(upbeat music) >> The stampede to cloud and massive VC investments has led to the emergence of a new generation of object store based data lakes. And with them two important trends, actually three important trends. First, a new category that combines data lakes and data warehouses aka the lakehouse is emerged as a leading contender to be the data platform of the future. And this novelty touts the ability to address data engineering, data science, and data warehouse workloads on a single shared data platform. The other major trend we've seen is query engines and broader data fabric virtualization platforms have embraced NextGen data lakes as platforms for SQL centric business intelligence workloads, reducing, or somebody even claim eliminating the need for separate data warehouses. Pretty bold. However, cloud data warehouses have added complimentary technologies to bridge the gaps with lakehouses. And the third is many, if not most customers that are embracing the so-called data fabric or data mesh architectures. They're looking at data lakes as a fundamental component of their strategies, and they're trying to evolve them to be more capable, hence the interest in lakehouse, but at the same time, they don't want to, or can't abandon their data warehouse estate. As such we see a battle royale is brewing between cloud data warehouses and cloud lakehouses. Is it possible to do it all with one cloud center analytical data platform? Well, we're going to find out. My name is Dave Vellante and welcome to the data platform's power panel on theCUBE. Our next episode in a series where we gather some of the industry's top analysts to talk about one of our favorite topics, data. In today's session, we'll discuss trends, emerging options, and the trade offs of various approaches and we'll name names. Joining us today are Sanjeev Mohan, who's the principal at SanjMo, Tony Baers, principal at dbInsight. And Doug Henschen is the vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. Guys, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you again. >> Thank guys. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So it's early June and we're gearing up with two major conferences, there's several database conferences, but two in particular that were very interested in, Snowflake Summit and Databricks Data and AI Summit. Doug let's start off with you and then Tony and Sanjeev, if you could kindly weigh in. Where did this all start, Doug? The notion of lakehouse. And let's talk about what exactly we mean by lakehouse. Go ahead. >> Yeah, well you nailed it in your intro. One platform to address BI data science, data engineering, fewer platforms, less cost, less complexity, very compelling. You can credit Databricks for coining the term lakehouse back in 2020, but it's really a much older idea. You can go back to Cloudera introducing their Impala database in 2012. That was a database on top of Hadoop. And indeed in that last decade, by the middle of that last decade, there were several SQL on Hadoop products, open standards like Apache Drill. And at the same time, the database vendors were trying to respond to this interest in machine learning and the data science. So they were adding SQL extensions, the likes Hudi and Vertical we're adding SQL extensions to support the data science. But then later in that decade with the shift to cloud and object storage, you saw the vendor shift to this whole cloud, and object storage idea. So you have in the database camp Snowflake introduce Snowpark to try to address the data science needs. They introduced that in 2020 and last year they announced support for Python. You also had Oracle, SAP jumped on this lakehouse idea last year, supporting both the lake and warehouse single vendor, not necessarily quite single platform. Google very recently also jumped on the bandwagon. And then you also mentioned, the SQL engine camp, the Dremios, the Ahanas, the Starbursts, really doing two things, a fabric for distributed access to many data sources, but also very firmly planning that idea that you can just have the lake and we'll help you do the BI workloads on that. And then of course, the data lake camp with the Databricks and Clouderas providing a warehouse style deployments on top of their lake platforms. >> Okay, thanks, Doug. I'd be remiss those of you who me know that I typically write my own intros. This time my colleagues fed me a lot of that material. So thank you. You guys make it easy. But Tony, give us your thoughts on this intro. >> Right. Well, I very much agree with both of you, which may not make for the most exciting television in terms of that it has been an evolution just like Doug said. I mean, for instance, just to give an example when Teradata bought AfterData was initially seen as a hardware platform play. In the end, it was basically, it was all those after functions that made a lot of sort of big data analytics accessible to SQL. (clears throat) And so what I really see just in a more simpler definition or functional definition, the data lakehouse is really an attempt by the data lake folks to make the data lake friendlier territory to the SQL folks, and also to get into friendly territory, to all the data stewards, who are basically concerned about the sprawl and the lack of control in governance in the data lake. So it's really kind of a continuing of an ongoing trend that being said, there's no action without counter action. And of course, at the other end of the spectrum, we also see a lot of the data warehouses starting to edit things like in database machine learning. So they're certainly not surrendering without a fight. Again, as Doug was mentioning, this has been part of a continual blending of platforms that we've seen over the years that we first saw in the Hadoop years with SQL on Hadoop and data warehouses starting to reach out to cloud storage or should say the HDFS and then with the cloud then going cloud native and therefore trying to break the silos down even further. >> Now, thank you. And Sanjeev, data lakes, when we first heard about them, there were such a compelling name, and then we realized all the problems associated with them. So pick it up from there. What would you add to Doug and Tony? >> I would say, these are excellent points that Doug and Tony have brought to light. The concept of lakehouse was going on to your point, Dave, a long time ago, long before the tone was invented. For example, in Uber, Uber was trying to do a mix of Hadoop and Vertical because what they really needed were transactional capabilities that Hadoop did not have. So they weren't calling it the lakehouse, they were using multiple technologies, but now they're able to collapse it into a single data store that we call lakehouse. Data lakes, excellent at batch processing large volumes of data, but they don't have the real time capabilities such as change data capture, doing inserts and updates. So this is why lakehouse has become so important because they give us these transactional capabilities. >> Great. So I'm interested, the name is great, lakehouse. The concept is powerful, but I get concerned that it's a lot of marketing hype behind it. So I want to examine that a bit deeper. How mature is the concept of lakehouse? Are there practical examples that really exist in the real world that are driving business results for practitioners? Tony, maybe you could kick that off. >> Well, put it this way. I think what's interesting is that both data lakes and data warehouse that each had to extend themselves. To believe the Databricks hype it's that this was just a natural extension of the data lake. In point of fact, Databricks had to go outside its core technology of Spark to make the lakehouse possible. And it's a very similar type of thing on the part with data warehouse folks, in terms of that they've had to go beyond SQL, In the case of Databricks. There have been a number of incremental improvements to Delta lake, to basically make the table format more performative, for instance. But the other thing, I think the most dramatic change in all that is in their SQL engine and they had to essentially pretty much abandon Spark SQL because it really, in off itself Spark SQL is essentially stop gap solution. And if they wanted to really address that crowd, they had to totally reinvent SQL or at least their SQL engine. And so Databricks SQL is not Spark SQL, it is not Spark, it's basically SQL that it's adapted to run in a Spark environment, but the underlying engine is C++, it's not scale or anything like that. So Databricks had to take a major detour outside of its core platform to do this. So to answer your question, this is not mature because these are all basically kind of, even though the idea of blending platforms has been going on for well over a decade, I would say that the current iteration is still fairly immature. And in the cloud, I could see a further evolution of this because if you think through cloud native architecture where you're essentially abstracting compute from data, there is no reason why, if let's say you are dealing with say, the same basically data targets say cloud storage, cloud object storage that you might not apportion the task to different compute engines. And so therefore you could have, for instance, let's say you're Google, you could have BigQuery, perform basically the types of the analytics, the SQL analytics that would be associated with the data warehouse and you could have BigQuery ML that does some in database machine learning, but at the same time for another part of the query, which might involve, let's say some deep learning, just for example, you might go out to let's say the serverless spark service or the data proc. And there's no reason why Google could not blend all those into a coherent offering that's basically all triggered through microservices. And I just gave Google as an example, if you could generalize that with all the other cloud or all the other third party vendors. So I think we're still very early in the game in terms of maturity of data lakehouses. >> Thanks, Tony. So Sanjeev, is this all hype? What are your thoughts? >> It's not hype, but completely agree. It's not mature yet. Lakehouses have still a lot of work to do, so what I'm now starting to see is that the world is dividing into two camps. On one hand, there are people who don't want to deal with the operational aspects of vast amounts of data. They are the ones who are going for BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Synapse, and so on because they want the platform to handle all the data modeling, access control, performance enhancements, but these are trade off. If you go with these platforms, then you are giving up on vendor neutrality. On the other side are those who have engineering skills. They want the independence. In other words, they don't want vendor lock in. They want to transform their data into any number of use cases, especially data science, machine learning use case. What they want is agility via open file formats using any compute engine. So why do I say lakehouses are not mature? Well, cloud data warehouses they provide you an excellent user experience. That is the main reason why Snowflake took off. If you have thousands of cables, it takes minutes to get them started, uploaded into your warehouse and start experimentation. Table formats are far more resonating with the community than file formats. But once the cost goes up of cloud data warehouse, then the organization start exploring lakehouses. But the problem is lakehouses still need to do a lot of work on metadata. Apache Hive was a fantastic first attempt at it. Even today Apache Hive is still very strong, but it's all technical metadata and it has so many different restrictions. That's why we see Databricks is investing into something called Unity Catalog. Hopefully we'll hear more about Unity Catalog at the end of the month. But there's a second problem. I just want to mention, and that is lack of standards. All these open source vendors, they're running, what I call ego projects. You see on LinkedIn, they're constantly battling with each other, but end user doesn't care. End user wants a problem to be solved. They want to use Trino, Dremio, Spark from EMR, Databricks, Ahana, DaaS, Frink, Athena. But the problem is that we don't have common standards. >> Right. Thanks. So Doug, I worry sometimes. I mean, I look at the space, we've debated for years, best of breed versus the full suite. You see AWS with whatever, 12 different plus data stores and different APIs and primitives. You got Oracle putting everything into its database. It's actually done some interesting things with MySQL HeatWave, so maybe there's proof points there, but Snowflake really good at data warehouse, simplifying data warehouse. Databricks, really good at making lakehouses actually more functional. Can one platform do it all? >> Well in a word, I can't be best at breed at all things. I think the upshot of and cogen analysis from Sanjeev there, the database, the vendors coming out of the database tradition, they excel at the SQL. They're extending it into data science, but when it comes to unstructured data, data science, ML AI often a compromise, the data lake crowd, the Databricks and such. They've struggled to completely displace the data warehouse when it really gets to the tough SLAs, they acknowledge that there's still a role for the warehouse. Maybe you can size down the warehouse and offload some of the BI workloads and maybe and some of these SQL engines, good for ad hoc, minimize data movement. But really when you get to the deep service level, a requirement, the high concurrency, the high query workloads, you end up creating something that's warehouse like. >> Where do you guys think this market is headed? What's going to take hold? Which projects are going to fade away? You got some things in Apache projects like Hudi and Iceberg, where do they fit Sanjeev? Do you have any thoughts on that? >> So thank you, Dave. So I feel that table formats are starting to mature. There is a lot of work that's being done. We will not have a single product or single platform. We'll have a mixture. So I see a lot of Apache Iceberg in the news. Apache Iceberg is really innovating. Their focus is on a table format, but then Delta and Apache Hudi are doing a lot of deep engineering work. For example, how do you handle high concurrency when there are multiple rights going on? Do you version your Parquet files or how do you do your upcerts basically? So different focus, at the end of the day, the end user will decide what is the right platform, but we are going to have multiple formats living with us for a long time. >> Doug is Iceberg in your view, something that's going to address some of those gaps in standards that Sanjeev was talking about earlier? >> Yeah, Delta lake, Hudi, Iceberg, they all address this need for consistency and scalability, Delta lake open technically, but open for access. I don't hear about Delta lakes in any worlds, but Databricks, hearing a lot of buzz about Apache Iceberg. End users want an open performance standard. And most recently Google embraced Iceberg for its recent a big lake, their stab at having supporting both lakes and warehouses on one conjoined platform. >> And Tony, of course, you remember the early days of the sort of big data movement you had MapR was the most closed. You had Horton works the most open. You had Cloudera in between. There was always this kind of contest as to who's the most open. Does that matter? Are we going to see a repeat of that here? >> I think it's spheres of influence, I think, and Doug very much was kind of referring to this. I would call it kind of like the MongoDB syndrome, which is that you have... and I'm talking about MongoDB before they changed their license, open source project, but very much associated with MongoDB, which basically, pretty much controlled most of the contributions made decisions. And I think Databricks has the same iron cloud hold on Delta lake, but still the market is pretty much associated Delta lake as the Databricks, open source project. I mean, Iceberg is probably further advanced than Hudi in terms of mind share. And so what I see that's breaking down to is essentially, basically the Databricks open source versus the everything else open source, the community open source. So I see it's a very similar type of breakdown that I see repeating itself here. >> So by the way, Mongo has a conference next week, another data platform is kind of not really relevant to this discussion totally. But in the sense it is because there's a lot of discussion on earnings calls these last couple of weeks about consumption and who's exposed, obviously people are concerned about Snowflake's consumption model. Mongo is maybe less exposed because Atlas is prominent in the portfolio, blah, blah, blah. But I wanted to bring up the little bit of controversy that we saw come out of the Snowflake earnings call, where the ever core analyst asked Frank Klutman about discretionary spend. And Frank basically said, look, we're not discretionary. We are deeply operationalized. Whereas he kind of poo-pooed the lakehouse or the data lake, et cetera, saying, oh yeah, data scientists will pull files out and play with them. That's really not our business. Do any of you have comments on that? Help us swing through that controversy. Who wants to take that one? >> Let's put it this way. The SQL folks are from Venus and the data scientists are from Mars. So it means it really comes down to it, sort that type of perception. The fact is, is that, traditionally with analytics, it was very SQL oriented and that basically the quants were kind of off in their corner, where they're using SaaS or where they're using Teradata. It's really a great leveler today, which is that, I mean basic Python it's become arguably one of the most popular programming languages, depending on what month you're looking at, at the title index. And of course, obviously SQL is, as I tell the MongoDB folks, SQL is not going away. You have a large skills base out there. And so basically I see this breaking down to essentially, you're going to have each group that's going to have its own natural preferences for its home turf. And the fact that basically, let's say the Python and scale of folks are using Databricks does not make them any less operational or machine critical than the SQL folks. >> Anybody else want to chime in on that one? >> Yeah, I totally agree with that. Python support in Snowflake is very nascent with all of Snowpark, all of the things outside of SQL, they're very much relying on partners too and make things possible and make data science possible. And it's very early days. I think the bottom line, what we're going to see is each of these camps is going to keep working on doing better at the thing that they don't do today, or they're new to, but they're not going to nail it. They're not going to be best of breed on both sides. So the SQL centric companies and shops are going to do more data science on their database centric platform. That data science driven companies might be doing more BI on their leagues with those vendors and the companies that have highly distributed data, they're going to add fabrics, and maybe offload more of their BI onto those engines, like Dremio and Starburst. >> So I've asked you this before, but I'll ask you Sanjeev. 'Cause Snowflake and Databricks are such great examples 'cause you have the data engineering crowd trying to go into data warehousing and you have the data warehousing guys trying to go into the lake territory. Snowflake has $5 billion in the balance sheet and I've asked you before, I ask you again, doesn't there has to be a semantic layer between these two worlds? Does Snowflake go out and do M&A and maybe buy ad scale or a data mirror? Or is that just sort of a bandaid? What are your thoughts on that Sanjeev? >> I think semantic layer is the metadata. The business metadata is extremely important. At the end of the day, the business folks, they'd rather go to the business metadata than have to figure out, for example, like let's say, I want to update somebody's email address and we have a lot of overhead with data residency laws and all that. I want my platform to give me the business metadata so I can write my business logic without having to worry about which database, which location. So having that semantic layer is extremely important. In fact, now we are taking it to the next level. Now we are saying that it's not just a semantic layer, it's all my KPIs, all my calculations. So how can I make those calculations independent of the compute engine, independent of the BI tool and make them fungible. So more disaggregation of the stack, but it gives us more best of breed products that the customers have to worry about. >> So I want to ask you about the stack, the modern data stack, if you will. And we always talk about injecting machine intelligence, AI into applications, making them more data driven. But when you look at the application development stack, it's separate, the database is tends to be separate from the data and analytics stack. Do those two worlds have to come together in the modern data world? And what does that look like organizationally? >> So organizationally even technically I think it is starting to happen. Microservices architecture was a first attempt to bring the application and the data world together, but they are fundamentally different things. For example, if an application crashes, that's horrible, but Kubernetes will self heal and it'll bring the application back up. But if a database crashes and corrupts your data, we have a huge problem. So that's why they have traditionally been two different stacks. They are starting to come together, especially with data ops, for instance, versioning of the way we write business logic. It used to be, a business logic was highly embedded into our database of choice, but now we are disaggregating that using GitHub, CICD the whole DevOps tool chain. So data is catching up to the way applications are. >> We also have databases, that trans analytical databases that's a little bit of what the story is with MongoDB next week with adding more analytical capabilities. But I think companies that talk about that are always careful to couch it as operational analytics, not the warehouse level workloads. So we're making progress, but I think there's always going to be, or there will long be a separate analytical data platform. >> Until data mesh takes over. (all laughing) Not opening a can of worms. >> Well, but wait, I know it's out of scope here, but wouldn't data mesh say, hey, do take your best of breed to Doug's earlier point. You can't be best of breed at everything, wouldn't data mesh advocate, data lakes do your data lake thing, data warehouse, do your data lake, then you're just a node on the mesh. (Tony laughs) Now you need separate data stores and you need separate teams. >> To my point. >> I think, I mean, put it this way. (laughs) Data mesh itself is a logical view of the world. The data mesh is not necessarily on the lake or on the warehouse. I think for me, the fear there is more in terms of, the silos of governance that could happen and the silo views of the world, how we redefine. And that's why and I want to go back to something what Sanjeev said, which is that it's going to be raising the importance of the semantic layer. Now does Snowflake that opens a couple of Pandora's boxes here, which is one, does Snowflake dare go into that space or do they risk basically alienating basically their partner ecosystem, which is a key part of their whole appeal, which is best of breed. They're kind of the same situation that Informatica was where in the early 2000s, when Informatica briefly flirted with analytic applications and realized that was not a good idea, need to redouble down on their core, which was data integration. The other thing though, that raises the importance of and this is where the best of breed comes in, is the data fabric. My contention is that and whether you use employee data mesh practice or not, if you do employee data mesh, you need data fabric. If you deploy data fabric, you don't necessarily need to practice data mesh. But data fabric at its core and admittedly it's a category that's still very poorly defined and evolving, but at its core, we're talking about a common meta data back plane, something that we used to talk about with master data management, this would be something that would be more what I would say basically, mutable, that would be more evolving, basically using, let's say, machine learning to kind of, so that we don't have to predefine rules or predefine what the world looks like. But so I think in the long run, what this really means is that whichever way we implement on whichever physical platform we implement, we need to all be speaking the same metadata language. And I think at the end of the day, regardless of whether it's a lake, warehouse or a lakehouse, we need common metadata. >> Doug, can I come back to something you pointed out? That those talking about bringing analytic and transaction databases together, you had talked about operationalizing those and the caution there. Educate me on MySQL HeatWave. I was surprised when Oracle put so much effort in that, and you may or may not be familiar with it, but a lot of folks have talked about that. Now it's got nowhere in the market, that no market share, but a lot of we've seen these benchmarks from Oracle. How real is that bringing together those two worlds and eliminating ETL? >> Yeah, I have to defer on that one. That's my colleague, Holger Mueller. He wrote the report on that. He's way deep on it and I'm not going to mock him. >> I wonder if that is something, how real that is or if it's just Oracle marketing, anybody have any thoughts on that? >> I'm pretty familiar with HeatWave. It's essentially Oracle doing what, I mean, there's kind of a parallel with what Google's doing with AlloyDB. It's an operational database that will have some embedded analytics. And it's also something which I expect to start seeing with MongoDB. And I think basically, Doug and Sanjeev were kind of referring to this before about basically kind of like the operational analytics, that are basically embedded within an operational database. The idea here is that the last thing you want to do with an operational database is slow it down. So you're not going to be doing very complex deep learning or anything like that, but you might be doing things like classification, you might be doing some predictives. In other words, we've just concluded a transaction with this customer, but was it less than what we were expecting? What does that mean in terms of, is this customer likely to turn? I think we're going to be seeing a lot of that. And I think that's what a lot of what MySQL HeatWave is all about. Whether Oracle has any presence in the market now it's still a pretty new announcement, but the other thing that kind of goes against Oracle, (laughs) that they had to battle against is that even though they own MySQL and run the open source project, everybody else, in terms of the actual commercial implementation it's associated with everybody else. And the popular perception has been that MySQL has been basically kind of like a sidelight for Oracle. And so it's on Oracles shoulders to prove that they're damn serious about it. >> There's no coincidence that MariaDB was launched the day that Oracle acquired Sun. Sanjeev, I wonder if we could come back to a topic that we discussed earlier, which is this notion of consumption, obviously Wall Street's very concerned about it. Snowflake dropped prices last week. I've always felt like, hey, the consumption model is the right model. I can dial it down in when I need to, of course, the street freaks out. What are your thoughts on just pricing, the consumption model? What's the right model for companies, for customers? >> Consumption model is here to stay. What I would like to see, and I think is an ideal situation and actually plays into the lakehouse concept is that, I have my data in some open format, maybe it's Parquet or CSV or JSON, Avro, and I can bring whatever engine is the best engine for my workloads, bring it on, pay for consumption, and then shut it down. And by the way, that could be Cloudera. We don't talk about Cloudera very much, but it could be one business unit wants to use Athena. Another business unit wants to use some other Trino let's say or Dremio. So every business unit is working on the same data set, see that's critical, but that data set is maybe in their VPC and they bring any compute engine, you pay for the use, shut it down. That then you're getting value and you're only paying for consumption. It's not like, I left a cluster running by mistake, so there have to be guardrails. The reason FinOps is so big is because it's very easy for me to run a Cartesian joint in the cloud and get a $10,000 bill. >> This looks like it's been a sort of a victim of its own success in some ways, they made it so easy to spin up single note instances, multi note instances. And back in the day when compute was scarce and costly, those database engines optimized every last bit so they could get as much workload as possible out of every instance. Today, it's really easy to spin up a new node, a new multi node cluster. So that freedom has meant many more nodes that aren't necessarily getting that utilization. So Snowflake has been doing a lot to add reporting, monitoring, dashboards around the utilization of all the nodes and multi node instances that have spun up. And meanwhile, we're seeing some of the traditional on-prem databases that are moving into the cloud, trying to offer that freedom. And I think they're going to have that same discovery that the cost surprises are going to follow as they make it easy to spin up new instances. >> Yeah, a lot of money went into this market over the last decade, separating compute from storage, moving to the cloud. I'm glad you mentioned Cloudera Sanjeev, 'cause they got it all started, the kind of big data movement. We don't talk about them that much. Sometimes I wonder if it's because when they merged Hortonworks and Cloudera, they dead ended both platforms, but then they did invest in a more modern platform. But what's the future of Cloudera? What are you seeing out there? >> Cloudera has a good product. I have to say the problem in our space is that there're way too many companies, there's way too much noise. We are expecting the end users to parse it out or we expecting analyst firms to boil it down. So I think marketing becomes a big problem. As far as technology is concerned, I think Cloudera did turn their selves around and Tony, I know you, you talked to them quite frequently. I think they have quite a comprehensive offering for a long time actually. They've created Kudu, so they got operational, they have Hadoop, they have an operational data warehouse, they're migrated to the cloud. They are in hybrid multi-cloud environment. Lot of cloud data warehouses are not hybrid. They're only in the cloud. >> Right. I think what Cloudera has done the most successful has been in the transition to the cloud and the fact that they're giving their customers more OnRamps to it, more hybrid OnRamps. So I give them a lot of credit there. They're also have been trying to position themselves as being the most price friendly in terms of that we will put more guardrails and governors on it. I mean, part of that could be spin. But on the other hand, they don't have the same vested interest in compute cycles as say, AWS would have with EMR. That being said, yes, Cloudera does it, I think its most powerful appeal so of that, it almost sounds in a way, I don't want to cast them as a legacy system. But the fact is they do have a huge landed legacy on-prem and still significant potential to land and expand that to the cloud. That being said, even though Cloudera is multifunction, I think it certainly has its strengths and weaknesses. And the fact this is that yes, Cloudera has an operational database or an operational data store with a kind of like the outgrowth of age base, but Cloudera is still based, primarily known for the deep analytics, the operational database nobody's going to buy Cloudera or Cloudera data platform strictly for the operational database. They may use it as an add-on, just in the same way that a lot of customers have used let's say Teradata basically to do some machine learning or let's say, Snowflake to parse through JSON. Again, it's not an indictment or anything like that, but the fact is obviously they do have their strengths and their weaknesses. I think their greatest opportunity is with their existing base because that base has a lot invested and vested. And the fact is they do have a hybrid path that a lot of the others lack. >> And of course being on the quarterly shock clock was not a good place to be under the microscope for Cloudera and now they at least can refactor the business accordingly. I'm glad you mentioned hybrid too. We saw Snowflake last month, did a deal with Dell whereby non-native Snowflake data could access on-prem object store from Dell. They announced a similar thing with pure storage. What do you guys make of that? Is that just... How significant will that be? Will customers actually do that? I think they're using either materialized views or extended tables. >> There are data rated and residency requirements. There are desires to have these platforms in your own data center. And finally they capitulated, I mean, Frank Klutman is famous for saying to be very focused and earlier, not many months ago, they called the going on-prem as a distraction, but clearly there's enough demand and certainly government contracts any company that has data residency requirements, it's a real need. So they finally addressed it. >> Yeah, I'll bet dollars to donuts, there was an EBC session and some big customer said, if you don't do this, we ain't doing business with you. And that was like, okay, we'll do it. >> So Dave, I have to say, earlier on you had brought this point, how Frank Klutman was poo-pooing data science workloads. On your show, about a year or so ago, he said, we are never going to on-prem. He burnt that bridge. (Tony laughs) That was on your show. >> I remember exactly the statement because it was interesting. He said, we're never going to do the halfway house. And I think what he meant is we're not going to bring the Snowflake architecture to run on-prem because it defeats the elasticity of the cloud. So this was kind of a capitulation in a way. But I think it still preserves his original intent sort of, I don't know. >> The point here is that every vendor will poo-poo whatever they don't have until they do have it. >> Yes. >> And then it'd be like, oh, we are all in, we've always been doing this. We have always supported this and now we are doing it better than others. >> Look, it was the same type of shock wave that we felt basically when AWS at the last moment at one of their reinvents, oh, by the way, we're going to introduce outposts. And the analyst group is typically pre briefed about a week or two ahead under NDA and that was not part of it. And when they dropped, they just casually dropped that in the analyst session. It's like, you could have heard the sound of lots of analysts changing their diapers at that point. >> (laughs) I remember that. And a props to Andy Jassy who once, many times actually told us, never say never when it comes to AWS. So guys, I know we got to run. We got some hard stops. Maybe you could each give us your final thoughts, Doug start us off and then-- >> Sure. Well, we've got the Snowflake Summit coming up. I'll be looking for customers that are really doing data science, that are really employing Python through Snowflake, through Snowpark. And then a couple weeks later, we've got Databricks with their Data and AI Summit in San Francisco. I'll be looking for customers that are really doing considerable BI workloads. Last year I did a market overview of this analytical data platform space, 14 vendors, eight of them claim to support lakehouse, both sides of the camp, Databricks customer had 32, their top customer that they could site was unnamed. It had 32 concurrent users doing 15,000 queries per hour. That's good but it's not up to the most demanding BI SQL workloads. And they acknowledged that and said, they need to keep working that. Snowflake asked for their biggest data science customer, they cited Kabura, 400 terabytes, 8,500 users, 400,000 data engineering jobs per day. I took the data engineering job to be probably SQL centric, ETL style transformation work. So I want to see the real use of the Python, how much Snowpark has grown as a way to support data science. >> Great. Tony. >> Actually of all things. And certainly, I'll also be looking for similar things in what Doug is saying, but I think sort of like, kind of out of left field, I'm interested to see what MongoDB is going to start to say about operational analytics, 'cause I mean, they're into this conquer the world strategy. We can be all things to all people. Okay, if that's the case, what's going to be a case with basically, putting in some inline analytics, what are you going to be doing with your query engine? So that's actually kind of an interesting thing we're looking for next week. >> Great. Sanjeev. >> So I'll be at MongoDB world, Snowflake and Databricks and very interested in seeing, but since Tony brought up MongoDB, I see that even the databases are shifting tremendously. They are addressing both the hashtag use case online, transactional and analytical. I'm also seeing that these databases started in, let's say in case of MySQL HeatWave, as relational or in MongoDB as document, but now they've added graph, they've added time series, they've added geospatial and they just keep adding more and more data structures and really making these databases multifunctional. So very interesting. >> It gets back to our discussion of best of breed, versus all in one. And it's likely Mongo's path or part of their strategy of course, is through developers. They're very developer focused. So we'll be looking for that. And guys, I'll be there as well. I'm hoping that we maybe have some extra time on theCUBE, so please stop by and we can maybe chat a little bit. Guys as always, fantastic. Thank you so much, Doug, Tony, Sanjeev, and let's do this again. >> It's been a pleasure. >> All right and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and the excellent analyst. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome back to Boston. We're down in the Seaport. This is the Cube's coverage of red hat summit, 2022. I'm Dave ante with my co-host Paul Gillon, Sebastian Moes. Here he is a senior enterprise architect at bit mark Sebastian. Thanks for coming to the queue. Welcome to the United States. Good to have you in Boston. >>Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. It's uh, good to be on a live summit again after, uh, those, uh, testing two years >>Strange, isn't it? I mean, people kind of don't know what to do. Shake, bump this bump, >>And >>It's like, but where everybody wants to get out of the, the home, the lockdown and, you know, there's a real pent up demand. Tell us about bit mark. >>Um, bit mark is a managed service, uh, provider for, um, German statutory health insurance companies. Um, we manage about our software that we develop, um, is for about 85% of the, uh, German health insurance companies. Um, we have, uh, not only do we build the software, we also have data centers where we run software for, for our customers. Um, and it's everything that a health insurance company is, uh, mandatory to have to run their business, so to >>Speak what, what's the life of an enterprise architect like these days and how, how has it evolved? How has it changed? Uh, I mean, independent of the pandemic, will we get to that, but, but, you know, technology changes, organizational objectives of, of changed the public policy changes. How, how was your, the life of an enterprise architect changed? >>Um, well we, we have this, uh, big monolith JG E application that is, uh, run on JBO. Um, and now we want to, we want to change that into a more modern environment and using, uh, OpenShift to do that. Um, and yeah, there's, uh, there's a lot of reg regulatory things that come up that need to be, um, need to be figured in. Uh, there is new demands that our customers have that we need to figure out how to get to market, uh, and to be able to deliver software more faster and, you know, make the turnaround, uh, or have the turnaround be less. >>So kind of following the technology trends of going from big monolith to microservices and containerization and distributed data, the, the, >>The whole, the scalability, uh, you know, and quick turnaround, that is, that is the main focus. >>So the application that you're here talking about this pace to face in application, kind of a new market for you, a new direction, is this part of that overall shift to a more modular microservices based, uh, >>Structure? Um, well, we, we, we had applications like this before, but this is a new branch of it because, um, there's a strong drive in Germany too, for more digital digitalization. Um, and to have a new interacting model with the customer from basic things to more advanced features like medication services, vaccination status, um, managing your allergies, and that's an edit value that we want to give, uh, for our customers. So they can, their customers can benefit. >>I dunno what it's like in Germany, but in the United States used to call up the doctor and say, Hey, can I just, can we do this over the phone? No, you gotta come into the office. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and then of course, with the pandemic, it was like, you can't come into the office. It was just total flipping, cuz you could get 80% of what you needed done, and this is what your app enabled essentially. Right? >>Yeah. And, and some that and some added value as well, uh, to, to give, um, yeah, a benefit for using this, uh, online interaction for, um, the insured people, the, the patients, >>Essentially a digital gateway, including your data. Well, that's the other thing you can't get right. As a patient, you can't ever get through your data, it's like right. You >>Get it, but nobody else can >>Get it. <laugh> sometimes it's hard for you to get it cuz of again, in the United States, HIPAA and the, and the, and the requirements for privacy restrict often access to, to data, you have to go through hoops to get it. So, uh, so, so that experience is what you codified in your application. Yes. >>Um, yes, we have this, uh, unique data set of all health related information that people have to, uh, interact with in, in when they're sick or when they deal with their healthcare company. Um, and yeah, we wanna provide that data to the customers. So they're able to look at it. Um, there's also the, uh, electronic patient folder. You can say, um, where there's data like medical exams and stuff in there that they have access to. We provide that as well for, for our customers. Um, but, uh, yeah, it is about the interaction and that I can see when I put something in to my insurance company via email or the doctor put something in that I have the interaction on my phone and see when it was delivered, um, to them when it's active, when I get the money, stuff like that. >>Now this application is built on OpenShift, it's cloud native, uh, has all the constructs. How different was that for your development team from building something like you mentioned, the monolithic Jbos application that you already have, how different was building the cloud native, uh, >>Constructs. Um, it is quite different. I mean, it's building software, there's a lot of the same things involved. We've been, we've done agile and scrum, uh, before and so on, but we now have a, um, we're trying to be, or no, we're actually achieved to be faster in bringing this to market, um, deploying it in different data centers, doing it all automatically doing automatic tested, uh, right as part of the pipeline. Um, there's, there's a lot of huge steps that we can, we're able to take because of the technology. And that's why we did go there in the first place. That's why we said, okay, this is, it needs to be, uh, cloud native. >>You found that red, red hat had the full suite of tools that you needed. >>Um, yeah, I mean, we, there's some open source stuff that we've also integrated into the pipeline and everything, but there's a lot of, for example, we are using the, uh, three scale, uh, the API management from, from red hat, um, just to be able to, um, use the functionality that we build, that the customers can use the functionality in other products that they use that serve partner people, uh, uh, certain partner companies can, are able to use the services as well. >>Okay. So the, the, the dumb question is, but I'll ask it anyway is you could get this stuff for free Kubernetes, open source, you know, you get E Ks for free. Why didn't you just use the freebie? >>Why? Um, well, we're, we're on a scale with so many, um, uh, customers and data centers that we have to take that we do need support in, in a way. Um, and I usually say, so if we take software from whoever, whatever company it is, we're gonna break it. Yeah. <laugh> um, the, the, the transaction load that we have is, is quite, uh, intense and the performance that we need, uh, especially in the, in the business to business, um, market is, is so big that we do need the interaction with, with a vendor and that they're able to help us, uh, with certain escalations >>German Germans play rough. So <laugh>, um, you know, when a, when a vendor announces an innovation lab, I always go, okay, that's an EBC, like an executive briefing center. It's all gonna be used for sales. But my understanding is you actually leveraged the innovation labs. It was actually helpful in building this application. Is that true? >>I, I, I actually, uh, to part in the open innovation that we did with RA hat, and we knew we knew what we wanted to do. We, we knew the technology, we knew what we wanted to have done, um, but they helped us to, to get there step by step with the, with the tools they have, the, um, uh, you know, the ways of working and how this is, this is built. It really lends itself to, to build that step by step and worry about some stuff later and just do it. Um, yeah, piecemeal, >>This is Al is also a new market for you. It's your first real business to consumer facing application. That's that implies a very different approach to experience design, uh, to how you >>And performance yeah, >>Yeah. Perform exactly. Uh, how did your development team adapt to that? >>Um, well, there's, there's, you know, certain things that you build into the process, like integration, testing, automated integration testing, where the application just gets checked right after you check in your software. Um, we built in low testing to, you know, we have an idea of how many transactions per second, there will be. And so the low testing takes care of that as well. Um, and that is easier if you have a small piece of software instead of the whole monolith that we usually have. And so you, we are able to, to build it quicker and get it out quick in, in hours. >>How, how have you, um, accessed customer feedback, you do your, you know, net promoter score surveys, what, what's the been the customer reaction, your, your consumer >>Reaction? Um, they, they, I mean, I'm kind of the wrong guy to talk to, to, uh, about <laugh> to >>Talk about, come on the architected, the thing. >>Yeah, I, I did. And, and then the feedback has been, it's been very good so far, uh, and we are pretty happy with it. Uh, it's it's running, uh, very well. Um, I don't quite know how they got there. Our customer does, uh, you know, uh, questionnaires and, and stuff like that. Yeah. We have a, a different depart, uh, department to, to solicit feedback on that. But from what I hear, uh, it's, it's received very well. >>One of the cloud native features, I understand you used extensively with APIs, uh, for integrations. How are you making this application accessible to partners? What, I mean, what are you exposing? How will you use those APIs to enhance the value through, through an ecosystem of >>Partners? Um, well, we document them, um, and so they're out there to use. And as long as there's a, um, a security process within, um, em that we have in front of it, um, they're open source, um, APIs. So, uh, as I said, they have other programs that they wrote themselves or that they bought that are able to use those APIs, um, from an open API document. Uh, and, and just interact with that as long as the user is, uh, authenticated, they're able to, to get this data and show it in a different context and use it in a different context. >>Did you play golf? >>Um, I used to time ago, not anymore. >>Now, do you know what a Mulligan is? Yes, I did. Okay. If you had a Mulligan, you'd do this all over again. What, what would you do differently? >>Um, an interesting question. I, don't not sure. Um, you, you say you're smarter after, after you've done that. Yeah. And, and of course there's, uh, there's, there, there there's certainly were things that I didn't expect that would happen. Um, like how, how really you need to go modular and on, on everything and need your own resource and infrastructure. Um, because we came from a very centralized, um, uh, scope. We had a database that is a big DB database, um, and now we're going into smaller database and not decentralized a lot. Um, and that was something that the extent of it, I didn't expect, I, I wanted to use more smaller things. And, and that was something that we very quickly learned that no, we need really need to separate stuff out. >>Was that an organizational sort of mindset shift? Um, are you, are you rethinking or rearchitecting your data, um, your data architecture as part of that, or is that more, or is this more just sort of tactical for this app? >>Um, no, we're definitely need to need to do this because, uh, it really gets, um, or it really is a, um, something to handle a, a big pool of data is, is really a challenge or can be a challenge at times >>To scale, >>To, to, to scale that up. Right. Yeah. Um, and so, yeah, we are going to, to separate that out and double some data. That's, that's gonna be a thing it's gonna be more data at the end, but since it's scaled out and, and decentralized, that will >>Help a lot of organizations would say, well, we wanna keep it centralized monolithic, which is kind of a negative term, but I think it's true, uh, because it's more cost effective. We're not gonna duplicate things as much. We're gonna have roles that are dedicated, but it sounds like you're seeing a business advantage of distributing those functions, decentralizing those functions to a >>Extent, right, right. Because if you, if you have a centralized Mon monolith, then it, I, yeah, it might be negative, but it really is. It's a good working software. Um, but to have that, it's, um, it's really hard to release new features and new, new, you know, even buck fixes it, it just takes time. It, it is, uh, uh, a time consuming process. And if you have it decentralized and in smaller packages, you can just do, Afix run it through the pipeline, have the testing done and just put that out within hours. >>How important was it to bit more to build this application on an open source platform? >>Um, the open source didn't come so much in our perspective of things, or we didn't consider it that much. It was just, this is there. This works. We have a good support behind that. Um, we are, our, our coach is not open sourced, then we're not going to anytime soon tell about it. Um, we're actually thinking about having parts that might be, uh, a kind of open source dish, uh, just in the healthcare community kind of thing. Um, but, uh, yeah, no, that didn't F factor in as much. Um, it was just something that we had >>Experienced another architecture question. So you've got the application stack, right. If I can use that term, although application development tools that you build use to build the application, and then you've got the data that the application needs, how are those architected, are they sort of separate entities? Are they coming together? >>Um, we used to have, we used to have, uh, uh, data, um, net a, a, um, an MDA approach, a J hue. Um, so they're very strong connected. That is, there's just in the database. There are models and entities that we use in the, in the JBO. Um, and well, we're still gonna use hibernate to, to, uh, to do the G GPA, but it's, uh, yeah, it's something that needs to be restructured because it just takes a lot of resources to manage data from different parts of the application, bringing them together, um, that will, will need to change. >>And what about new data sources? If I came to and say, Sebastian, I need to inject new data into the, the app. I need to get this to how, how, how difficult or, or fast easy is that, >>Uh, now in the, in the world now, or actually we wanna >>Compare, can you compare before and now, I mean, it wouldn' have to happen before would be >>Like, in the time in the timeframe it's, it's, it's not, it's hard to say. I mean, but if you have a project right now, we're talking, uh, months, um, like a year to, to get it done, get it tested, and then it even takes, um, up to a month to before it's out to every customer. Yeah. The rollout process takes some time. Yeah. Um, and we're planning on, or we, we developed the new, uh, the new software we developed in a couple of months. Uh, and then it is deployed and then it's in production and it's in production for all the customers that wanted to use it for now. I mean, it's not deployed to all customers yet, uh, because they need to adapt it and in their way. Um, but they have it, you know, it's, it's right there. It's deployed. Yeah. When we fix it, it's in a, you know, hours, couple days it's out and it's out in production, in different data centers for different customers. >>And we've come full circle the life of a, of an architect. It's, uh, it sounds like it's much better today. Sebastian, thanks so much for coming to the cube. Appreciate your time and your insights. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there that you watching the Cube's coverage of red hat summit, 2022 from Boston, Dave Valante for Paul Gillon, we'll be right back.

(intro music) >> We're back on theCUBE unpacking HPE's GreenLake announcements. I'm here with Keith Townsend, the CTO advisor. Keith, always awesome to see you, man. >> Good to be back on theCUBE. >> So, let's talk about these announcements. Let's break it down. Where do you want to start? >> So-- >> Cloud services? >> Cloud services, one of the things that we've gone back and forth with HPE over the past few years is that I don't understand GreenLake. Like, is it a financial scheme? Is it a cloud services? And I think data services, the data services announcement around Zirdle and Marketplace really elevates GreenLake to a cloud service. Kind of on par with some of the hyperscalers on how they think about architectures around data centers and, and fabrics and services to enterprise customers. >> When you say on, par in what regard? >> So, one of the things I didn't get, separate to the GreenLake announcement, we've heard a lot about HPE's containers services, Ezmeral, and they have a data fabric and it does things that the storage solutions does. Okay. That seems like a marketplace upon itself. And then the data services with the Zirdle acquisition, completely different marketplace? No, HPE is bringing all of that together, logically. So a cloud architect, similar to how they could go to AWS's console, select some services, deploy those services in their AWS VPC. Now, I can conceptually do that with HPE. I can go to HPE's GreenLake console, choose the services I need to build my app, and deploy it. That is something new within all these traditional OEM providers. >> Because of the cloud nativeness on-prem, bringing that capability. >> So, bringing the Aruba Central concepts, you know, Aruba Central, I think I read a stat, a hundred thousand customers on Aruba Central with a million interactions an hour. So this scale is hyperscale scale. This base to have a centralized marketplace and have those on those cloud-like services, but on-premises or in Niccolo, I think puts HPE near the top, if not the top for building private cloud services on-premises. >> Lets say you're a CTO at an organization that's an HPE customer or an architect. You're all in, on HPE, been working with the company for a long, long time. Wouldn't you want a view of your estate, your applications and workloads, where you could manage on-prem, Cloud, whether it's AWS, Azure, Google, take advantage of the cloud native, go across cloud, abstract all that complexity away, maybe eventually go out to the edge. Is that what you want? >> That's what I want, it's aspirational. No one between Microsoft to HPE, no one is able to give me that today. So as a CTO, I'm looking at platforms and seeing is the building blocks there. We talked to the HP storage team of how they're building the abstractions, that they can take anything from their ProLiant line, build the necessary storage underlay, and then abstract that away with a GreenLake. You can do that with AWS EBC, Azure storage. It really doesn't matter because they're building that abstractions. So, aspirationally they're there, they have the right vision. It's about excecution. >> Okay, so that is the right direction in your view, you, I mean, I think that that is clearly where customers want to go. >> A lot of work >> Keith: A lot of work. to get there, and it's a race, right? I mean, that's, you know, I feel as though, as a service is good starting point, but there's, there's a long way to go. And, so how do you feel about HPE's chances there, how they're positioning relative to not only the, there other sort of on-prem competitors, but public cloud players. >> So they're asking the right questions. They're asking the right questions of the right players. It's about relationships. Dave, you know this more than anyone that if you don't have the right relationships inside of the customers, you're not going to get there. And I think that's HPE's number one struggle. The, no slant to the VP of operations, but the VP of operations doesn't want to change his operations. He doesn't want disruption. What COO was coming to you and saying, "I want to be disruptive." Same thing in VP of operations, IT operations, they don't want disruption, but this has been HPE's traditional customer. HPE needs to get into the chief data officers, the chief marketing officers' office, and have these very difficult conversations in sales so that they can eventually show that they can't execute. I think that's the one of their primary challenges. >> So, okay that's good. I'm glad you brought that up because I think Ezmeral starts to go in that direction, it feels as though the first phase is let's pick off analytics. Let's make analytics on-prem as attractive and simple as it is in the cloud. And then, beyond that, let's support this notion of decentralized data and federated governance. And that is aspirational today. But no, as to your point, nobody really has that. AWS really, you know, they're not going after that, across clouds at this point in time, Microsoft is with arc, I guess, and Google kind of has Anthos and they're kind of doing it, but, but yeah, I'm not sure you're going to trust your cloud provider to be that player. So it's kind of like jump ball here, isn't it? >> You know, AWS make a strategic partnership with one of HP's primary competitors, because there was a gap. We know Andy Jassy, former president and CEO of AWS, doesn't typically partner with traditional OEMs, unless there's a real gap in his portfolio that he needed to do and he did it with VMware and he did it with HPE's primary competitor in storage and one of their primary competitors in storage. HPE sees the opportunity. The question is, do they have the workforce? Do they have the field teams, the field CTOs, the solution architects that can go and talk the talk to these customers and this new audience that they need to convince that HPE is just as, as respected a snowflake in these, in this data area. >> Can partners fill that gap? >> Partners definitely can fill that gap, but HPE still has the same challenge for partners: transforming partners from speaking boxes to solutions. I've spent a short stint at VMware. I was surprised at how rigid the channel is and these large organizations and making that transition. >> The other thing, when you think about it as a service that at least that I look for when, if you could comment is the pace, you know, we all would go to, we go to these events, go to re-invent and it's just this fire hose of announcements. We're seeing HPE on a cadence. You know, it's not like a once a year dealio with GreenLake. We're seeing, you know, some stuff with HPC. We're seeing the acquisition of Zerto of the, the DR services, the data protection as a service, Ezmeral. Do you feel like that pace is accelerating? And is it fast enough? >> You know what, I famously said on theCUBE that VMware moves at the pace of the CIO. HPE needs to move a little bit faster than the CIO because the CIO isn't their only customer. They have the opportunity to get customers outside of the CIO and I think they're moving fast enough. This is really hard stuff. Especially when you start to deal with data and the most valuable asset of an organization. Can you move too fast? You absolutely can. One of the other analysts said that you don't want to become the, the forgotten about data services company of the other, of the two thousands. You don't want to make that mistake in the twenties. So I, right now, I think I feel as if HPE is making the right cadence, bringing along their old customers, new customers. Challenge of all of the big OEMs is how do you not erode your base customer base and, but still move fast enough to satisfy the move fast break stuff crowd. >> Keep close to your customers. Keith, we got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE. >> I'd love to have you back. >> As always, Dave, great time. All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more great content from HPE GreenLake announcements. You're watching theCUBE.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of theCUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, I'm going to provide a little detail on the recent announcement that Insight Partners was acquiring Veeam for five billion dollars. There was a lot of information on the announcement in press releases and in news articles, so what I really want to focus on is what it means for the industry generally, and for the data protection community specifically. So, very briefly this was a five billion dollar exit for Veeam on top of a five hundred million dollar investment lead by the same Insight Partners last year. I think it had earlier investments, kind of a rent, with an option to buy. New management is being promoted from within, which I think is significant, to replace the two founders. Andrei Baronov and Ratmir Timashev are going to step down after the transition and give up their board seats. Veeam is a fascinating company. It started in the 2006, 2007 time frame, after the two founders, who met in college, formed and sold Aleta software to Quest. Then they started a company called AMUST Software, from which they created Veeam. You never hear about AMUST, but I believe it's the engineering and development arm of Veeam. Now the new CEO of Veeam, Bill Largent told theCUBE that AMUST is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Veeam and it won't effect any of the engineering assets that exist in Prague and in Russia. So this I the thing about Veeam, it's a very closely held company controlled by it's two founders, with a domicile in Switzerland. My understanding is Baronov is, well he's the technical guru, and he's a resident of that country in Switzerland, and the HQ there is very lean, the sizable engineering teams, as they say, is in Russia and Prague. Timashev resides in the US, and he's a marketing genius, who helped create this company, and it's always punched above it's weight class with, epic parties, and great products. Now interestingly, Veeam's rise, it coincided with the ascendancy of VMware. Veeam became the standard backup software for small to medium size companies within VMware shops. Their products are renowned for being simple, and working as advertised, and their customer support is outstanding by all accounts. But the US business lagged, despite the fact that most of VMware's business is in the Americas. You'd think you think if they super glued themself to VMware their Americas business would be higher. So a few years ago they decided to really go hard after the enterprise and they brought in Peter Mckay, from VMware, and he began to build up a US presence. But the enterprise business, it requires a lot of things that were kind of antithetical to Veeam. So think about long sales cycles, expensive sales people, belly to belly selling, with the expectations of, road maps, and clarity around enterprise feature sets. Now McKay was named CEO with Baronov, who continued to run engineering. So it was a bit of a culture clash. You got the sales oriented leader wanting the engineering team to turn on a dime and help close large deals, and satiate partners like HPE and Sysco, and you've got this genius co-leader, slash engineer, with an incredible track record of delivering features that the customer loves. So it really didn't work out and then Veeam scaled back on it's ambitions some what. At it's annual user conference in Miami last year, Ratmir came on theCUBE, and he talked about how Veeam's act one was all about dominance in virtualized environment. Let's listen to what he said about act two and then we'll come back and talk about it >> That was act one, we dominated it, we grew from zero to one billion within 10, 12 years. We added three hundred fifty thousand customers over that time frame, and now it's act two. What is act two? Act two is the, again, the new major industry transformation to a hybrid cloud. What are the similarities? Again, Veeam is in a great position because we're at the right time at the right place with a brilliant product. >> Now what we know is that act two is about a few things, one, as Ratmir said, hybrid cloud, multi cloud management, etcetera. But it's also about an awesome exit for it's two founders. Wow five billion dollars, five x revenue multiple, handing over the reigns is really the third thing this is about and creating more traditional governance structure for Veeam. Now they're moving from a governance structure that was closely held and opaque to one that is still going to be closely held, but ideally somewhat less opaque. Which brings me to inside partners. In the money world, you basically have a spectrum of investors. On the one side you've got banks, who are the most conservative. On the other side you've got VCs, now they're the most aggressive, of course. Now somewhere in the middle, you have private equity firms. Now they traditionally invest in companies, and they squeeze them for EBITDA, and they suck money out. But inside is more of a hybrid. They invest in a number of companies as VCs, they take a portion of the ownership. And to me they're more of a rule of forty PE, meaning it's not just about EBITDA, it's about growth plus EBITDA. So a rule of thirty or a rule of forty PE company, they can dial down EBITDA and go for growth, or dial up EBIT and moderate growth. So it's a great model. So I would expect Insight to bring structure and leadership to Veeam, with the goal of taking the company public at some point, because they like to sell to companies for all cash, I don't see a logical buyer at these kind of price points for this company in this market. It's growing market but it's still not a giant market. All right let's shift gears a little bit and get into some of the ETR data. Here's a narrative they put out recently that, to me, sums it up well. ETR said Veeam is one of the few vendors growing share among customers vs previous surveys in the storage sector. And that said, spending intentions are decelerating and continue to look poor in the largest sectors and Veeam trails Rubrik and Cohesity, although on a larger user base. So you can see by this statement that Veeam is of course doing well, but there are some cracks in the enterprise armor that I want to talk about and drill into a little bit. Now this now this Arline customer quote also, to me, sums up one of the reasons for Veeam's success. What this person said is if I want to do a Veeam back up to the cloud, it's basically point and click, very easy to use. Now I've talked to dozens, if not hundreds of Veeam customers, and they all say the same thing, it just works, that's kind of their motto. So this is the big reason why Veeam has steadily gained gained share over time. Now take a look at this chart, which shows the progression over time of Veeam's progress in terms of what ETR calls market share. Now remember, market share is a measure of pervasiveness in the ETR data set. And you can see, in the data, that Veeam has had a steady rise since ETR started tracking them at critical mass back in 2014. And you can see the steady decline in the survey for Veritas and Commvault and what appears to be, rapid momentum building for Rubrik and Cohesity, two companies that I said in my 2020 predictions breaking analysis that would continue to do well this year. Now notice I had to black out the January 2020 survey, which is ending shortly, so stay tuned for those results. But let's drill into Veeam's performance a little bit more. What this chart shows is a candlestick of net score and market share across all the respondents in the ETR survey for Veeam. Remember net score is a measure of spending momentum that subtracts customers that are spending less, the red, from those spending more, the greens. And it's represented over time by this blue line that you see. You can see that this blue line, it bounces around but it holds steady in the past couple of years pretty generally, and really in that thirty to forty percent range which you see on the left hand axis. Now that yellow line, is market share or pervasiveness, it also continues to climb steadily as I showed you in the previous chart. Now again this is amongst all respondents. Let's now take a look at this chart which isolates Veeam's performance in the largest companies, that enterprise push. Notice the pictures is somewhat choppier. Market share is okay, although unlike the previous chart, it's not steady. This is stunning. Peter McKay left in October 2018, and that's when Veeam really pulled back on it's big enterprise push, and you can see, there's a noticeable and steady drop there based on ETR data. So what's happening here is we are entering a new chapter for Veeam, act two so to speak. With new leadership and new governance. Danny Allen is taking over CTO, he previously ran strategy, Bill Largent is going to be CEO, the HQ is moving into the US. So in my opinon, Veeam's issues in the US have been more execution related than anything else. Veeam is a leader. So partnerships with Nutanix, Sysco, HPE, NetApp, should continue to improve and be somewhat productive, actually largely productive. Let's talk a little bit about Veeam's architecture, and a point of discussion that you often hear in the community. Veeam's a Window's based architecture. Now is that a blessing or is that a curse? Well the pros are that the Veeam team came out of a Windows world, and they know the platform very well. They are amazingly good at adding function, without screwing up performance somewhere else. You saw this a couple years back when they were making a big push on the enterprise and they increased the file sizes, and the number of objects that they could support. Another example is when Veeam added cloud back up, it was a really good product, version one. Unlink many products, when they first tried to port to the cloud, that wasn't the case. Recovery from the cloud is very tricky. Things are out of sync, you got a metadata challenge, and generally Veeam was able to achieve consistent levels of performance with it's cloud product. Now flip side of this, is that if you look at most, if not all, modern architectures today, are based on Linux. And once you start getting into mulit cloud, and cross cloud management, you're going to bump into and be interfacing with lots of Linux based systems. So Veeam is going to have migrate code, and maintaining consistent performance is going to be tougher. But as David Fourier, my colleague points out, there are many many ways to skin a cat, and Veeam's engineering team has really, based on it's track record, has proven that it can solve tough problems, and really deliver a great product consistently. I think the bigger issue and challenge for Veeam again, is execution in the US, and of course the enterprise. Customers in EBC's executive briefing centers, they want to see road maps, and enterprise features, and specials. And so we'll see, if that's something that Veeam has an appetite for. If they do, and I'm one of the incumbents, I'd be worried that Veeam could do a land and expand. Where Veeam isn't as strong in large enterprises, big companies they buy from Veeam. Maybe it's a smaller division, or remote location, but it's not like they don't do business in large accounts, they do. So in a way, they've already landed and they have an opportunity to expand, so that's something to pay attention to. If I'm an enterprise customer, I would be pressing Veeam on it's roadmap, and having them clarify their vision around hybrid and multi cloud management. Will Veeam be more transparent and willing to do specials for the enterprise, and their big partners, who expect them, when they say jump, they expect Veeam to say how high. How will Veeam's culture change, is the other thing I want to focus on. As the two founders step down, are they going to be able to main their engineering ethos, and customer loyalty, and can they figure out the enterprise. I'm a big fan of founder lead companies, when founders leave cultures often change. When founders stay, they're intensely committed, even beyond great CEOs who aren't founders. Look at Michael Dell. He went to the mat to keep his company against the great icon, now look at Dell technologies, after the EMC acquisition, it was completely transformed. Look at Oracle, look at the lengths that Larry Ellison goes to win. Compare that to a great CEO Joe Tucci, when he was at EMC, but you know when he was done, he was done, it was over. It wasn't his baby. So my point is how will this effect Veeam's culture and prospects in the long term. For me the bottom line is the big opportunity's in the US. And that's about execution. And I expect with the move to US HQ, new management, I expect they're going to see consistent market share gains, that's going to continue. The enterprise however, that's going to take longer, it's going to require more patience and more money. And with Veeam transitioning from essentially the two founder's lifestyle business into a company that's really built for an exit, they're going to have more money to invest, greater transparency, I hope, and a path to really build on their past successes. So this Dave Vellante signing out from the latest episode of theCUBE insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching everybody and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Locke from Las Vegas. It's the cube hovering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the cube Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we are alive on the show floor at AWS reinvent 19 with thousands of people. Stu and I have one of our cube Olam back. Joining us, we've got Gail Habermann, senior director of cloud services from new chats. Welcome back. Thank you for having me. And you're on brand with your Nutanix pin for president though. Nutanix right here. All right, so here we are, day three of re-invent 65,000 or so folks here. This is show floor has been nonstop for days. Big theme as been about outpost and what outposts and what AWS is doing there. But Newtanics you guys have been talking about hybrid cloud for years. What does all of the buzz about outpost? What does that mean for you guys? >>Yeah, I think, uh, this GA really validates our strategy and what we've been hearing from customers for many years around the need for hybrid and more broadly, I think consistency, consistency across the environments as a way or means to actually adopt hybrid, uh, ineffective manner is a longterm strategy. And I think, uh, AWS now realizing that and working in this direction, we see that with outpost and with a weather announcing with local as well. The idea is that you really need to have a consistent way to manage across different environments and ideally same construct as well. And that's what they're doing specifically with outpost. Uh, the direction we're being taking is the same where our software can run both on-prem but also in public cloud and edge so that the same applications, whether traditional or modern can run in the same way. So that not only mobility is easy, but people can use the same skill sets that they've developed over the many years, uh, across different environments. >>Yeah. Kelly, it's been fascinating for me to watch the maturation of the market. Of course. Newtanics his original design was, let's take these hyperscale type of architectures and bring it to the enterprise. Now we're seeing the intersection of what's happening at the enterprise and the public cloud and the environment. But you know, tile back a few years. The first time Newtanics came to this show, it was right after the acquisition of a small company called XY on and it was like, okay, it was exciting, but the Newtanics and Amazon connection was, we're trying to all figure out how the dots go together. Fast forward to today, uh, you know, bring us up to, you know, how Amazon, Nutanix and those solutions work together for your customers. >>Sure. So the latest initiative that we've announced as early access is Nutanix clusters where we use our software not only on prem now, but also on AWS bare metal instances. So for those who know, our software for many years have collapsed storage and compute into a single pool of resources that customers can deploy very easily and scale out as needed on a variety of hardware platforms. Traditionally in their data centers. Now we use the exact same software but on AWS, Bermuda instances. And what that means is that the same applications as is can be used either on prem or public cloud. So it's really easy for customers, for their business and mission. A mission critical applications. >>Yeah. I want to highlight a thing you talked about there, that bare metal service from Amazon, which is a relatively new thing. My understanding that was designed for the VMware on AWS, but they're opening up for ecosystem partners to do. And you said Nutanix clusters, is that what I had heard about at dot. Nexen was called XY clusters before. >>Yes. As part of this early access, we've renamed this, um, to Nutanix lessors, but this is the same idea, uh, in the idea is really that customers can now use our software. Uh, in AWS you see other cloud vendors also starting to offer bare metal services for this exact reason. And we are really evolving our company as well, where our software itself is going to be portable. So customers know they deploy our software, for example, on prem today they have a direct path to AWS. And other clouds in the future because we have heard from many customers that perhaps replatform let's say to AWS now, they're not sure what to do if they ever wanted to go to another vendor. Right. Um, so what we were trying to do is have a single platform that can go, can support multiple clouds and also the software itself has to be portable. And so that's the path we're on. >>What about portability? What are some of the key use cases that it will enable customers to achieve? >>Yeah, so many, many times now we hear that the customers are not looking to manage their physical infrastructure anymore. And so in cases where perhaps they acquired multiple companies and they have kind of a data center sprawl, they want to consolidate, one option is to consolidate into a data SQL data center. But another option now would be to consolidate into AWS location near them or in the region that they need. But the key here in the case of clusters is that the same VMs, same third party integrations that have had daily practices cannot work simply managed on AWS as opposed to managing their own data center. So it eases the operational burden, but it does not require a big lift and replatforming to achieve that. >>Yeah. So I was hearing, sorry, so I was hearing one of the loud and clear when you were saying that operational efficiency seems pretty loud and clear as a key benefit. >>Alright. So kill what you're describing there really reminds me of what I'm hearing from customers when they're talking about one of the reasons that they're adopting Coobernetti's. Uh, of course Amazon has a, you know, various ways to leverage Kubernetes socially EKS day down to the far gate, uh, it being supported there. Um, I know has carbon two carbon Nutanix clusters, how does that go together in the whole group and Eddie's story? Yes. >>So when I talk about clusters, it's really the, the entire South of that that we have that can be used across the, across the environments in that software stack includes many aspects to it. Of course the core is does having very resilient infrastructure software that you can run applications on, but it has many other phases to it. And one of them is containers. So like you run virtual machines either on our hypervisor or third party hypervisors. You can also run containers on any Coubernetties or our Kubernetes that we support as part of that software. And that whole thing is portable. So really what I'm talking about here is very foundational and definitely supports carbon as well. So customers know that both traditional and modern applications can, can be poured across clouds. Give us some customer examples where you've seen a legacy enterprise that has to transform in order to stay in business. >>I was working with Nutanix to do just that. Yes. So we have many customers, especially on the high end of the market and to your point, pharmaceuticals with security concerns, financial services that want to modernize, but they have very heavy investments in their traditional and business critical applications. And now that their cloud journey is maturing, they want to address those workloads. Those workloads are very hard to migrate or to replatform specifically. So they're looking for this way to maintain all the investments that they've done over years, but also get the benefits of public clouds where it's appropriate either for migration or for bursting. And so having that same software that could run the same VMs as is across multiple environments is a perfect solution for them. You know, eliminating the need to utilize different cloud native services. Maybe they'll do that over time, but right now this really helps them save millions because we hear from many customers. To your point, the CIO has the mandate to do this transformation, but I can't do it. Or my teams have resistance to do it because of this investments. >>Yeah, kill. I'm glad. Glad you're hitting on that transfer nation note because Nutanix itself has gone through a bit of a transformation recently, all software, that model, it feels like we've kind of gone through that transition. What does that help Nutanix learn when when you're working with your customers that you know, transformation is not easy, that the keynote talked about, that you need leadership involved and this chest can't be an incremental thing. You need to take bold moves to move things forward. And Nutanix itself has gone through some own of its own transformation. Absolutely. >>As always with Nutanix, we were very aggressive with execution, both in product velocity and here also in terms of business models. So we've moved from hardware to software and now to subscription. We find that customers absolutely love the notion that they have a lot more flexibility in terms of subscription. And as I mentioned before, we're evolving this further to support multiple clouds. And because we believe the, the five to 10 years ahead of us are going to be all about cloud everywhere rather than just on-prem. Uh, we need to support that in terms of our motto. And so we're going through that transformation ourselves. >>One of the things also that was talked about this week is just, well, maybe not talked about as multi-cloud, right? That's kind of a four letter word for Amazon, but it is often an operating model that we see a lot of customers are in for various reasons. Maybe not strategic. Maybe it's more we've inherited this or an enterprise as acquired smaller companies that have myriad cloud solutions and this is more of a reality than anything else. Some of the many announcements that AWS has made this week. You talked about this sort of validating the direction that Nutanix has been going in, but from what is the signal to you in terms of of Amazon's own evolution? >>Yes, I think we are really seeing an evolution, you know, while resisting the change to some extent. So I agree with you. Moldy cows, absolute no-no hybrid was a no-no. Now, hybrid is embraced, I think for a hybrid. There really are trying to reach for greater adoption for, I think the hard part. Like I mentioned before, business and mission critical applications, that's the main thing. I think with multi there's still resistance, but it's absolutely critical. Like you're saying, every EBC meeting that I've been here, customers talk about multi cloud because of organic adoption or evolution or acquisitions and so it's absolutely critical to have tuning like our hybrid cloud services that support multiple clouds. So we have services that support governance across clouds, cost optimization, security, compliance, automation, self-service. All these things really help customers, customers drive towards a more unified or harmonized way of managing multiple environments. And it's absolutely critical. I agree. >>We look into like a magic crystal ball kind of in the spirit of evolution. We look at cloud one. Dot. Oh, John furrier talks a lot about cloud two. Dot. Oh no. What if you look, say down the road the next five years, what do you think the state of cloud is going to look like? >>Yeah, I think our vision has been, and I really see this materializing as cloud everywhere rather than thinking about cloud is a centralized place where that is the cloud. Uh, if you think about even, uh, edge requiring heavy local processing, real compute, real storage, uh, very sensitive in terms of latency for networking. Uh, maybe our car is even right, are going to be a little mobile data centers. And so there's going to be a need to have cloud everywhere while still offloading some stuff for centralized processing. So we really need to find a way to bring that cloud everywhere. And what we've been working at Newtanics is towards that division of bringing that platform that has strong resiliency, uh, uh, very good latency sensitive workloads everywhere we might need it, uh, in preparation for that vision. And I think it's going to be very exciting to see how all these vendors and customers evolve their environment over time. It's going to be, I think, very different from what we thought about 20 years ago for sure. >>Do you see any one industry in particular as really right for this to be able to do, not just bring cloud everywhere but to live it and really completely flip an industry on its head? Anything that really kind of pops into your mind? >>Um, I'm not sure. I think in terms of vision it's going to be across the industries, but the more you have applications that do require that edge processing to be, again, low latency and robust. So IOT use cases, for example, with cus with retail, uh, maybe manufacturing and so on. I think we're going to see these guys lead the, the wave here because they simply cannot offload everything to the cloud, but others are going to follow it because it just makes sense. And if it's not an anomaly, then they'll be more comfortable in that process. >>So much change to come, but also so much opportunity. Gil, thank you for joining Stu and me on the cube this morning. Great to be here. Thank you very much. Our pleasure for Stu Miniman. I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching the cube live from AWS, reinvent 19 from Vegas. Thanks for watching.

(light music). >> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCube covering Dell technologies world 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everybody and welcome back to theCube's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Travis Vigil. He is the Senior Vice President Product Management at Dell EMC. Thank you so much for coming on theCube, for returning to theCube I should say. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Here from Austin Texas. >> Yes. Yes I am. >> Mothership. So there is a lot of great storage news so much storage news this week. Break it down for us. What are some of the sort of the headlines that you'd like our viewers to know about? >> Yeah there was a ton this morning in the keynote but for me it was three of the announcements in particular are something that I'm really excited about. The first is that we announced the unity XT which is the next generation platform of our unity product line. We've been shipping unity for a little less than three years. And in that time, we've actually shipped in nearly 80000 units. So it's been very successful for us. It's been known for flexibility, unified block and file, simplicity, value and with this release we're really taking it to the next level. We are increasing the performance entirely new hardware platform. It increases the performance up to 2x versus the previous generation. We're increasing data reduction rates up to five to one data reduction rate. It's NVMe ready and it's also architected for a hybrid cloud world. We call it cloud ready. So that's one thing. The second thing I'm excited about is actually that cloud ready part that I just talked about on unity XT. So we announced Dell EMC Cloud storage services today. And basically what that allows you to do is consume unity, Isilone or power Max as a service with direct connections into multiple public clouds which is really cool. And so if you're a customer like a unity XT customer for example, an awesome use case would be hybrid disaster recovery as a service. You don't have to have a secondary data center and you can actually use a ready native replication from on premises to the cloud. We showed a demonstration on stage where we are actually able to fail over to VMC on AWS automatically across on premises and what is consumed as a service unity XT in the cloud. I'm also excited about this capability because if you look at our Isilon product line, the fact that you can direct connect into multiple different public clouds is really cool because what a lot of people use Isilon for is big data analytics, streaming. A lot of the applications that are driving the unstructured data growth need burst compute. And so if you can sit in a data center right next to these multiple public clouds and be able to pick which compute that you want to use with your Isilon and have a customer be able to consume that as a service that's pretty exciting. So cloud services on the portfolio, a big part of the announcement today that I'm excited about. And the third thing I'm excited about is all the other things we announced around Isilon in general. We announced an entirely new software upgrade, a new OS 1fsa.2. That release increases the scalability of our Isilon clusters from 144 to 252. So big increase. Isilon is already known for having a very big single namespace. And so you might be asking well who really needs 252 nodes in a single cluster? Well believe me when I tell you autonomous driving or connected car, media and entertainment are very interested in this capability from us. So those are the big three for me what we're doing on unity XT, what we're doing in terms of cloud Connectivity and what we're doing with respect to Isilon. >> Travis I wonder if we could zoom out for a second here. I think we're at an interesting transition point when you talk about the storage industry. I think historically, storage is highly fragmented. I had my tier one storage, I had my mid-range storage, we had object storage, we had special HPC storage and there are so many different subcategories that you put in the environment. I wrote an article when Dell bought EMC. I said this is the end of the storage industry as we knew it. And I come to a show like this, cloud, hyper converging infrastructure. All of these pieces, storage is important but you just walk through many of the speeds and feeds and some of the new product lines that come out. But storage at the center and the storage admin, that's what EMC World was that's not what I hear at Dell technologies World. Give us kind of where we are in that transformation and of course I'm not saying that two years from now, we're in a storage-less world and nobody thinks about it 'cause data is more important than ever. >> Absolutely. >> Price capacity points are enabling customers to do more with it. So would love just kind of you to reflect back on where we are and where we're going for the market here. >> Yeah that's an excellent question Stu. I think you're exactly right. The discussions that we're having with customers more and more are centered around what you're trying to do, what business problem are you trying to solve? And you look within the portfolio, there have been places that we've done that before like with Isilon, it was very vertical industry focused. Speaking in the language of the customers around healthcare genomics or media and entertainment or whatever industry vertical we were targeting. More and more for the core I.T. buyer it's I want the infrastructure to work with my ecosystem. I'm investing in VMware so I want VRO plugins or I'm utilizing Ansible as my management and orchestration layer. So I want an Ansible playbook. And so if you look at what we've announced on power Max as part of this show, VRO, CSI and Ansible plugins or adapters for power Macs are a big part of what we're announcing because more and more, the customers that we're talking to want the storage to be good performance, cost effective, autonomous in terms of making a lot of decisions and optimizing itself but they want it to work in the broader ecosystem. So I was just having a conversation with a very large customer over in the EBC area earlier and we were talking about power Max and we were talking about all the cool things and all the new speeds and feeds, start talking about the Ansible playbook and that's when the customer leaned in and was like "Tell me more. "How does that work? "Because we're doing Ansible". So I think you're exactly right. I think whether you talk about management and orchestration or you whether you talk about the Dell Tech cloud platform where you can have storage as a piece of that. The conversation is shifting to a higher level, to the application or business problem level. >> Yeah I love it. Take us a little bit at that application space where to spend a bunch of the conversations talking everything from dev ops to containerization and micro services. When you talk about hybrid cloud. Well if I want similar to what the cloud environment is, that's usually what I'm doing. And sure, the VMware piece plays into that too but usually modernization ties into it and I know I've been hearing that story quite a lot bit more when I talked to storage people today. >> Yeah absolutely. I think the dev ops conversation with storage admins is probably one of the most popular conversation we're having. What are you doing for CSI plugins? We just announced one for our extreme IO product line, a lot of interest, a lot of conversations around that. And I think the conversation is also shifting to help me manage it, help me get me more intelligence about my storage estate versus speeds and feeds so one of the key conversations we have with customers is around a capability we have which is called Cloud IQ which I like to call it a health tracker for your storage estate. It gives you statistics, it gives you capacity trending. It gives you performance trending, it uses A.I. to predict capacity spikes or performance anomalies. And it's really an awesome tool for our customers because customers that use that are able to resolve issues in their environment three times faster than customers that don't. So I think you're absolutely right Stu, the conversation is more about how do I use the storage array in my environment? What ecosystems am I supporting? So it works with all the other stuff that I have to deal with. >> So digital transformation has been the buzzword of the last five years and the theme of this year's real transformation. I want to talk a little bit about implementation of these big technology initiatives. How do you work with customers to define exactly what they need, gather, garner support and make sure everyone is pulling in the same direction and wants the same thing? And then really bring it together. I mean is that, first of all, a challenge? And then second of all, walk us through the steps of what you do. >> Yeah I think to the earlier conversation there is a spectrum of conversations that we're having with customers and as Dell Technologies, we talk to customers big and small and we talk to customers who want to procure a solution or they want to procure an array. And I think the common thread in the conversations we're having is, give me the information that I need so that I can easily integrate it into my environment. And we're not out of the world where people care about IOPS and latency and all the speeds and feeds in the storage array. But increasingly there's customers are like "Yeah, yeah I need that "but I need you to tell me how it works "in my oracle environment "or my SAP environment". And so you can look at a lot of the solutions that Dell Technologies is bringing together via our solutions group. We've brought out an A.I. solution and with computing, networking and storage. We're focusing on SAP as a high value workload where customers again, compute networking and storage how do you bring it all together and kind of t shirt size the different solutions. So you know I think that if I look at it from a product lens that's how we're approaching it. There's also a services lens to look at it which is there's many customers that still want to do it themselves. And there's many customers that say "Hey can I get a managed service? "Can you just do it for me?" So we have a broad spectrum of customers and many customers that are on different places on that journey but it's definitely the conversations no matter where you're starting are all trending to, I want you to do more so I can focus on my business and my applications. >> So Travis really we've merged through the largest acquisition in tech history. You came from the Dell side. >> I did. >> The Dell storage side so would just love to get real quick your perspective on being in the Dell storage team to now being in the Dell Technologies, Dell EMC storage team and what that impact's been when you're meeting with customers that huge booster into the enterprise space too. >> Yeah it's been an amazing journey over these last two plus years. I guess going on three years now and I took a little break from being outside of the product group and I came back about a year ago. And so you're right I ran product management for Dell storage for quite some time and then I had the great opportunity to come back and run product management for all of Dell EMC storage. And you know I think there's a lot of stuff that's the same. We're still driving the roadmap, we're still prioritizing customer needs. We're still striving to provide the best possible solution for customers in what we do as a storage array or what we do in a broader solution. But you know the coming together of Dell and EMC from my perspective, it's been a great success. We had a lot of strength on the compute side, we had a small storage business. EMC had a large storage business. And so the combination of the two it's just been like chocolate and peanut butter. I mean it's been really good and I'm amazed at all the conversations and all the customers that have invested in Dell EMC for their storage infrastructure. When we have some of these customer events and you have name brand universities or large government entities and they're there giving you feedback about how they're using Isilon or ECS or whatever in their environment it's just a really impressive portfolio that we have and it's been an absolute joy. >> Well that's great. Next year I want the Dell EMC candy bar. So there's your next product idea (laughs). >> With chocolate and peanut butter. Yeah I would want it too. >> Travis thank you so much it was a pleasure having you on the cube. >> Alright. Awesome. Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, there is so much more of theCube's live coverage from Dell Technologies world coming up just after this. (light music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. (echoing percussive music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit, here at the Venetian in Las Vegas, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests this segment, we have Brian Bohan, the AABG global business lead at AWS, and Chris Wegmann, welcome back to theCUBE, managing director Accenture AWS Business Group. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us, yeah. >> So I want to start with you, Chris. It's been three years since Accenture and AWS announced this relationship, bring us up to speed on what's happened in those three years. >> Yeah, it's been a fast-paced three years. We've seen AWS continue to mature the platform, grow their number of services, we've seen our customers go from looking at just lift and shifting workloads at AWS, to now doing full cloud native services, machine learning, containerization, all the really cool stuff they can do on the platform. So for the business group, we've gone through that journey and that maturity as well. We started very focused on things like lift and shift migrations, and cloud management, and investing in assets and capabilities, now to really focus on innovation, and helping our customers drive the innovation on top of that platform. >> I want to get into that, but you've also recently said you're going to continue to expand this partnership, Brian-- >> Mhmm. >> And so what does this mean? >> Yeah, I mean just kind of keying off some of the things Chris talked about, right, is that, and I think we've talked about innovation specifically, really where we're going to focus, and we're also going to talk about vertical and industry solutions, which I think we'll talk about a little bit later. But, even if we looked at where we've had a lot of success in the mass migrations, moving enterprise applications like SAP to AWS, what we're seeing now, customers are in their maturity curve, where they're there in the cloud, and now they're asking what can I do? Right, so I have SAP, I have my core systems in the cloud, and so we're investing heavily, as Chris mentioned, in some of the modern technologies, so application modernization, cloud native development. Andy in his keynote today talked a lot about database freedom, so now that you're in the cloud, how can we start looking at your database portfolios, start using some RDS or Aurora, some other native AWS services. So, these are way that we can innovate with our customers that you maybe typically don't think about, but are critically important, and I would say on the other side, and what Chris mentioned as well, is the investments we're making in machine learning, and in AI, and in analytics, and edge computing. And then really at the core of that is data, right. And what we find, with these kinds of projects, is you need to move very, very quickly, and you also need to prove out the concepts. So these are two important things, and so what we're doing is a big investment in the partnership, is investing something we call Launchpad. So this a mechanism in Amazon parlance, we can think about it as two pizza teams, so several nodes of two pizza teams around the world, and these folks are 100% focused on driving innovation, and driving POCs, and pilots, and prototyping, and asset development, in the innovation areas around AWS machine learning, analytics, connect, so new modern customers care capabilities. So that's really important, and then, kind of related to that, very closely, is our innovation studios. So these team will be located across the world, some of them in or around liquid studios that Accenture has. So the innovation studio is a place where we can bring clients to get together, and we can execute on working backward, and ideation, and design thinking sections, so we can take it from an idea to actually a concrete, implementable set of requirements, and then use that Launchpad team to execute very quickly. So this is something we're really excited about. >> So interested, you bring clients into the studio. Now, why is that so important, to get everyone in the room together? >> Now I think what we've seen is it gets them out of their day-to-day environment, right? And in an innovative environment, where they can go through that innovation process, come up with those ideas, and then very quickly see them in reality, versus sitting and writing a bunch of requirements down and things like that. So the whole design thinking process and going through that, we find works very well, in a very innovative studio type format. >> So how does it work, I mean a client comes-- >> Yep. >> You're together, Accenture, AWS, together, with the clients-- >> Yep. >> saying what are your problems, and so how do you help them learn to think expansively about what their biggest challenges are? >> So we start with some design thinking workshops. So thinking about what they're trying to achieve, not the technology, right, we get the technology, but what they're trying to do, how they want to think about the problem differently, and we do the working backwards. So, idea is, where do you want to end up, either press release, or something like that, that documents where they want to be. Then we work backwards, at leverage the design thinking, and then going to the idea-zation phase, look at what will work, what might not work, and then how technology, we can use the AWS technology. So the technologists are there, they say, "Oh if we can go use these three services "off the platform, we can actually deliver this," and take advantage of this data that you may not have had before to help to answer that problem. >> And the technologists are also saying, "If we can leverage these three existing technologies, "we can also build some more stuff." >> Yeah, and I think Andy was again hitting home, the right tool for the right job, and as Chris mentioned, we don't start with the technology, we really start with the problem. And what's really cool about this is that Accenture's gotten very mature and developed and deep capabilities through their digital practice, around design thinking, working backward. And when folks come visit Amazon, one of our most popular EBC or executive briefing sessions, is around Amazon culture, and how does Amazon innovate. So we programatize that, as well, into our working backward methodology, that we work with clients, and what we've done is we've married these two things together. So, we're able now to bring the best of both worlds, and help our customers through that journey, getting from idea to actual realization. And then, as you saw, we now have I don't know how many services, 130 plus services, there's plenty of things in the bag that our technologists can then start working together with the clients to solve those problems. So it's really exciting. >> How do we innovate, that's sort of the question of the hour, the question of the era. At a company like Amazon that is now so big, but still is famous for it's start up mentality, and it's ability to innovate and deliver products that customers don't know they need, until they until they (Rebecca laughs) have them in their little hands, how do you do it? I mean, what is the secret sauce? >> So, I mean, there's a few things, and I don't have time to talk about all of them, but I think culture, we've talked about it a little bit, is hugely important, and you just can't graft on or import culture. You saw Guardian's CIO talk today how important it was. They didn't start with technology to cloud, they started with actually redesigning their work spaces and how their teams work together, that's super important. So at Amazon, we work in what we call two pizza teams. So every team is fairly autonomic, fairly small. They interact with other teams, but they can make decisions autonomously, and move fast. And then the other thing that we reward moving fast, is if you're going to move fast, you're also going to make some mistakes, you're going to take risks, you're going to experiment, and you're going to fail. So Jeff Bezos always likes to say, if you're not failing, then you're really not innovating. Right, so we want to controlled failures, and we want to make sure that when we are failing, it's what we call a two-way door, meaning that if we fail, we can come back through the door, and do it again. We haven't committed ourselves down a path that we can't retreat. So, you know, again, small teams, our culture, a culture that also rewards risk-taking, controlled risk-taking and failure, and that's also I think why getting us in the cloud is so important because now we have a platform where you can spin up nodes to run your analytics and your machine learning. If it's wrong, it doesn't work, you just tear it down, and that's it, you start over. So, it's a great platform for that as well. >> Chris, what have been some of the most exciting new business ideas, models, approaches, that you've come up with; we're having a number of really fascinating guests theCUBE, what personally excites you most? >> Yeah, I think one of the things is the research life science cloud and then some of the work we've done with AWS and marketed around that. To bring the research all together to make the researchers jobs much easier, bring all that data together and get the value out of the data. I was amazed when I first got involved in that and didn't realize how much time was spent just duplicating data across different systems during the research process, and I thought that's a lot of waste of time by very, very smart people, just coding data, and by us being able to do that, it just opens up the possibilities of what research can do. And it's all about saying how can we help lives to be better, and that's something that's really doing it. Other thing is just, customer interaction. So, one of the things I've talked about and have been very excited over the last couple of years, was you know Amazon Connect, future next generation call center capabilities, again, like Brian said, as a service, you can step up it up very quickly. You don't have to go and buy PBXs and install them and go through that whole, and the the 360 relationship that you can build with those services, that customers are demanding and asking for, right? You can go into organizations that have not been known for great customer care, and now within a few days, and do 360 type customer and omni-channel, and pass off chats, and stuff like that. You know, all the things that Amazon themselves, as dot com business, are famous for, right? And they can, they can get there. So you know, those things just excite me, and I see the clients get really excited when we go and sit down and talk about that stuff. >> And how are they measuring the ROI because I mean, as you said, at a company like Merck that is doing life-saving medicine every day, it's kind of obvious, but at a company that maybe is not good with customers, and then to suddenly have this more customer-centric call center, it really can change things. So how are they measuring what they're getting out of this? >> So they're measuring the sentiment of the customers, right, which Amazon can help you do too, right? You know, so really understanding how satisfied the customers are, they can tell by the way they're talking to the reps, and listening to the recordings, and stuff like that. And see how angry they get, and how much that reduces over time, and really get there, right. They're looking at customer satisfaction, of course. >> Yeah. >> Right, and almost every call center finishes up with some type of survey, right? So looking to see how those surveys have improved. They look at call volumes, they look at how many they're able to answer via chatbot, or via text, and things like that, and how many of those a customer care rep can do at the same time. When you're on the phone, usually you can only talk to one person, but a customer care rep might be able to take four or five calls at the same time, via chat, and be able to help customers which reduces the time waiting on the phone, and the less time you wait on the phone, the happier the customer is. >> Brian, last word, what do you think we're going to be talking about at AWS 2019. >> So I think if you look at the trend that we're seeing, so as we move more into the innovation services, what also is true is that we're getting increasingly focused on industry problems, right, and Chris already mentioned one with life sciences and the research life science cloud because it's sort of a migration across industries, with some variances, but when you're talking about deep applied learning and analytics, it's going to be very specific. So I think what we're going to see next year, is a lot more things like the research life science cloud across industries, right, so we're diving deep in financial services and capital markets, and banking around things like money-laundering, and anti-fraud platforms, right? We're working across over into PNC, and insurance, on kind of completely new ways to have customers think about how they engage with their PNC insurance companies. So, as we dive deeper into this, and as we apply a lot of these up the stack innovation services, I think we're going to see a lot more really compelling, exciting business solutions specific to industry problems, and I'm just super excited about that. >> Great, well we're looking forward to seeing you >> Yeah, yeah. (Rebecca laughs) >> here again. >> I'm sure we will. >> I'm looking forward to it. (Chris laughs) >> We'll be here. >> Chris, Brian, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage at the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (bouncy percussive music)

[Music] hi I'm Peter Burroughs welcome to another cube conversation from our beautiful Palo Alto studios today we're talking with Dan Rogers who's the chief marketing officer of ServiceNow good to say pietà Dan thanks very much for being here so Dan you as a CMO we're gonna spend some time talking about what the CMO does with the CMO doz now at ServiceNow and but give us a little bit of your background who are you where'd you came from how'd you get to where you are sometimes I joke that I was born in the clouds I come from the north of England it does rain there a lot but professionally I spent all my time in cloud companies so Salesforce Amazon Web Services and now of course so is now and what is ServiceNow do give us a little bit of background how is ServiceNow doing where is it going how our customers working with you well I think the way to answer that is by saying every company is undergoing a digital transformation and as they undergo digital transformation they realize that all the great stuff that they have in people's personal lives great user experiences great service experiences they want that at work as well so ServiceNow really brings those great experiences to work we have a platform which is called the now platform now platform basically is a set of services that deliver great user experiences the ability to request things easily help me fix my X helped me get a common answer to a question around say an employee question and then great service experiences so we create great workflow underneath so that all of those activities orchestrated across the organization and then great service intelligence so that over time were predicting things and recommending things just like you have with your consumer services today bringing all of that to the enterprise so let's talk a little bit about the CMO role because ultimately the there's you mention digital transformation and there's been for quite some time predictions made by various folks that you know the CMO is going to spend more money on technology than the IT manager well that clearly hasn't happened but that does not mean that the CMOS role and the marketing function hasn't changed as a consequence of technology how has technology how has a data orientation how has speed and alignment with data and how the organization operates it serves now on others change the CMO job changed marking I think in both a b2c context it's a very rich data environment a lot of that's happening through the web so you have instant data data you can make you know changes on the fly do a/b testing dialing your forms improve your completion rates dialing your conversions the same is also true in B to B and B to B a lot of what marketers are doing is providing the pipeline to the sales team and that has a funnel mindset a discipline around how much is converting at each stage why is it converting what's not converting row the leads going which leads are the most effective and where should we ultimately spend differently to help get those leads into meetings and on to our sales teams so they can execute against the opportunities now it used to be the b2b he was characterized by what Peter Drucker would have called value in exchange that you would sell a product and the product imbued the value of the company and that was up to the customer to figure out how to get value out of it we now seem to be moving to a value in utility model where instead of selling products were increasingly selling outcomes or increasingly it's actually taking the form of services serves now is at the vanguard of that change tell us a little bit about how that notion of value in exchange to value in utility is changing your job in quite frankly changing service now so yeah I'll actually take us right back to the founding of our company in 2004 our company was founded by Fred ludie and it was founded on a simple idea that we were going to make work better for people and what we would do therefore is listen to our customers about the problems that they had and design solutions with them for the to get them to answers so in my world that means that I'm not just going to describe the speeds and feeds of the products in fact I'm going to dial in to the solutions that our customers want to talk to us about and the business outcomes that they need there are seven solutions that we go to market where they'll just briefly tell you a little bit about those the first one is modernize IT Service Management customers are asking us we have a legacy IT service management infrastructure how get help desk from IT help us to modernize that we know we can do better than our antiquated process that's what you started that's where we started thank you and then you know we've migrated in IT to a much richer conversation around help you eliminate service outages how can we predict anomalies before they happen in your IT environment and then I want to run IT like a business I know you're gonna be talking to our CIO later in the series a lot of what modern CIOs are thinking about is looking at all the projects across the companies how can I support those with IT to transform the organization those are our IT conversations we have conversations happening in HR and they want to consumer eyes the employee experience and then customer service how can I improve customer satisfaction by resolving those underlying issues faster in security operations how can I resolve vulnerabilities and incidents faster and finally we open up our our whole platform to allow anyone to build applications that are intelligent and smart take advantage of all those platform capabilities around great user experience those are the seven solutions that would go to market with and our customers care about those outcomes against those seven solutions so increasingly the marketing organization is talking in the language of business value to what extent are our customers doing those seven things what business value of they had have they increased IT productivity by 20% have they resolved those security incidents 45% faster and we're talking in that language and we're helping customers accelerate their time to get to those outcomes increasingly the modern marketer I think is stepping into that role not just get the leads get them to our sales team but really thinking about the whole way through getting those customers to this end outcomes yeah I want to talk to you about that a little bit but let me take a quick Waypoint here that you mentioned earlier the biggest sea world the market has always been familiar with the role the data could play within our organization simply because in most b2c circumstances you have a lot of customers that are doing that value in exchange you know I'm buying dumb a lot of people are buying go but one of the things that's interesting about the b2b world especially as we move to this notion of value in utility this solution the ongoing service provisioning is we don't have a lot of customers with limited engagement we have perhaps fewer customers but with a lot of engagement because now it's at a service level and that creates new forms of data new types of data a much richer set of insights and what customers are doing how are you using that to inform marketing do a better job of serving customers do a better job of service sales do a better job of serving Cheryl yeah and it's a question I love and you know I'll interpret the questions how do we get customer insight how do we make sure that our marketing is customer centric and not generic we have a few feelers for that you talk about a data obviously from a web perspective we have really good fidelity on where customers are going what they're interacting with what demos they're doing what the conversion rates of those are we also have a lot of physical world interactions so my organization runs the EBC it's policy yeah executive briefing center drive so it's probably the executive briefing center we have hundreds of customers joining us we actually survey them and ask them what's top of mind we begin every one of our ABCs for the section called voice of customer where we hear from them what's most important for them as our product teams come and have those discussions they're gleaning from those customers what are they most want to talk about what are they most want to hear about and because all of that data is captured on a platform that she becomes rich and actionable for the rest of my product marketing organization that's a set of customer insights our knowledge event so we have an annual user conference called knowledge this year knowledge 18 will actually have around 18,000 registrants so you know these are become small little intimate a huge huge event but what's very unique about our event is 95% of the sessions are designed by and delivered by customers this isn't a marketing event this is a peer group event of customers teaching customers telling customers what they've learned sharing their experiences so when we do a we do a call for content for knowledge we're really building our agenda based on exactly what the data is telling us what our customers want to hear about what do they want to say again that's really from marketing perspective just such rich ground for us to learn exactly what they care about we have customer feelers of course you know through all of our our activities that we're doing in the field in fact not a single field activity that my team does is without a customer so every time we're getting that rich insight you know to the point which I'd say we are a customer centric marketing organization is there any other way well some would say that there there might be but they're probably gonna get eaten by ServiceNow over the course of the next few years but let me really tie this back because again historically marketers have been asked to get engaged customers generate leads that funnel you know get us that original group that's going to want to talk to us and marketers have sometimes taken some very annoying approaches to make this happen one of the things that our research shows is that increasingly the sustained engagement requires that marketing also has to be a source of value to customers you mentioned the community approach at your big conference and the fact that you're providing content providing information that the customers will find valuable do you subscribe to that notion that marketing should be a source of value to customers in addition to others what do you think yeah absolutely I think if you have this limited mindset that somehow you're getting a lead and leaders victory I think it's game over you talked about community I'll just build on that real quick ServiceNow as a very active community itself online with 150,000 community members my team run the community we literally provide advice to the community that's one of the most joyful things that we can do similarly my relationship with sales isn't you know her over the lead we're working with the sales team to understand how they want to develop those accounts what are the accounts need from them and that really influences my marketing plan so I see us definitely as part of value exchange with customers so we believe pretty strongly also that the marketing function because of this orientation towards outcome because of the you know a services increasingly a services approach an ongoing sense of value and the fact that you have this rich opportunity to capture data has to take a more broader whole lifecycle role in customer engagement that doesn't mean that sales is less important which is I think a mistake that many of maids at OU fewer sales people and I think that sales gets more focused that much more important more of a problem-solving function for customers but talk to me a little bit about this idea of marketing becoming more a part of the entire customer journey and not just that discover and evaluate phase first of all do you agree with me and second of all how's it playing out for your team well I'd say you know one of the amazing things about a subscription business and you know we're in a subscription businesses customers get to vote with their feet every month Venus is a subscription the great news is service now our neural rates are over 97 percent which is you know yeah well in a lot of other businesses they talk about 85 and b2b they talk about 85% being good but 97% is almost be to see like churn numbers there is only one way to get that and that is the entire company needs to be focused on customer success the way we think about how we develop products through our sales team is engaged in their marketing teams engage is around customer success so I think it's almost like if you don't have that hat on and the executive seat you never get to get those numbers so my role half three quarters is customer success ultimately that's what I'm doing and you may start to see a lot more of how we go to market you know really having a lot more of that success mindset I'm looking forward to knowledge 18 I think you'll see a very different orientation from us at that conference you'll see things like success clinics things like office hours and a whole bunch of other best practices that we're going to be sharing with our customers and that helping customers get to value quicker is very much something I care deeply about and that's really a big orientation for my team so you mentioned if they don't have the hat on then it's not going to work that says something about culture and says something about the type of people that you hire and bring in service now is growing very very rapidly give us a couple of key things if we had a group of marketers here and you said the one thing you need in the culture beyond just customer centric but the one thing you need is this and then one thing you need about when you look for people what's the one thing you need in the marketing culture you know it's such a fast-moving space I'd actually say me this combination of innovation and execution execution is clear that means you do have a relationship with a product team your relationship the sales team your relationship with your customers and they have needs and those things need executing on but also because it's such a fast moving environment the nature of the job is changing the nature of the toolset is changing what our customers need which is ultimately driving it is changing very fast you have to have this sense of innovation this idea you know Jeff Bezos of Amazon talks about it this idea of day one so it's really day one for how you do those traditional things in marketing because they're not being done in the same way everyone needs to come with that day one mindset you learn you go and we can execute that so a culture performance and nonetheless is porous and open to change people what kind of people what kind of things are you looking for when when you sit down an interview potential service now marketing employee and of course we have those different functions so there's functional skills sort of harder skills but again I'd probably say the same thing it's that ability to innovate because a lot of what we're doing hasn't been done before or it's not done well and we want to do it better we want to reimagine and reinvent so that idea of dynamism and flexibility and then this underlying execution is can you get it done we want to be an organization that commits to things and gets them done so in the thing that's the combination of those two things and then those functional disciplines of course we've got product marketing we have digital marketers we have some of the you know folks we're qualifying the leads we call those ad hours they'll have a very different functional disciplines and then some of those underlying values I think so you and I are having the same conversation in twenty eight twenty three what is the one thing that you're doing more of in 2023 than you're doing today what is the one thing you're doing less of in 2023 than you're doing today you know I'm going to use the customers the North Star on that as well I think will be even more intimate with our customers in 2023 that's how I'm grounded some organizations grounded that's how my company's grounded I don't think we can go far enough on that they're spending more time with them looking at the data more engaging with sales more to understand what's working what's not working ensuring they get to value that's really as possible being so speed the value time to value and increase the level of value that serves and I was able to provide yeah okay what's one thing you're doing loss of talking to me that's great this is a great question I want to give it to giver the right you know the right mindset you know I think so much is going to change I think the way we go about what we do is going to change fundamentally I think the way we think about events is going to be different I think away we think about meetings is going to be different the way we engage is going to be different it's going to be all driven by that North Star of the customer so I can't even imagine what it's going to look like and that's why it's such an exciting profession it really is more or less how about outbound more or less outbound I think that will look just different I think we'll be doing outbound I think I'll have a different flavor and that's one of the things I love about my job that's why I get up every day because it's all going to be different what we're doing now is entirely different than it was two years ago but it's super exciting so reflecting what you said about the culture that you want the people that you hire you yourself are performing great growth in service now while at the same time being very porous very flexible to change and anticipating expecting it that's it paid off all right Dan Rogers thank you very much for come on on in Dan Rogers service now and his great cube conversation Dan again thanks very much for coming here and we look forward to I'm Peter burns from our Palo Alto studios and we look forward to having another cube conversation with you [Music] you

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamOn 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans, everybody, I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. There's been a lot of talk of course this week because of WannaCry about ransomware. Edward Haletki is here, he is the principal at TVP Strategy and he and I were having a conversation the other night about ransomware. Edward is a security expert, strategist, been around a long time, Edward, good to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me again. >> Let's riff on this a little bit. You had some really, I thought, thought-provoking ideas about ransomware. I was making the point that look, if you got an air gap, you're good, right, and you said, "Well, no," I said, "Well, what if you have an offsite tape?" And you said, "Well, it's not that simple." >> Edward: It really isn't. >> What's the deal with how to protect myself against ransomware? >> Well, let's just start with a few things. This particular about of ransomware is actually in version 2.0. So the guy found the kill switch for the first version, they already fixed that bug and put it out again. So now it's hitting over 200,000 machines in 99 countries. It's spreading around the world like crazy. The only way that I found to protect yourself is to actually have the ability to do, in a lot of ways, versioned writes. In other words, you keep a version of everything. That's important, but you got to first figure out what's important. But it's more than that. It's an entire architecture around data protection, security and even your business. You need to start with, if you're talking about from the security perspective, you need to start with a way to prevent what's known. If I can prevent what's known from getting to you, like phishing attacks and other attacks, I can prevent you from spreading ransomware into your company. So that's kind of a gate, but if that comes through the gate which it could and it did, you need something able to detect ransomware. And that is a detection that data protection's prime to do. >> But like, okay, explain this. Sort of revisit the conversation we had. If I have an air gap, meaning I've got a separate data center that's disconnected somehow or periodically disconnected, as some vendors have suggested, I'll rotate the connection. And I've got data off site. Let's say I've even got it off site in tape, even though I would ideally not like to recover from tape. Why am I not protected in that scenario? >> It depends on the retention schedule. If the retention schedule's long enough, you'd probably be fine. Most people don't find out there's ransomware until they reboot a machine. >> Dave: And they've rotated through their tapes by then, you're saying. >> They could possibly do that. Some of the smaller businesses, they probably have. Some of the larger businesses that keep yearly and monthly and so forth, and they keep them for seven years probably haven't. But as we move move further and further away from tape and more to the connected universe, even multiple copies of something doesn't necessarily protect you, unless they're immutable copies. >> Well, Phil, Bill Philbin said it today, he said, in a different way, he said, "When we make boo-boos "and we replicate the boo-boos, we replicate really fast," and I tweeted out, I said, well, if there's malicious encryption, that probably replicates really fast. >> Edward: It does. >> Okay, and so. I mean, maybe we should explain the basics here as that's really what the ransomware folks are doing, right, they're encrypting your data and then saying, "Hey, you want the keys back, you got to pay us," is that-- >> Well, and actually, the new breed is, "Hey, pay us and we won't even give you the keys." >> Well, you know, I was watching CNBC the other day when WannaCry hit and one of the experts that they had on, the CNBC analysts asked them, the anchor's asked them, "Well, what do you do?" And they said, "Well, unfortunately, "you just might have to pay the ransom," which was surprising to me because there's no guarantee you're going to get the keys. >> The keys, but it's actually 60 million dollars worth of ransom right now. That's a lot of money. >> Okay, so-- >> I mean, this is, it's 300 dollars a bitcoin to get your key. >> Dave: Right, you're paying in bitcoin, obviously. >> Which is also, that's expensive to get. And a lot of companies just don't have bitcoins lying around, so they have to go out to either mine them or-- >> Dave: Or go to a marketplace. >> Go to marketplace and buy them. >> Especially the people that are still running Windows XP aren't necessarily the people that are bitcoin experts. >> Exactly. >> Okay, so now, what you had suggested to me was that the backup software vendor, we're here at VeeamOn and we're at a Veeam event, backup software vendor actually has data because they're pushing change data to the network periodically. And in theory, they could use analytics to identify anomalous behavior. >> Edward: Exactly. >> In terms of encryption activity that's higher than normal. Explain that. >> Well, there's a couple of ways you can do that. One is that you could look at the CPU utilization, say hey, it's a high CPU utilization, something's going on. Unfortunately, you can't tell if that's a normal action or a non-action, an encryption action, especially with the new chipsets, encryption's very very fast. And the overhead's very very little, could just hide in the noise. When you look at data though, as it gets encrypted, when I do data protection, normally in a virtualized environment or even in a physical environment these days we do something called change block tracking. Or the equivalent thereof in the physical world. And what that does is that, for every block that changes of the file system, I can, that gets sent over to be protected. So as those increase because I'm encrypting more and more and more, you're going to see an increase in the number of blocks that have changed. You could say normally that machine does maybe a kilobyte per backup. And suddenly you're doing a gigabyte. That's a huge difference, that's a big red flag saying hey, something's gone wrong, that's not normal. >> What about this idea of like, honeypot files, like here's where we store all the credit cards file. >> Edward: Oh, we call them canary files. >> Canary files, great. >> And this is, canary files are another way you can detect things. If you have a file server, you should just put a canary file out there, nice juicy name, you know, CEO's whatever, something like that, a spreadsheet, it could be an expense report that you know is ancient. It doesn't make any difference. What that canary file is used for is you just periodically query the file, like, can I read you? It doesn't have to be a big file, it just means I can read you, 'cause it's going to encrypt the whole thing. Once I can't read it anymore, you know, you've been hit by ransomware usually. >> Right, because there's no reason you would've encrypted that file. >> Or even touched it, no one should be touching it. >> Dave: Right, some zombie file. >> Exactly. >> Okay. Now, for a company like Veeam to put a solution, I mean, I'm making the case that there should be specific solutions in the marketplace for ransomware. >> Edward: Oh, absolutely. >> Not just a sort of hand waving and buy our product because of ransomware, it should be a specific solution geared towards solving the problem. What does that solution look like, how would a company like Veeam, who would the partners be that they would put that together, what types of companies would they need, what type of capabilities would be required? >> Well, for Veeam, I think you need four general capabilities. They have one of them, that's the recovery stage. They have instant, the capability to do instant recoveries. That is a must, so if you have ransomware, to recover the business, you just do an instant recovery of a known good source. The other one is on the front end, you really need the prevention. In other words, I'm going to prevent people from doing fishing or I'm going to prevent attacks coming in with that type of payload. So if it's an encrypted payload, don't let it through. Those are possible. The middle of it is the detection, and then what we call legal hold. In other words, I want to say, okay, I detected the possibility of ransomware. And then I want to mark this recover point, the one that I'm currently backing up, as potential for ransomware so the one before that is the one I say, "Hey, don't delete that one "until I've inspected it," and that's the one you may do the instant recovery off of. >> Okay, so prevention, I mean, that's just good practice. But let's assume for a second-- >> That's a security company has those capabilities, some of them do a really good job at that, but even with something like WannaCry, you can't prevent someone from clicking on a link. >> Right, so assume for a second that I didn't prevent it. So I should do that as best practice, but assume I didn't prevent it, so I got to have detection. >> Edward: Absolutely. >> They've penetrated, now I'm using what, analytics to look for anomalous behavior? >> I'm either using a canary file or I'm using analytics at the data protection layer. I could even use analytics at the storage layer to say, "Hey, there's a lot of changes happening," that's going to go down the storage path and I'm going to be able to see it there as well. >> Okay, and then legal hold, in 2006 when the federal rules of civil procedure changed and they said electronic documents are now admissible. Most large companies and certainly large companies in regulated industries began to implement techniques to do legal holds, particularly around email archiving, which was just one piece of the problem. That's a complicated problem. >> It is, but it's really legal hold like. It's the concepts of legal hold, but applied specifically to data protection. In other words, you want to say the recover point that I'm currently writing to could be bad. We don't know, so mark the recover point previous to that as don't delete. Don't mark the one you're just doing, it's the one previous to that. 'Cause what could happen is you may not do the instant restore 'cause they're fine. But three days later when that one's going to roll off, it rolls off and it may go away. And if it goes away, you're sunk. >> Okay, and then fast recovery, which is the capability that you said Veeam has, obviously. >> Edward: I would say some recovery, yeah. >> Am I to infer that an air gap is not required? >> Well, when you start doing the... It is and isn't. If you have a good architecture, that architecture's going to include things like going to an immutable storage source. So I'm going to store my backups on an immutable source or target. And that immutable target, the best one today is really an object store where it has versioned rights. Every version that gets written is immutable. So as you do data protection, you write to a new version a full image, so it's a synthetic full image that gets put into that blob of storage. So I have my target for, my Veeam target, let's say, and then Veeam would replicated that or do something to put that on this object store for versioned writes. Then what happens is I can either restore from the Veeam target, but let's say that gets corrupted, now I can go back to the object store as the ultimate source saying, "Hey, I'll just go back "to the immutable versions." >> Okay, when I hear immutability, I often think of blockchain. Can blockchain, does it fit in here in the future, can it help solve problems like this? >> Yes and no, blockchain is actually very old. We've been doing blockchain encryption for ages. EBC was an electronic blockchain for encryption. I'm not sure it's actually going to solve that problem. But immutable is basically non-writable, that's what I'm talking about, you can't change it once it's written. And if you can protect that using blockchain and the metadata and all that, that's fine. But I don't think that's necessary. >> It's like containers too. Everything's been around forever. (laughs) >> It has been. I mean, when you think about, but this particular one is really taking advantage of what object stores have to offer today. And there's several companies that have that capability and it adds a nice layer, we think it's archive, but it's not, to me it would be the intermediary. It's the pre-archive, it's kind of like, okay, put it there, and then I may archive that off on a retention schedule. >> Excellent, Edward, great analysis, thank you very much, appreciate that, so Stu, let me bring you into the conversation, put a bow on VeeamOn 2017, what are you takeaways? >> So Dave, we go to a lot of shows and love when you have a community that's excited. That term love is not one that you hear at many shows, I mean, I'm sure Edward probably-- >> Edward: I would agree. >> I love VMware bumper stickers that people have. Technology is, you know, we're down in the weeds here. I mean, here's people that are passionate about availability and backup. The thing that I was looking for coming on to this show, Dave, is what they addressed, you know, day one and the main keynote. Which is the big wave of virtualization has kind of gone past, you know, the peak of where it is. And how can they look at that next generation, can they hop on the waves? The things that I really liked, we got to talk to a lot of customers, Dave, customers, passionate, not only the enterprise where they've been getting into, but talked to a number of service providers including some interviews that we did where they like what they're doing, they keep building. Public cloud and where Veeam fits, I think it's early days. Want to see how that develops, want to see how customers use it, we did talk to one customer that was really excited about where that'll fit in. I like that Veeam has, you know, clear eyes as to where their future is and they're embracing that change. I always hear, sometimes you hear that term embrace and you're like, yeah yeah yeah, sure, you're kind of giving it lip service, but are you going to be able to move forward on that new trend, because as we talked, Dave, in a couple of segments here during our two days of interviews, usually when there's a shift in the landscape, the players change, the previous incumbent will not be the leader going forward. And Veeam has a strong team, they've put a lot of new people in place, and they know where the battles will be fought. Early days in some of this next wave, but it was exciting to be here and happy to share it with you. >> Yeah, I mean, I learned a lot about Veeam. Most of my interaction with the company have been either informal or kick in the tires, v tugs and v mugs where you've seen them for years. I came in knowing that the press releases talked about 600 million dollars in bookings, ambitions to become a billion dollar company. Very rapid growth rate, 45,000 partners. So that was quite interesting, to see that in action. This company's got real big ambitions, this idea of being sort of the availability expert for whatever use case you want, whether it's in the cloud or going to the cloud or coming from the cloud or between clouds, is very ambitious. I think that's a wide open space. I suspect it's a big market, although it's really emerging, and I suspect all the individual cloud vendors are going to be going, trying to protect their little parts of the world, companies like VMware are going to want to try to own that inter-clouding space and other startups are trying to get in there. It's a sort of jump ball in my view there, but I like the ambition. It was interesting to hear Peter McKay talk about Veeam in the context of software companies that are growing and growing fast, getting to 800 million which they're not there yet, the likes of Workday and Salesforce and ServiceNow. Of course, those are all public companies and Veeam is a private company, so it can write its own narrative. >> They've got enough revenue, Dave, that they could be public. There've been plenty of companies that have IPOed with much less revenue. I'm shocked you haven't mentioned it, Dave, profitability. I mean, in today's day and age, a company of the size that they are, and they're still growing at a rapid pace and they are profitable. So you know, kudos there. >> Yeah, and then the other thing that struck me was the pace of product announcements, I always look for that. At a lot of the shows that we go to, you hear a lot of hand waving about digital transformation, but you don't see a lot of products coming out. So there was some excitement around the products, so that's a good sign that they can turn strategy into R&D into products that sell that the partners are taking and uptaking. So it was a good sort of first experience certainly for me at VeeamOn and theCUBE, and Stu, always a pleasure working with you, we got, excuse me, get to take a break. The boys get to go home after 20 days on the road, and then, you know, we're cranking up again. We got shows every single week in June, multiple shows, US, international, so to to siliconangle.tv, check that out, check out our schedule. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news, wikibon.com is cranking some stuff out as well. Edward, thanks for sitting in. >> Oh, my pleasure. I do have one thing to interject, I've actually looked at Veeam from a totally different perspective. I've been watching them and monitoring them for about 10 years. From their technology perspective. Actually over 10 years, I started with them. So I went through the virtualization, backup wars with them and all the other companies. Their rate of innovation, their rate of change has actually been far greater than many other data protection companies. It's not just their new releases, it's their whole, they've gone through several shifts in messaging. And several shifts in what their products do. And it's been fascinating to watch. >> Well, and that's a really good point, because a lot of the traditional backup software companies are living on maintenance. And it seems like Veeam is trying to, as Pat Gelsinger says, catch the wave and not be left in the dust as driftwood. All right, we're going to leave it there, thanks for watching, everybody. We will see you next time, and take care. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome back to the three days of live coverage here at Red Hat Summit 2017. The sixth key note of the week just wrapped up. Everybody's streamin' out. We've got a couple more segments. Happy to welcome back to the program a couple gentlemen we had on actually the Open Stack Summit. John Allessio, who'd the vice president of - And Nick Hopman, who's the senior director of Emerging Technology Practices, both with Red Hat. Gentlemen, great to see you again. >> Great to see you again Stu, good afternoon. >> Yeah, so a year ago you guys launched this idea of the Open Innovation Labs. We're opening these labs this year. You've got some customers. We actually had Optum on earlier in the week. We're going to have the easiER AG guys on, I should say - I was corrected earlier this week. I shouldn't say guys, actually I think it's two doctors, a man and a woman that are on. >> Andre and Dorothy. Andre and Dorothy - so really amazing customer testimonials for working through. So John, why don't you start with, you know, give us the update on the innovation lab program. Open and innovation get, you know, discussed a lot. Give us the real meat of what happens. >> So, just maybe a quick recap. >> Yeah. >> So Stu, we had about oh a year and a half ago or so, our strategic advisory board tell us, Red Hat, we really are looking for you to help show us the way in how to develop software, but also kind of help us leverage this culture that Red Hat has and developing software the Red Hat way. And so we worked with about a dozen clients across the globe, got a lot of great feedback on what they were looking for. We created an offering and then we launched it, as you said in Austin at Open Stack Summit. And now we've done many engagements in Europe and in North America across multiple different industries. We had here at the Summit this week actually two clients talk on the main stage, both Optum and easiER AG. And both of them have been through innovation lab engagements. Very different industries, very different clients, but what it has proven in both cases is it's really been a great way and a great catalyst to kind of spark innovation, whether it's within an existing IT infrastructure or building out some capability in particular customer environments, like we did with Optum, or kind of taking some ideas. And I'll let Dorothy and Andre tell their story when they come on and work with you. I don't want to take their thunder. But a great way to show you how we can work with a start up and really help them kind of take their vision and make it reality in an application. >> Yeah, Nick, you know, we've done so many interviews about the various pieces, lots of interesting business. It reminds me of that kind of pipelining that you talk about. One of the announcements this week was Open Shift IO, which it helps with kind of the application modernization. Can you maybe help us, you know, put together how the products that Red Hat does and what you're doing in the Open Innovation Labs, how do those go together and mesh and new stuff come in? >> It's actually kind of at the core of what we do anyway. So, we are building on top of the foundation, the technologies at Red Hat's core platform. But in a residency with Open Innovation Labs we are tying in other technologies, other things outside of the Stack. But with like Open Shift IO, what we've created was what we called the push button infrastructure. How are we showing with the process and everything to innovate on top of the Red Hat technology? How do we accelerate that journey? And so we created what was called the push button infrastructure to show that foundational acceleration, and Open Shift IO is actually now kind of part of that core. And adding in other components, other technologies that Red Hat has, whether it's our ISV partners, things in Open Shift commons, all those things to accelerate the application development experience. And so I think with Open Shift IO and as Red Hat continues to evolve in the development kind of tooling landscape, you're going to see how we are helping our customers do cloud data of application development more so than ever before. >> Yep, and maybe to add to that too, Nick, we were talking to a client this morning about some of their challenges and their priorities for this current physical year, And that particular client was talking about Jenkins and a number of non-Red Hat technologies as well because at the end of the day, our customers have Red Hat products, have non-Red Hat products. I think the great thing that maybe you can mention is when you look at that push button infrastructure that we've built, it's not really a Red Hat thing, although it clearly is tied to the Red Hat technology. But it's even bigger than that. And I think that would be important for the team to understand. >> Yeah so we actually have online is what we call our text stack, and it allows the customer to kind of select the current technologies that we've currently got integrated into our push button infrastructure, and it's always evolving. So I think what we're trying to bring to the table from a technology perspective is our more prescriptive approach. But it's always changing, always evolving. So if customers are wanting to use x or y technology, we're able to integrate with that. But even more so, if you take that technology to the foundation, put a couple of droplets of the Red Hat DNA and the culture is really where that innovation and that inspiration kind of where it's - it's culminating on top of it. So they're building out the applications, like the easiER AG examples. >> John: Yeah, excellent. >> It's great, I always love - By the time we get to the end here, oh I see some of the common threads. You know, for example, Ansible's acquired a year and a half ago, boy we've seen Ansible you know weave it's way into a lot of products. >> Nick: Sure. >> Was talking to Ashush just a sort while ago. And the Open Stack commons, which reflected what you were just talking about is customers are coming, they're sharing their stories. And it's not all Red Hat pieces. One thing I think, I go to a lot of technology shows, and it's usually, "Oh, well we want to talk about solutions." But by these pieces, and Red Hat at it's core it's all open source, and therefore there's always going to be other pieces that tie in. How do you extend as to how much of this is driven by the Red Hat business versus you know the problems of the customer? I'm sure those mesh together pretty well, but maybe some learning you've had over the last year that you could share on that. >> Sure. I think one of the great starting points Stu is what we try and do in every case is start with what we call is a discovery session. So it's one of our consultants, or one of our solution architects really going into the client and having a discussion around what is the business problem we're trying to solve, or what is the business opportunity we're trying to capitalize upon. And from there, you know we have a half day to a day kind of discussion around what these priorities are, and then we come back to them with the deliverable that says okay, here's how we could solve that problem. Now there will be areas that we of course think we have Red Hat technology that absolutely is a perfect fit. We're going to put it in and make that as a recommendation. But there's going to be other technologies that we're also going to recommend as well. And I think that's what we've learned in these Innovation Lab engagements. Because often it's a discussion with IT of course, but also a discussion with line of business. And sometimes what happens in these discovery sessions is sometimes it's the line of business and IT perhaps connecting for the first time on this particular topic. And so we'll come back with that approach and it'll be an approach that's tailored to that customer environment. >> One thing kind of pivots a little bit from the topic of the technology, but I mean the culture and how we're doing this. I mean we are working with ISV's and things of how they could come through the residency to get things spun up into Open Shift commons and get their technology in the Stack or integrated with Red Hat's technical solutions. But on the other hand, you know really when they come in and they work with us, they're driving forward with looking at you know changes of their culture. They're trying to do digital transformation. They're trying to do these different types of things, but working with that cross-functional team. They're coming up with, oh wow, we were solving the problems the wrong way. And that's kind of just the point of the discovery session, figuring out what those business challenges are is really kind of what we're bubbling up with that process. >> Yeah, I'm curious. When I think to just open innovation, even outside of the technology world, sometimes we can learn a lot from people that aren't doing the same kind of things that we've been doing. I know you've got a couple of case studies here, customers sharing their stories, but how do we allow the community to learn more? When they get engaged in the innovation lab are customers sharing a little bit more? We know certain industries are more open to sharing than others, but what are they willing to share? What don't they share? How do you balance that kind of security if you will of their own IP as separate from the processes that they're doing? >> John: Sure. >> It's actually kind of interesting, we had a story this week, we have an engagement going on in our London space, which will be launching in a week and a half. But they're going on right now. And there was a customer that was kind of coming through for a regular executive briefing if you will. And we walked him through the space. And they saw the teams working in there and they were before in the sales kind of meaning, they were a little bit close-minded and close-sourced if you will. Trying to not want to share some of their core nuggets of their IP if you will. And once they saw kind of the collaborative landscape, and this is not even technology based, but just the culture of an open conversation. You know I hate to overuse - you know the sticky notes everywhere, the dev ops. I mean they were really doing a conversation with the customer that was engaging. And all of a sudden the customer that was there on the sales conversation goes, "I want to do this session, I want to go through this discovery session with you guys." And so I think customers are trying to do that. And the other thing is, in our spaces and in our locations, like Boston, we are actually having two team environments, and we've designed it to try and create collisions. So they're basically on two sides, but there's also a common area in the middle where we're trying to create those collisions to inspire that open conversation with our clients as well. Some may be comfortable with it, some might not be as comfortable with it, but we're going to challenge them. >> Nick, I love that term collisions. There's a small conference I go to in Providence. Haven't made it every year, but a few times. It's an innovation conference. And they call it the random collision of unusual suspects. It's the things we can learn from the people we don't know at all. Unfortunately, we're too much. You know, we know the people we know. We know a lot of the same information that we know. If somebody outside of the like three degrees of separation that you might find, that next really amazing thing that will help us move to the next piece, it brings me to my next point. You mentioned London and Boston, how do you decide where you're building your next centers, what's driving that kind of piece of it? And, you know, bring us up to speed as the two new locations, one of which if we had a good arm we might be able to throw a baseball and hit. >> Excellent, so let me just start by first of all saying, you know part of what we're doing here is it's this experiential residency is what it is. And that residency can happen at a client location, at a Red Hat location, or even a pop-up you know kind of third party location. And quite frankly, over the course of the last year, we've done all three of those scenarios. So all three of them are valid. As far as it relates to a Red Hat facility, what we try and do is find a location if we can that's either co-located with a large percentage of Red Hat clients, and or maybe Red Hat engineering. Because oftentimes we'll want to bring some of the engineers into these sessions. So, Mountain View, where we have a center today was a natural 'cause we have some engineering capability out on the west coast. And Boston is of course very natural as well because we have a very large engineering presence here in Boston. In fact, I'll let you talk a little bit about the Boston center 'cause that's going to be our next one that opens here in just a few weeks. So maybe Nick, talk a bit about you know what we're doing in the Boston center, which will be, if you will, our world wide hub for Red Hat innovation. It's not just going to be the Boston center, it's also going to be our world wide hub. >> No pun intended that it's in the hub that is Boston. >> You got it, you got it! >> Excellent. >> So you know, what are we doing in the innovation center, and the engineering center, and the customer briefing center all co-located in Boston. >> Yeah so it's actually going back to the collisions. We've even try and create collisions in our own organization. So it's actually an eight-shaped building. We've got four floors, or two floors on each side. So kind of effectively four floors. Engineering on one side on two floors, and an EBC on a floor above the Open Innovation Labs, and the Open Innovation Labs on the third floor if you will. And there's actually floor cut-outs, so people you know if they're coming in from an executive briefing, they can see down, see what's going on there. And then engineering on the other side. And the point there is that open culture just even within our organization, working with the engineers across the board, getting them over into our space, working with us to solving the problems. And showing, you know, I think the key point that I would hit on there is really trying to inspire customers what it's like to work in a community. So community powered innovation. All those types of things. And so the space is trying to do that. The collisions, the openness obviously, flexibility, but also what we're trying to do is create a platform or a catalyst of innovation. And whether or not it's in the location or pop-up location, we're trying to show the customer some of these principals that we're seeing that's effectively allowing Red Hat to drive the innovation, and how they can take that back into their own. So, you know the locations are great for driving a conversation from a sales perspective, and just overall showcasing it. But the reality is we've got this concept to innovate anywhere. We want to be able to take our technology, our open culture, everything you would want to use and go be able to take that back into your organization. 'Cause our immersive experience is only you know, it's kind of camp for coders or camp for the techies if you will. So you know that's working well, but that's not long term. Long term we have to show them how they can drive it forward, you know with themselves. >> Where do I sign up for the summer program? (all laugh) >> It's coming this summer. >> So Boston will launch in the end of June. >> End of June, early July. >> And the June timeframe we had, I don't know how many dozens of clients, and partners, and Red Hatters go through in hard hat tours this week, here at the Summit. And then in two weeks, we'll open in downtown or really in the heart of London. >> Stu: Alright, yeah, quick flat flight across the pond to get to London. Anything special about that location? >> I think just overall the locations all have a little bit of uniqueness to them. I they're definitely - we did design them to inspire innovation, thinking outside the box. So I think you know, if you go visit one of our locations you might a couple kind of hidden rooms if you will. Some other unique things. But overall, they are just hubs in general for the regions. Hubs of technology and innovation. And so from the go forward perspective I mean we are trying to say, you know, Red Hat is doing things different, thinking different. And these are kind of a way to show it. So trying to find that urban location that is a center point for people to be able to travel in and be able to experience that is really kind of the core. >> So London will open in two weeks, and then we're already working on blueprints for Singapore. >> Singapore, yeah. >> For our Asia hub, and had some great conversations with our leader for Latin America about some very initial plans for Latin America as well. So you know, we'll have great presence across the globe. We'll be able to bring this capability to customer sites. We've already done that. We'll be able to do pop ups. 'Cause even in some cases customers are saying you know we don't want to travel, but we want to get out of our home environment so we can really focus on this and have that immersive experience, and that intimate experience. So we'll do the pop ups as well. >> Driving change, we are seeing that that's the best way. Especially with this kind of, you know, the residency. It is a time box. So if we get them out of their day to day, some of the things, you know, sometimes are the things that are holding them out. Get them in the pop up location, get them outside of their space. All of a sudden their eyes open up. And we had a large retailer, international retailer that we did a project with on the west coast, and getting them out of their space got them coming back. The actual quotes from their executives and the key stakeholders were like they came back fired up. >> Stu: Yeah. >> And they came back motivated to try to make change without our organization. So it's disruption on every level. >> Yeah, you can't underestimate the motivation and the spirit that people come out of these engagements with. It's like a renewed sense of, "I can do this." And we saw that exactly with this retail engagement of really already working on preparing for Black Friday, and putting some great plans in place and really building that out for them. >> John Allessio, Nick Hopman; we always love digging in about the innovation. Absolutely something that excites most people of our industry. That doesn't? Maybe you're in the wrong industry. >> Exactly. >> We've got a couple more interviews. Stay tuned with us. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching the Cube. (light music)