a bunch of people applying, and it's just a perfect example of the kind of ecosystem development that we're thrilled to do, and in particular the fact that we're not charging either the employers or the applicants, so it's jobs.CNCF.io to get access to that. >> Great. Dan, you also mentioned in your keynote, Kubernetes has crossed the chasm. That changes the challenges that you have when you start talking about you know, the early or mid majority environment, so I know you've been flying around the globe, there's not only the three big events, but many small events, talk about how CNCF6 mission helps you know, educate and push, I guess not push, but educate and further innovation. >> Yeah, and just enable. So, one of the other programs we have is the Kubernetes Certified service provider, these are organizations, essentially consulting firms, that have a deep expertise that have had at least three of their engineers pass our certified Kubernetes administrator exam, and it is amazing now that we've passed 100 of those, but they're in over 30 different countries. So we're just thrilled to see businesses all around the world be able to take advantage of that. And I do get to go to a lot of events around the world; we're actually, CNCF is hosting our first ever events in Seoul and in Sydney in two weeks, that I'm quite excited for, and then in February, we're going to be back in India, and we're going to be in Bengaluru, where we had a very successful event in March. We'll be there in February 2020 and then our first one in New Delhi, those are both in the third week of February. And I think it does just speak to the number of people who are really eager for these to soak this up, but one of the cool things about it is we're combining both local experts, half of our speakers are local, half are international, and then we do a beginner track and an advanced track. >> Yeah, Dan, you know, I'd just love a little bit of insight from you as to, there's a little bit of uncontrolled chaos when you talk about open source. Many of the things that we're talking about this year, a year ago, we would've been, oh my gosh, I would've never thought of that. So give us what it's like to be kind of at the eye of the hurricane, if you would. >> A lot of criticism, to be honest. An amazing number of people like to point out the things that we're not quite doing correctly. But you know, the huge challenge for an organization like CNCF, where, we're a non-profit, these events are actually spinning off money that we're then able to reinvest directly into the projects, so doing things like a quarter million dollars for a security audit for Kubernetes that we were able to publish. Or a Jepson testing for NCD, or improving documentation and such. So a big part of it is trying to create those positive feedback loops, and have that, and then another huge part is just, given all the different competing interests and the fact that we literally have every big technology company in the world on our board and then all of the, I mean, hundreds of start ups that tend to be very competitive, it's just really important that we treat organizations similarly. So that all of our platinum members are treated the same, all our gold, all our silver, and then within the projects, that all the graduated projects are treated similarly, incubating, sandbox, and people really notice. I have kids, and it's a little bit there, where they're sort of always believing that the other kid is getting extra attention. >> Yeah, right, you can't be the king maker, if it will, you're letting it out. Look out a little bit, Dan, and you know, we still have more growth to go in the community, obviously the event has room for growth. What do you see looking forward to 2020 and beyond? >> Yeah, I would love to predict some sort of amazing discontinuity where everyone adopts these technologies and then CNCF is not necessary anymore, something like that. But the reality is, I mean, I love that crossing the chasm metaphor, and I do think it's very powerful, and we really do say 2018 was the year that Kubernetes crossed the chasm from the early adopters to the early majority, but I would emphasize the fact that it's only the early majority. We haven't reached in to the entire second half of the curve, the late majority and the laggards. And so there are a ton of organizations here at the event who are just getting up to speed on this and realizing, oh, we really need to invest and start understanding it. And so, I mean, I don't, we also talk about there will be some point of peak Kubecon, just like peak Loyal, and I don't yet see any signs of it being 2019 or 2020, but it's something that we're very cognizant of and working hard to try and ensure that the event remains useful for people and that they're seeing value from it. I mean, there was a real question when we went from one thousand Seattle four years ago to four thousand in Austin three years ago, oh, is this event even still useful, can developers still interact, do you still have conversations, is the hallway track still valuable? And thankfully, I'm able to chat with a lot of the core developers, where this is their fifth North American Kubecon and they're saying, no, I'm still getting value out of it. Now, what we tend to hear from them is, "but I didn't get to go to any sessions," or "I have so many hallway tracks and private meetings and interactions and such," but the great thing there is that we actually get all of these sessions up on YouTube within 48 or 72 hours, and so, people ask me, "oh, there's 18 different tracks, how do I decide which one to go to?" And I always say, "go to the one where you want to interact with the speaker afterwards, or ask a question," because the other ones, you can watch later. But there isn't really a substitute for being here on the ground. >> Well, there's so much content there, Dan, I think if they start watching now, by the time you get to Amsterdam, they'll have dented a little bit. >> I'll give a quick pitch for my favorite Chrome extension, it's called Video Speed Player. And you can speed people up to 120, 125%, get a little bit of that time back. >> Yeah, absolutely, we have at the backend of ours, there is YouTube, so you can adjust the speed and it does help most of the time, and you can back up a few seconds if needed. Dan, look, congratulations, we know you have a tough role, you and the CNCF, we really appreciate the partnership. We love our community, it has had a phenomenal time this week at the show, and look forward to 2020 and beyond. >> I do as well, I really want to thank you for being with us through this whole way, and I think it is just an important part of the ecosystem. >> And I know John Furrier also says thank you and looks forward to seeing you next year. >> Oh, absolutely. >> Dan, thank you so much. John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, getting towards the end of our three days, wall-to-wall coverage here in sunny San Diego, California, thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> live from Washington, D. C. It's the Cube covering a ws public sector summit by Amazon Web services. >> Welcome back, everyone to our nation's capital. We are the Cube. We are live at A W s Public Sector summit. I'm your host Rebecca Night, along with my co host, John Farrier. We're joined by Ken Eisner Director Worldwide Educational programs at a WS Thanks so much for coming on the show >> you for having me. >> So tell our viewers a little bit. About what? What you do as the director of educational programs. Sure, I head >> up a program called a Ws Educate a ws educate is Amazon's global initiative to provide students and teachers around the world with the resource is that they need really to propel students into this awesome field of cloud computing. We launched it back in May of 2,015 and we did it to fill this demand. If we look at it today, what kind of right in the midst of this fourth industrial revolution is changing the means of production obviously in the digital on cloud space, But it's also creating this new worker class all around. Yeah, the cloud Advanced services like machine learning I robotics, I ot and so on. And if you looked at the employer demand, um, Cloud computing has been the number one linked in skill for the past four years in a row. We look at cloud computing. We kind of divide into four families. Software development, cloud architecture, the data world, you know, like machine learning I data science, business intelligence and Alex and then the middle school opportunities like technical customer support, age and cybersecurity, which can range all the way from middle school of Ph. D. But yet the timeto hire these people has grown up dramatically. Glass door as study of companies over there platform between two thousand 92 1,050 18 and show that the timeto higher had increased by 80%. Yet just think about that we talk about I mean, this conference is all about innovation. If you don't have builders, if you don't have innovators, how the heck Kenya Kenya innovate? >> Can I gotta ask you, Andy, just to have known him for over eight years and reporting on him and covering it was on when when everyone didn't understand yet what it was. Now everyone kind of does our congratulations and success. But to see him on stage, talk passionately about education. Yeah, mean and knowing Andy means it's kind of boiled up because he's very reserved, very conservative guy, pragmatic. But for him to be overtly projecting, his opinion around education, which was really yeah, pretty critical means something's going on. This is a huge issue not just in politics, riel, state, local areas where education, where >> the root of income inequality it's it's a lot of. >> There's a lot of challenges. People just aren't ready for these new types of jobs that are coming out that >> pay well, by the way. And this is Elliott >> of him out there that are unfilled for the first time, there are more jobs unfilled than there are candidates for them. You're solving this problem. Tell us what's going on in Amazon. Why the fewer what's going on with all this? Why everyone's so jacked up >> a great point. I, Andy, I think, said that education is at a crisis point today and really talked about that racial inequality piece way. Timeto hire people in the software development space Cloud architecture um technical called cloud Support Age. It's incredibly long so that it's just creating excess costs into the system, but were so passionate, like if you look at going to the cloud, Amazon wants to disrupt areas where we do not see that progress happening. Education is an area that's in vast need for disruption. There are people were doing amazing stuff. We've heard from Cal Poly. We've heard from Yeah, Arizona State. Carnegie Mellon. There's Joseph Alan at North Northeastern. >> People are >> doing great stuff. We're looking at you some places that are doing dual enrollment programs between high school and community in college and higher ed. But we're not moving fast enough, but you guys >> are provided with educate your program. This is people can walk in the front door without any kind of going through gatekeepers or any kind of getting college. This is straight up from the front, or they could be dropouts that could be post college re Skilling. Whatever it is, they could walk in the front door and get skilled up through educators that correct, >> we send people the ws educate dot com. All you need is some element of being in school activity, or you won't be going back from Re Skilling perspective and you came free access into resource is whether your student teacher get free access into content. That's map two jobs, because again, would you people warm from the education way? All want enlightenment contributors to sai all important, But >> really they >> want careers and all the stats gallop ransom good stats about both what, yet students and what industry wants. They want them to be aligned to jobs. And we're seeing that there's a man >> my master was specifically If I'm unemployed and I want to work, what can I do? I walk into you, You can go >> right on and we can you sign up, we'll give you access to these online cloud. Career pathways will give you micro credentials so we can bad you credential you against you We belong something on Samarian Robo maker. So individual services and full pathways. >> So this a >> direct door for someone unemployed We're going to get some work and a high paying job, >> right? Right. Absolutely. >> We and we also >> give you free access into a ws because we know that hands on practice doing real world applications is just vital. So we >> will do that end. By the way, at the end of >> this, we have a job board Amazon customer In part of our job, we're all saying >> these air >> jobs are super high in demand. You can apply to get a job as an intern or as a full time. Are you through our job? >> This is what people don't know about Rebecca. The war is not out there, and this is the people. Some of the problems. This is a solution >> exactly, but I actually want to get drilled down a little bit. This initiative is not just for grown ups. It's it's for Kimmie. This is for you. Kid starts in kindergarten, So I'm really interested to hear what you're doing and how you're thinking about really starting with the little kids and particularly underrepresented minorities and women who are not. There were also under representative in the in the cloud industry how you're thinking expansively about getting more of those people into these jacks. And actually, it's still >> Day one within all y'all way started with Way started with 18 and older because we saw that as the Keith the key lever into that audience and start with computer science but we've expanded greatly. Our wee last year reinvent, We introduced pathways for students 14 over and cloud literacy materials such as a cloud inventor, Cloud Explorer and Cloud Builder. Back to really get at those young audiences. We've introduced dual enrollment stuff that happens between high school community college or high school in higher ed, and we're working on partnerships with scratch First Robotics Project lead the way that introduced, whether it's blocked based coding, robotics were finding robotics is such a huge door opener again, not just for technically and >> get into it absolutely, because it's hands on >> stuff is relevant. They weren't relevant stuff that they can touch that. They can feel that they can open their browser, make something happen, build a mobile application. But they also want tohave pathways into the future. They want to see something that they can. Eventually you'll wind up in and a ws the cloud just makes it real, because you, Khun do real worlds stuff from a browser by working with the first robot. Biotics are using scratch toe develop Ai ai extensions in recognition and Lex and Polly and so on. So we've entered into partnerships with him right toe. Open up those doors and create that long term engagement and pipe on into the high demand jobs of tomorrow. >> What do you do in terms of the colleges that you mentioned and you mention Northeastern and Cal Poly Arizona State? What? What are you seeing? Is the most exciting innovations there. >> Yes. So, first of all, we happen to be it. We're in over 24 100 institutions around the world. We actually, by the way, began in the U. S. And was 65% us. Now it's actually 35% US 65% outside. We're in 200 countries and territories around the world. But institutions such as the doing amazing stuff Polo chow at a Georgia Tech. Things that he's doing with visual ization on top of a ws is absolutely amazing. We launched a cloud Ambassador program to reward and recognize the top faculty from around the world. They're truly doing amazing stuff, but even more, we're seeing the output from students. There was a student, Alfredo Cologne. He was lived in Puerto Rico, devastated by Hurricane Maria. So lost his, you know, economic mobility came to Florida and started taking classes at local schools. He found a ws educate and just dove headlong into it. Did eight Pathways and then applied for a job in Dev Ops at Universal Studios and received a job. He is one of my favorite evangelists, but and it's not just that higher ed. We found community college students. We launched a duel enrolment with between Santa Monica College and Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles, focusing again a majority minority students, largely Hispanic, in that community. Um, and Michael Brown, you finish the cloud computing certificate, applied for an internship, a mission clouds so again a partner of ours and became a God. Hey, guys, internship And they start a whole program around. So not only were seeing your excitement out of the institutions, which we are, but we're also seeing Simon. Our students and businesses all want to get involved in this hiring brigade. >> Can I gotta ask. We're learning so much about Amazon would cover him for a long time. You know all the key buzzwords. Yeah, raise the bar all these terms working backwards. So >> tell us about what's your >> working backwards plan? Because you have a great mission and we applaud. I think it's a super critical. I think it's so under promoted. I think we'll do our best to kind of promote. It's really valuable to society and getting people their jobs. Yeah, but it's a great opportunity, you know, itself. But what's your goal? What's your What's your objective? How you gonna get there, What your priorities, What do you what do you what do you need >> to wear? A pure educational workforce? And today our job is to work backwards from employers and this cloud opportunity, >> the thing that we >> care about our customers still remains or student on DH. So we want to give excessive mobility to students into these fields in cloud computing, not just today and tomorrow. That requires a lot that requires machine lurking in the algorithm that you that changed the learning objectives you based on career, so content maps to thes careers, and we're gonna be working with educational institutions on that recruited does. Recruiting doesn't do an effective job at matching students into jobs. >> Are we >> looking at all of just the elite institutions as signals for that? That's a big >> students are your customer and customer, but older in support systems that that support you, right? Like Cal Poly and others to me. >> Luli. We've also got governments. So we were down in Louisiana just some last month, and Governor Bel Edwards said, We're going to state why with a WS educates cloud degree program across all of their community college system across the University of Louisiana State system and into K 12 because we believe in those long term pathways. Never before have governors have ministers of country were being with the Ministry of Education for Singapore in Indonesia, and we're working deep into India. Never had they been more aligned toe workforce development. It creates huge unrest. We've seen this in Spain and Greece we see in the U. S. But it's also this economic imperative, and Andy is right. Education is at a crisis. Education is not solving the needs of all their constituents, but also industries to blame. We haven't been deeply partnered with education. That partnership is such a huge part of >> this structural things of involved in the educational system. It's Lanier's Internets nonlinear got progressions air differently. This is an opportunity because I think if the it's just like competition, Hey, if the U. S Department of Education not get their act together. People aren't going to go to school. I mean, Peter Thiel, another political spectrums, was paying people not to go to college when I was a little different radical view Andy over here saying, Look at it. That's why you >> see the >> data points starting to boil up. I see some of my younger son's friends all saying questioning right what they could get on YouTube. What's accessible now, Thinking Lor, You can learn about anything digitally now. This is totally People are starting to realize that I might not need to be in college or I might not need to be learning this. I can go direct >> and we pay lip >> service to lifelong education if you end. If you terminally end education at X year, well, you know what's what's hap happening with the rest of your life? We need to be lifelong learners. And, yes, we need to have off ramps and the on ramps throughout our education. Thie. Other thing is, it's not just skill, it's the skills are important, and we need to have people were certified in various a ws skills and come but we also need to focus on those competencies. Education does a good job around critical decision making skills and stuff like, um, collaboration. But >> do they really >> do a good job at inventing? Simplified? >> Do they teach kids >> to fam? Are we walking kids to >> social emotional, you know? >> Absolutely. Are we teaching? Were kids have tio think big to move >> fast and have that bias for action? >> I think that I want to have fun doing it way. Alright, well, so fun having you on the show. A great conversation. >> Thank you. I appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John. For your you are watching the cube. Stay tuned.

(upbeat music) >> Live, from Washington DC. It's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington DC. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of John Furrier. We are excited to welcome to the program, General Keith Alexander former NSA Director, the first Commander to lead the US Cyber Command, Four-star General with a 40 year career. Thank you so much for coming theCUBE, we are honored, we are honored to have you. >> It is an honor to be here. Thank you. >> So let's talk about cyber threats. Let's start there and have you just give us your observations, your thoughts on what are the most pressing cyber threats that keep you up at night? >> Well, so, when you think about threats, you think about Nation States, so you can go to Iran, Russia, China, North Korea. And then you think about criminal threats, well all the things like ransomware. Some of the Nation State actors are also criminals at night so they can use Nation State tools. And my concern about all the evolution of cyber-threats, is that the attacks are getting more destructive, the malware has more legs with worms and the impact on our commercial sector and our nation, increasingly bigger. So you have all those from cyber. And then I think the biggest impact to our country is the theft of intellectual property, right. That's our future. So you look out on this floor here, think about all the technical talent. Now imagine that every idea that we have, somebody else is stealing, making a product out of it, competing with us, and beating us. That's kind of what Huawei did, taking CISCO code to make Huawei, and now they're racing down that road. So we have a couple of big issues here to solve, protect our future, that intellectual property, stop the theft of money and other ideas, and protect our nation. So when you think about cyber, that's what I think about going to. Often times I'll talk about the Nation State threat. The most prevalent threats is this criminal threat and the most, I think, right now, important for us strategically is the theft of intellectual property. >> So why don't we just have a digital force to counter all this? Why doesn't, you know, we take the same approach we did when we, you know, we celebrated the 75th anniversary D-day, okay, World War II, okay, that was just recently in the news. That's a physical war, okay. We have a digital war happening whether you call it or not. I think it is, personally my opinion. I think it is. You're seeing the misinformation campaigns, financial institutions leaving England, like it's nobody's business. I mean it crippled the entire UK, that like a big hack. Who knows? But its happening digitally. Where's the forces? Is that Cyber Command? What do you do? >> So that's Cyber Command. You bring out an important issue. And protecting the nation, the reason we set up Cyber Command not just to get me promoted, but that was a good outcome. (laughing) But it was actually how do we defend the country? How do we defend ourselves in cyber? So you need a force to do it. So you're right, you need a force. That force is Cyber Command. There's an issue though. Cyber Command cannot see today, attacks on our country. So they're left to try to go after the offense, but all the offense has to do is hit over here. They're looking at these sets of targets. They don't see the attacks. So they wouldn't have seen the attack on Sony. They don't see these devastating attacks. They don't see the thefts. So the real solution to what you bring up is make it visible, make it so our nation can defend itself from cyber by seeing the attacks that are hitting us. That should help us protect companies in sectors and help us share that information. It has to be at speed. So we talk about sharing, but it's senseless for me to send you for air traffic control, a letter, that a plane is located overhead. You get it in the mail seven days later, you think, well-- >> Too late. >> That's too late. >> Or fighting blindfolded. >> That's right. >> I mean-- >> So you can't do either. And so what it gets you to, is we have to create the new norm for visibility in cyber space. This does a whole host of things and you were good to bring out, it's also fake news. It's also deception. It's all these other things that are going on. We have to make that visible. >> How do you do that, though? >> What do you do? I do that. (laughing) So the way you do it, I think, is start at the beginning. What's happening to the network? So, on building a defensible framework, you've got to be able to see the attacks. Not what you expect, but all the attacks. So that's anomaly detection. So that's one of the things we have to do. And then you have to share that at network speed. And then you have to have a machine-learning expert system AI to help you go at the speeds the attacker's going to go at. On fake-news, this is a big problem. >> Yeah. >> You know. This has, been throughout time. Somebody pointed out about, you know, George Washington, right, seven fake letters, written to say, "Oh no, I think the King's good." He never wrote that. And the reason that countries do it, like Russia, in the elections, is to change something to more beneficial for them. Or at least what they believe is more beneficial. It is interesting, MIT has done some studies, so I've heard, on this. And that people are 70% more like to re-Tweet, re-Tweet fake news than they are the facts. So. >> Because it's more sensational, because it's-- >> That's food. It's good for you, in a way. But it's tasty. >> Look at this. It's kind of something that you want to talk about. "Can you believe what these guys are doing? "That's outrageous, retweet." >> Not true. >> Not true. Oh, yeah, but it makes me mad just thinking about it. >> Right, right. >> And so, you get people going, and you think, You know, it's like going into a bar and you know, you go to him, "He thinks you're ugly." and you go to me, and you go, "He thinks you're ugly." (laughs) And so we get going and you started it and we didn't even talk. >> Right, right. >> And so that's what Russia does. >> At scale too. >> At scale. >> At the scale point. >> So part of the solution to that is understanding where information is coming from, being able to see the see the environment like you do the physical environment at speed. I think step one, if I were to pick out the logical sequence of what'll happen, we'll get to a defensible architecture over the next year or two. We're already starting to see that with other sectors, so I think we can get there. As soon as you do that, now you're into, how do I know that this news is real. It's kind of like a block-chain for facts. How do we now do that in this way. We've got to figure that out. >> We're doing our part there. But I want to get back to this topic of infrastructure, because digital, okay, there's roads, there's digital roads, there's packets moving round. You mentioned Huawei ripping off CISCO, which takes their R and D and puts it in their pockets. They have to get that. But we let fake news and other things, you've got payload, content or payload, and then you've got infrastructure distribution. Right, so, we're getting at here as that there are literally roads and bridges and digital construction apparatus, infrastructure, that needs to be understood, addressed, monitored, or reset, because you've had email that's been around for awhile. But these are new kinds of infrastructure, but the payload, malware, fake news, whatever it is. There's an interaction between payload and infrastructure. Your thoughts and reaction to that as a Commander, thinking about how to combat all this? >> I, my gut reaction, is that you're going to have to change, we will have to change, how we think about that. It's not any more roads and avenues in. It's all the environment. You know, it's like this whole thing. Now the whole world is opened up. It's like the Matrix. You open it up and there it is. It's everything. So what we have to do is think about is if it's everything, how do we now operate in a world where you have both truths and fiction? That's the harder problem. So that's where I say, if we solve the first problem, we're so far along in establishing perhaps the level so it raises us up to a level where we're now securing it, where we can begin to see now the ideas for the pedigree of information I think will come out. If you think about the amount of unique information created every year, there are digital videos that claim it's doubling every year or more. If that's true, that half of, 75% of it is fiction, we've got a big road to go. And you know there is a lot of fiction out there, so we've got to fix it. And the unfortunate part is both sides of that, both the fiction and the finding the fiction, has consequences because somebody says that "A wasn't true, "That person, you know, they're saying, he was a rapist, "he was a robber, he was a drugger," and then they find out it was all fake, but he still has that stigma. And then the person over here says, "See, they accused me of that. "They're out to get me in other areas. "They can exclaim what they want." >> But sometimes the person saying that is also a person who has a lot of power in our government, who is saying that it's fake news, when it's not fake news, or, you know what, I-- >> So that's part of the issue. >> It's a very different climate >> Some of it is fake. Some of it's not. And that's what makes it so difficult for the public. So you could say, "That piece was fake, "maybe not the other six." But the reality is, and I think this is where the media can really help. This is where you can help. How do we set up the facts? And I think that's the hardest part. >> It's the truth. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's a data problem. And you know, we've talked about this off camera in the past. Data is critical for the systems to work. The visibility of the data. Having contextual data, the behavioral data. This gets a lot of the consequences. There's real consequences to this one. Theft, IP, freedom, lives. My son was video-gaming the other day and I could hear his friends all talking, "What's your ping start word? "What's your ping time? "I got lag, I'm dead." And this is a video game. Military, lagging, is not a game. People are losing their lives, potentially if they don't have the right tactical edge, access to technology. I know this is near and dear to your heart. I want to get your reaction. The Department of Defense is deploying strategies to make our military in the field, which represents 85% infantry, I believe, some statistic around that number, is relying on equipment. Technology can help, you know, that. Your thoughts on, the same direction. >> Going to the Cloud. Their effort to go to the Cloud is a great step forward, because it addresses just what you're saying. You know, everybody used to have their own data centers. But a data center has a fixed amount of computational capability. Once you reach it, you have to get another data center, or you just live with what you've got. In the Cloud if the problem's bigger, elasticity. Just add more corridors. And you can do things now that we could never do before. Perhaps even more importantly, you can make the Clouds global. And you can see around the world. Now you're talking about encrypted data. You're talking about ensuring that you have a level of encryption that you need, accesses and stuff. For mobile forces, that's the future. You don't carry a data center around with an infantry battalion. So you want that elasticity and you need the connectivity and you need the training to go with it. And the training gets you to what we were just talking about. When somebody serves up something wrong, and this happened to me in combat, in Desert Storm. We were launched on, everybody was getting ready to launch on something, and I said, "This doesn't sound right." And I told the Division Commander, "I don't agree. "I think this is crazy. "The Iraqis are not attacking us down this line. "I think it's old news. "I think somebody's taken an old report that we had "and re-read it and said oh my God, they're coming." And when we found out that was a JSTARS, remember how the JSTARS MTI thing would off of a wire, would look like a convoy. And that's what it was. So you have to have both. >> So you were on the cusp of an attack, deploying troops. >> That's right. >> On fake information, or misinformation, not accurate-- >> Old information. >> Old information. >> Old information. >> Old, fake, it's all not relevant. >> Well what happens is somebody interprets that to be true. So it gets back to you, how do you interpret the information? So there's training. It's a healthy dose of skepticism, you know. There are aliens in this room. Well, maybe not. (laughing) >> As far as we know. >> That's what everybody. >> But what a fascinating anecdote that you just told, about being in Desert Storm and having this report come and you saying, "Guys, this doesn't sound right." I mean, how often do you harken back to your experience in the military and when you were actually in combat, versus what you are doing today in terms of thinking about these threats? >> A lot. Because in the military, when you have troops in danger your first thought is how can I do more, how can I do better, what can I do to get them the intelligence they need? And you can innovate, and pressure is great innovator. (crunching sound) And it was amazing. And our Division Commander, General Griffith, was all into that. He said, "I trust you. "Do whatever you want." And we, it was amazing. So, I think that's a good thing. Note that when you go back and look at military campaigns, there's always this thing, the victor writes the history. (laughing) So you know, hopefully, the victor will write the truthful history. But that's not always the case. Sometimes history is re-written to be more like what they would like it to be. So, this fake news isn't new. This is something where I think journalists, historians, and others, can come together and say, "You know, that don't make sense. "Let's get the facts." >> But there's so much pressure on journalists today in this 24-hour news cycle, where you're not only expected to write the story, but you're expected to be Tweeting about it, or do a podcast about it later, to get that first draft of history right. >> So it may be part of that is as the reporter is saying it, step back and say, "Here's what we've been told." You know, we used to call those a certain type of sandwich, not a good-- (laughing) If memory serves it's a sandwich. One of these sandwiches. You're getting fed that, you're thinking, "You know, this doesn't make sense. "This time and day that this would occur." "So while we've heard this report. "It's sensational. "We need to go with the facts." And that's one of the areas that I think we really got to work. >> Journalism's changing too. I can tell you, from we've talked, data drives us. We've no advertising. Completely different model. In-depth interviews. The truth is out there. The key is how do you get the truth in context to real-time information for those right opportunities. Well, I want to get before we go, and thanks for coming on, and spending the time, General, I really appreciate it. Your company that you've formed, IronNet, okay, you're applying a lot of your discipline and knowledge in military cyber and cutting-edge tech. Tell us about your company. >> So one of the things that you, we brought up, and discussed here. When I had Cyber Command, one of the frustrations that I discussed with both Secretary Gates and Secretary Panetta, we can't see attacks on our country. And that's the commercial sector needs to help go fix that. The government can't fix that. So my thought was now that I'm in the commercial sector, I'll help fix the ability to see attacks on the commercial sector so we can share it with the government. What that entails is creating a behavioral analytic system that creates events, anomalies, an expert system with machine-learning and AI, that helps you understand what's going on and the ability to correlate and then give that to the government, so they can see that picture, so they have a chance of defending our country. So step one is doing that. Now, truth and lending, it's a lot harder than I thought it would be. (laughing) You know, I had this great saying, "Nothing is too hard "for those of us who don't have to do it." "How hard can this be?" Those were two of my favorite sayings. Now that I have to do it, I can say that it's hard, but it's doable. We can do this. And it's going to take some time. We are getting traction. The energy sector has been great to work with in this area. I think within a year, what we deploy with the companies, and what we push up to the Cloud and the ability to now start sharing that with government will change the way we think about cyber security. I think it's a disruptor. And we have to do that because that's the way they're going to attack us, with AI. We have to have a fast system to defend. >> I know you got to go, tight schedule here, but I want to get one quick question in. I know you're not a policy, you know, wonk, as they say, or expert. Well, you probably are an expert on policy, but if we can get a re-do on reshaping policy to enable these hard problems to be solved by entrepreneurs like yourself expertise that are coming into the space, quickly, with ideas to solve these big problems, whether it's fake news or understanding attacks. What do the policy makers need to do? Is it get out of the way? Do they rip up everything? Do they reshape it? What's your vision on this? What's your opinion? >> I think and I think the acting Secretary of Defense is taking this on and others. We've got to have a way of quickly going, this technology changes every two years or better. Our acquisition cycle is in many years. Continue to streamline the acquisition process. Break through that. Trust that the military and civilian leaders will do the right thing. Hold 'em accountable. You know, making the mistake, Amazon, Jeff Bezos, says a great thing, "Go quickly to failure so we can get "to success." And we in the military say, "If you fail, you're a dummy." No, no, try it. If it doesn't work, go on to success. So don't crush somebody because they failed, because they're going to succeed at some point. Try and try again. Persevere. The, so, I think a couple of things, ensure we fix the acquisition process. Streamline it. And allow Commanders and thought leaders the flexibility and agility to bring in the technology and ideas we need to make this a better military, a better intelligence community, and a better country. We can do this. >> All right. All right, I'm thinking Rosie the Riveter. We can do this. (laughing) >> We can do it. Just did it. >> General Alexander, thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Micron Insight 2018. Brought to you by Micron. >> Welcome back to San Francisco Bay everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering Micron Insight 2018. It's just wrapping up behind us. It's a day long of thought-leading content around AI, AI for good, how it's affecting the human condition and healthcare and the future of AI. I'm Dave Vellante, he's Peter Burris and that's the Golden Gate Bridge over there. You used to live right up that hill over there. >> I did. >> Dee Mooney is here. >> Until they kicked me out. >> Dee Mooney is here. She's the Executive Director of the Micron Foundation. Dee, thanks so much for taking time out of your schedule and coming on theCUBE. >> You bet, I'm very pleased to be here with you today. >> So, you guys had some hard news today. We heard about the 100 million dollar fund that you're launching, but you also had some news around the Foundation. >> That's right. >> The grant, you announced two winners of the grant. Tell us about that. >> That's right. So, it was a great opportunity for Micron to showcase its goodness and what a great platform for us to be able to launch the Advancing Curiosity grant. It is all around really focusing on that, on advancing curiosity, in the hopes that we can think about how might AI help for good, whether that's in business and health or life, and it's really a great platform for us to be able to be a part of today. >> So, what are the specifics? It was a million dollar grant? >> So, it was a million dollar fund and today we announced our first recipients. It was to the Berkeley College of Engineering, specifically their BAIR, which is Berkeley A, Artificial Intelligence Research lab, then also Stanford PHIND lab, which is the Precision, Health and Integrated Diagnostics lab. And then also a non-profit called AI For All, and really their focus is to get the next generation excited about AI and really help the underrepresented groups be exposed to the field. >> So with AI For All, so underrepresented groups as in the diversity culture-- >> Females, underrepresented groups that might not actually get the exposure to this type of math and science in schools and so they do summer camps and we are helping to send students there next summer. >> How do you decide, what are the criteria around which you decide who gets the grants, and take us through that process. >> Today, because we are all about goodness and trying to enhance and improve our communities, this was all around how can AI do some good. So, we are taking a look at what problems can be solved utilizing AI. The second thing we're taking a look at is the type of technology. We want students and our researchers to take a good look at how the technology can work. Then also, what groups are being represented. We want a very diverse group that bring different perspectives and we really think that's our true ability to innovate. >> Well, there's some real research that suggests a more diverse organization solves problems differently, gets to more creativity and actually has business outcomes. That may not be the objective here, but certainly it's a message for organizations worldwide. >> We certainly think so. The more people that are being involved in a conversation, we think the richer the ideas that come out of it. One more thing that we are taking a look at in this grant is we'd like the recipients to think about the data collection, the privacy issues, the ethical issues that go along with collecting such massive amounts of data, so that's also something that we want people to consider when they're applying. >> One of the challenges in any ethical framework is that the individuals that get to write the ethical framework or test the ethical framework, the ethics always works for them. One of the big issues that you just raised is that there is research that shows that if you put a certain class of people and make them responsible for training the AI system, that their biases will absolutely dominate the AI system. So these issues of diversity are really important, not just from a how does it work for them, but also from a very starting point of what should go into the definition of the problem, the approach and solution, how you train it. Are you going the full scope or are you looking at just segments of that problem? >> We'll take a look at, we hope to solve the problems eventually, but right now, just to start with, it's the first announcement of the fund. It's a million dollars, like we mentioned. The first three recipients were announced today. The other recipients that come along, we're really excited to see what comes out of that because maybe there will be some very unique approaches to solving problems utilizing AI. >> What other areas might you look at? How do you determine, curiosity and AI, how'd you come up with that and how do you determine the topics in the areas that you go after? >> The Micron Foundation's mission is to enhance our lives through our people and our philanthropy and we focus on stem and also basic human needs. So, when Micron is engaged in large business endeavors like today, talking about AI, it was the perfect opportunity for us to bring our goodness and focus on AI and the problems that can be solved utilizing it. >> Pretty good day today, I thought. >> Oh, yeah. >> I have to say, I've followed Micron for awhile and you guys can get pretty down and dirty on the technical side, but it was an up-level conversation today. The last speaker in particular really made us think a little bit, talking about are we going to get people to refer-- >> Max Tegmark, right? >> Was that Max Tegmark? Yeah. >> I think that's the name. I didn't catch his name, I popped in late. But he was talking about artificial general intelligence >> I know. >> Reaching, I guess a singularity and then, what struck me is he had a panel of AI researchers, all male, by the way, I think >> Yes. >> I noticed that. >> Yes, we did too. >> The last one, which was Elon Musk, who of course we all know, thinks that there's going to be artificial general intelligence or super intelligence, and he asked every single panel member, will we achieve that, and they all unanimously said yes. So, either they're all dead wrong or the world is going to be a scary place in 20, 30, 50 years. >> Right, right. What are your thoughts on that? >> Well, it was certainly thought-provoking to think about all the good things that AI can do, but also maybe the other side and I'm actually glad that we concluded with that, because that is an element of our fund. We want the people that apply to it or that we'll work with to think about those other sides. If these certain problems are solved, is there a down side as well, so that is definitely where we want that diverse thinking to come in, so we can approach the problems in a good way that helps us all. >> Limited time left, let's talk a little bit about women in tech. In California, Jerry Brown just signed a law into effect that, I believe it's any public company, has to have a woman >> On the Board? >> on the Board. What do you think about that? >> Well, personally, I think that's fantastic. >> Well, you're biased. (laughs) >> I might be a little biased. I guess it's a little unfortunate we now have to have laws for this because maybe there's not enough, I'm not exactly sure, 6but I think it's a step in the right direction. That really aligns well with what we try to do, bring diversity into the workplace, diversity into the conversation, so I think it's a good step in the right direction. >> You know, let's face it, this industry had a lack, really, of women leaders. We lost Meg Whitman in a huge Fortune 50 company, in terms of a woman leader, replaced by Antonio Neri, great guy, know him well, but that was one, if you're counting, one down. Ginni Rometty, obviously, huge presence in the industry. I want to ask you, what do you think about, I don't want to use the word quotas, I hate to use it, but if you don't have quotas, what's the answer? >> I don't know about quotas either. We do know that we help, our Foundation grants span the pipeline from young students all the way up through college and we see this pipeline. It starts leaking along the way. Fifth grade, we start seeing girls fall out. Eighth grade is another big-- >> In the U.S. >> In the U.S. >> Not so much in other countries, which is pretty fascinating. >> We are a global foundation and when we talk with our other partners, they're also interested in having stem outreach into their schools because they want to bring in the critical thinking and problem-solving skills, so, I used to think it was quite just a U.S. problem, but now being exposed to other cultures and countries, definitely they have a different approach, but I think it's a problem that we all strive to overcome. >> Well, it's pretty good research that shows that governance that includes women is generally more successful. It reaches better decisions, it reaches decisions that lead to, in the case of Boards, greater profitability, more success, so if you can't convince people with data, you have to convince them with law. At the end of the day, it would be nice if people recognized that a diverse approach to governance usually ends up with a better result but if you can't, you got to hit 'em over the head. >> I guess so, I guess so. >> Well, obviously, with the Kavanaugh confirmation, there's been a lot of talk about this lately. There's been some pretty interesting stuff. I've got two daughters, you have a daughter. Some pretty interesting stuff in our family chat that's been floating around. I saw, I think it was yesterday, my wife sent me a little ditty by a young woman who was singing a song about how tough it is for men, sort of tongue-in-cheek and singing things like, I can't open the door in my pajamas, I can't walk down the street on my phone at night, I can't leave my drink unattended, so tough for men, so tough for men, so on the one hand, you have the Me Too movement, you have a lot more, since Satya Nadella put his foot in his mouth at the Grace Opera event, I don't know if you saw that, he said-- >> I didn't. >> He said, a couple years ago >> He's the CEO of Microsoft. >> Said a couple years ago, a woman in the audience, Grace Opera, big conference for women, asked, "If we're underpaid, should we say anything?" and he said, no, that's bad kharma, you should wait and be patient, and then of course, he got a lot of you know what for that. >> That probably didn't work for them. And then, he apologized for it, he did the right thing. He said, you know what, I'm way off base and then he took proactive action. But, since then, you feel like there's been certainly much more attention paid to it, the Google debacle of last summer with the employee that wrote that Jerry Maguire tome. >> Right, right. >> Now the Me Too movement, then you see the reaction of women from the Kavanaugh appointment. Do you feel like we've made a lot of progress, but then you go, well, hmm, maybe we haven't. >> It sometimes feels like that. It sometimes feels like that. In my career, over 20 years, I have had a very positive experience working with men, women alike and have been very supported and I hope that we can continue to have the conversations and raise awareness, that everyone can feel good in their workplace, walking down the street and, like you mentioned, I think that it's very important that we all have a voice and all of us bring a different, unique perspective to the table. >> So do you feel that it's two steps forward, Dee, and maybe one step back every now and then, or are we making constant progress? >> It kind of feels like that right now. I'm not sure exactly why, but it seems like we're talking a lot about it more now and maybe just with a lot more attention on it, that's why it's seeming like we're taking a step back, but I think progress has been made and we have to continue to improve that. >> Yeah, I think if you strip out the politics of the Kavanaugh situation and then focus on the impact on women, I think you take a different perspective. I think that's a discussion that's worth having. On theCUBE last week, I interviewed somebody, she called herself, "I'm a Fixer," and I said, "You know, here's some adjectives I think of in a fixer, is a good listener, somebody who's a leader, somebody who's assertive, somebody who takes action quickly. Were those the adjectives that were described about you throughout your career, and the answer was, not always. Sometimes it was aggressive or right? >> True, true. >> That whole thing, when a woman takes swift action and is a leader, sometimes she's called derogatory names. When a man does it, he's seen as a great leader. So there's still that bias that you see out there, so two steps forward, one step back maybe. Well Dee, last thoughts on today and your mission. >> Well, we really hope to encourage the next generation to pursue math and science degrees, whether they are female or male or however they identify, and we want them to do great and hopefully have a great career in technology. >> I'm glad you mentioned that, 'cause it's not just about women, it's about people of color and however you identify. So, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. >> You bet, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. Back with our next guest right after this short break. We're live from Micron Insight 2018 from San Francisco. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Vancouver, Canada. It's the Cube. Covering OpenStack Summit, North America, 2018. Brought to you by Redhat, the OpenStack foundation and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Cube. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer, and your watching the Cube, the worldwide leader in tech coverage. Happy to welcome back back to the program, Arturo Suarez, who is with Canonical, program director. Haven't have him on for a couple of hours, Arturo, thanks for joining me again. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright and David Safaii who is the CEO of Trilio Data. We introduced your company to our community last year at the show in our backyard in Boston, so, thanks for joining us here in beautiful Vancouver. >> Thanks for having me again, good to see ya. >> Alright so, David, let's start with you. It's you know, a year since we talked to you, you know data management, absolutely, you know, such a hot space. Bring us into that update as to your company, what's happening in OpenStack and lets get into it from there. >> Sure. It's been an exciting year since I seen you last, you know. I think part of it's been the evolution and the maturity of this ecosystem that we're seeing. More business units are now moving production workloads into this environment. So the call to Trilio has really taken place. A lot of the times your seeing these cloud teams having to scramble to find the proper data protection solution. Trilio being a cloud native backup solution, you know, for this environment, its just a logical selection. >> Yeah, its one of those things I scratch my head, maybe you can explain to me, is, remember back in I was like, when we did virtualization, it was like took a little while before we had a good backup, you know, solution for there. When we go to cloud its like, wait, oh wait, lets not forget that there are things like security and backup. Why does it take a little bit while for that to kind of catch up into the market and have good solutions? >> So if you think about it this way, when people start this journey, right, the initial intent a lot of the time is to have some stateless workloads. We know that's not the case. Perception and reality. And your going to see it in the container market as well. So that's kind of the evolution that you see, that's kind of the draw that we see. >> Okay, Arturo, explain to us how Canonical fits. >> So, obviously Canonical powers more OpenStack than anyone else does. So OpenStack foundation survey would like to say it. But that's a fact, that's what I'll write. So, we're happy to partner with Trilio. We've always been very keep to accommodate the ecosystem in our story. Trilio vault matches very well our idea of having better economics as well for the data center. And it opens up OpenStack, not only for the original goal of OpenStack, like the hyper scalers or the scale out applications, right, which are cloud native if you want and are born on OpenStack. And OpenStack is born for them right, for that type of application. But now it opens that to a wide range of existing, I wouldn't call it legacy, but, you know what I mean like old applications that are really not going to be refreshed, you know. You'll only refresh that many applications year after year. 10% of your applications, 15% if you have a good devops team. Those still are suffering lock in from being in that virtualization world, or not even there, right. And with OpenStack and the addition of Trilio as a backup DR solution, just somebody provide what a pet VM needs right. So somebody opens up to a large real state of a data center to be accommodated in OpenStack seamlessly. >> It's great, Chris, here at OpenStack Summit this year, kind of the customers your seeing, someone said to me the other day that, you know the people here this year are people with mortgage to pay. And they meant that in a complimentary way, in that they're not like the cloud astronauts or they're not arguing about the philosophy of what is a true cloud. They actually have business to do. So I don't know, your talking about some of what your seeing here at this show and you know the kinds of people or maybe, you know, who are the folks that are using or kind of folks that are using Trilio today? >> Yeah and I think the conversation has been, the high quality conversations, higher caliber conversation where its a lot of day two conversations that have taken place, so, it's been engaging. People need to act, they need to move. They've got these fabulous clouds that's slicing and dicing, they're expanding in every which way possible. Now they say, alright, we have to codify this. You know the journey to the cloud doesn't have to be painful. And that's one of the great things that Canonicals done well, right. Build, operate, manage - here's your cloud, we're going to stand it up, you know, it's everything you need. Now with Trilio its not "Can I add back up to it?", like fries, it's just not like that. It's adding data protection to codify that and again that's why we're seeing these people start, are coming. They're asking that kind of, they're asking that question. >> Are you mostly talking to folks over in the enterprise space? I mean with OpenStack right, a lot of the conversations in the carrier space, they have some slightly different needs. Or how is that working for you? >> No, it's broadened. I'd say our customer base is everything from manufacturing to receiving financial services all over the world, adopt OpenStack. So, again it goes to the testament of adopting and building much easier than every before and the economics are big benefit. >> In terms of building on top of OpenStack or you know so directly with the APIs. And OpenStack has a number of components all with APIs and component, so how is that relationship been working with Canonical and the state of both Canonical's OpenStack as well as the standard, you know, getting used to the standard parts of the OpenStack stack. >> Yeah so we certify ourselves across the distribution, but you know, part of this is a seamless integration through leveraging juju charms for example. The lifecycle management of that cloud. So whether your going through an upgrade process or staying up a new cloud, Trilio just fits hand and glove with Canonical. >> Yeah at the end of the day APIs are APIs, OpenStack are OpenStack, right. That is very well defined. It's how you build it. When you build it to just take a picture of it and have an OpenStack up and running, or, when you build it to have an OpenStack that's going to be in your data center for ten years, for 20 years, right, that is a credible data center right. So that is our main difference. The OpenStack and the end of the day, the API is just consumable just for us as well as for the other guys, its exactly the same API. We don't modify, not everybody, right, but we do not modify anything from OpenStack. It's pure appstring OpenStack, right, there's no real difference there. >> Okay, what about I think service providers would be key market for this, how does that play in for both of you? >> I mean the service provider market of course is a big adapter of OpenStack and then now your seeing also with NFV environment, the rapid adoption there. It's been an important add to the OpenStack cloud if you think about how do I recover my configurations in that environment, so. >> Exactly and we mentioned before like right, the expansive real estate even in the world of service providers when you move out of the core, right, and they're challenging SLAs, right. So DR is effectively and that data protection as well because the VNFs that their running are effectively managing data that is prone to be protected, specially you know, in countries in Europe for instance, with the GDPR etc., you really need to have accountability of what data is in your data center without, you know, taking into account the economics of having an extra data center there, right. So the DR and data protection elements are key to the cloud strategy of service providers, right. >> What are folks looking at is cross cloud strategies and backup. Like what is the target right, I'm assuming either, cross data center or also up to the public cloud. How are people looking at that? Either one. >> So we see it, as far as the backend store of the target, we really have certified ourselves across any backup target. Within Canonical they're using self storage. If they added benefit of geo replication, right, so the DR story starts to evolve there. So site goes down, you have geo replication, you have Trilio there to spin backup that other site back up again. Relative to the public cloud, you know, as the hybrid world continuously evolves, you know, we're ready for that. We have qualified against S3 for example. But no ones banging down the door just at this moment. I think a lot of people just need to get the blocking and tackling done and leverage really the assets that they have, to make the most out of it, get the ROI there. And then we'll see if the demand evolves. >> So the beauty is to have the choice right, the freedom of choice. Which is what some of the private infrastructure software doesn't allow you to do. Like this is a one thing you can eat today, right. So that freedom of choice, whether you want to put that in a public cloud, if it's security compliant and what not, or you want to have that in another region or replicated somewhere else, another storage backend that is colder and cheaper and you know, so. That freedom of choice is a great asset. >> Arturo, what are you looking forward to in terms of the evolution of OpenStack storage and data capabilities? >> So, OpenStack is already opened up for absolutely everything, right. Storage in fact in OpenStack was, this is my 15th OpenStack, so I've been following it from the very very beginning right. So the storage in OpenStack is actually was the project that was mature first... >> Well I didn't want to start the question off with well, OpenStack storage is kind of done right. But... >> But it is right. At the end of the day when you look at all the existing, more legacy type of a storage filers, already have an integration with OpenStack. OpenStack made a turn few years ago, again, I'm telling my old stories of OpenStack, but when we started doing Cinder. And the Cinder drivers would apply in that to Neutron and the Neutron plugins now for network. But the Cinder drivers actually are a very easy way to plug in literally any other storage solution that you might find out there. And the beauty of it is that you can, you don't have to choose one. You can have many storage back ends in your data center right. So that is there. And then it will be, as we talked before, it be just a decision on the per use cases. Canonical will be part of that. Canonical will have a solution ready for each of those use cases by enabling partners. And obviously there will be some of them that will be more adequate to with the compliance and security terms, right. >> David, I'd love you to follow up on that. So there is the companies that have gone through the alphabet from A through Queens, and have the bumps and bruises. What's it like being a startup, getting into the ecosystem you know more recently. What's the opportunities? >> Yeah, I mean, I think for us the customers are at various points in their journeys right. So we have be able to qualify whether your kilo or your on queens. And we have to be able to deliver a service that you know is rock solid. So that's an onus on us. To deliver all that, make sure it's bullet proof. So it takes a lot of work. But, the community's been great to work with, the customers view us as partners. And they're willing to work with you, which has been fantastic, you know. >> Okay. Want to give you both a final take aways from the event. David you want to start? >> Sure. So as I was saying before I think the conversations been high caliber conversations, right. It's been interesting for us, because if you think about back up and DR, data protection is actually a much broader term and I think it evolves. And I think we're on a great spot for it to evolve even further. We take a workload, a point in time, right, if the conversation becomes about workload mobility inside your cloud, I can move it to any part, and that's some of the conversations that we've had using back up for resource management, right, I want to move tenants from one availability zone to another availability zone. Or I'm standing up a new cloud. That's just part of the by product of backup and recovery. One of the things that we're actually, we're exploring and we'll give you guys a nice showcase of this in Berlin is that we'll be running scanners through our back ups. Doing more with points in time, to give your tenants and your customers the ability to go back to the best last known state, you know it's clean. All the patches, the configurations, the anti-virus type stuff. So this is going to be a great evolution it's going to be a great journey. Having the ability of being a startup gives us the flexibility and we can be nimble, where a legacy data protection has 30 year old code and they don't have that ability. So, it's been great. >> So as you know, following up on what David said, right, the flexibility of having a data protection solution finally on OpenStack, being able to compare and win against all the private cloud infrastructure is a great asset. The fact that OpenStack now you see is ready for prime because it gets less media attention its not shiny anymore it's not that interesting to talk about OpenStack. But everyone needs an OpenStack solution, right. The ecosystem landscape where come from the digital wars back in the day, we're not wasting time right there right. So it's more of a filling a need that OpenStack opens up for. And Trilio has done that very well in the data protection domain. >> It's been a really great relationship. >> Alright, David Safaii, Arturo Suarez, thank you so much for joining us again. And check out thecube.net. If you go to the site, not only can you search by events and by guest but if you put in keyword, for example, getting ready for this event, I typed OpenStack in and there were hundreds of interviews that we've done over the years, not only at this OpenStack summit, but many other shows that have talked about it. Go find them, poke around, you know, so much content to be able to dig in. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back with a lot more coverage here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching the Cube. (Background music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Informatica World 2018. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Hey, welcome back everyone to theCUBE, live here in Las Vegas at The Venetian. I'm John Furrier the co-host of theCUBE, we're here at Informatica Word 2018 with Peter Burris, analyst at Wikibon, and SiliconANGLE, and theCUBE, our next guest is Dave Green, Senior Director of IT Informatics, Genomic Health, welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you, great to be here. >> You guys are doin' a ton of data so, we want to get into it, very cool, obviously, a lot of testing, lot of proprietary work, you know, this is where the power of data can come in. But first before we get into it, just take a quick minute to describe the company, what you do there, and what the mission is. >> Absolutely yep. So I work for Genomic Health, the company was founded in the year 2000, and it was founded on the premise, there was a lot of science and technology around the areas of genetic testing, but it hadn't been applied to the world of cancer, and cancer specifically. So we launched the first product on the market in 2004, and it's focused on breast cancer, based in the US. And the job the company has is to really help physicians sit down with their patient, and inform the treatment decision that the physician and patient have to make together. So the situation is, let's use breast cancer again, if a woman's been diagnosed with breast cancer, they'll often go for a biopsy, the cancer cells are actually extracted form the body. We get a sample of those in our lab, we run trough a lot of diagnostic testing, and based upon a lot of clinical research, evidence, and studies we've done over the years, it's a lot of data there in itself. We can help predict the likelihood of recurrence of cancer, over five years, 10 years, based upon different types of treatment options. And we basically, even though we do diagnostic testing, we're really an information provider, an information company, that's the we see ourselves. The idea is to sit down, have the physician sit down with the patient, we deliver a report at the end of the day. So all this testing, all the data crunching, everything we do, ends up with a relatively simple report, there's a risk curve, and based upon that, different types of treatment options make sense for the patient. So if maybe a woman decided do I need chemotherapy yes or no well chemotherapy's incredibly expensive from a healthcare economics perspective, it's incredibly invasive in terms of side-effects, you know, people know about hair loss, but there's a ton of other really, really detrimental side effects too. So if there's no clinical benefit from going through chemotherapy, we can help inform that decision, right? Give the patient confidence that they know it's the right thing to do, and I'm on a certain side of a risk curve, or there may be better options. Drug therapies these days, every single day, there's a new drug comin' on the market to combat certain types of cancer in some way. So that's our job, that's the gist of what we do. >> So what do you do with the data, so what's the strategic initiatives around data? Obviously data is key to this, 'cause you need to analyze data but, just give us an order of magnitude, a taste or a sample of some of the things that you're doing with data. >> Right, so I mean, we're growing as a company, it's a growing space, so far as, there's more and more people throughout the world with cancer every day, we're growing internationally too. So we have data that we receive from all over the world. In terms of some of the key initiatives we have underway. So we're doing a lot more in the space of partnering, we're built up a commercial infrastructure over the course of years. And that commercial infrastructure goes with the IT infrastructure that matches to it. So we're using that commercial channel to really expand, the number of tests we're able to bring to market, and we do that by partnering with smaller labs. They're not able to build the same infrastructure themselves so we can use all of the capabilities that we've built up, we bring them into our ecosystem and extend the reach that we have to bring in other types of product tests. So we look at things like data, one of the initiatives we have right now is it's very difficult space to operate, right? Healthcare is incredibly complex, from a data perspective, it's messy, there are people involved, there's humans involved, literally we're all unique, we're all individual. The job we have, and in many of these cases, where we bring in third-party labs as well, is to take care of all of the processing of the commercial, and clinical related information we need to get from patients. We need to move through, and make sure we get the right information the first time through. And we use that information, then, to trigger the rest of the testing process. It's both clinical, it's business, it's related to healthcare insurance providers, government mandated information we have to collect as well, we've got to bring all these different facets together. >> You've got to a lot of moving parts and dynamics, what's the relationship with Informatica? As a customer, you're using which product? Could you just take a minute to explain? >> Yep, absolutely, yeah, so we're a customer. The couple main products we use, so, we use their master data management product, it's very important for us, that we know and recognize the right physician, right? The physicianal link to the patient, we've got to get that right, We've got to have accurate information, >> John: That's a big one. >> That's a big one, yeah. >> And we use that for the older information we get in, and we also use it for the billing site too, so ultimately we get paid, 'cause we want to reinvest in our patients, we want to put them through more of our tests, that's one angle, so incredibly important for us. >> John: It's a critical component to the business model. >> It's, yeah, absolutely, it's mission critical. If we get that wrong, forget the rest of the tests, forget the science, the technology, all of the cool stuff we do, it's a basic fundamental thing we have to get right. >> Well, you didn't just blow a campaign, you blew a life. >> Yeah! Or at least we're slowing down, getting the right information, the actual information, >> John: That'll ruin your reputation, I mean, everything, dominoes will just fall. >> It's incredible important for us to get right, that's still one thing we've got from Informatica. The other thing we've partnered with them from, is where we, we look at the integrations between the default applications that we have. We have some data that we have to process on-premise, we have a laboratory information system, that's real-time, critical processing, it's interfacing with robots in a lab, and things like this, so that's got to interface with the likes of Salesforce, which is our CRM, which is where we receive all of your information, and where we clinical information from the physician on behalf of the patient. These things have to connect together, the data has to integrate, we have to make sense of it, we have to logically know, what information is flowing through what business process throughout the company, and we use Informatica to be able to do that as well. >> Peter: Well healthcare is at the vanguard of so many things, it's the vanguard of ethics, because of the role that people play. It's at the vanguard of big data, it was one of the first clear, you know, broadly understood, the drive to understand the genome was fundamentally a big data problem, and people said, wow, I didn't realize we could do that with data! It's also at the vanguard of understanding the relationship between analog and digital and the fact that, this is all an analog experience that has to be turned into a digital experience, so we can do things with it. You must watch much of what's going on around here and say, yeah, we've gone through that, what kind of advice and counsel can you give to folks who are perhaps just entering into new ways of thinking about using data, new ways of applying data, new ways of understanding that relation between analog and digital. How would you advise your peers to think differently? >> Yeah, so one of the things I've certainly noted, in walking around and talking to some of my peers at Informatica World this week was just, a bit of some of the frustration actually, from the technical side. And that becomes, because they see the technical solutions, they see the data and the opportunity, but what we've not done, in many cases, with this technology is be able to explain that to the business people that we're working with, and establishing that business partnership. So I think, been patient, looking to educate, looking for quick wins, opportunities to show what data can do, how transformative, you know, data can be in terms of, how business people work every single day. The connection I've certainly seen in my company, no different, it's somewhat ironic that we, we have this treasure trove of clinical information that we've built up over time. We've not been looking at our business, the way we run our business the same way. So, in some ways we've been able to, to, well we do it in this area, the clinical space, let's replicate that and transform, bring it through to the business side too. >> Evidence-based business management. >> Exactly right, yeah. So I think being persistent, looking for the ability to educate, looking for quick wins, and looking to use the technology to show what's possible, help lead the way, and be consistent and patient on that journey. And it's a journey, it's not a one project, it's not a I just bring in a tool, life is good, it has to be much more than that. So that's what I've learned, at least, what I've seen so far today, this week. >> Dave, thanks for taking the time to come on theCUBE and share your story. >> Sure thing. >> Genomic Health, great work, growing international, they got data challenges, they're solving them, and they're getting, they have to get 'em right, and this is, we're hearing more of this. Great story, thank you for coming on. >> Dave: Appreciate it, thank you. >> I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris, here for day two of coverage of Informatica World, stay with us, we'll be back after this break. (bubbly music)

>> Welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're in the Palo Alto studio talking about customer journeys today. And we're really excited to have professional, who's been doing this for a long time, he's Jeff Weidener, he's an Information Management Professional at this moment in time, and still, in the past and future, Jeff Welcome. >> Well thank you for having me. >> So you've been playing in the spheres for a very long time, and we talked a little bit before we turned the cameras on, about one of the great topics that I love in this area is, the customer, the 360 view of the customer. And that the Nirvana that everyone says you know, we're there, we're pulling in all these data sets, we know exactly what's going on, the person calls into the call center and they can pull up all their records, and there's this great vision that we're all striving for. How close are we to that? >> I think we're several years away from that perfect vision that we've talked about, for the last, I would say, 10, 10 to 15 years, that I've dealt with, from folks who were doing catalogs, like Sears catalogs, all the way to today, where we're trying to mix and match all this information, but most companies are not turning that into actionable data, or actionable information, in any way that's reasonable. And it's just because of the historic kind of Silo, nature of all these different systems, I mean, you know, I keep hearing about, we're gonna do it, all these things can tie together, we can dump all the data in a single data lake and pull it out, what are some of the inhibitors and what are some of the approaches to try to break some of those down? >> Most has been around getting that data lake, in order to put the data in its spot, basically try and make sure that, do I have the environment to work in? Many times a traditional enterprise warehouse doesn't have the right processing power, for you, the individual, who wants to do the work, or, doesn't have the capacity that'll allow you to just bring all the data in, try to ratify it. That's really just trying to do the data cleansing, and trying to just make some sense of it, cause many times, there aren't those domain experts. So I usually work in marketing, and on our Customer 360 exercise, was around, direct mail, email, all the interactions from our Salesmaker, and alike. So, when we look at the data, we go, I don't understand why the Salesmaker is forgetting X, of that behavior that we want to roll together. >> Right. >> But really it's finding that environment, second is the harmonization, is I have Bob Smith and Robert Smith, and Master Data Management Systems, are perhaps few and far between, of being real services that I can call as a data scientist, or as a data worker, to be able to say, how do I line these together? How can I make sure that all these customer touchpoints are really talking about the same individual, the company, or maybe just the consumer? >> Right. >> And finally, it is in those Customer 360 projects getting those teams to want to play together, getting that crowdsourcing, either to change the data, such as, I have data, as you mentioned around Chat, and I want you to tell me more about it, or I want you to tell me how I can break it down. >> Right, right. >> And if I wanna make changes to it, you go, we'll wait, where's your money, in order to make that change. >> Right, right. >> And there's so many aspects to it, right. So there's kind of the classic, you know, ingest, you gotta get the data, you gotta run it through the processes you said did harmonize it to bring it together, and then you gotta present it to the person who's in a position at the moment of truth, to do something with it. And those are three very very different challenges. They've been the same challenges forever, but now we're adding all this new stuff to it, like, are you pulling data from other sources outside of the system of record, are you pulling social data, are you pulling other system data that's not necessarily part of the transactional system. So, we're making the job harder, at the same time, we're trying to give more power to more people and not just the data scientists. But as you said I think, the data worker, so how's that transformation taking place where we're enabling more kind of data workers if you will, that aren't necessarily data scientists, to have the power that's available with the analytics, and an aggregated data set behind them. >> Right. Well we are creating or have created the wild west, we gave them tools, and said, go forth and make, make something out of it. Oh okay. Then we started having this decentralization of all the tools, and when we finally gave them the big tools, the big, that's quote unquote, big data tools, like the process, billings of records, that still is the wild west, but at least we're got them centralized with certain tools. So we were able to do at least standardize on the tool set, standardize on the data environment, so that at least when they're working on that space, we get to go, well, what are you working on? How are you working on that? What type of data are you working with? And how do we bring that back as a process, so that we can say, you did something on Chat Data? Great! Bob over here, he likes to work with that Chat data. So that, that exposure and transparency because of these centralization data. Now, new tools are adding on top of that, data catalogs, and putting inside tools that will make it so that you actually tell, that known information, all-in-one wiki-like interface. So we're trying to add more around putting the right permissions on top of that data, cataloging them in some way, with these either worksheets, or these information management tools, so that, if you're starting to deal with privacy data, you've got a flag, from, it's ingest all the way to the end. >> Right. >> But more controls are being seen as a way that a business is improving its maturity. >> Yeah. Now, the good news bad news is, more and more of the actual interactions are electronic. You want it going to places, they're not picking up the phone as much, as they're engaging with the company either via web browser or more and more a mobile browser, a mobile app, whatever. So, now the good news is, you can track all that. The bad news is, you can track all that. So, as we add more complexity, then there's this other little thing that everybody wants to do now, which is real-time, right, so with Kafka and Flink and Spark and all these new technologies, that enable you to basically see all the data as it's flowing, versus a sampling of the data from the past, a whole new opportunity, and challenge. So how are you seeing it and how are you gonna try to take advantage of that opportunity as well as address that challenge in your world. >> Well in my data science world, I've said, hey, give me some more data, keep on going, and when I have to put on the data sheriff hat, I'm now having to ask the executives, and our stakeholders, why streaming? Why do you really need to have all of this? >> It's the newest shiny toy. >> New shiny toy! So, when you talk to a stakeholder and you say, you need a shiny toy, great. I can get you that shiny toy. But I need an outcome. I need a, a value. And that helps me in tempering the next statement I give to them, you want streaming, so, or you want real time data, it's gonna cost you, three X. Are you gonna pay for it? Great. Here's my shiny toy. But yes, with the influx of all of this data, you're having to change the architecture and many times IT traditionally hasn't been able to make that, that rapid transition, which lends itself to shadow IT, or other folks trying to cobble something together, not to make that happen. >> And then there's this other pesky little thing that gets in the way, in the form of governance, and security. >> Compliance, privacy and finally marketability, I wanna give you a, I want you to feel that you're trusting me, in handling your data, but also that when I respond back to you, I'm giving you a good customer experience so called, don't be creepy. >> Right, right. >> Lately, the new compliance rule in Europe, GDPR, a policy that comes with a, well, a shotgun, that says, if there are violations of this policy, which involves privacy, or the ability for me to be forgotten, of the information that a corporation collects, it can mean four percent of a total company's revenue. >> Right. >> And that's on every instance, that's getting a lot of motivation for information governance today. >> Right. >> That risk, but the rules are around, trying to be able to say, where did the data come from? How did the data flow through the system? Who's touched that data? And those information management tools are mostly the human interaction, hey what are you guys working on? How are you guys working on it? What type of assets are you actually driving, so that we can bring it together for that privacy, that compliance, and workflow, and then later on top of that, that deliverability. How do you want to be contacted? How do you, what are the areas that you feel, are the ways that we should engage with you? And of course, everything that gets missed in any optimization exercise, the feedback loop. I get feedback from you that say, you're interested in puppies, but your data set says you're interested in cats. How do I make that go into a Customer 360 product. So, privacy, and being, and coming at, saying, oh, here's an advertisement for, for hippos and you go, what do you know about me that I don't know? >> Wrong browser. >> So you chose Datameer, along the journey, why did you choose them, how did you implement them, and how did they address some of these issues that we've just been discussing? >> Datameer was chosen primarily to take on that self-service data preparational layer from the beginning. Dealing with large amounts of online data, we move from from taking the digital intelligence tools that are out there, knowing about browser activities, the cookies that you have to get your identity, and said, we want the entire feed. We want all of that information, because we wanna make that actionable. I don't wanna just give it to a BI report, I wanna turn it into marketing automation. So we got the entire feed of data, and we worked on that with the usual SQL tools, but after a while, it wasn't manageable, by either, all of the 450 to 950 columns of data, or the fact that there are multiple teams working on it, and I had no idea, what they were able to do. So I couldn't share in that value, I couldn't reuse, the insights that they could have. So Datameer allowed for a visual interface, that was not in a coding language, that allowed people to start putting all of their work inside one interface, that didn't have to worry about saving it up to the server, it was all being done inside one environment. So that it could take not only the digital data, but the Salesforce CRN data, marry them together and let people work with it. And it broadened on the other areas, again allowing it that crowdsourcing of other people's analytics. Why? Mostly because of the state we are in around IT, is an inability to change rapidly, at least for us, in our field. >> Right. >> That my, the biggest problem we had, was there wasn't a scheduler. We didn't have the ability to get value out of our, on our work, without having someone to press the button and run it, and if they ran it, it took eight hours, they walked away, it would fail. And you had no, you had to go back and do it all over again. >> Oh yeah. >> So Datameer allows us to have that self-service interface, that had management that IT could agree upon, to let us have our own lab environment, and execute our work. >> So what was the results, when you suddenly give people access to this tool? I mean, were they receptive, did you have to train them a lot, did some people just get it and some people just don't, they don't wanna act on data, what was kind of the real-world results of rolling this out, within the population? Real-world results allowed us to get ten million dollars in uplift, in our marketing activities across multiple channels. >> Ten million dollars in uplift? How did you measure that? >> That was measured through the operating expenses, by one not sending that work outside, some of the management, of the data, is being, was sent outside, and that team builds their own models off of them, we said, we should be able to drink our own champagne, second, it was on the uplift of a direct mail and email campaign, so having a better response rate, and generally, not sending out a bunch of app store messages, that we weren't needing too. And then turning that into a list that could be sent out to our email and direct mail vendors, to say, this is what we believe, this account or contact is engaged with on the site. Give those a little bit more context. So we add that in, that we were hopefully getting and resonating a better message. >> Right. >> In, and where did you start? What was the easiest way to provide an opportunity for people new to this type of tooling access to have success? >> Mostly it was trying to, was taking pre-doctored worksheets, or already pre-packaged output, and one of the challenges that we had were people saying well I don't wanna work in a visual language, while they're users of tools like Tableau or Clicks, and others that are happy to drag-and-drop in their data, many of the data workers, the tried-and-true, are saying, I wanna write it in SQL. >> Mm hm. >> So, we had to give at least that last mile, analytical data set to them, and say, okay. Yeah, go ahead and move it over to your SQL environment, move it over into the space that you feel comfortable and you feel confident to control, but let' come on back and we'll translate it back to, this tool, we'll show you how easy it was, to go from, working with IT, which would take months, to go and doing it on yourself, which would take weeks, and the processing and the cost of your Siloed, shadowed IT environment, will go down in days. We're able to show them that, that acceleration of time to market of their data. >> What was your biggest surprise? An individual user, an individual use case, something that really you just didn't see coming, that's kind of a pleasant, you know the law of unintended consequences on the positive side. >> That's was such a wide option, I mean honestly, beginning back from the data science background, we thought it would just be, bring your data in, throw it on out there, and we're done. We went from, maybe about 20 large datasets of AdTech and Martech, and information, advertising, technology, marketing technology, data, to CRMM formation, order activity, and many other categories, just within marketing alone, and I think perhaps, the other big ah-ha moment was, since we brought that in, of other divisions data, those own teams came in, said, hey, we can use this too. >> Right. >> The adoption really surprised me that it would, you would have people that say, oh I can work with this, I have this freedom to work with this data. >> Right right. >> Well we see it time and time again, it's a recurring theme of all the things we cover, which is, you know a really, big piece of the innovation story, is giving, you know, more people access to more data, and the tools to actually manipulate it. So that you can unlock that brain power, as opposed to keeping it with the data scientists on Mahogany Row, and the super-big brain. So, sounds like that really validates that whole hypothesis. >> I went through reviewing hands-on 11 different tools, when I chose Datameer. This was everything from, big name companies, to small start-up companies, that have wild artificial intelligence slogans in their marketing material, and we chose it mostly because it had the right fit, as an end-to-end approach. It had the scheduler, it had the visual interface, it had the, enough management and other capabilities that IT would leave us alone. Some of the other products that we were looking at gave you, Pig-El-Lee to work with data, will allow you to schedule data, but they never came all together. And for the value we get out of it, we needed to have something altogether. >> Right. Well Jeff, thanks for taking a few minutes and sharing your story, really appreciate it, and it sounds like it was a really successful project. >> Was! >> All right. He's Jeff Weidener, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCube from Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.

>> Male Narrator: Live from San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering QuickBooks Connect 2016. Now here are your hosts Jeff Frick and John Walls. >> And welcome back inside the San Jose Convention Center here at the Cube, along with Jeff Frick, I'm John Walls, appreciate you joining us here as we continue our coverage of QuickBooks Connect 2016, live here on SiliconANGLE TV. This is the flagship broadcast where we extract the signal from the noise. And Jeff, we're on the home stretch here through the second day, I could stay here for a few more days. Great guests, great lineups, great keynotes, and a lot of energy here on the floor I like. >> Lot of energy, I love these kinds of shows because it's really about helping people be successful and we're talking about real things, and again we keep coming back to products and solutions in technology but for most small businesses it's about cash. It's about cash flow. >> Being successful, Rania Succar, is now joining us, she's a QuickBooks Financing and Director there at QuickBooks, and we appreciate your time here, Rania. >> Great. >> So tell us about just the overarching mission, right, cause as Jeff said, helping people, giving them access to capital, badly needed, small businesses, it's a critical need, and what QuickBooks does on that, with that, on the financing platform. >> Well you guys have seen it here for the last few days. The QuickBooks team is absolutely focused on helping small businesses survive and thrive. Everyone here's trying to crack that, and you just said it, cash is one of the biggest pain points that small businesses face. Whenever we talk to small businesses, the first thing they tell us is the thing that keeps them up at night is cash flow, and we also know one of the biggest reasons that small businesses fail is they can't get access to cash flow, and to cash, and so the team a couple years back said we've got to crack this in order to help more small businesses survive past the five year mark and be able to put their dreams into action. So with that in mind, we took a look at financing and for small businesses, it's a fairly broken process, so we're working to reinvent small business lending. It's broken for a couple of reasons, one is, if you have ten businesses that go into a bank to apply for a loan, only three get approved, and it takes over 30 hours of work for a small business to do that application to a bank, so it's right for innovating and improving the experience for small businesses, so what we do, is we're hyper focused on making the experience better in three ways, first, we're trying to drive up the approval rate, and we do that with the incredible clarity and we do that with the incredible clarity with which we can understand the small business based on the data that we have. We understand the small business ecosystem better than anyone, and we understand the full picture of a small business' credit worthiness, and financial health better than everyone, anyone. We can give them access to-- we can help them get credit for all the future invoices that they have coming in, we understand the strength of their customer base, you put that together, we can drive approval rates up. The other thing we're focused on is the time it takes to apply. You need to put together tax returns, and interim financial reports if it's the middle of the year, and bank statements, it's very frustrating. We have most of that information in the Intuit space, and our vision is rather than even applying it's just available for you in QuickBooks when you need it, and the third thing, so approval rates, the time it takes, the third thing we're very focused on is the guidance. Small businesses need advice, most of them didn't get into running their own small business because they knew anything about finances, they had a dream and they wanted to put it into place, and so we're very focused on taking the insights we have about a small business to help them get lending that's right for them with confidence that they're getting the right financing for their business. So we can help them predict when they're going to need financing, and we can connect them to an accountant because we know over a million of our small businesses are connected to accountants. So that's what we do, and this week as you heard, we just announced we crossed the half a billion dollar mark in financing in small businesses. >> Now, say that again. >> Half a billion dollars. >> Half a billion dollars of financing. >> Congratulations. >> We're incredibly proud, we're incredibly proud. >> Let me ask you a couple details, so my kids are going, they're applying for college right now, so the CommonApp-- >> So, Jeff will need somewhere shy of half a million of that money. (Rania laughs) >> Do you have like a CommonApp inside QuickBooks which is a defined kind of definition that then gets shared with the lenders that want to participate in the market, or do you have like a defined QuickBooks FICO score, if you will, based on these other parameters that you have that then get shared with the lenders, how do you kind of, you've got all this data, it's my data, but I'm allowing you to use in such a way to help me get this loan in this market place. How does the actual mechanics work. >> I love that, we're a platform, almost like an Amazon in a sense, where you go to Amazon, you have one thing that you want to get and you get access to multiple different providers, so we're a platform. Right now, the way that it works, there is a CommonApp, but the amazing thing is you don't have to fill it out because we have all the information inside QuickBooks so we pre-fill it for you and ask you just for a couple of things but we do all the work and then we figure out which of our lending partners based on what you need, we've got about a dozen, are best suited for your needs, and then we send the information to the lenders with your permission and then you get all your offers right there, and the really neat thing about what we do is we compare the offers apples to apples, this is pretty incredible, we're super focused on transparency, this is a big part of our value proposition, we always disclose the APR of the loan, we always show the loan cost apples to apples so that you know exactly what you're getting, we show you things like what are the fees, what are the pre-payment penalties, so it's super clear, super transparent, and you know what you're getting. >> It's like the comparison shopping table. >> Exactly. >> You lay it all out and I can make my decisions. >> Exactly. >> And then how long does it usually take on a relatively smooth process given the fact you're already pre-populating the data, it goes out, what does it usually take? >> A lot of our lenders fund within the same day. >> Jeff: Within the same day? >> So you literally with a lot of our lenders, if everything goes right, you can apply within minutes and get funding in your bank account the same business day. >> The money goes through the same system as well. (Jeff chuckles) >> There are lenders, and we have a portfolio of offerings, so we'll work with, we have an SBA lender, we've got work in capital lenders, if you're going through the SBA process it's a lot faster through our process than it would be if you applied through a traditional bank, but it still could take a couple of months in that case, so we make that very clear, when you choose the offering that you want, if you're in need for financing right away, it can happen very quickly, if you're willing to wait a couple more months, in the worst case, in the case of an SBA loan, on average, it's less than a week. >> Well it seems like you have so many pieces in place to make it much more convenient and much more reliable and I guess much more predictable for a small business, what about approval rates then, what, you said three out of ten? >> That's the current. >> On average, is that the current, is that your average? >> Ours is better than that, it's not quite there, you know, we have a really high aspiration on that, where we'd like to be able to get, you know, we'd like to get it closer to 60 or 70 percent over time, the approval rate, so we're still moving in that direction, we've got a great team, we've got tons of innovation and R&D happening right now back in Mountain View, we've got a ton of data scientists that are combing through this data and improving the approval rates all the time, so that's an area where we're innovating and really pushing for our small businesses. >> And so, nice announcement this week, well better than nice, great announcement this week, but you're always looking, as you said, for the next best thing. >> Rania: Yep. >> And so what have you heard from your client base that says okay, we've addressed this, now this is where we need to pivot, this is where we need to go, like what's the next big hurdle or next big challenge that you think you need to handle? >> It's innovating on those three areas I told you, and on each of those three we've made quite a lot of work and quite a lot of headway in the last few years, but there's so much more room, and so like I've said we have this team of phenomenal data scientists working to find those areas of advantage for small businesses where we can help them get approved more often. We've got the team that's trying to really make it to a point where you're in QuickBooks and you can see your financing offer before you even apply. We want to get rid of the application altogether and just service the best offer for you, and then all the prediction for when you're going to need financing and that cash flow prediction, looping in the accountant so the accountant can immediately see all the options you were given and they can talk through them with you. >> And your clients can find out right away, the customers, if they did not get approved. >> Right. >> Where's the trouble area, where did the red light come on? >> That's right. >> Because of the figures you're able to consult with them and help them maybe shore up their bottom line? >> We don't do enough of that today, it's absolutely in our road map, so that's a huge opportunity because we have a relationship with small businesses, it's not like a transaction where you go to a website and you apply for a loan, we're in it for the long term to help small businesses grow and so you can imagine, and this is where we're headed, when you start, you know, you get your first financing, it could be a credit card, and then a year or two later we see that you're financials have improved and we consult you on the next offering and all the way you get better terms because you've been with us for a while and we can help make sure you're getting better financing deals over time. >> It's a really interesting situation, because, you know, hopefully over time, really it becomes, we always talk about kind of looking back, and then predictive and then prescriptive, so in theory, as you're moving down your path, as you're growing your business, it should actually flag you, right, hey, by the way you've got a big event, seasonalities coming up, oh we just noticed you just locked in a big purchase order, somebody's late to pay et cetera, it might be a good time to get actually ahead of the curve before you even know that this event is coming to go ahead and make even up to in making the offer. >> Absolutely, you know, you're getting ready to, you know, for the holidays and have you thought about making sure you've got enough financing to buy as much inventory as you want this year so you can take advantage of the seasonal trends we're seeing. Or we're seeing a lot of retailers, you know, really heavying up on inventory, have you thought about doing that as apart of your strategy, it looks like it could be a good year, so there's so much opportunity there, we can pair every small business owner with a line of credit so that they can manage payroll at any given time and never have to worry about the cash flow ups and downs that come. >> Right, and then I would imagine too, within like those different offers, not only apples to apples across the same type of loan, but maybe you should consider, you know, a factoring on your receivables, versus a capital loan that's capitalized against some equipment or something, cause there's also options within the types of financing that you may want to do. >> So on that we've done quite bit of work. We have lenders in our portfolio that do invoice financing. We've got lenders in our portfolio, Amex working capital terms, that do vendor bill payment through, you know, paying all of your bills that are coming up, we've got as I said SBA loans that will help with long term expansion, we've got that, and we're just continuing to innovate on that too. >> And from the lender point of you, you said you have about a dozen, you're bringing in more, you know, for the opportunity, cause a lot of them probably already have existing relationships with many of these clients, how do they see kind of the opportunity to interface for those clients in this different way through QuickBooks as an intermediary? >> Oh, they love it, because it's very hard for these lenders to go out and acquire new customers, often times they don't have a relationship with these existing customers and they have to go out and do the hard work to acquire customers whereas they're in the QuickBooks ecosystem and, you know, customers really love the opportunity to work with these lenders because we can provide the right advice to them paired with the loan offering, so it works out very well. >> It should be cheaper for them to actually provide those too, cause again you're taking a lot of the headache out. So, before we went live, you talked about some of the numbers, I just want to go through some of the numbers, so you shared the big number 500 million. >> Yep. >> But in terms of kind of an average loan size that you see, in a lifetime value of the loans to some of the customers, I was wondering if you could share some of those statistics. >> Sure, so we see two very different needs for financing from our customer base, there's the work and capital loans, and there's the expansion capital loans, and our customers typically are split between the need for both and at any given time, a business is actually looking for both. They need to smooth over the work and capital and then the expansion capital as well, but our average loan size is about 35,000 dollars today, and it ranges from as little as 2,500 dollars to just smooth a very small cashflow bump that you have, all the way up to 250-500 thousand dollars to do some of the all the way up to 250-500 thousand dollars to do some of the bigger expansions that small businesses are looking to do, and it's really wonderful to be able to help small businesses on both sides of the spectrum because if you're a small business owner, seasonality is really a major pain point. Often times, they'll have most of their business concentrated in the summer months, or potentially the summer months and the winter months, but not the spring and the fall, and so you need, you still have tons of bills, you have employees you need to cover in those off months, and having access to financing where you can get it fairly quickly cause you don't know when those bumps are going to hit, is incredibly valuable. On the flip side, the expansion side, every business owners dream is to expand and it's been amazing to be here over the past few days and hear these stories, you know, Alli Webb on stage yesterday, the founder of Drybar, talking about how she went from one location to 66 in 5 years, and so it's very hard to go into a bank branch in 5 years, and so it's very hard to go into a bank branch and convince them of your grand idea to expand. >> Jeff: Especially if they don't have hair. >> Especially if they don't have hair, she had a hard time... (everyone laughs) >> Her husband and her brother are business partners and they're both bald. >> Yeah, they're sitting with them, they don't have hair either, so. >> So for that reason, it's hard to convince people, and so it's wonderful to be able to help the expansion side of things too. >> Hopefully this has been, if nothing else, a great opportunity for Frick Inc. to find out about the small business college fund. >> Jeff: It's already gone through. >> That quick. >> John: Right, so we'll find out in less than 24 hours. The kids are going to Stanford. >> Alright. >> Or you're going to work at the community college for a bit. Rania we appreciate the time. >> Sure, it was great. >> Very much, thank you for being here. >> Thank you. >> And congratulations on the Amex announcement, and so many other great things you have in the pipeline now to make small business dreams come true. >> Wonderful, thank you very much, it was great to chat with you. >> Thank you very much Rania. Back with more here on the Cube from San Jose in just a moment. (hip tech music)

>>Hello everyone. Welcome to the Cube's coverage of AWS Reinvent 22. I'm John Ferer, host of the Cube. Got some great coverage here talking about software supply chain and sustainability in the cloud. We've got a great conversation. Gunner Helickson, Vice President and general manager at Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Business Unit of Red Hat. Thanks for coming on. And Edon Eja Director, Product Management of commercial software services aws. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me today. >>Oh, it's a pleasure. >>You know, the hottest topic coming out of Cloudnative developer communities is slide chain software sustainability. This is a huge issue. As open source continues to power away and fund and grow this next generation modern development environment, you know, supply chain, you know, sustainability is a huge discussion because you gotta check things out where, what's in the code. Okay, open source is great, but now we gotta commercialize it. This is the topic, Gunner, let's get in, get with you. What, what are you seeing here and what's some of the things that you're seeing around the sustainability piece of it? Because, you know, containers, Kubernetes, we're seeing that that run time really dominate this new abstraction layer, cloud scale. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, so I, it's interesting that the, you know, so Red Hat's been doing this for 20 years, right? Making open source safe to consume in the enterprise. And there was a time when in order to do that you needed to have a, a long term life cycle and you needed to be very good at remediating security vulnerabilities. And that was kind of, that was the bar that you had that you had to climb over. Nowadays with the number of vulnerabilities coming through, what people are most worried about is, is kind of the providence of the software and making sure that it has been vetted and it's been safe, and that that things that you get from your vendor should be more secure than things that you've just downloaded off of GitHub, for example. Right? And that's, that's a, that's a place where Red Hat's very comfortable living, right? >>Because we've been doing it for, for 20 years. I think there, there's another, there's another aspect to this, to this supply chain question as well, especially with the pandemic. You know, we've got these, these supply chains have been jammed up. The actual physical supply chains have been jammed up. And, and the two of these issues actually come together, right? Because as we've been go, as we go through the pandemic, we've had these digital transformation efforts, which are in large part people creating software in order to manage better their physical supply chain problems. And so as part of that digital transformation, you have another supply chain problem, which is the software supply chain problem, right? And so these two things kind of merge on these as people are trying to improve the performance of transportation systems, logistics, et cetera. Ultimately it all boils down to it all. Both supply chain problems actually boil down to a software problem. It's very >>Interesting that, Well, that is interesting. I wanna just follow up on that real quick if you don't mind. Because if you think about the convergence of the software and physical world, you know, that's, you know, IOT and also hybrid cloud kind of plays into that at scale, this opens up more surface area for attacks, especially when you're under a lot of pressure. This is where, you know, you can, you have a service area in the physical side and you have constraints there. And obviously the pandemic causes problems, but now you've got the software side. Can you, how are you guys handling that? Can you just share a little bit more of how you guys are looking at that with Red Hat? What's, what's the customer challenge? Obviously, you know, skills gaps is one, but like that's a convergence at the same time. More security problems. >>Yeah, yeah, that's right. And certainly the volume of, if we just look at security vulnerabilities themselves, just the volume of security vulnerabilities has gone up considerably as more people begin using the software. And as the software becomes more important to kind of critical infrastructure, more eyeballs are on it. And so we're uncovering more problems, which is kind of, that's, that's okay. That's how the world works. And so certainly the, the number of remediations required every year has gone up. But also the customer expectations, as I've mentioned before, the customer expectations have changed, right? People want to be able to show to their auditors and to their regulators that no, we, we, in fact, I can show the providence of the software that I'm using. I didn't just download something random off the internet. I actually have, like you, you know, adults paying attention to the, how the software gets put together. >>And it's still, honestly, it's still very early days. We can, I think the, in as an industry, I think we're very good at managing, identifying remediating vulnerabilities in the aggregate. We're pretty good at that. I think things are less clear when we talk about kind of the management of that supply chain, proving the provenance, proving the, and creating a resilient supply chain for software. We have lots of tools, but we don't really have lots of shared expectations. Yeah. And so it's gonna be interesting over the next few years, I think we're gonna have more rules are gonna come out. I see NIST has already, has already published some of them. And as these new rules come out, the whole industry is gonna have to kind of pull together and, and really and really rally around some of this shared understanding so we can all have shared expectations and we can all speak the same language when we're talking about this >>Problem. That's awesome. A and Amazon web service is obviously the largest cloud platform out there, you know, the pandemic, even post pandemic, some of these supply chain issues, whether it's physical or software, you're also an outlet for that. So if someone can't buy hardware or, or something physical, they can always get the cloud. You guys have great network compute and whatnot and you got thousands of ISVs across the globe. How are you helping customers with this supply chain problem? Because whether it's, you know, I need to get in my networking gears delayed, I'm gonna go to the cloud and get help there. Or whether it's knowing the workloads and, and what's going on inside them with respect open source. Cause you've got open source, which is kind of an external forcing function. You got AWS and you got, you know, physical compute stores, networking, et cetera. How are you guys helping customers with the supply chain challenge, which could be an opportunity? >>Yeah, thanks John. I think there, there are multiple layers to that. At, at the most basic level we are helping customers buy abstracting away all these data central constructs that they would have to worry about if they were running their own data centers. They would have to figure out how the networking gear, you talk about, you know, having the right compute, right physical hardware. So by moving to the cloud, at least they're delegating that problem to AWS and letting us manage and making sure that we have an instance available for them whenever they want it. And if they wanna scale it, the, the, the capacity is there for them to use now then that, so we kind of give them space to work on the second part of the problem, which is building their own supply chain solutions. And we work with all kinds of customers here at AWS from all different industry segments, automotive, retail, manufacturing. >>And you know, you see that the complexity of the supply chain with all those moving pieces, like hundreds and thousands of moving pieces, it's very daunting. So cus and then on the other hand, customers need more better services. So you need to move fast. So you need to build, build your agility in the supply chain itself. And that is where, you know, Red Hat and AWS come together where we can build, we can enable customers to build their supply chain solutions on platform like Red Hat Enterprise, Linux Rail or Red Hat OpenShift on, on aws. We call it Rosa. And the benefit there is that you can actually use the services that we, that are relevant for the supply chain solutions like Amazon managed blockchain, you know, SageMaker. So you can actually build predictive and s you can improve forecasting, you can make sure that you have solutions that help you identify where you can cut costs. And so those are some of the ways we are helping customers, you know, figure out how they actually wanna deal with the supply chain challenges that we're running into in today's world. >>Yeah, and you know, you mentioned sustainability outside of software su sustainability, you know, as people move to the cloud, we've reported on silicon angle here in the cube that it's better to have the sustainability with the cloud because then the data centers aren't using all that energy too. So there's also all kinds of sustainability advantages, Gunner, because this is, this is kind of how your relationship with Amazon's expanded. You mentioned Rosa, which is Red Hat on, you know, on OpenShift, on aws. This is interesting because one of the biggest discussions is skills gap, but we were also talking about the fact that the humans are huge part of the talent value. In other words, the, the humans still need to be involved and having that relationship with managed services and Red Hat, this piece becomes one of those things that's not talked about much, which is the talent is increasing in value the humans, and now you got managed services on the cloud, has got scale and human interactions. Can you share, you know, how you guys are working together on this piece? Cuz this is interesting cuz this kind of brings up the relationship of that operator or developer. >>Yeah, Yeah. So I think there's, so I think about this in a few dimensions. First is that the kind of the, I it's difficult to find a customer who is not talking about automation at some level right now. And obviously you can automate the processes and, and the physical infrastructure that you already have that's using tools like Ansible, right? But I think that the, combining it with the, the elasticity of a solution like aws, so you combine the automation with kind of elastic and, and converting a lot of the capital expenses into operating expenses, that's a great way actually to save labor, right? So instead of like racking hard drives, you can have somebody who's somebody do something a little more like, you know, more valuable work, right? And so, so okay, but that gives you a platform and then what do you do with that platform? >>And if you've got your systems automated and you've got this kind of elastic infrastructure underneath you, what you do on top of it is really interesting. So a great example of this is the collaboration that, that we had with running the rel workstation on aws. So you might think like, well why would anybody wanna run a workstation on, on a cloud? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you consider how complex it is to set up, if you have the, the use case here is like industrial workstations, right? So it's animators, people doing computational fluid dynamics, things like this. So these are industries that are extremely data heavy. They have workstations have very large hardware requirements, often with accelerated GPUs and things like this. That is an extremely expensive thing to install on premise anywhere. And if the pandemic taught us anything, it's, if you have a bunch of very expensive talent and they all have to work from a home, it is very difficult to go provide them with, you know, several tens of thousands of dollars worth of worth of worth of workstation equipment. >>And so combine the rail workstation with the AWS infrastructure and now all that workstation computational infrastructure is available on demand and on and available right next to the considerable amount of data that they're analyzing or animating or, or, or working on. So it's a really interesting, it's, it was actually, this is an idea that I was actually born with the pandemic. Yeah. And, and it's kind of a combination of everything that we're talking about, right? It's the supply chain challenges of the customer, It's the lack of lack of talent, making sure that people are being put their best and highest use. And it's also having this kind of elastic, I think, opex heavy infrastructure as opposed to a CapEx heavy infrastructure. >>That's a great example. I think that's illustrates to me what I love about cloud right now is that you can put stuff in, in the cloud and then flex what you need when you need it at in the cloud rather than either ingress or egress data. You, you just more, you get more versatility around the workload needs, whether it's more compute or more storage or other high level services. This is kind of where this NextGen cloud is going. This is where, where, where customers want to go once their workloads are up and running. How do you simplify all this and how do you guys look at this from a joint customer perspective? Because that example I think will be something that all companies will be working on, which is put it in the cloud and flex to the, whatever the workload needs and put it closer to the work compute. I wanna put it there. If I wanna leverage more storage and networking, Well, I'll do that too. It's not one thing. It's gotta flex around what's, how are you guys simplifying this? >>Yeah, I think so for, I'll, I'll just give my point of view and then I'm, I'm very curious to hear what a not has to say about it, but the, I think and think about it in a few dimensions, right? So there's, there is a, technically like any solution that aan a nun's team and my team wanna put together needs to be kind of technically coherent, right? The things need to work well together, but that's not the, that's not even most of the job. Most of the job is actually the ensuring and operational consistency and operational simplicity so that everything is the day-to-day operations of these things kind of work well together. And then also all the way to things like support and even acquisition, right? Making sure that all the contracts work together, right? It's a really in what, So when Aon and I think about places of working together, it's very rare that we're just looking at a technical collaboration. It's actually a holistic collaboration across support acquisition as well as all the engineering that we have to do. >>And on your, your view on how you're simplifying it with Red Hat for your joint customers making Collabo >>Yeah. Gun, Yeah. Gunner covered it. Well I think the, the benefit here is that Red Hat has been the leading Linux distribution provider. So they have a lot of experience. AWS has been the leading cloud provider. So we have both our own point of views, our own learning from our respective set of customers. So the way we try to simplify and bring these things together is working closely. In fact, I sometimes joke internally that if you see Ghana and my team talking to each other on a call, you cannot really tell who who belongs to which team. Because we're always figuring out, okay, how do we simplify discount experience? How do we simplify programs? How do we simplify go to market? How do we simplify the product pieces? So it's really bringing our, our learning and share our perspective to the table and then really figure out how do we actually help customers make progress. Rosa that we talked about is a great example of that, you know, you know, we, together we figured out, hey, there is a need for customers to have this capability in AWS and we went out and built it. So those are just some of the examples in how both teams are working together to simplify the experience, make it complete, make it more coherent. >>Great. That's awesome. That next question is really around how you help organizations with the sustainability piece, how to support them, simplifying it. But first, before we get into that, what is the core problem around this sustainability discussion we're talking about here, supply chain sustainability, What is the core challenge? Can you both share your thoughts on what that problem is and what the solution looks like and then we can get into advice? >>Yeah. Well from my point of view, it's, I think, you know, one of the lessons of the last three years is every organization is kind of taking a careful look at how resilient it is. Or ever I should say, every organization learned exactly how resilient it was, right? And that comes from both the, the physical challenges and the logistics challenges that everyone had. The talent challenges you mentioned earlier. And of course the, the software challenges, you know, as everyone kind of embarks on this, this digital transformation journey that, that we've all been talking about. And I think, so I really frame it as, as resilience, right? And and resilience is at bottom is really about ensuring that you have options and that you have choices. The more choices you have, the more options you have, the more resilient you, you and your organization is going to be. And so I know that that's how, that's how I approach the market. I'm pretty sure that's exact, that's how AON is, has approaching the market, is ensuring that we are providing as many options as possible to customers so that they can assemble the right, assemble the right pieces to create a, a solution that works for their particular set of challenges or their unique set of challenges and and unique context. Aon, is that, does that sound about right to you? Yeah, >>I think you covered it well. I, I can speak to another aspect of sustainability, which is becoming increasingly top of mind for our customer is like how do they build products and services and solutions and whether it's supply chain or anything else which is sustainable, which is for the long term good of the, the planet. And I think that is where we have been also being very intentional and focused in how we design our data center. How we actually build our cooling system so that we, those are energy efficient. You know, we, we are on track to power all our operations with renewable energy by 2025, which is five years ahead of our initial commitment. And perhaps the most obvious example of all of this is our work with arm processors Graviton three, where, you know, we are building our own chip to make sure that we are designing energy efficiency into the process. And you know, we, there's the arm graviton, three arm processor chips, there are about 60% more energy efficient compared to some of the CD six comparable. So all those things that are also we are working on in making sure that whatever our customers build on our platform is long term sustainable. So that's another dimension of how we are working that into our >>Platform. That's awesome. This is a great conversation. You know, the supply chain is on both sides, physical and software. You're starting to see them come together in great conversations and certainly moving workloads to the cloud running in more efficiently will help on the sustainability side, in my opinion. Of course, you guys talked about that and we've covered it, but now you start getting into how to refactor, and this is a big conversation we've been having lately, is as you not just lift and ship but re-platform and refactor, customers are seeing great advantages on this. So I have to ask you guys, how are you helping customers and organizations support sustainability and, and simplify the complex environment that has a lot of potential integrations? Obviously API's help of course, but that's the kind of baseline, what's the, what's the advice that you give customers? Cause you know, it can look complex and it becomes complex, but there's an answer here. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, I think so. Whenever, when, when I get questions like this from from customers, the, the first thing I guide them to is, we talked earlier about this notion of consistency and how important that is. It's one thing, it it, it is one way to solve the problem is to create an entirely new operational model, an entirely new acquisition model and an entirely new stack of technologies in order to be more sustainable. That is probably not in the cards for most folks. What they want to do is have their existing estate and they're trying to introduce sustainability into the work that they are already doing. They don't need to build another silo in order to create sustainability, right? And so there have to be, there has to be some common threads, there has to be some common platforms across the existing estate and your more sustainable estate, right? >>And, and so things like Red Hat enterprise Linux, which can provide this kind of common, not just a technical substrate, but a common operational substrate on which you can build these solutions if you have a common platform on which you are building solutions, whether it's RHEL or whether it's OpenShift or any of our other platforms that creates options for you underneath. So that in some cases maybe you need to run things on premise, some things you need to run in the cloud, but you don't have to profoundly change how you work when you're moving from one place to another. >>And that, what's your thoughts on, on the simplification? >>Yeah, I mean think that when you talk about replatforming and refactoring, it is a daunting undertaking, you know, in today's, in the, especially in today's fast paced work. So, but the good news is you don't have to do it by yourself. Customers don't have to do it on their own. You know, together AWS and Red Hat, we have our rich partner ecosystem, you know AWS over AWS has over a hundred thousand partners that can help you take that journey, the transformation journey. And within AWS and working with our partners like Red Hat, we make sure that we have all in, in my mind there are really three big pillars that you have to have to make sure that customers can successfully re-platform refactor their applications to the modern cloud architecture. You need to have the rich set of services and tools that meet their different scenarios, different use cases. Because no one size fits all. You have to have the right programs because sometimes customers need those incentives, they need those, you know, that help in the first step and last but no needs, they need training. So all of that, we try to cover that as we work with our customers, work with our partners and that is where, you know, together we try to help customers take that step, which is, which is a challenging step to take. >>Yeah. You know, it's great to talk to you guys, both leaders in your field. Obviously Red hats, well story history. I remember the days back when I was provisioning, loading OSS on hardware with, with CDs, if you remember, that was days gunner. But now with high level services, if you look at this year's reinvent, and this is like kind of my final question for the segment is then we'll get your reaction to is last year we talked about higher level services. I sat down with Adam Celski, we talked about that. If you look at what's happened this year, you're starting to see people talk about their environment as their cloud. So Amazon has the gift of the CapEx, the all that, all that investment and people can operate on top of it. They're calling that environment their cloud. Okay, For the first time we're seeing this new dynamic where it's like they have a cloud, but they're Amazon's the CapEx, they're operating. So you're starting to see the operational visibility gun around how to operate this environment. And it's not hybrid this, that it's just, it's cloud. This is kind of an inflection point. Do you guys agree with that or, or having a reaction to that statement? Because I, I think this is kind of the next gen super cloud-like capability. It's, it's, we're going, we're building the cloud. It's now an environment. It's not talking about private cloud, this cloud, it's, it's all cloud. What's your reaction? >>Yeah, I think, well I think it's a very natural, I mean we used words like hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, if, I guess super cloud is what the kids are saying now, right? It's, it's all, it's all describing the same phenomena, right? Which is, which is being able to take advantage of lots of different infrastructure options, but still having something that creates some commonality among them so that you can, so that you can manage them effectively, right? So that you can have kind of uniform compliance across your estate so that you can have kind of, you can make the best use of your talent across the estate. I mean this is a, this is, it's a very natural thing. >>They're calling it cloud, the estate is the cloud. >>Yeah. So yeah, so, so fine if it, if it means that we no longer have to argue about what's multi-cloud and what's hybrid cloud, I think that's great. Let's just call it cloud. >>And what's your reaction, cuz this is kind of the next gen benefits of, of higher level services combined with amazing, you know, compute and, and resource at the infrastructure level. What's your, what's your view on that? >>Yeah, I think the construct of a unified environment makes sense for customers who have all these use cases which require, like for instance, if you are doing some edge computing and you're running it WS outpost or you know, wave lent and these things. So, and, and it is, it is fear for customer to say, think that hey, this is one environment, same set of tooling that they wanna build that works across all their different environments. That is why we work with partners like Red Hat so that customers who are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on premises and who are running in AWS get the same level of support, get the same level of security features, all of that. So from that sense, it actually makes sense for us to build these capabilities in a way that customers don't have to worry about, Okay, now I'm actually in the AWS data center versus I'm running outpost on premises. It is all one. They, they just use the same set of cli command line APIs and all of that. So in that sense, it's actually helps customers have that unification so that that consistency of experience helps their workforce and be more productive versus figuring out, okay, what do I do, which tool I use? Where >>And on you just nailed it. This is about supply chain sustainability, moving the workloads into a cloud environment. You mentioned wavelength, this conversation's gonna continue. We haven't even talked about the edge yet. This is something that's gonna be all about operating these workloads at scale and all the, with the cloud services. So thanks for sharing that and we'll pick up that edge piece later. But for reinvent right now, this is really the key conversation. How to bake the sustained supply chain work in a complex environment, making it simpler. And so thanks for sharing your insights here on the cube. >>Thanks. Thanks for having >>Us. Okay, this is the cube's coverage of ados Reinvent 22. I'm John Fur, your host. Thanks for watching.

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to the Cube special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Foer, host of the Cube. We've got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, our videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and aws. This is the customer successes with VMware cloud on AWS showcase, accelerating business transformation here in the showcase with Samir Candu Worldwide. VMware strategic alliance solution, architect leader with AWS Samir. Great to have you and Daniel Re Myer, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are, are working together. You're the key players in the re relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Greatly appreciate it. >>Great to have you guys both on, As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Geling, then CEO and then then CEO AWS at Andy Chasy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success. OFM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since, and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later we got this whole inflection point coming. You're starting to see, you know, this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side. More automation, more serverless, I mean, and a, I mean it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kinda a whole nother level. Where are we, Samir? Let's start with you on, on the relationship. >>Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced, and then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware cloud on aws. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware day in, day out. As far as advancing VMware cloud on aws. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with a solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements, you know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right? More recently, one of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. >>And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware cloud on aws, and even with VMware's, other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >>Great stuff. Daniel, I wanna get to you in a second. Upon this principal architect position you have in your title, you're the global a synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly world, talking about how the, the workloads on it has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AI ops, you got it. Ops changing a lot, you got a lot more automation edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the >>Relationship? So at at, at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. We are also enabling US mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembled globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers, that's, that's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the, the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. And over the time we, we really have involved the solution. As Samia mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware cloud on aws. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of, of workload. So for example, we just added the I four I host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as you mentioned it, AI workloads. >>Yeah. So I wanna guess just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation. You know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in the queue in the past couple weeks in a big way that the OPS teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds OP a little bit weird, but operation IT operations is now part of the, a lot more data ops, security writing code composing, you know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing? What are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >>That, that's a great point because originally VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people at customers. So for example, aws very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the IT ops area. And usually these are very different, very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's, it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customers, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, well we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service, recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure. That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >>Samir, talk about your perspective. I wanna get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS remar of, actually it was Amazon res machine learning automation, robotics and space. It was really kinda the confluence of industrial IOT software physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code automation, you know, Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster. Yeah, I mean, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on, on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >>Yeah, totally. Right. And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware cloud on aws, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's gonna give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with iot, even with utilizing Alexa or if there's any other service that you wanna utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings. Right off the top though, with digital transformation, right? You, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology. Even in your business leaders are looking to reinvent their business. They're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy. Maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. Okay. Then also, Oh, >>Go ahead, finish >>Your thought. No, no, I was gonna say, what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that VS four admin that's used to their on-premises at environment. Now with VMware cloud on aws, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, yeah. You still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware cloud on AWS two. >>Danielle, I wanna get your thoughts on this because at at explore and, and, and after the event, now as we prep for Cuban and reinvent coming up the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators and it's like hundreds of thousands of, of, of, of users and millions of people talking about and and peaked on VM we're interested in v VMware. The common thread was one's one, one person said, I'm trying to figure out where I'm gonna put my career in the next 10 to 15 years. And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm gonna be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet architects, is it Solution architect sre. So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are gonna try to make these career decisions, like how, what am I gonna work on? And it's, and that was kind of fuzzy, but I wanna get your thoughts. How would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity and what's gonna happen? >>So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means in, in to to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills? And, and trainings is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the, the answer is to make digital transformation a success. We need not just to talk about technology, but also about process people and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware cloud on a, on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment. You can use the same managing and monitoring tools. If you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of, of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware cloud on aws. And that gives not just leaders, but but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in, in such a complex project, >>The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go and, and then now that once they're confident they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because you know, on your side you've got higher level services, you got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, lot improvement. So, okay, nothing's changed. I can still run my job now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the, for the, for the customer there? >>Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud, but if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you wanna utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on premises or even in VMware cloud on aws, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you wanna expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >>Great stuff. I love, love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, cuz people wanna know what's goes on in behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationship? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? You guys just have a zoom meeting, Do you guys fly out, you write go do you ship thing? I mean I'm making it up, but you get the idea, what's the, what's, how does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >>So we hope to get more frequently together in person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to zoom conferences and and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if we are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have reg regular assembled now also in person geo based. So for emia, for the Americas, for aj. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >>What's interesting, you know, as, as events are coming back to here, before you get, you weigh in, I'll comment, as the cube's been going back out to events, we are hearing comments like what, what pandemic we were more productive in the pandemic. I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in person, they're happy to see people, but there's no one's, no one's really missed the beat. I mean it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More if anything, productivity gains. >>Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, even if you look at AWS's and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said met earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation and VMware cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there have been, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology we've been able to still communicate work with our customers. Even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot. We had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware cloud on AWS outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware cloud on AWS outposts. So even with the on premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >>And our last segment we did here on the, on this showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean go, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and, and people can reference that. We won't get into it here, but I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Cuz again, I think right now we're in at a, an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with reinvent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >>So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked us for over the last years. Whenever, whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware cloud on aws, you have to add additional notes. Now we have three different note types with different ratios of compute, storage and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS six one, NetApp onap, and VMware cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements at the upcoming events. >>Samir, what's your, what's your reaction take on the, on what's coming down on your side? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scale with their needs, right? So with VMware cloud on aws, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are gonna be announcements, innovations and whatnot with outcoming events. But together we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS to Daniel's point storage, for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's gonna be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events that's gonna give us the options to even advance our own services together. >>Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I wanna get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in, in the open conversations on the cube is in the old days it was going back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem they did best, had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships and they do business together and they, they sell to each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture cuz we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining. >>And this, you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides. They come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem, you know, interplay. What's your thoughts on this? And, and, and because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much. Innovation is only, you gotta do innovation, but when you do innovation, you gotta integrate it, you gotta connect it. So what is, how do you guys see this as a, as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >>So we are, we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even, even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware cloud on aws moving to the cloud, firstly it's, it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe it's some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise. You can do this if you decide you want to stay with some of your services on premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can mana manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead and it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on premise or the cloud. It it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both works, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware cloud on aws, by the way, in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by aws. More than 200 different services ranging from object based storage, load balancing and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >>We, we call that super cloud in, in a, in a way that we be generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is gonna where cloud is right now, you guys are, are not commodity. Amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things. Having got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. Absolutely. And everybody wins. >>Yeah. And a hundred percent agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it it, it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with aws, maybe more proficient with the viewers technology, but then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud. Maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are. Maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware cloud on aws. Maybe you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skill, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of, back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the >>Day. I mean, I just think it's, it's a, it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean, you don't have to do anything. You still run the fear, the way you working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >>Yeah, absolutely. And if, if you look, not every, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we gave, we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time they can free up resources to develop new innovations and, and grow their business. >>Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Danielle, thank you for coming to Germany, Octoberfest, I know it's evening over there, your weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir final give you the final word, AWS reinvents coming up. Preparing. We're gonna have an exclusive with Adam, but Fry, we do a curtain raise, a dual preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at reinvent this year? The big show? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what I call a chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking for to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there. But if they wanna be hands on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, you know, been in CIS admin world and whatnot, being hands on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. Yeah, >>Reinvents an amazing show for the in person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at the cube. It's becoming popular. We more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media, so thanks, thanks for sharing that. Samir Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud Ons, really accelerating business transformation withs and VMware. I'm John Fur with the cube, thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to this cube showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware cloud on it's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred and VP of commercial services at aws and NA Ryan Bard, who's the VP and general manager of cloud solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on this showcase. >>Great to be here. >>Hey, thanks for having us on. It's a great topic. You know, we, we've been covering this VMware cloud on abus since, since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch the evolution from people saying, Oh, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. It's what's this mean? And depress work were, we're kind of not really on board with kind of the vision, but as it played out as you guys had announced together, it did work out great for VMware. It did work out great for a D and it continues two years later and I want just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going. I'll see multiple years. Where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware explorer just recently and going in to reinvent, which is only a couple weeks away, feels like tomorrow. But you know, as we prepare a lot going on, where are we with the evolution of the solution? >>I mean, first thing I wanna say is, you know, PBO 2016 was a someon moment and the history of it, right? When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jessey came together to announce this and I think John, you were there at the time I was there, it was a great, great moment. We launched the solution in 2017, the year after that at VM Word back when we called it Word, I think we have gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we have learned froms also in the processes, this notion of working backwards. So we really, really focused on customer feedback as we build a service offering now five years old, pretty remarkable journey. You know, in the first years we tried to get across all the regions, you know, that was a big focus because there was so much demand for it. >>In the second year we started going really on enterprise grade features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretch clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using VSA and NSX across two AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nine s availability that applications start started to get with that particular feature. And we kept moving forward all kinds of integration with AWS direct connect transit gateways with our own advanced networking capabilities. You know, along the way, disaster recovery, we punched out two, two new services just focused on that. And then more recently we launched our outposts partnership. We were up on stage at Reinvent, again with Pat Andy announcing AWS outposts and the VMware flavor of that VMware cloud and AWS outposts. I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well with our federal and high certification more recently. So all in all, we are super excited. We're five years old. The customer momentum is really, really strong and we are scaling the service massively across all geos and industries. >>That's great, great update. And I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship. And, and this has kind of been the theme for AWS since I can remember from day one. Fred, you guys do the heavy lifting as as, as you always say for the customers here, VMware comes on board, takes advantage of the AWS and kind of just doesn't miss a beat, continues to move their workloads that everyone's using, you know, vSphere and these are, these are big workloads on aws. What's the AWS perspective on this? How do you see it? >>Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the, the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on Preem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's, that's evolving quickly and, and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about. But that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the, for the customer. So it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint, from a business standpoint. And obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and, and responding to what customers want. So pretty, pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to bmc. Yeah, >>That's what great value publish. We've been talking about that in context too. Anyone building on top of the cloud, they can have their own supercloud as we call it. If you take advantage of all the CapEx and and investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and, and and continues to make in performance IAS and pass all great stuff. I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level, what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options on the market? What makes it different? What's the combination? You mentioned jointly engineered, what are some of the key differentiators of the service compared to others? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things Fred talked about is this jointly engineered notion right from day one. We were the earlier doctors of AWS Nitro platform, right? The reinvention of E two back five years ago. And so we have been, you know, having a very, very strong engineering partnership at that level. I think from a VMware customer standpoint, you get the full software defined data center or compute storage networking on EC two, bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally, right on aws EC two global regions. Now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us that customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service, right? And this was somewhat new to VMware, but we took away the pain of this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers had to provision rack, stack hardware, configure the software on top, and then upgrade the software and the security batches on top. >>So we took, took away all of that pain as customers transitioned to VMware cloud and aws. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the lock for j debacle industry was just going through that, right? Favorite proof point from customers was before they put even race this issue to us, we sent them a notification saying we already patched all of your systems, no action from you. The customers were super thrilled. I mean these are large banks, many other customers around the world, super thrilled they had to take no action, but a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing. >>Nora, that's a great, so that's a great point. You know, the whole managed service piece brings up the security, you kind of teasing at it, but you know, there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you are doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. You know, Fred, we were commenting before we came on camera, there's more bits than ever before and, and at at the physics layer too, as well as the software. So you never know when there's gonna be a zero day vulnerability out there. Just, it happens. We saw one with fornet this week, this came outta the woodwork. But moving fast on those patches, it's huge. This brings up the whole support angle. I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well, because to me we see the value when we, when we talk to customers on the cube about this, you know, it was a real, real easy understanding of how, what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the aws. But the question that comes up that we wanna get more clarity on is how do you guys handle support together? >>Well, what's interesting about this is that it's, it's done mutually. We have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer, including all the way up into the app layer, as you think about some of the other workloads like sap, we'll go end to end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them. And on top of that, we look at where, where we're improving reliability in, in as a first order of, of principle between both companies. So from an availability and reliability standpoint, it's, it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land, we're gonna go help the customer resolve. That works really well >>On the VMware side. What's been the feedback there? What's the, what are some of the updates? >>Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service, but we have a phenomenal backend relationship with aws. Customers call VMware for the service for any issues and, and then we have a awesome relationship with AWS on the backend for support issues or any hardware issues. The BASKE management that we jointly do, right? All of the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about. I think on the front end, we also have a really good group of solution architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution. Do complex things like cloud migration, which is much, much easier with VMware cloud aws, you know, we are presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways. And so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day. >>You know, you had mentioned, I've got a list here, some of the innovations the, you mentioned the stretch clustering, you know, getting the GOs working, Advanced network, disaster recovery, you know, fed, Fed ramp, public sector certifications, outposts, all good. You guys are checking the boxes every year. You got a good, good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship. The question that I'm interested in is what's next? What recent innovations are you doing? Are you making investments in what's on the lists this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the, the new things, the list of accomplishments, people wanna know what's next. They don't wanna see stagnant growth here, they wanna see more action, you know, as as cloud kind of continues to scale and modern applications cloud native, you're seeing more and more containers, more and more, you know, more CF C I C D pipe pipelining with with modern apps, put more pressure on the system. What's new, what's the new innovations? >>Absolutely. And I think as a five yearold service offering innovation is top of mind for us every single day. So just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explorer. First of all, our new platform i four I dot metal, it's isolate based, it's pretty awesome. It's the latest and greatest, all the speeds and feeds that we would expect from VMware and aws. At this point in our relationship. We announced two different storage options. This notion of working from customer feedback, allowing customers even more price reductions, really take off that storage and park it externally, right? And you know, separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS Fsx, with NetApp on tap, which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based, really excited about this offering as well. >>And the second storage offering for VMware cloud Flex Storage, VMware's own managed storage offering. Beyond that, we have done a lot of other innovations as well. I really wanted to talk about VMware cloud Flex Compute, where previously customers could only scale by hosts and a host is 36 to 48 cores, give or take. But with VMware cloud Flex Compute, we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the V C P memory and storage that maps to the applications, however small they might be. So this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that that we are launching in the market this year. And then last but not least, talk about ransomware. Of course it's a hot topic in industry. We are seeing many, many customers ask for this. We are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware cloud DR solution. >>A lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots and backups are actually safe to use. So there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well. A lot of networking innovations with Project Knot star for ability to have layer flow through layer seven, you know, new SaaS services in that area as well. Keep in mind that the service already supports managed Kubernetes for containers. It's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines. And so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMs and containers and sort of at the heart of our office, >>The networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on. Every year it's the same, same conversation, get better, faster networking, more, more options there. The flex computes. Interesting. If you don't mind me getting a quick clarification, could you explain the Drew screen resource defined versus hardware defined? Because this is kind of what we had saw at Explore coming out, that notion of resource defined versus hardware defined. What's the, what does that mean? >>Yeah, I mean I think we have been super successful in this hardware defined notion. We we're scaling by the hardware unit that we present as software defined data centers, right? And so that's been super successful. But we, you know, customers wanted more, especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally, right? Lower their costs even more. And so this is the part where resource defined starts to be very, very interesting as a way to think about, you know, here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customers request for fiber machines, five containers, its size exactly for that. And then as utilization grows, we elastically behind the scenes, we're able to grow it through policies. So that's a whole different dimension. It's a whole different service offering that adds value and customers are comfortable. They can go from one to the other, they can go back to that post based model if they so choose to. And there's a jump off point across these two different economic models. >>It's kind of cloud of flexibility right there. I like the name Fred. Let's get into some of the examples of customers, if you don't mind. Let's get into some of the ex, we have some time. I wanna unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments. One of the things we've heard again on the cube is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship, they love the cloud positioning of it. And then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like, feels great. It's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they would start consuming higher level services, kind of that adoption next level happens and because it it's in the cloud, so, So can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware cloud on AWS on getting started, and then how do they progress once they're there? How does it evolve? Can you just walk us through a couple of use cases? >>Sure. There's a, well there's a couple. One, it's pretty interesting that, you know, like you said, as there's more and more bits you need better and better hardware and networking. And we're super excited about the I four and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around a lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds. But what customers are doing with it, like the college in New Jersey, they're accelerating their deployment on a, on onboarding over like 7,400 students over a six to eight month period. And they've really realized a ton of savings. But what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native services too. So connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this. The, the options there obviously are tied to all the innovation that we have across any services, whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with Tanu or with any other container and or services within aws. >>So there's, there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing, which is moved quickly with full compliance, whether it's in like healthcare or regulatory business is, is allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with tech extract or any other really cool service that has, you know, monthly and quarterly innovations. So there's things that you just can't, could not do before that are coming out and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their, their current app base in, in a rapid fashion. So pretty excited about it. There's a lot of examples. I think I probably don't have time to go into too, too many here. Yeah. But that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform. >>Nora, what's your perspective from the VMware sy? So, you know, you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's, you know, higher level services and or whatever's homegrown where's being rolled out? Cuz you now have a lot of hybrid too, so, so what's your, what's your take on what, what's happening in with customers? >>I mean, it's been phenomenal, the, the customer adoption of this and you know, banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production grade applications, tier one applications on the service over the last five years. And so, you know, I have a couple of really good examples. S and p Global is one of my favorite examples. Large bank, they merge with IHS market, big sort of conglomeration. Now both customers were using VMware cloud and AWS in different ways. And with the, with the use case, one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers? And then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the global, which there were many. And so one specific example for this company was how they migrated thousand 1000 workloads to VMware cloud AWS in just six weeks. Pretty phenomenal. If you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process, people process technology and the beauty of the technology going from VMware point A to VMware point B, the the lowest cost, lowest risk approach to adopting VMware, VMware cloud, and aws. So that's, you know, one of my favorite examples. There are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see. The good thing is we are seeing rapid expansion across the globe that constantly entering new markets with the limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap there. >>Yeah, it's great to see, I mean the data center migrations go from months, many, many months to weeks. It's interesting to see some of those success stories. So congratulations. One >>Of other, one of the other interesting fascinating benefits is the sustainability improvement in terms of being green. So the efficiency gains that we have both in current generation and new generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic, they're also saving power, which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time. They're, they're seeing those benefits. If you're running really inefficiently in your own data center, that is just a, not a great use of power. So the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads is, are pretty phenomenal just in being more green, which I like. We just all need to do our part there. And, and this is a big part of it here. >>It's a huge, it's a huge point about the sustainability. Fred, I'm glad you called that out. The other one I would say is supply chain issues. Another one you see that constrains, I can't buy hardware. And the third one is really obvious, but no one really talks about it. It's security, right? I mean, I remember interviewing Stephen Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago, this is like 2013, and you know, at that time people were saying the cloud's not secure. And he's like, listen, it's more secure in the cloud on premise. And if you look at the security breaches, it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities, not so much hardware. So there's a lot you gotta to stay current on, on the isolation there is is hard. So I think, I think the security and supply chain, Fred is, is another one. Do you agree? >>I I absolutely agree. It's, it's hard to manage supply chain nowadays. We put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and, and have the resources that are available and run them, run them more efficiently. Yeah, and then like you said on the security point, security is job one. It is, it is the only P one. And if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers, there's nothing more important. >>And naron your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things, it's really gonna get better. All right, final question. I really wanna thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I wanna kind of end with kind of a curve ball and put you eyes on the spot. We're talking about a modern, a new modern shift. It's another, we're seeing another inflection point, we've been documenting it, it's almost like cloud hitting another inflection point with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer. Continue to put a lot of pressure and, and innovation in the infrastructure side. So the question is for you guys each to answer is what's the same and what's different in today's market? So it's kind of like we want more of the same here, but also things have changed radically and better here. What are the, what's, what's changed for the better and where, what's still the same kind of thing hanging around that people are focused on? Can you share your perspective? >>I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll tackle it. You know, businesses are complex and they're often unique that that's the same. What's changed is how fast you can innovate. The ability to combine manage services and new innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today. Leveraging world class hardware that you don't have to worry about that's elastic. You, you could not do that even five, 10 years ago to the degree you can today, especially with innovation. So innovation is accelerating at a, at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the, the set of services that are available to them. It's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of of engineers can go actually develop in a week. It is phenomenal. So super excited about this space and it's only gonna continue to accelerate that. That's my take. All right. >>You got a lot of platform to compete on with, got a lot to build on then you're Ryan, your side, What's your, what's your answer to that question? >>I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constant. I think what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly, you know, build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that motor production quickly and efficiently. I think we, we are seeing, you know, we are at the very start of that sort of of journey. Of course we have invested in Kubernetes the means to an end, but there's so much more beyond that's happening in industry. And I think we're at the very, very beginning of this transformations, enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we are inherently part of it. >>Yeah. Well gentlemen, I really appreciate that we're seeing the same thing. It's more the same here on, you know, solving these complexities with distractions. Whether it's, you know, higher level services with large scale infrastructure at, at your fingertips. Infrastructures, code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happen in Fred with AWS on your side. And we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator, again, being a cloud operator and developer. So the developer ops is kind of, DevOps is kind of changing too. So all for the better. Thank you for spending the time and we're seeing again, that traction with the VMware customer base and of us getting, getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives, >>I appreciate it. Thank you so >>Much. Okay, thank you John. Okay, this is the Cube and AWS VMware showcase, accelerating business transformation. VMware cloud on aws, jointly engineered solution, bringing innovation to the VMware customer base, going to the cloud and beyond. I'm John Fur, your host. Thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to the special cube presentation of accelerating business transformation on vmc on aws. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We have dawan director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on adb. This is a great showcase and should be a lot of fun. Ashish, thanks for coming on. >>Hi John. Thank you so much. >>So VMware cloud on AWS has been well documented as this big success for VMware and aws. As customers move their workloads into the cloud, IT operations of VMware customers has signaling a lot of change. This is changing the landscape globally is on cloud migration and beyond. What's your take on this? Can you open this up with the most important story around VMC on aws? >>Yes, John. The most important thing for our customers today is the how they can safely and swiftly move their ID infrastructure and applications through cloud. Now, VMware cloud AWS is a service that allows all vSphere based workloads to move to cloud safely, swiftly and reliably. Banks can move their core, core banking platforms, insurance companies move their core insurance platforms, telcos move their goss, bss, PLA platforms, government organizations are moving their citizen engagement platforms using VMC on aws because this is one platform that allows you to move it, move their VMware based platforms very fast. Migrations can happen in a matter of days instead of months. Extremely securely. It's a VMware manage service. It's very secure and highly reliably. It gets the, the reliability of the underlyings infrastructure along with it. So win-win from our customers perspective. >>You know, we reported on this big news in 2016 with Andy Chas, the, and Pat Geling at the time, a lot of people said it was a bad deal. It turned out to be a great deal because not only could VMware customers actually have a cloud migrate to the cloud, do it safely, which was their number one concern. They didn't want to have disruption to their operations, but also position themselves for what's beyond just shifting to the cloud. So I have to ask you, since you got the finger on the pulse here, what are we seeing in the market when it comes to migrating and modern modernizing in the cloud? Because that's the next step. They go to the cloud, you guys have done that, doing it, then they go, I gotta modernize, which means kind of upgrading or refactoring. What's your take on that? >>Yeah, absolutely. Look, the first step is to help our customers assess their infrastructure and licensing and entire ID operations. Once we've done the assessment, we then create their migration plans. A lot of our customers are at that inflection point. They're, they're looking at their real estate, ex data center, real estate. They're looking at their contracts with colocation vendors. They really want to exit their data centers, right? And VMware cloud and AWS is a perfect solution for customers who wanna exit their data centers, migrate these applications onto the AWS platform using VMC on aws, get rid of additional real estate overheads, power overheads, be socially and environmentally conscious by doing that as well, right? So that's the migration story, but to your point, it doesn't end there, right? Modernization is a critical aspect of the entire customer journey as as well customers, once they've migrated their ID applications and infrastructure on cloud get access to all the modernization services that AWS has. They can correct easily to our data lake services, to our AIML services, to custom databases, right? They can decide which applications they want to keep and which applications they want to refactor. They want to take decisions on containerization, make decisions on service computing once they've come to the cloud. But the most important thing is to take that first step. You know, exit data centers, come to AWS using vmc or aws, and then a whole host of modernization options available to them. >>Yeah, I gotta say, we had this right on this, on this story, because you just pointed out a big thing, which was first order of business is to make sure to leverage the on-prem investments that those customers made and then migrate to the cloud where they can maintain their applications, their data, their infrastructure operations that they're used to, and then be in position to start getting modern. So I have to ask you, how are you guys specifically, or how is VMware cloud on s addressing these needs of the customers? Because what happens next is something that needs to happen faster. And sometimes the skills might not be there because if they're running old school, IT ops now they gotta come in and jump in. They're gonna use a data cloud, they're gonna want to use all kinds of machine learning, and there's a lot of great goodness going on above the stack there. So as you move with the higher level services, you know, it's a no brainer, obviously, but they're not, it's not yesterday's higher level services in the cloud. So how are, how is this being addressed? >>Absolutely. I think you hit up on a very important point, and that is skills, right? When our customers are operating, some of the most critical applications I just mentioned, core banking, core insurance, et cetera, they're most of the core applications that our customers have across industries, like even, even large scale ERP systems, they're actually sitting on VMware's vSphere platform right now. When the customer wants to migrate these to cloud, one of the key bottlenecks they face is skill sets. They have the trained manpower for these core applications, but for these high level services, they may not, right? So the first order of business is to help them ease this migration pain as much as possible by not wanting them to, to upscale immediately. And we VMware cloud and AWS exactly does that. I mean, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to create new skill set for doing this, right? Their existing skill sets suffice, but at the same time, it gives them that, that leeway to build that skills roadmap for their team. DNS is invested in that, right? Yes. We want to help them build those skills in the high level services, be it aml, be it, be it i t be it data lake and analytics. We want to invest in them, and we help our customers through that. So that ultimately the ultimate goal of making them drop data is, is, is a front and center. >>I wanna get into some of the use cases and success stories, but I want to just reiterate, hit back your point on the skill thing. Because if you look at what you guys have done at aws, you've essentially, and Andy Chassey used to talk about this all the time when I would interview him, and now last year Adam was saying the same thing. You guys do all the heavy lifting, but if you're a VMware customer user or operator, you are used to things. You don't have to be relearn to be a cloud architect. Now you're already in the game. So this is like almost like a instant path to cloud skills for the VMware. There's hundreds of thousands of, of VMware architects and operators that now instantly become cloud architects, literally overnight. Can you respond to that? Do you agree with that? And then give an example. >>Yes, absolutely. You know, if you have skills on the VMware platform, you know, know, migrating to AWS using via by cloud and AWS is absolutely possible. You don't have to really change the skills. The operations are exactly the same. The management systems are exactly the same. So you don't really have to change anything but the advantages that you get access to all the other AWS services. So you are instantly able to integrate with other AWS services and you become a cloud architect immediately, right? You are able to solve some of the critical problems that your underlying IT infrastructure has immediately using this. And I think that's a great value proposition for our customers to use this service. >>And just one more point, I want just get into something that's really kind of inside baseball or nuanced VMC or VMware cloud on AWS means something. Could you take a minute to explain what on AWS means? Just because you're like hosting and using Amazon as a, as a work workload? Being on AWS means something specific in your world, being VMC on AWS mean? >>Yes. This is a great question, by the way, You know, on AWS means that, you know, VMware's vse platform is, is a, is an iconic enterprise virtualization software, you know, a disproportionately high market share across industries. So when we wanted to create a cloud product along with them, obviously our aim was for them, for the, for this platform to have the goodness of the AWS underlying infrastructure, right? And, and therefore, when we created this VMware cloud solution, it it literally use the AWS platform under the eighth, right? And that's why it's called a VMs VMware cloud on AWS using, using the, the, the wide portfolio of our regions across the world and the strength of the underlying infrastructure, the reliability and, and, and sustainability that it offers. And therefore this product is called VMC on aws. >>It's a distinction I think is worth noting, and it does reflect engineering and some levels of integration that go well beyond just having a SaaS app and, and basically platform as a service or past services. So I just wanna make sure that now super cloud, we'll talk about that a little bit in another interview, but I gotta get one more question in before we get into the use cases and customer success stories is in, in most of the VM world, VMware world, in that IT world, it used to, when you heard migration, people would go, Oh my God, that's gonna take months. And when I hear about moving stuff around and doing cloud native, the first reaction people might have is complexity. So two questions for you before we move on to the next talk. Track complexity. How are you addressing the complexity issue and how long these migrations take? Is it easy? Is it it hard? I mean, you know, the knee jerk reaction is month, You're very used to that. If they're dealing with Oracle or other old school vendors, like, they're, like the old guard would be like, takes a year to move stuff around. So can you comment on complexity and speed? >>Yeah. So the first, first thing is complexity. And you know, what makes what makes anything complex is if you're, if you're required to acquire new skill sets or you've gotta, if you're required to manage something differently, and as far as VMware cloud and AWS on both these aspects, you don't have to do anything, right? You don't have to acquire new skill sets. Your existing idea operation skill sets on, on VMware's platforms are absolutely fine and you don't have to manage it any differently like, than what you're managing your, your ID infrastructure today. So in both these aspects, it's exactly the same and therefore it is absolutely not complex as far as, as far as, as far as we cloud and AWS is concerned. And the other thing is speed. This is where the huge differentiation is. You have seen that, you know, large banks and large telcos have now moved their workloads, you know, literally in days instead of months. >>Because because of VMware cloud and aws, a lot of time customers come to us with specific deadlines because they want to exit their data centers on a particular date. And what happens, VMware cloud and AWS is called upon to do that migration, right? So speed is absolutely critical. The reason is also exactly the same because you are using the exactly the same platform, the same management systems, people are available to you, you're able to migrate quickly, right? I would just reference recently we got an award from President Zelensky of Ukraine for, you know, migrating their entire ID digital infrastructure and, and that that happened because they were using VMware cloud database and happened very swiftly. >>That's been a great example. I mean, that's one political, but the economic advantage of getting outta the data center could be national security. You mentioned Ukraine, I mean Oscar see bombing and death over there. So clearly that's a critical crown jewel for their running their operations, which is, you know, you know, world mission critical. So great stuff. I love the speed thing. I think that's a huge one. Let's get into some of the use cases. One of them is, the first one I wanted to talk about was we just hit on data, data center migration. It could be financial reasons on a downturn or our, or market growth. People can make money by shifting to the cloud, either saving money or making money. You win on both sides. It's a, it's a, it's almost a recession proof, if you will. Cloud is so use case for number one data center migration. Take us through what that looks like. Give an example of a success. Take us through a day, day in the life of a data center migration in, in a couple minutes. >>Yeah. You know, I can give you an example of a, of a, of a large bank who decided to migrate, you know, their, all their data centers outside their existing infrastructure. And they had, they had a set timeline, right? They had a set timeline to migrate the, the, they were coming up on a renewal and they wanted to make sure that this set timeline is met. We did a, a complete assessment of their infrastructure. We did a complete assessment of their IT applications, more than 80% of their IT applications, underlying v vSphere platform. And we, we thought that the right solution for them in the timeline that they wanted, right, is VMware cloud ands. And obviously it was a large bank, it wanted to do it safely and securely. It wanted to have it completely managed, and therefore VMware cloud and aws, you know, ticked all the boxes as far as that is concerned. >>I'll be happy to report that the large bank has moved to most of their applications on AWS exiting three of their data centers, and they'll be exiting 12 more very soon. So that's a great example of, of, of the large bank exiting data centers. There's another Corolla to that. Not only did they manage to manage to exit their data centers and of course use and be more agile, but they also met their sustainability goals. Their board of directors had given them goals to be carbon neutral by 2025. They found out that 35% of all their carbon foot footprint was in their data centers. And if they moved their, their ID infrastructure to cloud, they would severely reduce the, the carbon footprint, which is 35% down to 17 to 18%. Right? And that meant their, their, their, their sustainability targets and their commitment to the go to being carbon neutral as well. >>And that they, and they shift that to you guys. Would you guys take that burden? A heavy lifting there and you guys have a sustainability story, which is a whole nother showcase in and of itself. We >>Can Exactly. And, and cause of the scale of our, of our operations, we are able to, we are able to work on that really well as >>Well. All right. So love the data migration. I think that's got real proof points. You got, I can save money, I can, I can then move and position my applications into the cloud for that reason and other reasons as a lot of other reasons to do that. But now it gets into what you mentioned earlier was, okay, data migration, clearly a use case and you laid out some successes. I'm sure there's a zillion others. But then the next step comes, now you got cloud architects becoming minted every, and you got managed services and higher level services. What happens next? Can you give us an example of the use case of the modernization around the NextGen workloads, NextGen applications? We're starting to see, you know, things like data clouds, not data warehouses. We're not gonna data clouds, it's gonna be all kinds of clouds. These NextGen apps are pure digital transformation in action. Take us through a use case of how you guys make that happen with a success story. >>Yes, absolutely. And this is, this is an amazing success story and the customer here is s and p global ratings. As you know, s and p global ratings is, is the world leader as far as global ratings, global credit ratings is concerned. And for them, you know, the last couple of years have been tough as far as hardware procurement is concerned, right? The pandemic has really upended the, the supply chain. And it was taking a lot of time to procure hardware, you know, configure it in time, make sure that that's reliable and then, you know, distribute it in the wide variety of, of, of offices and locations that they have. And they came to us. We, we did, again, a, a, a alar, a fairly large comprehensive assessment of their ID infrastructure and their licensing contracts. And we also found out that VMware cloud and AWS is the right solution for them. >>So we worked there, migrated all their applications, and as soon as we migrated all their applications, they got, they got access to, you know, our high level services be our analytics services, our machine learning services, our, our, our, our artificial intelligence services that have been critical for them, for their growth. And, and that really is helping them, you know, get towards their next level of modern applications. Right Now, obviously going forward, they will have, they will have the choice to, you know, really think about which applications they want to, you know, refactor or which applications they want to go ahead with. That is really a choice in front of them. And, but you know, the, we VMware cloud and AWS really gave them the opportunity to first migrate and then, you know, move towards modernization with speed. >>You know, the speed of a startup is always the kind of the Silicon Valley story where you're, you know, people can make massive changes in 18 months, whether that's a pivot or a new product. You see that in startup world. Now, in the enterprise, you can see the same thing. I noticed behind you on your whiteboard, you got a slogan that says, are you thinking big? I know Amazon likes to think big, but also you work back from the customers and, and I think this modern application thing's a big deal because I think the mindset has always been constrained because back before they moved to the cloud, most IT, and, and, and on-premise data center shops, it's slow. You gotta get the hardware, you gotta configure it, you gotta, you gotta stand it up, make sure all the software is validated on it, and loading a database and loading oss, I mean, mean, yeah, it got easier and with scripting and whatnot, but when you move to the cloud, you have more scale, which means more speed, which means it opens up their capability to think differently and build product. What are you seeing there? Can you share your opinion on that epiphany of, wow, things are going fast, I got more time to actually think about maybe doing a cloud native app or transforming this or that. What's your, what's your reaction to that? Can you share your opinion? >>Well, ultimately we, we want our customers to utilize, you know, most of our modern services, you know, applications should be microservices based. When desired, they should use serverless applic. So list technology, they should not have monolithic, you know, relational database contracts. They should use custom databases, they should use containers when needed, right? So ultimately, we want our customers to use these modern technologies to make sure that their IT infrastructure, their licensing, their, their entire IT spend is completely native to cloud technologies. They work with the speed of a startup, but it's important for them to, to, to get to the first step, right? So that's why we create this journey for our customers, where you help them migrate, give them time to build the skills, they'll help them mo modernize, take our partners along with their, along with us to, to make sure that they can address the need for our customers. That's, that's what our customers need today, and that's what we are working backwards from. >>Yeah, and I think that opens up some big ideas. I'll just say that the, you know, we're joking, I was joking the other night with someone here in, in Palo Alto around serverless, and I said, you know, soon you're gonna hear words like architectural list. And that's a criticism on one hand, but you might say, Hey, you know, if you don't really need an architecture, you know, storage lists, I mean, at the end of the day, infrastructure is code means developers can do all the it in the coding cycles and then make the operations cloud based. And I think this is kind of where I see the dots connecting. Final thought here, take us through what you're thinking around how this new world is evolving. I mean, architecturals kind of a joke, but the point is, you know, you have to some sort of architecture, but you don't have to overthink it. >>Totally. No, that's a great thought, by the way. I know it's a joke, but it's a great thought because at the end of the day, you know, what do the customers really want? They want outcomes, right? Why did service technology come? It was because there was an outcome that they needed. They didn't want to get stuck with, you know, the, the, the real estate of, of a, of a server. They wanted to use compute when they needed to, right? Similarly, what you're talking about is, you know, outcome based, you know, desire of our customers and, and, and that's exactly where the word is going to, Right? Cloud really enforces that, right? We are actually, you know, working backwards from a customer's outcome and using, using our area the breadth and depth of our services to, to deliver those outcomes, right? And, and most of our services are in that path, right? When we use VMware cloud and aws, the outcome is a, to migrate then to modernize, but doesn't stop there, use our native services, you know, get the business outcomes using this. So I think that's, that's exactly what we are going through >>Actually, should actually, you're the director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on Aus. I wanna thank you for coming on, but I'll give you the final minute. Give a plug, explain what is the VMware cloud on Aus, Why is it great? Why should people engage with you and, and the team, and what ultimately is this path look like for them going forward? >>Yeah. At the end of the day, we want our customers to have the best paths to the cloud, right? The, the best path to the cloud is making sure that they migrate safely, reliably, and securely as well as with speed, right? And then, you know, use that cloud platform to, to utilize AWS's native services to make sure that they modernize their IT infrastructure and applications, right? We want, ultimately that our customers, customers, customer get the best out of, you know, utilizing the, that whole application experience is enhanced tremendously by using our services. And I think that's, that's exactly what we are working towards VMware cloud AWS is, is helping our customers in that journey towards migrating, modernizing, whether they wanna exit a data center or whether they wanna modernize their applications. It's a essential first step that we wanna help our customers with >>One director of global sales and go to market with VMware cloud on neighbors. He's with aws sharing his thoughts on accelerating business transformation on aws. This is a showcase. We're talking about the future path. We're talking about use cases with success stories from customers as she's thank you for spending time today on this showcase. >>Thank you, John. I appreciate it. >>Okay. This is the cube, special coverage, special presentation of the AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> TheCUBE presents UiPath Forward 5. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hello and welcome back to TheCUBE's coverage of UiPath Forward 5. We're here in Las Vegas at the Venetian Convention Center. This is day two. We're wrapping up Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante. This is the fourth time theCUBE has been at UiPath Forward. And we've seen the transformation of the company from, essentially, what was a really interesting and easy to adopt point product to now one through acquisitions, IPO, has made a number of enhancements to its platform. David Cardenas is here. Deputy Director of Operations for County of Los Angeles, the Department of Public Health. David, good to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me on guys. Appreciate it. >> So what is your role? What does it have to do with automation? >> So I had been, actually started off in the IT space within the public health. Had served as a CIO previously, but now been moving into broader operations. And I basically manage all of the back office operations for the department, HR, IT, finance, all that. >> So you've had a wild ride in the last couple of years. >> Yeah, I think, like I've been talking earlier, it's just been, the last two years have just been horrendous. It's been a really difficult experience for us. >> Yeah, and I mean, the scars are there, and maybe permanently. But it also had major effects on organizations, on operations that, again, seem to be permanent. How would you describe the situation in your organization? >> So I think it, the urgency that came along with the pandemic response, kind of required us to look at things, you know, differently. We had to be, realize we had to be a lot more nimble than when we were and try to figure out how to enhance our operations. But really look at the core of what we're doing and figure out how it is to be more efficient. So I think we've kind of seen it as an opportunity to really examine ourselves a little bit more deeply and see what things we need to do to kind of, to fix our operations and get things on a better path. >> You know, I think a lot of organizations we talked to say that. But I want to understand how you handle this is, you didn't have time to sit back in the middle of the pandemic. >> Yeah. >> And then as you exit, what I call the isolation economy, people are so burned out, you know? So how do you deal with that organizational trauma? Say, okay now, let's sit back and think about this. Do people, are they eager to do so? Do they have the appetite for it? What's that dynamic like? >> So I think certainly there's a level of exhaustion inside the organization. I can't say that there isn't because it's just been, you know, two years of 24/7/365 kind of work. And that's tough on any organization. But I think what we realize is that there's, you know, we need to move into action quickly 'cause we don't know what's going to come next, right? And we're expecting that this is just a sign of what's to come and that we're just at the start of that stage of, we're just going to see a lot more outbreaks, we're going to see a lot more conditions kind of hitting us. And if we're not prepared for that, we're not going to be able to respond for the, and preserve the health and safety of our citizens, right? So I think we're taking a very active, like, look at these opportunities and see what we've done and say how do we now make the changes that we made in response to the pandemic permanent so that the next time this comes at us, we won't have to be struggling the way that we were to try to figure things out because we'll have such a better foundation in place to be able to move things forward. >> I mean, I've never served in the military, but I imagine that when you're in the military, you're always prepared for some kind of, you know, in your world, code red, right? >> Yeah. >> So it's like this code red culture. And that seems to have carried through, right? People are, you know, constantly aware that, wow. We got caught off guard and we don't want that to happen again. Because that was a big part of the trauma was just the unknown- >> Right. >> and the lack of preparedness. So thinking about technology and its role in helping you to prepare for that type of uncertainty. Can you describe how you're applying technology to prepare for the next unknown? >> So I think, so that first part of what you said, I think the difficulty we've always had in the public health side is that there's the, generally the approach to healthcare is very reactionary, right? Your first interface with the healthcare system is, "I'm going to go see my doctor; I'm going to go to the hospital." The work that we do in public health is to try to do everything we can to keep you out of that, right? So it's broad-based messaging, social media now is going to put us out there. But also, to be able to surveil disease in a different way. And so the holy grail for us in healthcare has always been, at least on the public health side, has been to try to see how can we tap in more actively that when you go see the doctor or when you go to the hospital, how can I get access to that information very, very quickly so that I know, and can see, and surveil my entire county in my jurisdiction and know, oh, there's an outbreak of disease happening in this section of the county. We're 10 million people with, you know, hundreds of square miles inside of LA. There are places where we can see very, you know, specific targets that we know we have to hit. But the data's a little stale and we find out several months after. We need to figure out a way to do that more actively. Technology's going to be our path to be able to capture that information more actively and come up on something a little bit, so we can track things faster and be able to respond more quickly. So that's our focus for all our technology implementations, automation like UiPath has offered us and other things, is around how to gather that information more quickly and put that into action so we can do quick interventions. >> People have notoriously short memories. Please tell me (chuckles) any of the friction that you may have experienced in years past before the pandemic. That those friction points where people are thinking, "Eh, what are the odds?" >> Yeah. "Eh, I've got finite budget, I think I'm going to spend it on this thing over here." Do you, are you able to still ride sort of the wave of mind share at this point when putting programs together for the future? >> So whatever friction was there during the pandemic wiped away. I mean, we had amazing collaboration with the medical provider community, our hospital partners. The healthcare system in LA was working very closely with us to make sure that we were responding. And there is that wave that we are trying to make sure that we use this as an opportunity to kind of ride it so that we can implement all the things that we want. 'Cause we don't know how long that's going to last us. The last time that I saw anything this large was after the anthrax attacks and the bioterrorism attacks that we had after 9/11. >> How interesting. >> Public health was really in lens at that point. And we had a huge infusion of funding, a lot of support from stakeholders, both politically and within the healthcare system. And we were able to make some large steps in movement at that point. This feels the same but in a larger scale because now it touched every part of the infrastructure. And we saw how society really had to react to what was going on in a different way than anyone has ever prepared for. And so now is we think is a time where we know that people are making more investments. And our success is going to be their success in the longterm. >> And you have to know that expectations are now set- >> Extremely high. >> at a completely different level, right? >> Yes, absolutely. >> There is no, "Oh, we don't have enough PPE." >> Correct. >> Right? >> David: Correct. >> The the expectation level is, hey, you should have learned from all of- >> We should have it; we can deliver it, We'll have it at the ready when we need to provide it. Yes, absolutely. >> Okay, so I sort of mentioned, we're, David cubed on theCUBE (all laughing). So three Daves. You spoke today at the conference? >> Actually I'm speaking later actually in the session in an hour or so. >> Oh Okay. My understanding is that you've got this concept of putting humans at the center of the automation. What does that mean? Why is that important? Help us understand that. >> So I think what we found in the crisis is that the high demand for information was something we hadn't seen before, right? We're one of the largest media markets in the United States. And what we really had trouble with is trying to figure out how to serve the residents, to provide them the information that we needed to provide to them. And so what we had traditionally done is press releases, you know, just general marketing campaigns, billboards, trying to send our message out. And when you're talking about a pandemic where on a daily basis, hour-by-hour people wanted to know what was going on in their local communities. Like, we had to change the way that we focused on. So we started thinking about, what is the information that the residents of our county need? And how can we set up an infrastructure to sustain the feeding of that? Because if we can provide more information, people will make their own personal decisions around their personal risk, their personal safety measures they need to take, and do so more actively. More so than, you know, one of us going on camera to say, "This is what you should do." They can look for themselves and look at the data that's in front of them and be able to make those choices for themselves, right? And so we needed to make sure that everything that we were doing wasn't built around feeding it to our political stakeholders, which are important stakeholders. We needed to make sure that they're aware and are messaging out, and our leadership are aware. But it's what could we give the public to be able to make them have access to information that we were collecting on an every single day basis to be able to make the decisions for their lives. And so the automation was key to that. We were at the beginning of the pandemic just had tons and tons of resources that we were throwing at the problem that was, our systems were slow, we didn't have good ability to move data back and forth between our systems, and we needed a stop-gap solution to really fill that need and be able to make the data cycles to meet the data cycles. We had basically every day had to deliver reports and analytics and dashboards by like 10 o'clock in the morning because we knew that the 12 an hour and the five-hour news cycles were going to hit and the press were going to then take those and message out. And the public started to kind of come in at that same time and look at 10 and 11 o'clock and 12 o'clock. >> Yeah. >> We could see it from how many hits were hitting our website, looking for that information. So when we failed and had a cycle where that data cycle didn't work and we couldn't deliver, the public would let us know, the press would let us know, the stakeholders would let us know. We had never experienced anything like that before, right. Where people had like this voracious appetite for the information. So we needed to have a very bulletproof process to make sure that every single 24 hours we were delivering that data, making it available at the ready. >> Software robots enabled that. >> Exactly. >> Okay. And so how were you able to implement that so quickly within such a traumatic environment? >> So I think, I guess necessity is always the mother of invention. It kind of drove us to go real quickly to look at what we had. We had data entry operations set up where we had dozens and dozens of people whose sole job in life on a 24-hour cycle was to receive medical reports that we we're getting, interview data that's coming from our case interviews, hospitalization data that was coming in through all these different channels. And it was all coming in in various forms. And they were entering that into our systems of record. And that's what we were using, extracts from that system of record, what was using to generate the data analyses in our systems and our dashboards. And so we couldn't rely on those after a while because the data was coming in at such high volume. There wasn't enough data entry staff to be able to fit the need, right? And so we needed to replace those humans and take them out of that data entry cycle, pop in the bots. And so what we started to look at is, let's pick off the, where it is that that data entry cycle starts and see what we could do to kind of replace that cycle. And we started off with a very discreet workload that was focused on some of our case interview data that was being turned into PDFs that somebody was using to enter into our systems. And we said, "Well before you do that," since we can't import into the systems 'cause it wasn't working, the import utilities weren't working. We got 'em into simple Excel spreadsheets, mapped those to the fields in our systems and let the bots do that over and over again. And we just started off with that one-use case and just tuned it and went cycle after cycle. The bots just got better and better to the point where we had almost like 95% success rates on each submission of data transactions that we did every day. >> Okay, and you applied that automation, I don't know, how many bots was it roughly? >> We're now at like 30; we started with about five. >> Okay, oh, interesting. So you started with five and you applied 'em to this specific use case to handle the velocity and volume of data- >> Correct. >> that was coming in. But that's obviously dynamic and it's changed. >> Absolutely. >> I presume it's shifted to other areas now. So how did you take what you learned there and then apply it to other use cases in other parts of the organization? >> So, fortunately for us, the process that was being used to capture the information to generate the dashboards and the analyses for the case interview data, which is what we started with- >> Yeah. >> Was essentially being used the same for the hospitalization data that we were getting and for tracking deaths as they were coming in as well. And so the bots essentially were just, we just took one process, take the same bots, copy them over essentially, and had them follow the very same process. We didn't try to introduce any different workflow than what was being done for the first one so we could replicate quickly. So I think it was lucky for us a lot- >> Dave V.: I was going to say, was that luck or by design? >> It was the same people doing the same analyses, right? So in the end they were thinking about how to be efficient themselves. So they kind of had coalesced around a similar process. And so it was kind of like fortunate, but it was by design in terms of how they- >> Dave V.: It was logical to them. >> Logical to them to make it. >> Interesting. >> So for us to be able to insert the bots became pretty easy on the front end. It's just now as we're trying to now expand to other areas that were now encountering like unique processes that we just can't replicate that quickly. We're having to like now dig into. >> So how are you handling that? First of all, how are you determining which processes? Is it sort of process driven? Is it data driven? How do you determine that? >> So obviously right now the focus still is COVID. So the the priorities scale that we've set internally for analyzing those opportunities really is centered around, you know, which things are really going to help our pandemic response, right? We're expecting another surge that's going to happen probably in the next couple of weeks. That'll probably take us through December. Hopefully, at that point, things start to calm down. But that means high-data volume again; these same process. So we're looking at optimizing the processes that we have, what can we do to make those cycles better, faster, you know, what else can we add? The data teams haven't stopped to try to figure out how else can they turn out new data reports, new data analysis, to give us a different perspective on the new variants and the new different outbreaks and hotspots that are popping up. And so we also have to kind of keep up with where they're going on these data dashboards. So they're adding more data into these reports so we know we have to optimize that. And then there's these kind of tangential work. So for example, COVID brought about, unfortunately, a lot of domestic violence reports. And so we have a lot of domestic violence agencies that we work with and that we have interactions with and to monitor their work, we have certain processes. So that's kind of like COVID-adjacent. But it's because it's such a very critical task, we're looking at how we can kind of help in those processes and areas. Same thing in like in our substance abuse area. We have substance use disorder treatment services that we provide. And we're delivering those at a higher rate because COVID kind of created more of a crisis than we would've liked. And so that's how we're prioritizing. It's really about what is the social need, what does the community need, and how can we put the technology work in those areas? >> So how do you envision the future of automation in your organization and the future of your organization? What does that look like? Paint a picture for us. >> So I'm hoping that it really does, you know, so we're going to take everything that's COVID related in the disease control areas, both in terms of our laboratory operations, in terms of our clinic operations, the way we respond, vaccination campaigns, things of that nature. And we're going to look at it to see what can efficiencies can we do there because it's a natural outgrowth of everything we've done on COVID up to this point. So, you know, it's almost like it's as simple as you're just replicating it with another disease. The disease might have different characteristics, but the work process that we follow is very similar. It's not like we're going to change everything and do something completely different for a respiratory condition as we would for some other type of foodborne condition or something else that might happen. So we certainly see very easy opportunities to just to grow out what we've already done in terms of the processes is to do that. So that's wave one, is really focus on that grow out. The second piece I think is to look at these kind of other general kind of community-based type of operations and see what operations we can do there to kind of implement some improvements there. And then I'm certainly in my new role of, in Deputy Director of Operation, I'm a CIO before. Now that I'm in this operations role, I have access to the full administrative apparatus for the department. And believe me, there's enough to keep me busy there. (Dave V. Laughing) And so that's going to be kind of my third prong is to kind of look at the implement there. >> Awesome. Go ahead, Dave. >> Yeah, so, this is going to be taking a step back, kind of a higher level view. If we could direct the same level of rigor and attention towards some other thing that we've directed towards COVID, if you could snap your fingers and make that happen, what would that thing be in the arena of public health in LA County in particular, or if you want California, United States. What is something that you feel maybe needs more attention that it's getting right now? >> So I think I touched on it a little bit earlier, but I think it's the thing we've been always been trying to get to is how to really become just very intentional about how we share data more actively, right? I don't have to know everything about you, but there are certain things I care about when you go to the doctor for that doctor and that physician to tell me. Our physicians, our healthcare system as you know, is always under a lot of pressure. Doctors don't have the time to sit down and write a form out for me and tell me everything that's going on. During COVID they did because they were, they cared about their patients so much and knew, I need to know what's going on at every single moment. And if I don't tell you what's going on in my office, you'll never know and can't tell us what's going on in the community. So they had a vested interest in telling us. But on a normal day-to-day, they don't have the time for that. I got to replace that. We got to make sure that when we get to, not me only, but everyone in this public health community has to be focused and working with our healthcare partners to automate the dissemination and the distribution of information so that I have the information at my fingers, that I can then tell you, "Here's what's going on in your local community," down to your neighborhood, down to your zip code, your census tracked, down to your neighbors' homes. We'll be able to tell you, "This is your risk. Here are the things that are going on. This is what you have to watch out for." And the more that we can be more that focused and laser-focused on meeting that goal, we will be able to do our job more effectively. >> And you can do that while preserving people's privacy. >> Privacy, absolutely. >> Yeah, absolutely. But if people are informed then they can make their own decisions. >> Correct. >> And they're not frustrated at the systems. David, we got to wrap. >> Sure. >> But maybe you can help us. What's your impression of the, first of all, is this your first Forward? You've been to others? >> This is my first time. >> Okay. >> My first time. >> What's your sort of takeaway when you go back to the office or home and people say, "Hey, how was the show? What, what'd you learn?" What are you going to say? >> Well, from just seeing all the partners here and kind of seeing all the different events I've been able to go to and the sessions there's, you don't know many times I've gone to and say, "We've got to be doing that." And so there's certainly these opportunities for, you know, more AI, more automation opportunities that we have not, we just haven't even touched on really. I think that we really need to do that. I have to be able to, as a public institution at some point our budgets get capped. We only have so much that we're going to receive. Even riding this wave, there's only so much we're going to be able to get. So we have to be very efficient and use our resources more. There's a lot more that we can do with AI, a lot more with the tools that we saw, some of the work product that are coming out at this conference that we think we can directly apply to kind of take the humans out of that, their traditional roles, get them doing higher level work so I can get the most out of them and have this other more mundane type of work, just have the systems just do it. I don't need anybody doing that necessarily, that work. I need to be able to leverage them for other higher level capabilities. >> Well thank you for that. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and really appreciate. Dave- >> It's been great talking to you guys, thank you. >> Dave, you know, I love software shows because the business impact is so enormous and I especially love cool software shows. You know, this first of all, the venue. 3,500 people here. Very cool venue. I like the fact that it's not like booth in your face, booth competition. I mean I love VMware, VMworld, VMware Explore. But it's like, "My booth is bigger than your booth." This is really nice and clean, and it's all about the experience. >> A lot of steak, not as much sizzle. >> Yeah, definitely. >> A lot of steak. >> And the customer content at the UiPath events is always outstanding. But we are entering a new era for UiPath, and we're talking. We heard a lot about the Enterprise platform. You know, the big thing is this company's been in this quarterly shock-lock since last April when it went public. And it hasn't all been pretty. And so new co-CEO comes in, they've got, you know, resetting priorities around financials, go to market, they've got to have profitable growth. So watching that that closely. But also product innovation so the co-CEOs will be able to split that up, split their duties up. Daniel Dines the product visionary, product guru. Rob Enslin, you know- making the operations work. >> Operations execution business, yeah. >> We heard that Carl Eschenbach did the introduction. Carl's a major operator, wanted that DNA into the company. 'Cause they got to keep product innovation. And I want to, I want to see R&D spending, stay relatively high. >> Product innovation, but under the heading of platform. And that's the key thing is just not being that tool set. The positioning has been, I think, accurate that, you know, over history, we started with these RPA tools and now we've moved into business process automation and now we're moving into new frontiers where, where truly, AI and ML are being leveraged. I love the re-infer story about going in and using natural national (chuckles) national, natural language processing. I can't even say it, to go through messaging. That's sort of a next-level of intelligence to be able to automate things that couldn't be automated before. So that whole platform story is key. And they seem to have made a pretty good case for their journey into platform as far as I'm concerned. >> Well, yeah, to me again. So it's always about the customers, want to come to an event like this, you listen to what they say in the keynotes and then you listen to what the customers say. And there's a very strong alignment in the UiPath community between, you know, the marketing and the actual implementation. You know, marketing's always going to be ahead. But, we saw this a couple of years ago with platform. And now we're seeing it, you know, throughout the customer base, 10,000+ customers. I think this company could have, you know, easily double, tripled, maybe even 10x that. All right, we got to wrap. Dave Nicholson, thank you. Two weeks in a row. Good job. And let's see. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Check out thecube.net; wikibon.com has the research. We'll be on the road as usual. theCUBE, you can follow us. UiPath Forward 5, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're out and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(modern music) >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco for VMware Explore, formerly VMworld. theCUBE's been here 12 years today, we've been watching the evolution of the user conference. It's been quite a journey to see and, you know, virtualization just explode. We got two great guests here, we're going to break it all down. Ash McCarty, director of Multicloud Product Management Dell Technologies, no stranger to the VMworld, now VMware Explore, and Josh Prewitt, Chief Product Officer at Rackspace Technology. Great to see you guys, thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, thanks so much, thanks for having us. >> So, you know, the theme this year is multicloud, but it's really all about vSphere 8's out, you got VxRail, you got containers, you got the magic going on around cloud native, which it really points to the future state of where this is going, which is agile enterprises, infrastructure as code, high performance under the hood, I mean, all the things that you guys have been doing for many, many years and decades and business, but now with VMware putting it all together, it feels like, this year, it's like you got visibility into the value proposition, people have clear line of sight into where the performances are from the hardware software and now Cloud, it's kind of coming together, feels like it's coming together. Let's talk about that and the relationship between you guys, Rackspace and Dell and VMware. >> Perfect. That sounds great. Well, thanks so much for having us. You know, I'll sort of kick that off. We've got a huge lifelong partnership and relationship with Dell and VMware and the technologies that these guys create that we're able to put in front of our customers are really what allows us to go drive those business outcomes. So, yeah, happy to dive into it. >> Yeah, and I think to add to that, we understand that customers have a tremendously complex challenge ahead of them on managing their infrastructure. That's why with VxRail, we have intelligent infrastructure. We want it to simplify the outcomes for customers no matter if they're managing VMware or if they're managing the actual hardware infrastructure underneath it. >> Yeah, one of the things that we always talk about, you know, you read about it on the blogs and the news and the startup world, is "Oh, product-market fit," and, well, it kind of applies here, if you think about what's going on on the product side with the Edge emerging, hybrid cloud on pace with private cloud, and obviously, cloud native is great too if you have native applications in there, but now, putting it all together, you're hearing things like the telco cloud, I hear buzzwords like that, I hear supercloud, which we promoting, which you see in companies becoming cloud themselves, with the CapEx being handled by either public cloud or optimized on premise or hosted hardware. I mean, this is now, this is not all about everything's going to the cloud, this is now cloud operations on premise and in hosting hardware, so I'd love to get your perspective on that because you guys are huge hosting, you've got huge experience there, modernizing all the time. What does the modern era look like for the customer? >> Yeah, yeah, so, I mean, I think it's very clear to everybody that it's a multicloud world, right? I think the main question is, are you multicloud as a strategy, or are you multicloud as a situation? Because everybody's multicloud. That ship has sailed, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> And so, when I look at the capabilities that we have with the partnership with Dell and the VxRail technologies, you know, life-cycle management that you have to go and perform across your fleet can be extremely difficult, and whenever you take something like the VxRail and you add, you know, you have the hardware and you have the software all fully integrated there, it makes it much easier to do life-cycle management, so for a company like Rackspace, where we have tens of thousands of nodes that we're managing for customers across 29 global data centers, and we're all over the place, the ability to have that strength with Dell's hardware, the VMware platform improve life-cycle management makes it so much easier for us to manage our fleet and be able to deliver those outcomes even faster for customers. >> So assuming that VxRail isn't a virtual railroad that delivers data to Rackspace data centers, if it's not that, what is it, Ash? Give us a little premier on what VxRail is. >> Well, VxRail is the first and only jointly engineered HCI system with VMware, so everything we do with VMware is better. >> So hyperconverged infrastructure. >> Hyperconverged infrastructure. >> What we used to call a server because all the bits are in the box, right? >> All the storage is computed in there. >> Everything's in there. Right. >> Simplifies management. And we built in with the VxRail HCI system software, which is really our secret sauce, we built in to actually add those automation capabilities with VMware, so it allows you to scale out very quickly, scale up very quickly. And one of our big capabilities is our life-cycle management, which is full stack, meaning it life-cycles the entire vSphere stack as well as the hardware infrastructure underneath as one continuously validated state, meaning that customers can focus more on their business outcomes and driving their business forward versus spending time managing their infrastructure. >> And when you talk about customers, it's also the value proposition that's flowing through Rackspace because Rackspace, when you install these systems, how long does it take to spin up to have a VM available for use when you install one of these systems? >> Oh, so you can have the system up and running very quickly. So we automate all the day one deployment, so you can have the system up and running in your labs, in your data centers in 45 minutes, and you can have VMs up in provision very shortly after that. >> So what do you do with that kind of agility? >> Oh my gosh, so we've actually taken that, and we've taken the VxRail platform and we've created what we call Rackspace Services for VMware Cloud, and this is our platform that is based on VxRail, it's based on vCloud Director from VMware, and by having the VxRail is already RackStacked, ready to go for our customers, we're able to sign a customer up today, and then, within a matter of minutes, give them access to a vCloud Director portal where they can go in and spin up a new VM anytime they want, but then, it also integrates into all of those cloud management platforms and tools, right? It integrates into your Terraform, so you've got, you know, your full CI/CD pipeline, and so you have that full end-to-end capability. If you want to go click around on a portal, you can using vCloud Director and using vSphere and all that great stuff. If you want to automate it, you can do that too. And we do it all in the backs of that VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure. >> Talk about the DPU dynamic. We're hearing a lot about DPUs. VxRail, you guys have some HCI-like vibe there with DPUs. How is that impacting performance, can you guys see? 'Cause we're hearing a lot of buzz around the VxRail and the VMware DPUs really making things much faster. >> I mean, it's the thing we talk about most with customers now is their challenges with scaling their infrastructure, and VxRail is going to be the first and only jointly engineered system that will have vSphere 8 with DPUs functionality and will have the full life-cycle management, and what this really empowers customers to do is, as they're growing their environments that they're scaling out their workloads in the data center, they need a way to scale to that next generation of networking and network security, and that's what DPUs allow you to do. They give you that offload and that high performance capability. >> Talk about the... I'd love to get your guys' perspective, while we're just riffing on this real quick sidebar for a second, if VxRail has these capabilities which you guys are promoting it does and some of the things go on in the modern era, the next gen apps are going to look a lot different. We're kind of calling it supercloud, if you will, for lack of a better description. Yeah, multicloud is a state, I agree. It's a situation and a state, but supercloud is really the functionality of what cloud does. So what do you guys see as, maybe it's tea leaves reading now or dots connecting, what are some of those next gen apps? I mean the Edge is there with, "Oh, the Edge is going to explode," and I can see the Edge having new kinds of apps that we've never seen before, whether it's on premise building lights and however they work or IoT changing. What do you guys see as the next gen app/apps coming out that's not looking the same as now, or how are apps today changing for next gen? 'Cause you get more performance at the Edge, you get more action, you get more co-locations in GEOS, so it's clear multicloud multi-presence is happening too, right? So what are you guys seeing? What's this... >> Yeah, I would say two areas that resonate most with customers is customers transitioning to their cloud native journey, so beginning it and using things like Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations, which we fully support and have a white paper out there list for customers, another area is really in the AIML space, so we've been partnering with both VMware and Nvidia to simplify how customers deploy new AIML infrastructure. I mean, it's challenging, complex, a lot of customers are wanting to dive in because it really enables them to better operate and operate on insights and analytics they get from running their business. >> Josh? >> And, you know, I think it really comes down to, whether you want to call it Edge or IoT or, you know, smart things, whatever, right? It all comes down to how we are expected, now, to capture all of the data to create a better user experience, and that's what we're seeing the modern applications being built around, right, is how do you leverage all of the data that's now at your fingertips, whether it's from wearables, machine vision, whatever it may be, and drive that improved user experience. And so that's the apps that we're seeing now, right? You know, of course, you still have all your business apps, all your ERP capabilities that need to exist and all of that great stuff, but at the same time, I also expect that, whenever, you know, now, whenever I'm walking into a store and their machine vision picks me up and they're pinging my phone and pushing me push notifications, I expect to have a better user experience. >> And do a database search on you too, by the way. >> Yeah, exactly, right? >> No search warrants out for 'em, you know, you're good. >> That's exactly it, so, you know, you kind of expect that better user experience and that's where I'm seeing a lot of the new app development. >> Yeah, it's fun, as these cases are intoxicating to think about all the weird coolness around it. The thing that I want to get your thoughts on is, we were just talking on the analyst session earlier in theCUBE, if DevOps is here and won, which we believe it has and infrastructure as code is happening, the cloud native discussion, shifting left CI/CD pipeline, that's DevOps in my mind, that's like cloud native developers, that's like traditional IT in my mind, so that's all part of the coding. DataOps and Security Ops seem to be the most robust areas of conversations where that's the new Ops, right? So, I mean, I made the term up, but new Ops, in terms of the focus, what are you making more efficient? What are you optimizing for? What's your guys reaction to that? Because all the conversations that we talk about is data, security, and then the rest seems to be cool, all good on the developer's side. Yeah, shift left events happening up there, Kubernetes containers, but all the action on the Ops side seems to be data and security. >> Yeah. >> What's your reaction to that? Is that right? >> So personally, I do think that it's right. I think that, you know with great power comes great responsibility, right? And so the clouds have brought that to us, all of your infrastructure as code has brought that to us. We have that great power now, right? But then you start to see, kind of, the pipeline attacks that are starting to become more and more popular. And so how you secure something that is as complex as, you know, a cloud native development pipeline is really hard, it's really challenging, so I do think that it warrants the attention. Then on the data side, I think that that matters because when I talked about those examples of a better user experience, I don't want my better user experience tomorrow, I don't want it 20 minutes from now. I want that real time capability, and so with that comes massive requirements from a compute and hardware perspective, massive requirements from a software perspective, and from, you know, what folks are now calling DataOps perspective >> Data addressability, having the data available to be delivered in real time. >> You know, there there's been a lot of talk, here at the conference, about the disaggregation of, you know, the brainularism, if we're going to make up words, you know, the horsepower that's involved, CPU, DPU, GPU. I'll make up another word. We're familiar with the thermometers used during COVID to measure temperature. Pretend that I've invented a device called a Care-o-meter and I'm pointing at various people's foreheads, who needs to care about DPUs and GPUs and CPUs? You know, John was referencing the idea of security at the Edge, data. Well, wow, we've got GPUs that can do things. Who needs to care about that? Obviously, we care about it. You care about it. You care about it. You're building this stuff, you're deploying this stuff, but at what level in the customer stack do they need to care about it? Are you going in, is RackSpace engaging customers and saying, "Look, here's the value proposition: we understand your mission to be this. We believe we can achieve your mission." How far down in the organization do you go before you get to someone where you have to have the DPU conversation? 'Cause we didn't even define DPU yet here, which is always offensive to me. >> I think I defined it actually. >> Did you define DPU? Good. Thank you John. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But so who should care? Who should really care about that? >> Oh, that's such a complex question, right? Because everybody, Rackspace included >> But a good one. But a good question. >> Oh, it's a great question. >> Thank you. >> Great question. (laughing) >> Everybody, Rackspace included, is talking about selling business outcomes, right? And ultimately, that is what matters. It is what matters, is selling those business outcomes to the customer. And so of course we're dealing with our business buyers who are just looking for, "Hey, improve my KPIs, make this run faster, better, stronger, all of that great stuff," but ultimately you get down to an IT staff, and to the IT staff, these things matter because the IT staff, they all have budgets that they have to hit. The realities start to hit them and they can't just go and spend whatever they want, you know, trying to hit the KPIs of the marketing department or the finance department, right? And so you have your business buyers that do care significantly about buying their outcomes, and so we're having, you know, the business outcomes conversations with them and then, oftentimes, they will come back to us and say, "Okay, but now we need you to talk to this person over in our IT organization. We need you to talk with our CIO, with our VP of infrastructure," whatever that may be, where we really get down to the nuts and bolts and we talk about how, you know, we can stretch the hardware coming from Dell, we can stretch the software coming from VMware, and we can deliver a higher caliber experience, a lower TCO, by taking advantage of some of the new technologies coming out. >> Yeah, so there's a reason why I ask that awesome question, and it's because I can imagine a scenario where, and this speaks to RackSpace's position in the market today and moving forward and what your history has been, people want to know, "Well, why should I work with Rackspace instead of some mega-hyper-monster-cloud?" If part of the answer is: well, it's because, for very specific application environments, like healthcare we talked about earlier, that might be a conversation where you're actually bringing in Dell to have a conversation about how you are specifically optimizing hardware and software to achieve things that otherwise can't be achieved with t-shirt sizes of servers in a hyperscale cloud. I mean, is that part of the Rackspace value proposition moving forward, that you can do things like that with partners like Dell that the other folks aren't going to focus on? >> Absolutely, it is, right? And a lot of the power of Rackspace is that, you know, we're the best-in-class pure play cloud solutions provider, and we can talk to you about your AWS, your Azure, your GCP, all of that great stuff, but we can also talk to you about private cloud solutions that are built on the backs of Dell Technologies, and in this multicloud world, you don't have that one size fits all for every single application. There are some things that run great in a hyperscale provider, and we can help you get there, but just exactly like you said, there are these verticals where you have applications that don't necessarily run all that well or they're not modernized, they haven't been refactored to be able to take advantage of cloud native services. And if all you're going to do is run that on bare metal in VMs, a hosted private cloud is, by far, the best way to do that, right? And Rackspace provides that hosted private cloud on the backs of Dell technology, on the backs of VMware technology, and we can go deliver those custom bespoke solutions to customers. >> So the infrastructure and the hardware still matters, Ash, yes? >> Absolutely, and I think he just highlighted, while what he does with his customers and what's important to his internal organization is being to deliver faster outcomes, better outcomes, give those customers, to meet those KPIs of those customers consuming their infrastructure at Rackspace, so I think, really, what the DPU and the underlying infrastructure enables is all that full stack integration to allow them to quickly scale to the demands of those customers and what they need in their infrastructure. >> Guys, while we got you here, what do you think about this year's VMware Explore, a lot of anticipation around how many people are going to show up and, you know, all kinds of things around the new name and Broadcom. Big attendance here, I mean, I was very surprised about the size of the attendance and the show floor, the ecosystem, this train is not stopping. I mean, this is VMware's third act, no matter what the contextual situation is. What's your observation of the show? Do you agree, or is there anything that you could want to share about for folks who didn't make it, what they missed? >> Yeah, I mean it really highlights, I mean, you've seen the breadth of the show, I know people that aren't here that aren't able to see it are really missing the excitement. So there's a lot of great announcements around multicloud, around all the announcements, around the vSphere 8 with the DPUs, the vSAN Express Storage architecture, ton of new exciting technologies that are really empowering how customers, you know, the future of how customers are going to consume their workloads in their data centers. >> Josh, they're not short on products and stuff. A lot of moving parts. vSphere 8, a bunch of new stuff. And the cloud native stuff's looking pretty good too, off the tee. >> You know, it does feel like a focus on the core, though, in a way. So I don't think there's been a lot of peripheral noise at the show. Sometimes it's, you know, "And we got this, and this, and this, and this." It's vSphere 8, vSAN 8, cloud software, you know, really hammering it home and refining it. >> But you don't think of it as a little bit of a circus act. I mean the general keynote was theatrical, I thought, I mean, I thought they did a good job on that. I think vSphere 8 was buried a little bit, I thought they could have... They checked the box at the beginning. >> That's true, that's true. >> I mean, they mentioned it, but we didn't see the demos. You know? Demos are usually great. But that's my only criticism. >> Well, that's why we supplemented it with the VxRail announcements, right? With our big announcements around vSphere 8 and with the DPUs as well as the vSAN Express Storage architecture being integrated into VxRail, so I think, you know, it's always that ongoing partnership and, you know, doing what's best for our customers, showing them the next generation and how they consume that technology. >> Yeah, you guys got good props on VxRail. We had a great chat about it yesterday. Rackspace, you guys doing good? Quick update on what's happening with you guys. Give a quick plug. What's going on at Rackspace? What's hot? What's going on? Give a quick plug for what the services are and the products you got going on there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we are that end-to-end cloud provider, right? And so we've got really exciting offers in market, helping customers take advantage of all the hyperscale providers, and then giving them that private cloud experience. We've got everything from single-tenant running in our data centers on the backs of vSphere, vCloud Director, and VxRails, all the way through to, like, multi-tenant burstable capability that runs within our own data centers as well. It's a really exciting time for technology, a really exciting time for Rackspace. >> Congratulations, we've been following your journey for a long time. Dell, you guys do continue to do a great job and end-to-end phenomenal work. The telco thing's a huge opportunity, we didn't even go there. But Ash, thanks. Josh, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay, thanks for watching theCUBE. We're live, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Two sets here in Moscone West on the ground level, in the lobby, checking out all the action. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (modern music)