(light music) (airy white noise rumbling) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. We're here, day four of our coverage of AWS re:Invent 22. There's been about, we've heard, north of 55,000 folks here in person. We're seeing only a fraction of that but it's packed in the expo center. We're at the Venetian Expo, Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. Dave, we've had such great conversations as we always do on theCUBE. With the AWS ecosystem, we're going to be talking with another partner on that ecosystem and what they're doing to innovate together next. >> Well, we know security is the number one topic on IT practitioners, mine, CIOs, CISOs. We also know that they don't have the bench strength, that's why they look to manage service providers, manage service security providers. It's a growing topic, we've talked about it. We talked about it at re:Inforce earlier this year. I think it was July, actually, and August, believe it or not, not everybody was at the Cape. It was pretty well attended conference and that's their security focus conference, exclusive on security. But there's a lot of security here too. >> Lot of security, we're going to be talking about that next. We have two guests from Capgemini joining us. Mike Wasielewski, the head of cloud security, and NextGen secure architectures, welcome Mike. Anne Saunders also joins us, the Director of Cybersecurity Technology Partnerships at Capgemini, welcome Anne. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Hey guys. >> So, day four of the show, how you feeling? >> Anne: Pretty good. >> Mike: It's a long show. >> It is a long, and it's still jamming in here. Normally on the last day, it dwindles down. Not here. >> No, the foot traffic around the booth and around the totality of this expo floor has been amazing, I think. >> It really has. Anne, I want to start with you. Capgemini making some moves in the waves in the cloud and cloud security spaces. Talk to us about what Cap's got going on there. >> Well, we actually have a variety of things going on. Very much partner driven. The SOC Essentials offering that Mike's going to talk about shortly is the kind of the starter offer where we're going to build from and build out from. SOC Essentials is definitely critical for establishing that foundation. A lot of good stuff coming along with partners. Since I manage the partners, I'm kind of keen on who we get involved with and how we work with them to build out value and focus on our overall cloud security strategy. Mike, you want to talk about SOC Essentials? >> Yeah, well, no, I mean, I think at Capgemini, we really say cybersecurity is part of our DNA and so as we look at what we do in the cloud, you'll find that security has always been an underpinning to a lot of what we deliver, whether it's on the DevSecOps services, migration services, stuff like that. But what we're really trying to do is be intentional about how we approach the security piece of the cloud in different ways, right? Traditional infrastructure, you mentioned the totality of security vendors here and at re:Inforce. We're really seeing that you have to approach it differently. So we're bringing together the right partners. We're using what's part of our DNA to really be able to drive the next generation of security inside those clouds for our clients and customers. So as Anne was talking about, we have a new service called the Capgemini Cloud SOC Essentials, and we've really brought our partners to bear, in this case Trend Micro, really bringing a lot of their intelligence and building off of what they do so that we can help customers. Services can be pretty expensive, right, when you go for the high end, or if you have to try to run one yourself, there's a lot of time, I think you mentioned earlier, right, the people's benches. It's really hard to have a really good cybersecurity people in those smaller businesses. So what we're trying to do is we're really trying to help companies, whether you're the really big buyers of the world or some of the smaller ones, right? We want to be able to give you the visibility and ability to deliver to your customers securely. So that's how we're approaching security now and we're cloud SOC Essentials, the new thing that we're announcing while we were here is really driving out of. >> When I came out of re:Invent, when you do these events, you get this Kool-Aid injection and after a while you're like hm, what did I learn? And one of the things that struck me in talking to people is you've got the shared responsibility model that the cloud has sort of created and I know there's complexities across cloud but let's just keep it at cloud generically for a moment. And then you've got the CISO, the AppDev, AppSecDev group is being asked to do a lot. They're kind of being dragged into security that's really not their wheelhouse and then you've got audit which is like the last line of defense. And so one of the things that struck me at re:Inforce is like, okay, Amazon, great job for their portion of the shared responsibility model but I didn't hear a lot in terms of making the CISO's life easier and I'm guessing that's where you guys come in. I wonder if you could talk about that trend, that conceptual layers that I just laid out and where you guys fit. >> Mike: Sure, so I think first and foremost, I always go back to a quote from, I think it's attributed to Peter Drucker, whether that's right or wrong, who knows? But culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? And I think what we've seen in our conversations with whether you're talking to the CISO, the application team, the AppDev team, wherever throughout the organization, we really see that culture is what's going to drive success or failure of security in the org, and so what we do is we really do bring that totality of perspective. We're not just cloud, not just security, not just AppDev. We can really bring across the totality of the Capgemini estate. So that when we go, and you're right, a CISO says, I'm having a hard time getting the app people to deliver what I need. If you just come from a security perspective, you're right, that's what's going to happen. So what we try to do is so, we've got a great DevSecOps service, for example in the cloud where we do that. We bring all the perspectives together, how do we align KPIs? That's a big problem, I think, for what you're seeing, making CISO's lives easier, is about making sure that the app team KPIs are aligned with the CISO's but also the CISO's KPIs are aligned with the app teams. And by doing that, we have had really great success in a number of organizations by giving them the tools then and the people on our side to be able to make those alignments at the business level, to drive the right business outcome, to drive the right security outcome, the right application outcome. That's where I think we've really come to play. >> Absolutely, and I will say from a partnering perspective, what's key in supporting that strategy is we will learn from our partners, we lean on our partners to understand what the trends they're seeing and where they're having an impact with regards to supporting the CISO and supporting the overall security strategy within a company. I mean, they're on the cutting edge. We do a lot to track their technology roadmaps. We do a lot to track how they build their buyer personas and what issues they're dealing with and what issues they're prepared to deal with regards to where they're investing and who's investing in them. A lot of strategy around which partner to bring in and support, how we're going to address the challenges, the CISO and the IT teams are having to kind of support that overall. Security is a part of everything, DNA kind of strategy. >> Yeah, do you have a favorite example, Anne, of a partner that came in with Capgemini, helped a customer really be able to do what Capgemini is doing and that is, have cybersecurity be actually part of their DNA when there's so many challenges, the skills gap. Any favorite example that really you think articulates how you're able to enable organizations to achieve just that? >> Anne: Well, actually the SOC Essentials offering that we're rolling out is a prime example of that. I mean, we work very, very closely with Trend on all fronts with regards to developing it. It's one of those completely collaborative from day one to going to the customer and that it's almost that seamless connectivity and just partnering at such a strategic level is a great example of how it's done right, and when it's done right, how successful it can be. >> Dave: Why Trend Micro? Because I mean, I'm sure you've seen, I think that's Optiv, has the eye test with all the tools and you talk to CISOs, they're like really trying to consolidate those tools. So I presume there's a portfolio play there, but tell us, tell the audience a little bit more about why Trend Micro and I mean your branding with them, why those guys? >> Well, it goes towards the technology, of course, and all the development they've done and their position within AWS and how they address assuring security for our clients who are moving onto and running their estates on AWS. There's such a long heritage with regards to their technology platform and what they've developed, that deep experience, that kind of the strength of the technology because of the longevity they've had and where they sit within their domain. I try to call partners out by their domain and their area of expertise is part of the reason, I mean. >> Yeah, I think another big part of it is Gartner is expecting, I think they published this out in the next three years, we expect to see another consolidation both inside of the enterprises as well as, I look back a couple years, when Palo Alto went on a very nice spending spree, right? And put together a lot of really great companies that built their Prisma platform. So what I think one of the reasons we picked Trend in this particular case is as we look forward for our customers and our clients, not just having point solutions, right? This isn't just about endpoint protection, this isn't just about security posture management. This is really who can take the totality of the customer's problems and deliver on the right outcomes from a single platform, and so when we look at companies like Trend, like Palo, some of the bigger partners for us, that's where we try to focus. They're definitely best in breed and we bring those to our customers too for certain things. But as we look to the future, I think really finding those partners that are going to be able to solve a swath of problems at the right price point for their customers, that is where I think we see the industry moving. >> Dave: And maybe be around as an independent company. Was that a factor as well? I mean, you see Thoma Bravo buying up all his hiring companies and right, so, and maybe they're trying to create something that could be competitive, but you're saying Trend Micros there, so. >> Well I think as Anne mentioned, the 30 year heritage, I think, of Trend Micro really driving this and I've done work with them in various past things. There's also a big part of just the people you like, the people that are good to work with, that are really trying to be customer obsessed, going back right, at an AWS event, the ones that get the cloud tend to be able to follow those Amazon LPs as well, right, just kind of naturally, and so I think when you look at the Trend Micros of the world, that's where that kind of cloud native piece comes out and I like working with that. >> In this environment, the macro environment, lets talk a bit, earning season, it's really mixed. I mean you're seeing some really good earnings, some mixed earnings, some good earnings with cautious guidance. So nobody really (indistinct), and it was for a period time there was a thinking that security was non-discretionary and it's clearly non-discretionary, but the CISO, she or he, doesn't have unlimited budgets, right? So what are you seeing in terms of how are customers dealing with this challenging macro environment? Is it through tools consolidation? Is that a play that's going on? What are you seeing in the customer base? >> Anne: I see ways, and we're working through this right now where we're actually weaving cybersecurity in at the very beginning of how we're designing offers across our entire offer portfolio, not just the cybersecurity business. So taking that approach in the long run will help contain costs and our hope, and we're already seeing it, is it's actually helping change the perception that security's that cost center and that final obstacle you have to get over and it's going to throw your margins off and all that sort of stuff. >> Dave: I like that, its at least is like a security cover charge. You're not getting in unless we do the security thing. >> Exactly, a security cover charge, that's what you should call it. >> Yeah. >> Like it. >> Another piece though, you mentioned earlier about making CISO's life easier, right? And I think, as Anne did a really absolutely true about building it in, not to the security stack but application developers, they want visibility they want observability, they want to do it right. They want CI/CD pipeline that can give them confidence in their security. So should the CISO have a budget issue, right? And they can't necessarily afford, but the application team as they're looking at what products they want to purchase, can I get a SaaS or a DaaS, right? The static or dynamic application security testing in my product up front and if the app team buys into that methodology, the CISO convinces them, yes, this is important. Now I've got two budgets to pull from, and in the end I end up with a cheaper, a lower cost of a service. So I think that's another way that we see with like DevSecOps and a few other services, that building in on day one that you mentioned. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> Getting both teams involved. >> Dave: That's interesting, Mike, because that's the alignment that you were talking about earlier in the KPIs and you're not a tech vendor saying, buy my product, you guys have deep consultancy backgrounds. >> Anne: And the customer appreciates that. >> Yeah. >> Anne: They see us as looking out for their best interest when we're trying to support them and help them and bringing it to the table at the very beginning as something that is there and we're conscientious of, just helps them in the long run and I think, they're seeing that, they appreciate that. >> Dave: Yeah, you can bring best practice around measurements, alignment, business process, stuff like that. Maybe even some industry expertise which you're not typically going to get from a product company. >> Well, one thing you just mentioned that I love talking about with Capgemini is the industry expertise, right? So when you look at systems integrators, there are a lot of really, really good ones. To say otherwise would be foolish. But Capgemini with our acquisition of Altran, a couple years ago, I think think it was, right? How many other GSIs or SIs are actually building silicon for IoT chips? So IoT's huge right now, the intelligent industry moving forward is going to drive a lot of those business outcomes that people are looking for. Who else can say we've built an autonomous vehicle, Capgemini can. Who can say that we've built the IoT devices from the ground up? We know not just how to integrate them into AWS, into the IoT services in the cloud, but to build and have that secure development for the firmware and all and that's where I think our customers really look to us as being those industry experts and being able to bring that totality of our business to bear for what they need to do to achieve their objectives to deliver to their customer. >> Dave: That's interesting. I mean, using silicon as a differentiator to drive a lot of business outcomes and security. >> Mike: Absolutely. >> I mean you see what Amazon's doing in silicon, Look at Apple. Look at what Tesla's doing with silicon. >> Dave: That's where you're seeing a lot of people start focusing 'cause not everybody can do it. >> Yeah. >> It's hard. >> Right. >> It's hard. >> And you'll see some interesting announcements from us and some interesting information and trends that we'll be driving because of where we're placed and what we have going around security and intelligent industry overall. We have a lot of investment going on there right now and again, from the partner perspective, it's an ecosystem of key partners that collectively work together to kind of create a seamless security posture for an intelligent industry initiative with these companies that we're working with. >> So last question, probably toughest question, and that's to give us a 30 second like elevator pitch or a billboard and I'm going to ask you, Anne, specifically about the SOC Essentials program powered by Trend Micro. Why should organizations look to that? >> Organizations should move to it or work with us on it because we have the expertise, we have the width and breadth to help them fill the gaps, be those eyes, be that team, the police behind it all, so to speak, and be the team behind them to make sure we're giving them the right information they need to actually act effectively on maintaining their security posture. >> Nice and then last question for you, Mike is that billboard, why should organizations in any industry work with Capgemini to help become an intelligent industrial player. >> Mike: Sure, so if you look at our board up top, right, we've got our tagline that says, "get the future you want." And that's what you're going to get with Capgemini. It's not just about selling a service, it's not just about what partners' right in reselling. We don't want that to be why you come to us. You, as a company have a vision and we will help you achieve that vision in a way that nobody else can because of our depth, because of the breadth that we have that's very hard to replicate. >> Awesome guys, that was great answers. Mike, Anne, thank you for spending some time with Dave and me on the program today talking about what's new with Capgemini. We'll be following this space. >> All right, thank you very much. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (gentle light music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome back to everyone, to "theCUBE's" coverage here in Seattle, Washington for Amazon Web Services Partner Marketplace Seller Conference, combining their partner network with Marketplace forming a new organization called AWS Partner Organization. This is "theCUBE" coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got great "Cube" alumni here from Zscaler, a very successful cloud company doing great work. Stelio D'Alo, senior director of cloud business development and Raveesh Chugh, VP of Public Cloud Partnerships at Zscaler. Welcome back to "theCUBE." Good to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks having us, John. >> So we've been doing a lot of coverage of Zscaler, what a great success story. I mean, the numbers are great. The business performance, it's in the top two, three, one, two, three in all metrics on public companies, SaaS. So you guys, check. Good job. >> Yes, thank you. >> So you guys have done a good job. Now you're here, selling through the Marketplace. You guys are a world class performing company in cloud SaaS, so you're in the front lines doing well. Now, Marketplace is a procurement front end opportunity for people to buy. Hey, self-service, buy and put things together. Sounds novel, what a great concept. Great cloud life. >> Yes. >> You guys are participating and now sellers are coming together. The merger of the public, the partner network with Marketplace. It feels like this is a second act for AWS to go to the next level. They got their training wheels done with partners. Now they're going to the next level. What do you guys think about this? >> Well, I think you're right, John. I think it is very much something that is in keeping with the way AWS does business. Very Amazonian, they're working back from the customer. What we're seeing is, our customers and in general, the market is gravitating towards purchase mechanisms and route to market that just are lower friction. So in the same way that companies are going through their digital transformations now, really modernizing the way they host applications and they reach the internet. They're also modernizing on the purchasing side, which is super exciting, because we're all motivated to help customers with that agility. >> You know, it's fun to watch and again I'm being really candid and props to you guys as a company. Now, everyone else is kind of following that. Okay, lift and shift, check, doing some things. Now they go, whoa, I can really build on this. People are building their own apps for their companies. Going to build their own stuff. They're going to use piece parts. They're going to put it together in a really scalable way. That's the new normal. Okay, so now they go okay, I'm going to just buy through the market, I get purchasing power. So you guys have been a real leader with AWS. Can you share what you guys are doing in the Marketplace? I think you guys are a nice example of how to execute the Marketplace. Take us through. What are you guys offering there? What's the contract look like? Is it multi-pronged? What's the approach? What do customers get if they go to the marketplace for Zscaler? >> Yeah, so it's been a very exciting story and been a very pleasing one for us with AWS marketplace. We see a huge growth potentially. There are more than 350,000 customers that are actively buying through Marketplace today. We expect that number to grow to around a million customers by the next, I would say, five to ten years and we want to be part of this wave. We see AWS Marketplace to be a channel where not only our resalers or our channel partners can come and transact, but also our GSIs like Accenture want to transact through this channel. We are doing a lot, in terms of bringing new customers through Marketplace, who want to not only close their deals, but close it in the next few hours. That's the beauty of Marketplace, the agility, the flexibility in terms of pricing that it provides to ISVs like us. If a customer wants to delay their payments by a couple of quarters, Marketplace supports that. If a customer wants to do monthly payments, Marketplace supports that. We are seeing lot of customers, big customers, that have signed EDPs, enterprise discount plans with AWS. These are multi-year cloud commits coming to us and saying we can retire our EDPs with AWS if we transact your solution through AWS Marketplace. So what we have done, as of today, we have all of our production services enabled through AWS Marketplace. What that means for customers, they can now retire their EDPs by buying Zscaler products through AWS Marketplace and in return get the full benefit of maximizing their EDP commits with AWS. >> So you guys are fully committed, no toe on the water, as we heard. You guys are all in. >> Absolutely, that's exactly the way to put it. We're all in, all of our solutions are available in the marketplace. As you mentioned, we're a SaaS provider. So we're one of the vendors in the Marketplace that have SaaS solutions. So unlike a lot of customers and even the market in general, associate the Marketplace for historical reasons, the way it started with a lot of monthly subscriptions and just dipping your toe in it from a consumer perspective. Whereas we're doing multimillion dollar, multi-year SaaS contracts. So the most complicated kinds of transactions you'd normally associate with enterprise software, we're doing in very low friction ways. >> On the Zscaler side going in low friction. >> Yep, yeah, that's right. >> How about the customer experience? >> So it is primarily the the customer that experiences. >> Driving it? >> Yeah, they're driving it and it's because rather than traditional methods of going through paperwork, purchase orders- >> What are some of the things that customers are saying about this, bcause I see two benefits, I'll say that. The friction, it's a channel, okay, for Zscaler. Let's be clear, but now you have a customer who's got a lot of Amazon. They're a trusted partner too. So why wouldn't they want to have one point of contact to use their purchasing power and you guys are okay with that. >> We're absolutely okay with it. The reason being, we're still doing the transaction and we can do the transaction with our... We're a channel first company, so that's another important distinction of how people tend to think of the Marketplace. We go through channel. A lot of our transactions are with traditional channel partners and you'd be surprised the kinds of, even the Telcos, carrier providers, are starting to embrace Marketplace. So from a customer perspective, it's less paperwork, less legal work. >> Yeah, I'd love to get your reaction to something, because I think this highlights to me what we've been reporting on with "theCUBE" with super cloud and other trends that are different in a good way. Taking it to the next level and that is that if you look at Zscaler, SaaS, SaaS is self-service, the scale, there's efficiencies. Marketplace first started out as a self-service catalog, a website, you know, click and choose, but now it's a different. He calls it a supply chain, like the CICD pipeline of buying software. He mentions that, there's also services. He put the Channel partners can come in. The GSIs, global system integrators can come in. So it's more than just a catalog now. It's kind of self-service procurement more than it is just a catalog of buy stuff. >> Yes, so yeah, I feel CEOs, CSOs of today should understand what Marketplace brings to the bear in terms of different kinds of services or Zscaler solutions that they can acquire through Marketplace and other ISV solutions, for that matter. I feel like we are at a point, after the pandemic, where there'll be a lot of digital exploration and companies can do more in terms of not just Marketplace, but also including the channel partners as part of deals. So you talked about channel conflict. AWS addressed this by bringing a program called CPPO in the picture, Channel Partner Private Offers. What that does is, we are not only bringing all our channel partners into deals. For renewals as well, they're the partner of record and they get paid alongside with the customer. So AWS does all the heavy lifting, in terms of disbursements of payments to us, to the channel partner, so it's a win-win situation for all. >> I mean, private offers and co-sale has been very popular. >> It has been, and that is our bread and butter in the Marketplace. Again, we do primarily three year contracts and so private offers work super well. A nice thing for us as a vendor is it provides a great amount of flexibility. Private Offer gives you a lot of optionality, in terms of how the constructs of the deal and whether or not you're working with a partner, how the partner is utilizing as well to resell to the end user. So, we've always talked about AWS giving IT agility. This gives purchasing and finance business agility. >> Yeah, and I think this comes up a lot. I just noticed this happening a lot more, where you see dedicated sessions, not just on DevOps and all the goodies of the cloud, financial strategy. >> Yeah. >> Seeing a lot more conversation around how to operationalize the business transactions in the cloud. >> Absolutely. >> This is the new, I mean it's not new, it's been thrown around, but not at a tech conference. You don't see that. So I got to ask you guys, what's the message to the CISOs and executives watching the business people about Zscaler in the Marketplace? What should they be looking at? What is the pitch for Zscaler for the Marketplace buyer? >> So I would say that we are a cloud-delivered network security service. We have been in this game for more than a decade. We have years of early head start with lots of features and functionality versus our competitors. If customers were to move into AWS Cloud, they can get rid of their next-gen firewalls and just have all the traffic routed through our Zscaler internet access and use Zscaler private access for accessing their private applications. We feel we have done everything in our capacity, in terms of enabling customers through Marketplace and will continue to participate in more features and functionality that Marketplace has to offer. We would like these customers to take advantage of their EDPs as well as their retirement and spend for the multi-commit through AWS Marketplace. Learn about what we have to offer and how we can really expedite the motion for them, if they want to procure our solutions through Marketplace >> You know, we're seeing an ability for them to get more creative, more progressive in terms of the purchasing. We're also doing, we're really excited about the ability to serve multiple markets. So we've had an immense amount of success in commercial. We also are seeing increasing amount of public sector, US federal government agencies that want to procure this way as well for the same reasons. So there's a lot of innovation going on. >> So you have the FedRAMP going on, you got all those certifications. >> Exactly right. So we are the first cloud-native solution to provide IL5 ATO, as well as FedRAMP pie and we make that all available, GSA schedule pricing through the AWS Marketplace, again through FSIs and other resellers. >> Public private partnerships have been a big factor, having that span of capability. I got to ask you about, this is a cool conversation, because now you're like, okay, I'm selling through the Marketplace. Companies themselves are changing how they operate. They don't just buy software that we used to use. So general purpose, bundled stuff. Oh yeah, I'm buying this product, because this has got a great solution and I have to get forced to use this firewall, because I bought this over here. That's not how companies are architecting and developing their businesses. It's no longer buying IT. They're building their company digitally. They have to be the application. So they're not sitting around, saying hey, can I get a solution? They're building and architecting their solution. This is kind of like the new enterprise that no one's talking about. They kind of, got to do their own work. >> Yes. >> There's no general purpose solution that maps every company. So they got to pick the best piece parts and integrate them. >> Yes and I feel- >> Do you guys agree with that? >> Yeah, I agree with that and customers don't want to go for point solutions anymore. They want to go with a platform approach. They want go with a vendor that can not only cut down their vendors from multi-dozens to maybe a dozen or less and that's where, you know, we kind of have pivoted to the platform-centric approach, where we not only help customers with Cloud Network Security, but we also help customers with Cloud Native Application Protection Platform that we just recently launched. It's going by the name of the different elements, including Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Identity Event Management and so we are continuously doing more and more on the configuration and vulnerability side space. So if a customer has an AWS S3 bucket that is opened it can be detected and can be remediated. So all of those proactive steps we are taking, in terms of enhancing our portfolio, but we have come a long way as a company, as a platform that we have evolved in the Marketplace. >> What's the hottest product? >> The hottest product? >> In Marketplace right now. >> Well, the fastest growing products include our digital experience products and we have new Cloud Protection. So we've got Posture and Workload Protection as well and those are the fastest growing. For AWS customers a strong affinity also for ZPA, which provides you zero trust access to your workloads on AWS. So those are all the most popular in Marketplace. >> Yeah. >> So I would like to add that we recently launched and this has been a few years, a couple of years. We launched a product called Zscaler Digital X, the ZDX. >> Mm-hmm. >> What that product does is, let's say you're making a Zoom call and your WiFi network is laggy or it's a Zoom server that's laggy. It kind of detects where is the problem and it further tells the IT department you need to fix either the server on which Zoom is running, or fix your home network. So that is the beauty of the product. So I think we are seeing massive growth with some of our new editions in the portfolio, which is a long time coming. >> Yeah and certainly a lot of growth opportunities for you guys, as you come in. Where do you see Zscaler's big growth coming from product-wise? What's the big push? Actually, this is great upside for you here. >> Yeah. >> On the go to market side. Where's the big growth for Zscaler right now? So I think we are focused as a company on zero trust architecture. We want to securely connect users to apps, apps to apps, workloads to workloads and machines to machines. We want to give customers an experience where they have direct access to the apps that's hidden from the outside world and they can securely connect to the apps in a very succinct fashion. The user experience is second to none. A lot of customers use us on the Microsoft Office 365 side, where they see a lag in connecting to Microsoft Office 365 directly. They use the IE service to securely connect. >> Yeah, latency kills. >> Microsoft Office 365. >> Latency kills, as we always say, you know and security, you got to look at the pattern, you want to see that data. >> Yeah, and emerging use cases, there is an immense amount of white space and upside for us as well in emerging use cases, like OT, 5G, IOT. >> Yeah. >> Federal government, DOD. >> Oh god, tactical edge government. >> Security at the edge, absolutely, yeah. >> Where's the big edge? What's the edge challenge right now, if you have to put your finger on the edge, because right now that's the hot area, we're watching that. It's going to be highly contested. It's not yet clear, I mean certainly hybrid is the operating model, cloud, distributing, computing, but edge has got unique things that you can't really point to on premises that's the same. It's highly dynamic, you need high bandwidth, low latency, compute at the edge. The data has to be processed right there. What's the big thing at the edge right now? >> Well, so that's probably an emerging answer. I mean, we're working with our customers, they're inventing and they're kind of finding the use cases for those edge, but one of the good things about Zscaler is that we are able to, we've got low latency at the edge. We're able to work as a computer at the edge. We work on Outpost, Snowball, Snowcone, the Snow devices. So we can be wherever our customers need us. Mobile devices, there are a lot of applications where we've got to be either on embedded devices, on tractors, providing security for those IOT devices. So we're pretty comfortable with where we are being the- >> So that's why you guys are financially doing so well, performance wise. I got to ask you though, because I think that brings up the great point. If this is why I like the Marketplace, if I'm a customer, the edge is highly dynamic. It's changing all the time. I don't want to wait to buy something. If I got my solution architects on a product, I need to know I'm going to have zero trust built in and I need to push the button on Zscaler. I don't want to wait. So how does the procurement side impact? What have you guys seen? Share your thoughts on how Marketplace is working from the procurement standpoint, because it seems to me to be fast. Is that right, or is it still slow on their side? On the buyer side, because this to me would be a benefit to developers, if we say, hey, the procurement can just go really fast. I don't want to go through a bunch of PO approvals or slow meetings. >> It can be, that manifests itself in several ways, John. It can be, for instance, somebody wants to do a POC and traditionally you could take any amount of time to get budget approval, take it through. What if you had a pre-approved cloud budget and that was spent primarily through AWS Marketplace, because it's consolidated data on your AWS invoice. The ability to purchase a POC on the Marketplace could be done literally within minutes of the decision being made to go forward with it. So that's kind of a front end, you know, early stage use case. We've got examples we didn't talk about on our recent earnings call of how we have helped customers bring in their procurement with large million dollar, multimillion dollar deals. Even when a resaler's been involved, one of our resaler partners. Being able to accelerate deals, because there's so much less legal work and traditional bureaucratic effort. >> Agility. >> That agility purchasing process has allowed our customers to pull into the quarter, or the end of month, or end of quarter for them, deals that would've otherwise not been able to be done. >> So this is a great example of where you can set policy and kind of create some guard rails around innovation and integration deals, knowing if it's something that the edge is happening, say okay, here's some budget. We approved it, or Amazon gives credits and partnership going on. Then I'd say, hey, well green light this, not to exceed a million dollars, or whatever number in their range and then let people have the freedom to execute. >> You're absolutely right, so from the purchasing side, it does give them that agility. It eliminates a lot of the processes that would push out a purchase in actual execution past when the business decision is made and quite frankly, to be honest, AWS has been very accommodative. They're a great partner. They've invested a lot in Marketplace, Marketplace programs, to help customers do the right thing and do it more quickly as well as vendors like us to help our customers make the decisions they need to. >> Rising tide, a rising tide floats all boats and you guys are a great example of an independent company. Highly successful on your own. >> Yep. >> Certainly the numbers are clear. Wall Street loves Zscaler and economics are great. >> Our customer CSAT numbers are off the scale as well. >> Customers are great and now you've got the Marketplace. This is again, a new normal. A new kind of ecosystem is developing where it's not like the old monolithic ecosystems. The value creation and extraction is happening differently now. It's kind of interesting. >> Yes and I feel we have a long way to go, but what I can tell you is that Zscaler is in this for the long run. We are seeing some of the competitors erupt in the space as well, but they have a long way to go. What we have built requires years worth of R&D and features and thousands of customer's use cases which kind of lead to something what Zscaler has come up with today. What we have is very unique and is going to continuously be an innovation in the market in the years to come. In terms of being more cloud-savvy or more cloud-focused or more cloud-native than what the market has seen so far in the form of next-gen firewalls. >> I know you guys have got a lot of AI work. We've had many conversations with Howie over there. Great stuff and really appreciate you guys participating in our super cloud event we had and we'll see more of that where we're talking about the next generation clouds, really enabling that new disruptive, open-spanning capabilities across multiple environments to run cloud-native modern applications at scale and secure. Appreciate your time to come on "theCUBE". >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks, I totally appreciate it. Zscaler, leading company here on "theCUBE" talking about their relationship with Marketplace as they continue to grow and succeed as technology goes to the next level in the cloud. Of course "theCUBE's" covering it here in Seattle. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (peaceful electronic music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome back to everyone, to "theCUBE's" coverage here in Seattle, Washington for Amazon Web Services Partner Marketplace Seller Conference, combining their partner network with Marketplace forming a new organization called AWS Partner Organization. This is "theCUBE" coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got great "Cube" alumni here from Zscaler, a very successful cloud company doing great work. Stelio D'Alo, senior director of cloud business development and Raveesh Chugh, VP of Public Cloud Partnerships at Zscaler. Welcome back to "theCUBE." Good to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks having us, John. >> So we've been doing a lot of coverage of Zscaler, what a great success story. I mean, the numbers are great. The business performance, it's in the top two, three, one, two, three in all metrics on public companies, SaaS. So you guys, check. Good job. >> Yes, thank you. >> So you guys have done a good job. Now you're here, selling through the Marketplace. You guys are a world class performing company in cloud SaaS, so you're in the front lines doing well. Now, Marketplace is a procurement front end opportunity for people to buy. Hey, self-service, buy and put things together. Sounds novel, what a great concept. Great cloud life. >> Yes. >> You guys are participating and now sellers are coming together. The merger of the public, the partner network with Marketplace. It feels like this is a second act for AWS to go to the next level. They got their training wheels done with partners. Now they're going to the next level. What do you guys think about this? >> Well, I think you're right, John. I think it is very much something that is in keeping with the way AWS does business. Very Amazonian, they're working back from the customer. What we're seeing is, our customers and in general, the market is gravitating towards purchase mechanisms and route to market that just are lower friction. So in the same way that companies are going through their digital transformations now, really modernizing the way they host applications and they reach the internet. They're also modernizing on the purchasing side, which is super exciting, because we're all motivated to help customers with that agility. >> You know, it's fun to watch and again I'm being really candid and props to you guys as a company. Now, everyone else is kind of following that. Okay, lift and shift, check, doing some things. Now they go, whoa, I can really build on this. People are building their own apps for their companies. Going to build their own stuff. They're going to use piece parts. They're going to put it together in a really scalable way. That's the new normal. Okay, so now they go okay, I'm going to just buy through the market, I get purchasing power. So you guys have been a real leader with AWS. Can you share what you guys are doing in the Marketplace? I think you guys are a nice example of how to execute the Marketplace. Take us through. What are you guys offering there? What's the contract look like? Is it multi-pronged? What's the approach? What do customers get if they go to the marketplace for Zscaler? >> Yeah, so it's been a very exciting story and been a very pleasing one for us with AWS marketplace. We see a huge growth potentially. There are more than 350,000 customers that are actively buying through Marketplace today. We expect that number to grow to around a million customers by the next, I would say, five to ten years and we want to be part of this wave. We see AWS Marketplace to be a channel where not only our resalers or our channel partners can come and transact, but also our GSIs like Accenture want to transact through this channel. We are doing a lot, in terms of bringing new customers through Marketplace, who want to not only close their deals, but close it in the next few hours. That's the beauty of Marketplace, the agility, the flexibility in terms of pricing that it provides to ISVs like us. If a customer wants to delay their payments by a couple of quarters, Marketplace supports that. If a customer wants to do monthly payments, Marketplace supports that. We are seeing lot of customers, big customers, that have signed EDPs, enterprise discount plans with AWS. These are multi-year cloud commits coming to us and saying we can retire our EDPs with AWS if we transact your solution through AWS Marketplace. So what we have done, as of today, we have all of our production services enabled through AWS Marketplace. What that means for customers, they can now retire their EDPs by buying Zscaler products through AWS Marketplace and in return get the full benefit of maximizing their EDP commits with AWS. >> So you guys are fully committed, no toe on the water, as we heard. You guys are all in. >> Absolutely, that's exactly the way to put it. We're all in, all of our solutions are available in the marketplace. As you mentioned, we're a SaaS provider. So we're one of the vendors in the Marketplace that have SaaS solutions. So unlike a lot of customers and even the market in general, associate the Marketplace for historical reasons, the way it started with a lot of monthly subscriptions and just dipping your toe in it from a consumer perspective. Whereas we're doing multimillion dollar, multi-year SaaS contracts. So the most complicated kinds of transactions you'd normally associate with enterprise software, we're doing in very low friction ways. >> On the Zscaler side going in low friction. >> Yep, yeah, that's right. >> How about the customer experience? >> So it is primarily the the customer that experiences. >> Driving it? >> Yeah, they're driving it and it's because rather than traditional methods of going through paperwork, purchase orders- >> What are some of the things that customers are saying about this, bcause I see two benefits, I'll say that. The friction, it's a channel, okay, for Zscaler. Let's be clear, but now you have a customer who's got a lot of Amazon. They're a trusted partner too. So why wouldn't they want to have one point of contact to use their purchasing power and you guys are okay with that. >> We're absolutely okay with it. The reason being, we're still doing the transaction and we can do the transaction with our... We're a channel first company, so that's another important distinction of how people tend to think of the Marketplace. We go through channel. A lot of our transactions are with traditional channel partners and you'd be surprised the kinds of, even the Telcos, carrier providers, are starting to embrace Marketplace. So from a customer perspective, it's less paperwork, less legal work. >> Yeah, I'd love to get your reaction to something, because I think this highlights to me what we've been reporting on with "theCUBE" with super cloud and other trends that are different in a good way. Taking it to the next level and that is that if you look at Zscaler, SaaS, SaaS is self-service, the scale, there's efficiencies. Marketplace first started out as a self-service catalog, a website, you know, click and choose, but now it's a different. He calls it a supply chain, like the CICD pipeline of buying software. He mentions that, there's also services. He put the Channel partners can come in. The GSIs, global system integrators can come in. So it's more than just a catalog now. It's kind of self-service procurement more than it is just a catalog of buy stuff. >> Yes, so yeah, I feel CEOs, CSOs of today should understand what Marketplace brings to the bear in terms of different kinds of services or Zscaler solutions that they can acquire through Marketplace and other ISV solutions, for that matter. I feel like we are at a point, after the pandemic, where there'll be a lot of digital exploration and companies can do more in terms of not just Marketplace, but also including the channel partners as part of deals. So you talked about channel conflict. AWS addressed this by bringing a program called CPPO in the picture, Channel Partner Private Offers. What that does is, we are not only bringing all our channel partners into deals. For renewals as well, they're the partner of record and they get paid alongside with the customer. So AWS does all the heavy lifting, in terms of disbursements of payments to us, to the channel partner, so it's a win-win situation for all. >> I mean, private offers and co-sale has been very popular. >> It has been, and that is our bread and butter in the Marketplace. Again, we do primarily three year contracts and so private offers work super well. A nice thing for us as a vendor is it provides a great amount of flexibility. Private Offer gives you a lot of optionality, in terms of how the constructs of the deal and whether or not you're working with a partner, how the partner is utilizing as well to resell to the end user. So, we've always talked about AWS giving IT agility. This gives purchasing and finance business agility. >> Yeah, and I think this comes up a lot. I just noticed this happening a lot more, where you see dedicated sessions, not just on DevOps and all the goodies of the cloud, financial strategy. >> Yeah. >> Seeing a lot more conversation around how to operationalize the business transactions in the cloud. >> Absolutely. >> This is the new, I mean it's not new, it's been thrown around, but not at a tech conference. You don't see that. So I got to ask you guys, what's the message to the CISOs and executives watching the business people about Zscaler in the Marketplace? What should they be looking at? What is the pitch for Zscaler for the Marketplace buyer? >> So I would say that we are a cloud-delivered network security service. We have been in this game for more than a decade. We have years of early head start with lots of features and functionality versus our competitors. If customers were to move into AWS Cloud, they can get rid of their next-gen firewalls and just have all the traffic routed through our Zscaler internet access and use Zscaler private access for accessing their private applications. We feel we have done everything in our capacity, in terms of enabling customers through Marketplace and will continue to participate in more features and functionality that Marketplace has to offer. We would like these customers to take advantage of their EDPs as well as their retirement and spend for the multi-commit through AWS Marketplace. Learn about what we have to offer and how we can really expedite the motion for them, if they want to procure our solutions through Marketplace >> You know, we're seeing an ability for them to get more creative, more progressive in terms of the purchasing. We're also doing, we're really excited about the ability to serve multiple markets. So we've had an immense amount of success in commercial. We also are seeing increasing amount of public sector, US federal government agencies that want to procure this way as well for the same reasons. So there's a lot of innovation going on. >> So you have the FedRAMP going on, you got all those certifications. >> Exactly right. So we are the first cloud-native solution to provide IL5 ATO, as well as FedRAMP pie and we make that all available, GSA schedule pricing through the AWS Marketplace, again through FSIs and other resellers. >> Public private partnerships have been a big factor, having that span of capability. I got to ask you about, this is a cool conversation, because now you're like, okay, I'm selling through the Marketplace. Companies themselves are changing how they operate. They don't just buy software that we used to use. So general purpose, bundled stuff. Oh yeah, I'm buying this product, because this has got a great solution and I have to get forced to use this firewall, because I bought this over here. That's not how companies are architecting and developing their businesses. It's no longer buying IT. They're building their company digitally. They have to be the application. So they're not sitting around, saying hey, can I get a solution? They're building and architecting their solution. This is kind of like the new enterprise that no one's talking about. They kind of, got to do their own work. >> Yes. >> There's no general purpose solution that maps every company. So they got to pick the best piece parts and integrate them. >> Yes and I feel- >> Do you guys agree with that? >> Yeah, I agree with that and customers don't want to go for point solutions anymore. They want to go with a platform approach. They want go with a vendor that can not only cut down their vendors from multi-dozens to maybe a dozen or less and that's where, you know, we kind of have pivoted to the platform-centric approach, where we not only help customers with Cloud Network Security, but we also help customers with Cloud Native Application Protection Platform that we just recently launched. It's going by the name of the different elements, including Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Identity Event Management and so we are continuously doing more and more on the configuration and vulnerability side space. So if a customer has an AWS S3 bucket that is opened it can be detected and can be remediated. So all of those proactive steps we are taking, in terms of enhancing our portfolio, but we have come a long way as a company, as a platform that we have evolved in the Marketplace. >> What's the hottest product? >> The hottest product? >> In Marketplace right now. >> Well, the fastest growing products include our digital experience products and we have new Cloud Protection. So we've got Posture and Workload Protection as well and those are the fastest growing. For AWS customers a strong affinity also for ZPA, which provides you zero trust access to your workloads on AWS. So those are all the most popular in Marketplace. >> Yeah. >> So I would like to add that we recently launched and this has been a few years, a couple of years. We launched a product called Zscaler Digital X, the ZDX. >> Mm-hmm. >> What that product does is, let's say you're making a Zoom call and your WiFi network is laggy or it's a Zoom server that's laggy. It kind of detects where is the problem and it further tells the IT department you need to fix either the server on which Zoom is running, or fix your home network. So that is the beauty of the product. So I think we are seeing massive growth with some of our new editions in the portfolio, which is a long time coming. >> Yeah and certainly a lot of growth opportunities for you guys, as you come in. Where do you see Zscaler's big growth coming from product-wise? What's the big push? Actually, this is great upside for you here. >> Yeah. >> On the go to market side. Where's the big growth for Zscaler right now? So I think we are focused as a company on zero trust architecture. We want to securely connect users to apps, apps to apps, workloads to workloads and machines to machines. We want to give customers an experience where they have direct access to the apps that's hidden from the outside world and they can securely connect to the apps in a very succinct fashion. The user experience is second to none. A lot of customers use us on the Microsoft Office 365 side, where they see a lag in connecting to Microsoft Office 365 directly. They use the IE service to securely connect. >> Yeah, latency kills. >> Microsoft Office 365. >> Latency kills, as we always say, you know and security, you got to look at the pattern, you want to see that data. >> Yeah, and emerging use cases, there is an immense amount of white space and upside for us as well in emerging use cases, like OT, 5G, IOT. >> Yeah. >> Federal government, DOD. >> Oh god, tactical edge government. >> Security at the edge, absolutely, yeah. >> Where's the big edge? What's the edge challenge right now, if you have to put your finger on the edge, because right now that's the hot area, we're watching that. It's going to be highly contested. It's not yet clear, I mean certainly hybrid is the operating model, cloud, distributing, computing, but edge has got unique things that you can't really point to on premises that's the same. It's highly dynamic, you need high bandwidth, low latency, compute at the edge. The data has to be processed right there. What's the big thing at the edge right now? >> Well, so that's probably an emerging answer. I mean, we're working with our customers, they're inventing and they're kind of finding the use cases for those edge, but one of the good things about Zscaler is that we are able to, we've got low latency at the edge. We're able to work as a computer at the edge. We work on Outpost, Snowball, Snowcone, the Snow devices. So we can be wherever our customers need us. Mobile devices, there are a lot of applications where we've got to be either on embedded devices, on tractors, providing security for those IOT devices. So we're pretty comfortable with where we are being the- >> So that's why you guys are financially doing so well, performance wise. I got to ask you though, because I think that brings up the great point. If this is why I like the Marketplace, if I'm a customer, the edge is highly dynamic. It's changing all the time. I don't want to wait to buy something. If I got my solution architects on a product, I need to know I'm going to have zero trust built in and I need to push the button on Zscaler. I don't want to wait. So how does the procurement side impact? What have you guys seen? Share your thoughts on how Marketplace is working from the procurement standpoint, because it seems to me to be fast. Is that right, or is it still slow on their side? On the buyer side, because this to me would be a benefit to developers, if we say, hey, the procurement can just go really fast. I don't want to go through a bunch of PO approvals or slow meetings. >> It can be, that manifests itself in several ways, John. It can be, for instance, somebody wants to do a POC and traditionally you could take any amount of time to get budget approval, take it through. What if you had a pre-approved cloud budget and that was spent primarily through AWS Marketplace, because it's consolidated data on your AWS invoice. The ability to purchase a POC on the Marketplace could be done literally within minutes of the decision being made to go forward with it. So that's kind of a front end, you know, early stage use case. We've got examples we didn't talk about on our recent earnings call of how we have helped customers bring in their procurement with large million dollar, multimillion dollar deals. Even when a resaler's been involved, one of our resaler partners. Being able to accelerate deals, because there's so much less legal work and traditional bureaucratic effort. >> Agility. >> That agility purchasing process has allowed our customers to pull into the quarter, or the end of month, or end of quarter for them, deals that would've otherwise not been able to be done. >> So this is a great example of where you can set policy and kind of create some guard rails around innovation and integration deals, knowing if it's something that the edge is happening, say okay, here's some budget. We approved it, or Amazon gives credits and partnership going on. Then I'd say, hey, well green light this, not to exceed a million dollars, or whatever number in their range and then let people have the freedom to execute. >> You're absolutely right, so from the purchasing side, it does give them that agility. It eliminates a lot of the processes that would push out a purchase in actual execution past when the business decision is made and quite frankly, to be honest, AWS has been very accommodative. They're a great partner. They've invested a lot in Marketplace, Marketplace programs, to help customers do the right thing and do it more quickly as well as vendors like us to help our customers make the decisions they need to. >> Rising tide, a rising tide floats all boats and you guys are a great example of an independent company. Highly successful on your own. >> Yep. >> Certainly the numbers are clear. Wall Street loves Zscaler and economics are great. >> Our customer CSAT numbers are off the scale as well. >> Customers are great and now you've got the Marketplace. This is again, a new normal. A new kind of ecosystem is developing where it's not like the old monolithic ecosystems. The value creation and extraction is happening differently now. It's kind of interesting. >> Yes and I feel we have a long way to go, but what I can tell you is that Zscaler is in this for the long run. We are seeing some of the competitors erupt in the space as well, but they have a long way to go. What we have built requires years worth of R&D and features and thousands of customer's use cases which kind of lead to something what Zscaler has come up with today. What we have is very unique and is going to continuously be an innovation in the market in the years to come. In terms of being more cloud-savvy or more cloud-focused or more cloud-native than what the market has seen so far in the form of next-gen firewalls. >> I know you guys have got a lot of AI work. We've had many conversations with Howie over there. Great stuff and really appreciate you guys participating in our super cloud event we had and we'll see more of that where we're talking about the next generation clouds, really enabling that new disruptive, open-spanning capabilities across multiple environments to run cloud-native modern applications at scale and secure. Appreciate your time to come on "theCUBE". >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks, I totally appreciate it. Zscaler, leading company here on "theCUBE" talking about their relationship with Marketplace as they continue to grow and succeed as technology goes to the next level in the cloud. Of course "theCUBE's" covering it here in Seattle. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (peaceful electronic music)

>>Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John furrier with Dave Valante host of the cube. We're here on the ground floor, Moscone west two sets Walter Wall coverage. Three days. We heard Laura Heisman, the senior vice president and CMO of VMware, put it all together. Great to see you. Nice, thanks for, to see you for spending time outta your very busy week. >>It is a busy week. It is a great week. >>So a lot of people were anticipating what world was gonna look like. And then the name changed to VMware Explorer. This is our 12th year covering VMware's annual conference, formerly known ASM world. Now VMware Explorer, bold move, but Raghu teased it out on his keynote. Some reason behind it, expand on, on the thought process. The name change, obviously multi-cloud big headline here. vSphere eight partnerships with cloud hyperscale is a completely clear direction for VMware. Take us through why the name changed. Exactly, exactly. And why it's all coming together. Think he kind of hinted that he kinda said exactly, you know, exploring the new things, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. But take us through that. You've architected it. >>Yeah. It is a, a change of, we have a great past at VMware and we're looking to our future at the same time. And so when you come back from a pandemic and things changing, and you're really looking at the expansion of the business now is the time because it wasn't just to come back to what we were doing before. And every company should be thinking about that, but it's what are we gonna do to actually go forward? And VMware itself is on our own journey as expanding in more into the cloud, our multi-cloud leadership and everything that we're doing there. And we wanted to make sure that our audience was able to explore that with us. And so it was the perfect opportunity we're back live. And VMware Explorer is for everyone. That's been coming Tom world for so many years. We love our community and expanding it to our new communities that maybe don't have that legacy and that history and have them here with us at >>VMware. You did a great job. I love the event here. Love how it turned out. And, and a lot of interesting things happened along the way. Prior to this event you had we're coming outta the pandemic. So it's the first face to face yes. Of the VMware community coming together, which this is an annual right of passage for everyone in the customer base. Broadcom buys VMware. No, no, if you name change it to VMware Explorer and then Broadcom buys VMware. So announces, announces the, the buyout. So, and all the certainty, uncertainty kind of hanging around it. You had to navigate those waters, take us through, what was that like? How did you pull it off? It was a huge success. Yeah, because everyone showed up. Yeah. It's, it's, it's the same event, different name, >>It's >>Same vibe. >>The only thing constant is change. Right? And so it's the, we've gotta focus on the business and our VMware customers and our partners and our community at large. And so it's really keeping the eye on what we're trying to communicate to our community. And this is for our VMware community. The VMO community is here in spades. It is wonderful to have the VMO community here. We have tons of different customers, new customers, old customers, and it's just being able to share everything VMware. And I think people are just excited about that. It's great energy on the show floor and all >>Around. And it's not like you had years to plan it. I mean, you basically six months in you, you went, you said you went on a six month listening tour the other day. What was the number one question you got on that listening tour? >>Well, definitely about the name change was one, but I would say also, it's not just the question. It was the ask of, we have we're in what we call our chapter three here. And it's really our move into multicloud and helping all of our customers with their complexities. >>So virtualization, private cloud, and now multi-cloud correct. The third chapter. >>Yeah. And the, the question and the ask is how do we let our customers and partners know what this is, help us Laura. Like that was the number one ask to me of help us explain it. And that was my challenge and opportunity coming into explore, and really to explain everything about our, if you watched the gen session yesterday, these was, was going through our multiple different chapters where we are helping our customers with their multi-cloud strategies. And so it is been that evolution gets us today and it doesn't end today. It starts today. And we keep going, >>Like, like a lot of companies, obviously in you in this new role, you inherited a hybrid world and, and you've got, you got two years of virtual under your belt, and now you're running a completely different event from that standpoint. How does the sort of the COVID online translate into new relationships and how you're cultivating those? What's that dynamic like? >>Well, let's start with how happy everyone is to see each other in person. No doubt. Yeah. It is amazing just to see people, the high fives in the hallways, the hugs, oh, some people just the fist pump, whatever people mats are there masks aren't there, right? It is something of where everyone's comfort level, but it is really just about getting everyone together and thinking about how do, how was it before the pandemic? You don't necessarily just wanna repeat coming back. And so how do you think about this from an in-person event? People have been sitting behind their screens. How do we engage and how are we interactive? Knowing that attention spans are probably a little bit shorter. People are used to getting up and going get their coffee. We have coffee in the conference rooms, right? Things like that, making the experience just a really great one for everyone. So they're comfortable back in person, but I mean, honestly the energy and seeing people's smiles on their faces, it's wonderful to be back in person. >>It's interesting, you know, the cube, we've had some transformations ourselves with the pandemic and, and living through and getting back to events, but hybrid cloud and hybrid events is now the steady state. So, and in a way it's kind of interesting how hybrid cloud and now multi-cloud the digital aspect of integrating into the physical events is now key. First class citizen thinking. Yeah. For CMOs, you guys did a great job of preserving the, the, the, the best part of it, which is face to face people seeing each other and now bringing in the digital and then extending this. So that it's an always on kind of explore. Is that the thinking behind it? Yes. What's your vision on where you go next? Because if it's not, it's not one and done and see you next year. No anymore, because no, the pandemic showed us that hybrid and digital and physical together. If design as first class citizens with each other. Yeah. One sub-optimize me obviously face to face is better than digital, but if you can't make it, it shouldn't be a bad experience. >>No, not at all. Good's your vision. And, and we're in a point where not everyone's gonna come back, that everyone has what's going on with their life. And so you have to think about it as in person and online, it's not necessarily even hybrid. And so it's, what's the experience for people that are here, you know, over 10,000 people here, you wanna be sure that that is a great experience for them. And then our viewers online, we wanna be sure that they're able to, to know what's going on, stay in touch with everything VMware and enjoy that. So the gen session that was live, we have a ton of on demand content. And this is just the start. So now we go on to essentially multiple other VMware explorers around the world. >>It's interesting. The business model of events is so tickets driven or sponsorship on site on the location that you can get almost addicted to the, no, we don't wanna do digital and kind of foreclose that you guys embraced the, the combo. So what's the attendance. I mean, probably wasn't as big as when everyone was physical. Yep. What are some of the numbers? Can you give us some D data on attendance? Some of the stats around the show, cuz obviously people showed up and drove. Yes. It wasn't a no show. That's sure a lot of great stuff here >>We have. So it's over 10,000 people that are registered and we see them here. The gen session was packed. They're walking the show floor and then I don't have the numbers yet for our online viewership, but everything that we're doing to promote it online, if anyone missed it online, the gen session is already up and they'll see more sessions going live as well as all the on demand content so that everyone can stay in the loop of what's happening. And all of our announcements, >>You're obviously not disappointed. Were you surprised? A little nervous. >>So I will say one thing that we learned from others, thank goodness others have gone before us. So as far as coming back in person is the big change is actually registration happens closer to the event, right. Is a very big change from pre so, >>So it's at the end. Yes. >>The last three weeks. And we had been told that from peers at RSA and other conferences, that that's what happens. So we were prepared for that, but people wanna know what's going on in the world. Yeah. Right. You wanna have that faith before you buy that ticket and book your travel. And so that has definitely been one of the biggest changes and one that I think that will maybe continue to see here. So that was probably the biggest thing that changed as far as what to expect as registration. But we planned for this. We knew it was not going to be as big in the past and that that's gonna be, I think the new norm, >>I think you're right. I think a lot of last minute decisions, you know, sometimes people >>Wanna know, I mean, it's, what's gonna happen another gonna be outbreak or, I mean, I think people have gotten trained to be disappointed >>Well and be flexible >>With COVID I and, and, and weirded out by things. So people get anxiety on the COVID you've seen that. Yeah. >>Yeah. Yeah. I wanna ask you about the developer messaging cause that's one of the real huge takeaways. It was so strong. And you said the other day in the analyst session, the developers of the Kings and the Queens now, you know, we, when we hear developers, we think we pictured Steve Bama running around on stage developers develop, but it's different. It's a different vibe here. It it's like you're serving the Kings in the, in the Queens with, through partnerships and embracing open source. Can you talk a little bit about how you approached or, and you are approaching developer messages? Yeah, >>I, so, you know, I came from GitHub and so developers have been on my mind for many years now. And so joining VMware, I got to join this great world of enterprise software background and my developer background. And we have such an opportunity to really help our developer community understand the benefits of VMware to make them heroes just like we made sort of virtualization professionals heroes in the past, we can do the same thing with developers. We wanna be sure that we're speaking with our developer community. That was very much on stage as well as many of the sessions. And so our, we think about that with our products and what we're doing as far as product development and helping developers be able to test and learn with our products. And it's really thinking about the enterprise developer and how can we help them be successful. >>And I think, I think the beautiful thing about that message is, is that the enterprises that you guys have that great base with, they're all pretty much leaned into cl cloud native and they see it and it's starting to see the hybrid private cloud public cloud. And now with edge coming, it's pretty much a mandate that cloud native drive the architecture and that came clear in the messaging. So I have to ask you on the activations, you guys have done how much developer ops customer base mix are you seeing transfer over? Because the trend that we're seeing is is that it operations and that's generic. I'll say that word generically, but you know, your base is it almost every company has VMware. So they're also enabling inside their company developers. So how much is developer percentage to ops or is they blending in, it's almost a hundred percent, which how would you see >>That it's growing? So it's definitely growing. I wouldn't say it's a hundred percent, but it is growing. And it is one where every company is thinking about their developer. There's not enough developers in the world per the number of job openings out there. Everyone wants to innovate fast and they need to be able to invest in their developers. And we wanna be able to give them the tools to be able to do that. Cuz you want your developers to be happy and make it easier to do their jobs. And so that's what we're committed to really being able to help them do. And so we're seeing an uptick there and we're seeing, you'll see that with our product announcements and what we're doing. And so it's growing. >>The other thing I want to ask you, we saw again, we saw a lot of energy on the customer vibe. We're getting catching that here, cuz the sessions are right behind us and upstairs the floor, we've heard comments like the ecosystem's back. I mean not to anywhere, but there was a definitely an ecosystem spring to the step. If you will, amongst the partners, can you share what's happening here? Observations things that you've noticed that have been cool, that that can highlight some trends in the partner side of it. Yeah. What's going on with partners. >>Yeah. I mean our partners are so important to us. We're thrilled that they're here with us here. The expo floor, it is busy and people are visiting and reuniting and learning from each other and everything that you want to happen on the expo floor. And we've done special things throughout the week. For example, we have a whole hyperscaler day essentially happening where we wanna highlight some of the hyperscalers and let them be able to, to share with all of our attendees what they're doing. So we've given them more time within the sessions as well. And so you'll see our partner ecosystem all over the place, not just on the expo >>Floor, a lot of range of partners. Dave, you got the hyperscalers, you have the big, the big whales and cloud whales. And then you have now the second tier we call 'em super cloud type customer and partners. And you got the multi-cloud architecture, developing a lot of moving parts that are changing and growing and evolving. How do you view that? How you just gonna ride the wave? Are you watching it? Are you gonna explore it through more, you know, kind of joint marketing. I mean, what's your, how do you take this momentum that you have? And by the way, a lot of stuff's coming outta the oven. I was talking with Joan last night at the, at the press analyst event. And there's a lot of stuff coming outta the VMware oven product wise that hasn't hit the market yet. Yep. That's that's that's I mean, you can't really put a number on that sales yet, but it's got value. Yep. So you got that happening. You got this momentum behind you, you just ride the wave and what's the strategy. Well, >>It is all about how do we pass to the partner, right? So it is about the partner relationship. And we think about that our partner community is huge to us at VMware. I'm sure you've been hearing that from everyone you've been speaking to. So it's not even it's ride the wave, but it's embrace. Got it. It's embrace our partners. We need their help, our customer base. We do touch everybody and we need them to be able to support us and share what it is that we're doing from our product E evolution, our product announcements. So it's continuous education. It's there in educating us. It's definitely a two way relationship and really what we're even to get done here at explore together. It's progress that you can't always do on a zoom or a teams call or a WebEx call. You can't do that in two weeks, two years sometimes. And we're able to even have really great conversations >>Here and, and your go to market is transforming as well. You, you guys have talked about how you're reaching many different touchpoints. We've talked about developers. I mean, the other thing we've seen at events, we talked about the last minute, you know, registrations. The other thing we've seen is a lot more senior members of audiences. And now part of that is maybe okay, maybe some of the junior folks can't travel, they can't get, but, but, but why is it that the senior people come, they, they maybe they wouldn't have come before maybe because they're going through digital transformations. They wanna lean in and understand it better. But it seemed, I know you had an executive summit, you know, on day zero and Hawk 10 was here and, and so forth. So, okay. I get that. But it seems in talking to the partners, they're like, wow, the quality of the conversations that we're having has really been up leveled compared to previous years in other conferences. >>So yeah. Yeah. I think it's that they're all thinking about their transformation as well. We had the executive summit on day zero for us Monday, right? And it was a hundred plus executives invited in for a day who have stayed because they wanna hear what's going on. When I joined VMware, I said, VMware has a gift that so many companies are jealous of because we have relationships with the executives and that's what every company's startup to large company wants. And they're, they're really trusted customers of ours. And so we haven't been together and they want to be here to be able to know what's going on and join us in the meetings. And we have tons of meetings happening throughout >>The event and they're loyal and they're loyal. They're absolutely, they're active, active in a good way. They'll give you great feedback, candid feedback. Sometimes, you know, you might not wanna hear, but it's truthful. They're rare, engaging feedback gift. And they stay with you and they're loyal and they show up and they learn they're in sessions. So all good stuff. And then we only have about a minute left. Laura. I want to get your thoughts and, and end the segment with your explanation to the world around explore. What's next? What does it mean? What's gonna happen next? What does this brand turn into? Yeah. How do you see this unfolding? How do people, how should people view the VMware Explorer event brand and future activities? >>Yeah. VMware Explorer. This is just the start. So we're after this, we're going to Brazil, Barcelona, Singapore, China, and Japan. And so it is definitely a momentum that we're going on. The brand is unbelievable. It is so beautiful. We're exploring with it. We can have so much fun with this brand and we plan to continue to have fun with this brand. And it is all about the, the momentum with our sales team and our customers and our partners. And just continuing what we're doing, this is, this is just the beginning. It's not the, it's a global >>Brand explore >>Global. Absolutely. Absolutely. >>All right, Dave, that's gonna be great for the cube global activities. There you go, Laura. Great to see you. Thank you for coming on. I know you're super busy. Final question. It's kind of the trick question. What's your favorite aspect of the event? Pick a favorite child. What's going on here? Okay. In your mind, what's the most exciting thing about this event that that's near and dear to >>Your heart? So first it's hearing the feedback from the customers, but I do have to say my team as well. I mean, huge shout out to my team. They are the hub and spoke of all parts of explore. Yeah. VMware Explorer. Wouldn't be here without them. And so it's great to see it all coming >>Together. As they say in the scoring and the Olympics, the degree of difficulty for this event, given all the things going on, you guys did an amazing job. >>We witnessed >>To it. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you for a great booth here. It looks beautiful. Thanks for coming. Wonderful. >>Thank you for >>Having me. Okay. The cues live coverage here on the floor of Moscone west I'm Trevor Dave. Valante two sets, three days. Stay with us for more live coverage. We'll be right back.

(bright music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Snowflake Summit 22, live from Caesar's Forum in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin here with about 7,000 plus folks, and this next Cube segment, two words, girl power. Please welcome one of our alumni back to the program, Colleen Kapase, SVP, Worldwide Partners and Alliances at Snowflake and Poornima Ramaswamy, EVP of Global Partnerships and Chief of Staff to the CEO. Ladies, welcome to the program! >> Thank you, very happy to be here, amazing event! >> Isn't it? It's so great to see this many people. Yesterday, the keynote, we got in barely, standing room only. I know there was at least one overflow room, maybe two. People are chomping at the bit to hear what Snowflake and its ecosystem has been up to the last three years, since 2019. >> It's been phenomenal! Since the last time we met together, as humans coming together, and then seeing the step function growth three years later, I don't think, we didn't grow gradually. We just jumped three years ahead, and people have just been hungry for the information and the sharing and the joint education, so it's been a phenomenal show. >> It has been, Poornima, talk to us about the Qlik partnership with Snowflake. What's it all about? What's your joint vision, your joint strategy? Give us all that good stuff. >> Sure, so speaking of three years, this relationship has been in existence for the last three years. We were at the last Snowflake Conference in 2019, and I liked what Frank said, even though we were not in-person in life the innovation has continued and our relationship has strengthened over the last three years as well. So it's interesting that everything that Frank and everything that was mentioned at the keynote yesterday is completely in alignment with Qlik's vision and strategy as well. We are focused on making data available for quick decision making, in a timely manner, for in the moment business decisions as such. The world has gone topsy-turvy in the last two years, so you want to know things that are changing as they happen and not one day late, one month late or one quarter late, because then the world's already passed you, that business moment has passed you. That's been our focus. We've got a dual product strategy and portfolio. We collaborate really strongly with Snowflake on both of those to make the most amount of data, made available on the Snowflake platform in the shortest amount of time, so that it's fresh, and it's timely for business decision makers to get access to it, to make decisions as they are dealing with supply chain challenges and people challenges and so on and can make those moments count as such. >> They have to, one of the things that we've learned in the pandemic is access to real-time data is no longer a, oh, that's great, nice to have. It's table stakes for businesses in every industry. Consumer expectations have risen to a level we've probably never seen, and let's face it, they're not going to go down. Nobody's going to want less data, slower. (laughs) Colleen, talk about the Qlik partnership from your Snowflake's perspective. >> Yeah, it's been fabulous, and we started on the BI side and keep evolving it, frankly with more technology, more solutions, making that real-time access, not just the the BI side of having the business intelligence and seeing the data but moving beyond that to the governance side, and that's such a huge piece of the relationship as well, and the trustworthy that executives have with the data, who's seeing it and how are we leveraging it, and we keep expanding that too and having some fun too. I know you guys have been making some acquisitions. >> Talk to us about what's going on at Qlik and some news today as well, acquisitions news, what's the deal? >> Yeah, so like I mentioned, we have a dual product strategy, a Qlik data integration platform and a Qlik analytics platform. And we are strengthening, making sure that we align with Snowflake's vision of all workloads, SaaS only and governed. So the announcement today was we do provide real-time data using our Qlik data integration platform into Snowflake, but that real-time data has to make its way into the hands of the business decision makers as well. So we launched what we call as direct query into Snowflake, so as and when data gets into the Snowflake platform, now customers for specific use cases can choose to access that data as it comes in by accessing it directly on Snowflake. And there are other use cases where the data's already been prepared and so on, and they'll continue using the Qlik analytics platform, but this direct query access will make a world of difference in terms of that active intelligence, in-the-moment decision making. The second announcement that we did was the SaaS first and going all into SaaS, so we are doing our data movement investments in our SaaS platform, and one of our first investments is on the Snowflake platform, going direct into Snowflake, and our data ingestion now, our data replication real-time is going to be available natively into the Snowflake platform through our SaaS data transformation investment that we've made. So those are the two big announcements, and governance has been the cornerstone for our platform end-to-end, right from the beginning, and that strength continues, and that's, again, completely in alignment with the vision that Snowflake has as well. >> I couldn't agree more, that native integration, we used to think about bringing the data to the work, and now it's bring the work to the data, because that's the secure environment, the governed environment, and that's what we're seeing with our product roadmaps together and where we're going, and it gives customers just peace of mind. When you're bringing the work to the data, it's more secure, it's more governed, and that real-time access, it's speed, because boy, so many executives have to make real-time decisions quickly. The world is moving faster than it ever has before, and I've never had an executive say, "Oh yeah, I'll just wait and get the data later." That's not a conversation they have. I need it, and I need it now, and I need it at my fingertips, and I need more of my entire organization to have access to that data, what I feel secure and safe to share with them. And so, having Qlik make that possible is just fantastic. >> The security piece is absolutely critical. We've seen such changes to the threat landscape in the last couple of years. It's no longer now a, if we get hit by a cyber attack, it's a matter of when. And the volume of data just keeps proliferating, proliferating, proliferating, which obviously is not going to slow down either. So having the governance factor, the ability to share data securely, leveraging powerful analytics across to customers and partners and ecosystem, it sounds like to me a pretty big differentiator of what Snowflake is delivering to its customers and the ecosystem. >> It is, and I would say one of the things that has held folks back from moving to the cloud before, was governance. Is this just going to be a free for all, Lisa? I'm not feeling secure with that. And so, having the ability to extend our ecosystem and work on that governance together gives executives peace of mind, that they can easily determine who's going to have access to what, which makes a transition to the cloud faster. And that's what we're looking for, because to have our customers experience the benefits of cloud and the moving up and moving down from a data perspective and really getting access to the data cloud, that's where the nirvana is, and so you guys are helping make that possible and provide that peace of mind, so it's amazing. >> You talk about peace of mind, and it's one of those things we think, oh, it's a marketing term or it's a soft term. It's actually not, it's completely measurable, and it's something that I talk to a lot of C-suite, and the statement of "I sleep better at night," is real. There's gravity with it, knowing that they can trust where the data is. The access is governed. It just keeps getting more and more critical every day. >> Colleen: Well, it's a newsworthy event, frankly- >> Absolutely, nobody wants don't to be a headline. >> If things don't go right, that's people's jobs on the line that's reputations, and that's careers, so that is so important, and I think with a lot of our customers that's our conversations directly of how can you ensure that this is going to be a secure experience? And it's Snowflake and some of our superpowers, and frankly, some of our partners superpowers too, together it's better. >> I can bring this home with a customer example, a couple of customer examples. So Urban Outfitters, I think they're a well-known brand. They've got about 650 stores, to your point on governed autonomy is what I call it. But then it's not just about helping with decision making at the top. You want to be able to make decision making at all levels, so we speak about data democratization. It's about not just strategic decisions that you make for a two-year timeframe or a five-year timeframe. It's about decisions that you want to make today in the first half of the day versus the second half of the day. So Urban Outfitters is a common customer, and during the pandemic they had to change their in-stores into distribution centers. They had to look at their supply chain landscape, because there were supply chain bottlenecks that are still happening today. So, with the power of both Qlik data integration and Qlik analytics, but then the combined power of Qlik and Snowflake, the customer actually was able to make insights available to their in-store managers, to their distribution centers, and from a time perspective, what used to take them days, or, in fact, sometimes even weeks, they're now able to get data in 15 minutes refresh time for their operational decision makers, their distribution centers and their order taking systems, so they're able to make decisions on which brands are moving, not moving. Do they need to change the product position in their stores? Do they need to change their suppliers today? Because, for what's going to be in their inventory one month later, because they are foreseeing, they're able to predict the supply chain bottlenecks that are coming in. They're able to do all of that today because that power of a governed autonomous environment that we've built but real-time data making fresh data available through Snowflake and easy-to-use dashboards and visualization through the analytics platform that we've got. And another customer ABB, 37 different SAP source systems being refreshed every two minutes, worldwide for B2B transactions to be able to make all of those decisions. >> And what you're talking about there, especially with their Urban Outfitters example, I think that's one that everybody as a consumer of clothing and apparel, what you just described, what Qlik and Snowflake enabled there, that could have very well saved that organization. We saw a lot of retailers that were not able to make that pivot. >> Poornima: Yep, no, and it did. >> You are exactly right. I think the differentiation on a lot of our core customers together of combing through, not just surviving but thriving through the pandemic, access to data and supply chain management, and it's these types of solutions that are game changing, and that's why Snowflake's not being sold just to the IT department, it's the business decision makers where they have to make decisions, and one of the things that surprised us the most was we had the star schema COVID data up on our data marketplace and the access to that, that we had our customers to determine supply chain management. What's open? What are the rules per state, per region? Where should we put supply? Where should we not? It was phenomenal. So when you have tools like what Qlik offers together with that data coming through the community, I think that's where a lot of executives experience the power of the data cloud, and that's what we want to see. And we're helping real businesses. We say we want to drive outcomes. Supply chain management was a massive outcome that we helped over the last two years. >> And that was critical, obviously we're still in that from a macro economic perspective. It's still a challenge for a lot of folks, but it was life and death. It was, initially, how do we survive this? And to your point, Colleen, now we've got this foundation, now we can thrive, and we can leave the competition who wasn't able to move this fast in the dust behind us. >> A foreseen function for change, really, and then that change wasn't just different, it was better. >> Yeah, it is better, and it now sets the foundation for the next stage of innovation, which is auto ML and AI ML. You're looking back, you're saying, "Okay this is all the data, "so these are the decisions I had to make in the moment." But then now they can start looking at what are the midterm and the long term strategic decisions I have to make, because I can now predict what are the interconnectedness or the second secondary level and the tertiary level impact for worldwide events. There's a pandemic. We are passed the pandemic. There's flood somewhere. There's fire somewhere. China shuts down every so often. You need new suppliers. How do you get out of your way in terms of making daily decisions, but start planning ahead? I think auto ML, AI ML, and data's going to be the foundation for that and real-time data at that. So what Snowflake's doing in terms of the investment in that space, and Qlik has acquired companies in the auto ML space and driving more automation, that time-to-business value and time-to-predictive insights is going to become very key. >> Absolutely key and also really a lifeline for organizations to be able to do that. >> And I have to say, it's a source of pride for us to see our partners growing and thriving in this environment too. Like some of these acquisitions they're making, Lisa, in the machine learning space, it's awesome. This is where customers want to go. They've got all this fabulous data. They now know how to access it real time. How do I use queries to make me smarter? How do I use this machine learning to look at a vast amount of data in a very real time fashion and make business decisions from? That's the future, that's where we're going. So to see you guys expand from BI, to governance, to machine learning, we're really, Lisa, watching companies in our ecosystem grow as we grow, and that's the piece I take a lot of personal pride in, and it's the fun part of the job, frankly. >> Yeah, as you should take part in that, and that's something too, that's been thematic the last... We were recovering this show yesterday and today that the growth and the substance of the Snowflake ecosystem. You see it, you feel it, and you hear it. >> Yeah, well in Frank Slootman's book, "Amp It Up," there's actually a section that he talks about, because I think he has some amazing lifelong advice on his journey of growth, and he tells us that, "Hey you can attach your company, "your personal career energy to an elevator going up "and a company and a high growth story "or a flat or declining." And it's harder in a flat and declining space, and Snowflake we certainly see as an elevator skyrocketing up and these organizations surrounding us with their technologies and capabilities to have joint outcomes, they're doing fantastic too. I've heard this story over and over again this week. I love seeing this story too with Qlik, and it's just amazing. >> I bet, Ladies, thank you so much for joining me, talking about the Snowflake-Qlik partnership, the better together power, and also, you're just scratching the surface. The future, the momentum, you can feel it. >> Yeah, I love it. >> We appreciate your insights and your time and good luck! >> Thank you, thank you. >> And let's let the girl bosses go! (laughs) >> Exactly! (laughs) For my girl boss guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Snowflake Summit 22, live from Caesar's Forum in Las Vegas. I'll be right back with my next guest. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I tell you this place is packed. It's quite amazing here, over 20,000 people, I'd say it's closer to 25, maybe 27,000, and it's whole overflow, lots going on in the evenings. It's quite remarkable and we're really happy to be part of this. Jay Turner is here, he's the Vice President of Development and Operations, at PCCW Global. He's joined by Garrett Lowell, Vice President of Ecosystem Partnerships for the Americas at PCCW Global. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. Jay, maybe you could take us through, for those people who aren't familiar with your company, what do you guys do, what are you all about? >> PCCW Global is the international operating wing of Hong Kong telecom. If it's outside of Hong Kong, it's our network. We've got about 695,000 kilometers of diverse cable, we've got about 43, 44 terabit of capacity came into business in 2005, if my brain is serving me correctly right now. We have a very diverse and vast portfolio ranging all the way from satellite teleports, all the way to IP transit. We're a Tier 1 service provider from that perspective as well. We do one of everything when it comes to networking and that's really, what was the basis of Console Connect, was inventing a platform to really enable our users to capitalize on our network and our assets. >> Okay. 2005, obviously you predated Cloud, you laid a bunch of fibers struck it in the ocean, I mean, global networks. There was a big trend to do that you had to think, you had to go bigger, go home in that business, (laughing) all right. Console Connect is your platform, is that right? >> Jay: Yes. >> So explain- >> Yeah, sorry, Console Connect is a software defined interconnection platform. We built a user self-service portal. Users can allocate ports, they get the LOAs issued to them directly from the platform. And then once they've got an active port or they've come in via one of our partnerships, they can then provision connectivity across our platform. That may be extending to their data centers or extending to their branch office, or it could be building a circuit into the Cloud via direct connect, could be building a circuit into an internet exchange. All of those circuits are going to be across that 685,000 kilometers of diverse fiber rather than going across the public internet. >> When you started, it took some time obviously to build out that infrastructure and then the Cloud came into play, but it was still early days, but it sounds like you're taking the AWS Cloud model and applying that to your business, eliminate all that undifferentiated heavy lifting, if you will, like the visioning in management. >> Yeah, we've heard many people, and that's kind of the impetus of this was, I want to be directly connected to my end point. And how do I do that? AWS, yes, they had direct connect, but figuring out how to do that as an enterprise was challenging. So we said, hey, we'll automate that for you. Just tell us what region you want to connect to. And we'll do all the heavy lifting and we'll just hand you back a villain tag. You're good to go. So it's a classic case, okay. AWS has direct connect. People will go, oh, that's directly competitive, but it's now you're adding value on top of that. Right? >> Yeah. >> Describe where you fit, Garrett, inside of the AWS ecosystem. You look around this hall and it's just a huge growing ecosystem, where you fit inside of that ecosystem and then your ecosystem. What's that like? >> Where we fit into the AWS ecosystem, as Jay alluded to, we're adding value to our partners and customers where they can come in, not only are they able to access the AWS platform as well as other Cloud platforms, but they're also able to access each other. We have a marketplace in our platform, which allows our customers and partners to put a description of their services on the marketplace and advertise their capabilities out to the rest of the ecosystem of PCCW Global and Console Connect. >> And you're doing that inside of AWS, is that right or at least in part? >> No, that's not inside of AWS. >> So your platform is your platform. >> Yes. >> Your relationship with AWS is to superpower direct connect. Is that right or? >> So we're directly connected to AWS throughout the globe. And this allows our customers and partners to be able to utilize not only the PCCW global network, but also to expand that capability to the AWS platform in Cloud. >> So wherever there's a Cloud, you plug into it, okay? >> Garrett: That's correct. >> Jay: Yeah. And then another advantage, the customer, obviously doesn't have to be directly co-located with AWS. They don't have to be in the same geographical region. If for some reason you need to be connected to U.S. west, but you're in Frankfurt, fine, we'll back all the traffic for you. >> Dave: Does that happen a lot? >> It actually does. >> How come? What's the use case there. >> Global diversity is certainly one of them just being able to have multiple footprints. But the other thing that we're seeing more of late is these Cloud-based companies are beginning to be attracted to where their customers are located. So they'll start seeing these packets of views and they'll go, well, we're going to go into that region as well, stand up a VPC there. We want our customers then being able to directly connect to that asset that's closest to them. And then still be able to back call that traffic if necessary or take it wherever. >> What's the big macro trends in your business? Broadly you see cost per bit coming down, you see data consumption and usage going through the roof. How does that affect you? What are some of the big trends that you see? >> I think one of the biggest ones and one that we targeted with Console Connect, we were hearing a lot of customers going, the world's changing so dynamically. We don't know how to do a one-year forecast of bandwidth, much less a three-year, which is what a lot of contracts are asking us for. So we said, hey, how about one day? Can you do one day? (Dave laughs) Because that's what our granularity is. We allow for anything from one day up to three years right now, and then even within that term, we're dynamic. If something happens, if suddenly some product goes through the roof and you've suddenly got a spike in traffic, if a ship drags its anchor through a sub sea cable, and suddenly you're having to pivot, you just come into the platform, you click a couple of buttons, 20 seconds later, we've modified your bandwidth for you or we've provisioned a new circuit for you, we've got your backup going, whatever. Really at the end of the day, it's the customer paying for their network, so the customer should be the one making those decisions. >> How's that affect pricing? I presume or so, I can have one day to a three-year term, for example if I commit to three years, I get a better deal. Is that right, or? >> You do, but at the end of the day, it's actually pretty much a moderate, a better deal. We don't want to force the hand of the customer. If you signed a 12 month contract with us, we're going to give you a 3% discount. >> So it's not really, that's not a motivation to do it. It's just (indistinct) reduce the transaction complexity. And that's why you will sign up for a longer term not to get the big discount. >> Correct. And then, like I said, even within a longer contract, we're still going to allow you to flex and flow and modify if you need to, because it's your network. >> What kind of constraints do you put on that? Do I have to commit to a flow? And then everything above that is, I can flex up. Is that how it works? >> Yeah. >> Okay. And then, the more I commit to, the better the deal is, or not necessarily? >> No, it's pretty much flat rate. >> Okay, I'm going to commit and I'm going to say, all right, I know I'm going to use X, or sign up for that and anything over it, you're pretty flexible, I might get a few points if I sign up for more, somebody might want to optimize that if they're big enough. >> And another really neat advantage, the other complaint we heard from customers, they go, I need three different direct connect, I need to be connected to three different parties, but I don't want to run three different cross-connects and I don't want to have three different ports. That's just an expense and I don't want. And we, fine, take your one gig port run one gig of services on it. If that's 20 different services, we're fine. We allow you to multiplex your port and provision as- >> So awesome. I love that model. I know some software companies who I would recommend to take a look at that pricing model. So Garrett, how do you segment the ecosystem? How do you look at that? Maybe you could draw and paint a picture of the idea of partners and what they look like. I know there's not just one category, but, >> Sure. Our ideal partners are internet exchangers, Cloud partners and SAS providers, because a big piece of our business is migration to the Cloud, and the flexibility of our platform allows and encourages our SAS providers and SI partners to perform migration to the Cloud much easier in a flexible format for their customers. >> What can you tell us, any kind of metrics you can give us around your business to give a sense of the scope, the scale? >> Well, of our business, (Dave laughs) one of the driving factors here, Gardner says that about 2023, I think, 40% of the enterprise workloads will be deployed in the Cloud, which is all fine and dandy, except in my head, you're just trading one set of complexities for another. Instead of having everything in a glass house and being able to understand that, now you're going, it's in the Cloud, now I need to manage my connectivity there. wait a minute, are my security policies still the same? Do they apply if I'm going across the public internet? What exposure have I just bought into myself to try to run this? The platform really aims at normalizing that as much as possible. If you're directly connected to AWS, at the end of the day, that's a really long ethernet cable. So your a glass house just got a lot bigger, but you're still able to maintain and use the exact same policies and procedures that you've been using. That's really one of our guiding principles, is to reduce that complexity and make it very simple for the user. >> I understand that, cause in the early days of Cloud, a lot of enterprises, the CIOs, they were concerned about security, then I think they realized, ah, AWS has pretty good security. CIA is using it. But still people would say to me, it's not that it's best security, it's just different. You know, we move slow, Dave. How do you accommodate, there's that diversity, I mean, AWS is obviously matured, but are you suggesting that you can take my security edicts in my glass house and bring those into your networks and ultimately into the Cloud? Is that how it works? >> That's the goal. It's not going to be a panacea more than likely, but the more edicts that we can allow you to bring across and not have to go back and revamp and, the better for you as a customer and the better really for us, because it normalizes things, it makes it much easier for us to accommodate more and more users. >> And is it such now in the eco, is all the diversity in the ecosystem, is it such that there's enough common patterns you guys can accommodate most of those use cases? >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the key components is the fact that the platform runs on our MPLS network, which is inherently secure. It's not on the public internet anywhere. We do have internet on demand capability. So in the event that a customer wants access to the internet, no problem. We can accommodate this. And we also have 5G capability built into the platform to allow flexibility of location and flexibility of, I would say, standing up new customer locations. And then the other component of the security is the fact that the customers can bring their own security and apply anywhere. We're not blocking, we don't have any port filters or anything of this nature. >> If would think 5G actually, I could see people arguing both sides, but my sense is 5G is going to be a huge driver for your business cause it's going to just create so much more demand for your services, I think. I can see somebody arguing the counter about it. What's your point of view on that? >> No, I think that's a fair assessment. I think it's going to drive business for everyone here on the show floor and it's pushing those workloads more toward the edge, which is not an area that people were typically concerned with. The edge was just the door that they walked through. That's becoming much different now. We're also going to start seeing, and we're already seeing it, huge trends of moving that data at the edge rather than bringing it all the way back to a central warehouse and help ending it. The ability to have a dynamic platform where you can see exactly what your network's doing and in the push of a button, modify that, or provision new connectivity in response to how your business is performing. >> Yeah, ultimately it's all about the applications that are going to be driving demand for more data. That's just a tailwind for you guys. >> Yeah. You look at, some of the car companies are coming on, Tesla, you're drive around with like eight CPUs and I think communicating back over the air. >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> You start scaling that and you start getting into some some real bottlenecks. >> Amazing business you guys having obviously capital intensive, but once you get in there, you got a big moat. That is a matter of getting on a flywheel and innovating. Guys, congratulations on all the progress and so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Great to meet you guys. Good luck. All right, thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in High-Tech Coverage. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> The cloud is evolving. You know, it's no longer a set of remote services somewhere off in the cloud, in the distance. It's expanding. It's moving to on-prem. On-prem workloads are connecting to the cloud. They're spanning clouds in a way that hides the plumbing and simplifies deployment, management, security, and governance. So hybrid multicloud is the next big thing in infrastructure, and at the recent Nutanix .NEXT conference, we got a major dose of that theme, and with me to talk about what we heard at that event, what we learned, why it matters, and what it means to customers are Monica Kumar, who's the senior vice president of marketing and cloud go-to-market at Nutanix, and Tarkan Maner, who's the chief commercial officer at Nutanix. Guys, great to see you again. Welcome to the theCUBE. >> Great to be back here. >> Great to see you, Dave. >> Okay, so you just completed another .NEXT. As an analyst, I like to evaluate the messaging at an event like this, drill into the technical details to try to understand if you're actually investing in the things that you're promoting in your keynotes, and then talk to customers to see how real it is. So with that as a warning, you guys are all in on hybrid multicloud, and I have my takeaways that I'd be happy to share, but, Tarkan, what were your impressions, coming out of the event? >> Look, you had a great entry. Our goal, as Monica is going to outline, too, cloud is not a destination. It's an operating model. Our customers are basically using cloud as a business model, as an operating model. It's not just a bunch of techno mumbo-jumbo, as, kind of, you outlined. We want to make sure we make cloud invisible to the customer so they can focus on what they need to focus on as a business. So as part of that, we want to make sure the workloads, the apps, they can run anywhere the way the customer wants. So in that context, you know, our entire story was bringing customer workloads, use-cases, partner ecosystem with ISVs and cloud providers and service providers and ISPs we're working with like Citrix on end user computing, like Red Hat on cloud native, and also bringing the right products, both in terms of infrastructure capability and management capability for both operators and application developers. So bringing all these pieces together and make it simple for the customer to use the cloud as an operating model. That was the biggest goal here. >> Great, thank you. Monica, anything you'd add in terms of your takeaways? >> Well, I think Tarkan said it right. We are here to make cloud complexity invisible. This was our big event to get thousands of our customers, partners, our supporters together and unveil our product portfolio, which is much more simplified, now. It's a cloud platform. And really have a chance to show them how we are building an ecosystem around it, and really bringing to life the whole notion of hybrid multicloud computing. >> So, Monica, could you just, for our audience, just summarize the big news that came out of .NEXT? >> Yeah, we actually made four different announcements, and most of them were focused around, obviously, our product portfolio. So the first one was around enhancements to our cloud platform to help customers build modern, software-defined data centers to speed their hybrid multicloud deployments while supporting their business-critical applications, and that was really about the next version of our flagship, AOS six, availability. We announced the general availability of that, and key features really included things like built-in virtual networking, disaster recovery enhancements, security enhancements that otherwise would need a lot of specialized hardware, software, and skills are now built into our platform. And, most importantly, all of this functionality being managed through a single interface, right? Which significantly decreases the operational overhead. So that was one announcement. The second announcement was focused around data services and really making it easy for customers to simplify data management, also optimize big data and database workloads. We announced capability that now improves performances of database workloads by 2x, big data workloads by 3x, so lots of great stuff there. We also announced a new service called Nutanix Data Lens, which is a new unstructured data governance service. So, again, I don't want to go into a lot of details here. Maybe we can do it later. That was our second big announcement. The third announcement, which is really around partnerships, and we'll talk more about that, is with Microsoft. We announced the preview of Nutanix Clusters and Azure, and that's really taking our entire flagship Nutanix platform and running it on Azure. And so, now, we are in preview on that one, and we're super excited about that. And then, last but not least, and I know Tarkan is going to go into a lot more detail, is we announced a strategic partnership with Citrix around the whole future of hybrid work. So lots of big news coming out of it. I just gave you a quick summary. There's a lot more around this, as well. >> Okay. Now, I'd like to give you my honest take, if you guys don't mind, and, Tarkan, I'll steal one of your lines. Don't hate me, okay? So the first thing I'm going to say is I think, Nutanix, you have the absolute right vision. There's no question in my mind. But what you're doing is not trivial, and I think it's going to play out. It's going to take a number of years. To actually build an abstraction layer, which is where you're going, as I take it, as a platform that can exploit all the respective cloud native primitives and run virtually any workload in any cloud. And then what you're doing, as I see it, is abstracting that underlying technology complexity and bringing that same experience on-prem, across clouds, and as I say, that's hard. I will say this: the deep dives that I got at the analyst event, it convinced me that you're committed to this vision. You're spending real dollars on focused research and development on this effort, and, very importantly, you're sticking to your true heritage of making this simple. Now, you're not alone. All the non-hyperscalers are going after the multicloud opportunity, which, again, is really challenging, but my assessment is you're ahead of the game. You're certainly focused on your markets, but, from what I've seen, I believe it's one of the best examples of a true hybrid multicloud-- you're on that journey-- that I've seen to date. So I would give you high marks there. And I like the ecosystem-building piece of it. So, Tarkan, you could course-correct anything that I've said, and I'd love for you to pick up on your comments. It takes a village, you know, you're sort of invoking Hillary Clinton, to bring the right solution to customers. So maybe you could talk about some of that, as well. >> Look, actually, you hit all the right points, and I don't hate you for that. I love you for that, as you know. Look, at the end of the day, we started this journey about 10 years ago. The last two years with Monica, with the great executive team, and overall team as a whole, big push to what you just suggested. We're not necessarily, you know, passionate about cloud. Again, it's a business model. We're passionate about customer outcomes, and some of those outcomes sometimes are going to also be on-prem. That's why we focus on this terminology, hybrid multicloud. It is not multicloud, it's not just private cloud or on-prem and non-cloud. We want to make sure customers have the right outcomes. So based on that, whether those are cloud partners or platform partners like HPE, Dell, Supermicro. We just announced a partnership with Supermicro, now, we're selling our software. HPE, we run on GreenLake. Lenovo, we run on TruScale. Big support for Lenovo. Dell's still a great partner to us. On cloud partnerships, as Monica mentioned, obviously Azure. We had a big session with AWS. Lots of new work going on with Red Hat as an ISV partner. Tying that also to IBM Cloud, as we move forward, as Red Hat and IBM Cloud go hand in hand, and also tons of workarounds, as Monica mentioned. So it takes a village. We want to make sure customer outcomes deliver value. So anywhere, for any app, on any infrastructure, any cloud, regardless standards or protocols, we want to make sure we have an open system coverage, not only for operators, but also for application developers, develop those applications securely and for operators, run and manage those applications securely anywhere. So from that perspective, tons of interest, obviously, on the Citrix or the UC side, as Monica mentioned earlier, we also just announced the Red Hat partnership for cloud services. Right before that, next we highlighted that, and we are super excited about those two partnerships. >> Yeah, so, when I talked to some of your product folks and got into the technology a little bit, it's clear to me you're not wrapping your stack in containers and shoving it into the cloud and hosting it like some do. You're actually going much deeper. And, again, that's why it's hard. You could take advantage of those things, but-- So, Monica, you were on the stage at .NEXT with Eric Lockhart of Microsoft. Maybe you can share some details around the focus on Azure and what it means for customers. >> Absolutely. First of all, I'm so grateful that Eric actually flew out to the Bay Area to be live on stage with us. So very super grateful for Eric and Azure partnership there. As I said earlier, we announced the preview of Nutanix Clusters and Azure. It's a big deal. We've been working on it for a while. What this means is that a select few organizations will have an opportunity to get early access and also help shape the roadmap of our offering. And, obviously, we're looking forward to then announcing general availability soon after that. So that's number one. We're already seeing tremendous interest. We have a large number of customers who want to get their hands on early access. We are already working with them to get them set up. The second piece that Eric and I talked about really was, you know, the reason why the work that we're doing together is so important is because we do know that hybrid cloud is the preferred IT model. You know, we've heard that in spades from all different industries' research, by talking to customers, by talking to people like yourselves. However, when customers actually start deploying it, there's lots of issues that come up. There's limited skill sets, resources, and, most importantly, there's a disparity between the on-premises networking security management and the cloud networking security management. And that's what we are focused on, together as partners, is removing that barrier, the friction between on-prem and Azure cloud. So our customers can easily migrate their workloads in Azure cloud, do cloud disaster recovery, create a burst into cloud for elasticity if they need to, or even use Azure as an on-ramp to modernize applications by using the Azure cloud services. So that's one big piece. The second piece is our partnership around Kubernetes and cloud native, and that's something we've already provided to the market. It's GA with Azure and Nutanix cloud platform working together to build Kubernetes-based applications, container-based applications, and run them and manage them. So there's a lot more information on nutanix.com/azure. And I would say, for those of our listeners who want to give it a try and who want their hands on it, we also have a test drive available. You can actually experience the product by going to nutanix.com/azure and taking the test drive. >> Excellent. Now, Tarkan, we saw recently that you announced services. You've got HPE GreenLake, Lenovo, their Azure service, which is called TruScale. We saw you with Keith White at HPE Discover. I was just with Keith White this week, by the way, face to face. Awesome guy. So that's exciting. You got some investments going on there. What can you tell us about those partnerships? >> So, look, as we talked through this a little bit, the HPE relationship is a very critical relationship. One of our fastest growing partnerships. You know, our customers now can run a Nutanix software on any HPE platform. We call it DX, is the platform. But beyond that, now, if the customers want to use HPE service as-a-service, now, Nutanix software, the entire stack, it's not only hybrid multicloud platform, the database capability, EUC capability, storage capability, can run on HPE's service, GreenLake service. Same thing, by the way, same way available on Lenovo. Again, we're doing similar work with Dell and Supermicro, again, giving our customers choice. If they want to go to a public club partner like Azure, AWS, they have that choice. And also, as you know, I know Monica, you're going to talk about this, with our GSI partnerships and new service provider program, we're giving options to customers because, in some other regions, HPE might not be their choice or Azure not be choice, and a local telco might the choice in some country like Japan or India. So we give options and capability to the customers to run Nutanix software anywhere they like. >> I think that's a really important point you're making because, as I see all these infrastructure providers, who are traditionally on-prem players, introduce as-a-service, one of the things I'm looking for is, sure, they've got to have their own services, their own products available, but what other ecosystem partners are they offering? Are they truly giving the customers choice? Because that's, really, that's the hallmark of a cloud provider. You know, if we think about Amazon, you don't always have to use the Amazon product. You can use actually a competitive product, and that's the way it is. They let the customers choose. Of course, they want to sell their own, but, if you innovate fast enough, which, of course, Nutanix is all about innovation, a lot of customers are going to choose you. So that's key to these as-a-service models. So, Monica, Tarkan mentioned the GSIs. What can you tell us about the big partners there? >> Yeah, definitely. Actually, before I talk about GSIs, I do want to make sure our listeners understand we already support AWS in a public cloud, right? So Nutanix totally is available in general, generally available on AWS to use and build a hybrid cloud offering. And the reason I say that is because our philosophy from day one, even on the infrastructure side, has been freedom of choice for our customers and supporting as large a number of platforms and substrates as we can. And that's the notion that we are continuing, here, forward with. So to talk about GSIs a bit more, obviously, when you say one platform, any app, any cloud, any cloud includes on-prem, it includes hyperscalers, it includes the regional service providers, as well. So as an example, TCS is a really great partner of ours. We have a long history of working together with TCS, in global 2000 accounts across many different industries, retail, financial services, energy, and we are really focused, for example, with them, on expanding our joint business around mission critical applications deployment in our customer accounts, and specifically our databases with Nutanix Era, for example. Another great partner for us is HCL. In fact, HCL's solution SKALE DB, we showcased at .NEXT just yesterday. And SKALE DB is a fully managed database service that HCL offers which includes a Nutanix platform, including Nutanix Era, which is our database service, along with HCL services, as well as the hardware/software that customers need to actually run their business applications on it. And then, moving on to service providers, you know, we have great partnerships like with Cyxtera, who, in fact, was the service provider partner of the year. That's the award they just got. And many other service providers, including working with, you know, all of the edge cloud, Equinix. So, I can go on. We have a long list of partnerships, but what I want to say is that these are very important partnerships to us. All the way from, as Tarkan said, OEMs, hyperscalers, ISVs, you know, like Red Hat, Citrix, and, of course, our service provider, GSI partnerships. And then, last but not least, I think, Tarkan, I'd love for you to maybe comment on our channel partnerships as well, right? That's a very important part of our ecosystem. >> No, absolutely. You're absolutely right. Monica. As you suggested, our GSI program is one of the best programs in the industry in number of GSIs we support, new SP program, enterprise solution providers, service provider program, covering telcos and regional service providers, like you suggested, OVH in France, NTT in Japan, Yotta group in India, Cyxtera in the US. We have over 50 new service providers signed up in the last few months since the announcement, but tying all these things, obviously, to our overall channel ecosystem with our distributors and resellers, which is moving very nicely. We have Christian Alvarez, who is running our channel programs globally. And one last piece, Dave, I think this was important point that Monica brought up. Again, give choice to our customers. It's not about cloud by itself. It's outcomes, but cloud is an enabler to get there, especially in a hybrid multicloud fashion. And last point I would add to this is help customers regardless of the stage they're in in their cloud migration. From rehosting to replatforming, repurchasing or refactoring, rearchitecting applications or retaining applications or retiring applications, they will have different needs. And what we're trying to do, with Monica's help, with the entire team: choice. Choice in stage, choice in maturity to migrate to cloud, and choice on platform. >> So I want to close. First of all, I want to give some of my impressions. So we've been watching Nutanix since the early days. I remember vividly standing around the conference call with my colleague at the time, Stu Miniman. The state-of-the-art was converged infrastructure, at the time, bolting together storage, networking, and compute, very hardware centric. And the founding team at Nutanix told us, "We're going to have a software-led version of that." And you popularized, you kind of created the hyperconverged infrastructure market. You created what we called at the time true private cloud, scaled up as a company, and now you're really going after that multicloud, hybrid cloud opportunity. Jerry Chen and Greylock, they just wrote a piece called Castles on the Cloud, and the whole concept was, and I say this all the time, the hyperscalers, last year, just spent a hundred billion dollars on CapEx. That's a gift to companies that can add value on top of that. And that's exactly the strategy that you're taking, so I like it. You've got to move fast, and you are. So, guys, thanks for coming on, but I want you to both-- maybe, Tarkan, you can start, and Monica, you can bring us home. Give us your wrap up, your summary, and any final thoughts. >> All right, look, I'm going to go back to where I started this. Again, I know I go back. This is like a broken record, but it's so important we hear from the customers. Again, cloud is not a destination. It's a business model. We are here to support those outcomes, regardless of platform, regardless of hypervisor, cloud type or app, making sure from legacy apps to cloud native apps, we are there for the customers regardless of their stage in their migration. >> Dave: Right, thank you. Monica? >> Yeah. And I, again, you know, just the whole conversation we've been having is around this but I'll remind everybody that why we started out. Our journey was to make infrastructure invisible. We are now very well poised to helping our customers, making the cloud complexity invisible. So our customers can focus on business outcomes and innovation. And, as you can see, coming out of .NEXT, we've been firing on all cylinders to deliver this differentiated, unified hybrid multicloud platform so our customers can really run any app, anywhere, on any cloud. And with the simplicity that we are known for because, you know, our customers love us. NPS 90 plus seven years in a row. But, again, the guiding principle is simplicity, portability, choice. And, really, our compass is our customers. So that's what we are focused on. >> Well, I love not having to get on planes every Sunday and coming back every Friday, but I do miss going to events like .NEXT, where I meet a lot of those customers. And I, again, we've been following you guys since the early days. I can attest to the customer delight. I've spent a lot of time with them, driven in taxis, hung out at parties, on buses. And so, guys, listen, good luck in the next chapter of Nutanix. We'll be there reporting and really appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and, as always, we'll see you next time. (light music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 20, 21 brought to you by IBM, >>Everybody welcome back to IBM. Think 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of this event. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, but doing that virtually for the better part of a 14 months. Now we're going to get deeper into application modernization. Marie ASHRAE is here. She's the director of marketing at mainline information systems and David burrows. Burrows is an account executive at mainline folks. Welcome to the cube. Great to have you on today. >>Thank you. Nice to be here >>To start with with mainline. Uh, people might not be familiar with, with mainline, but you've transformed over the past five years. I wonder if you could describe that for our audience? >>Yes, we have. Indeed. We have, um, mainline, um, you know, it's a 30 plus year company and, um, and for 30 odd years we had really been focused a lot in hardware, right? Hardware reselling. That's what the market needed. That's what we did a lot of. But then in the past, I would say five to eight years, maybe even 10 years, we started on this transformation project, um, for the business where we started transforming ourselves into really systems integrators versus just hardware reseller. So now we can go to a client and we can say, Hey, now what are you struggling with? Right? What are your business challenges? And then from there, we can integrate a solution that might be hardware. It might be software, it might be some services, it could be managed services. It could be staffing services, um, could be a number of different things and put all that together and then deliver a complete solution that helps them with their, their business requirements. Okay, >>David, that, that must've been an interesting transition because what Marie just described is it used to be every opportunity was a nail and whatever box you were selling was the hammer. And, and that, that has changed dramatically. Of course. So you, you, I wonder what that discussion was like with, with, with clients. You must have heard that early on and said, Oh, this cloud thing is happening. The world is changing. We've got to change too. I wonder if you could chime in on that transformation. >>Yes. That's our, uh, as our clients have been changing, what we've been doing is, uh, you know, making sure that we fully understand what's available not only in the marketplace, but the competition and what, what each industry segment, for example, baking versus insurance versus a utility maybe facing, uh, during this this time. And so, you know, being able to transform as a, as an accounting dedicated, we've been able to, uh, indicate and so provide solutions as Marie indicated. Um, the large focus over the last five years has been networking and security as we move, uh, more compute to the edge, close to the edge. Security has been predominant. Uh, and so, you know, hardware is really almost commoditized through and through and with the exception of, you know, IBM, Z and, and power. Uh, and so, you know, we've had to really, uh, sellers, you know, focus on what customers are dealing with and how they transition. Uh, and as we, uh, you know, through COVID, it's actually been a bigger challenge, a bigger focus on security. And I think we'll talk about that a little bit later in more detail >>Let's, let's, let's do that now. So, so Marie, maybe at a high level, you could talk about those challenges that your clients are facing. And then we can sort of double click on how that was exacerbated by, by COVID. And I'm really interested in your perspectives on sort of the post isolation economy and how those challenges are going to shift, but, but maybe, maybe kick us off at the high level if you could. >>Sure. So, um, so, you know, people, companies were moving toward, um, uh, th the whole digital transformation, right? Probably for the past three to four years, we started seeing more and more that's constantly, everybody sees those buzz words all the time. Um, so clients were shifting in that direction and we were shifting to try to satisfy them with their needs with those solutions, but then came COVID and all of a sudden, right. What people were, were planning on doing for the next, let's say five years. I mean, most of the iOS were saying, yeah, we're going to get there in five years. Well, that had to happen. Right. It had to have brakes went on and it had to happen instantaneously. So that put a big change in focus, a big change in direction for not only our clients. Right. But for our own folks, folks like David, who are trying to service these clients with having to bring them these solutions that we're going to solve their digital business needs, um, today and not five years from now. >>Yeah. So David let's, let's talk about that. I mean, what Marie just described, I call it the forced March to digital, because as Maria, as you were saying, people were on a digital transformation, but there was a little bit of complacency and okay, we'll get there. We're really busy doing some other stuff. And then all of a sudden you've probably seen the meme of the COVID wrecking ball coming, coming into the building, the office building and saying, you know, well, we're doing fine. And all of a sudden, boom, the forest COVID comes in. So, so, so, so how did that affect your clients and how did you respond? I mean, they're asking for VDI and get me some laptops, I need end point security. And so how did that affect the, the application modernization efforts and David, maybe you could comment on that. >>So I, I think for, for me, the biggest challenge was all business, the competition within business to survive COVID, uh, you know, they had to put on first thing was how do we get our, our customer, uh, supported correctly and how do we get our workers supportive, working at home? So the very first thing we did over the initial six months was most companies had to transform immediately within the first 30 to 90 days to allow their workforce to work from home. Uh, that happened throughout my, my customer base, uh, both in Southern California, uh, was customers really focused on, uh, how do we business process, how do we compete in this marketplace and get return on investment speed, you know, time to value or what we invest in these, uh, COVID times so that we can compete with other, uh, businesses that are trying to stay alive, uh, through this transition. And, and now, you know, we're seeing on, uh, on the backend, uh, you know, that time, the value in terms of investment is even more important because some businesses have been significantly impacted from not only cashflow, uh, but you know, certainly in terms of profitability during this time >>Makes sense. And so I'm read, so we were talking earlier about the, sort of the initial path to digital transformation, and I wonder if that's gotta be course corrected. I would think we were forced in to compress, you know, the digital reality, uh, and, and I guess in a way that's good. Uh, but in a way it was, we probably made a lot of mistakes. It was a bit of a Petri dish. So now as we begin to knock on exit COVID, you would think those, those imperatives, uh, adjust and they start to become aligned. What's your take on that, especially as it relates to application and infrastructure modernization. >>Um, so I would agree with that. I think that there's definitely has to be a little bit of a, of a real alignment happening. And I know recently I read that, um, 20, 21 is expected to be a very, um, large year in it spend because all of those, um, initiatives that CEOs and others were going after pre COVID kind of got put on hold, right. So they could then go focus on all of those digital needs that were needed, like, you know, the CDI, you know, work at home, all the security stuff for that. So I think we're going to see, I'm thinking, we're going to see a shift again now, and maybe businesses are going to go back and try to pick up where they were, uh, prior to COVID and now start working on more of really of the application modernization, um, initiatives that were in mind. And I know we wanted to talk about that as well, because David's been working on quite a bit of application modernization with, um, a few of his clients, um, as we're seeing again, businesses change. Um, and, and I don't know that all of that changes because of COVID. I think all of that change was for their competitiveness, um, to get there anyway. So I think that's going to start, as you said before, Dave, I think it's going to start now having to >>Kind of rethink, >>It reminds me of traffic on the David, if you've ever been to driving in, in London when it's slingshots, right. It's that's what's COVID was like Murray you're absolutely right. Last year it spend was down four to 5% this year. I mean, our prediction is going to be in the six to 7% range, which, which kind of aligns with where Gartner and IDC are based on our surveys. But, you know, back in, in April, like I think the 16th of April, it was a headline in the wall street journal that the China grew 18% GDP in the quarter. So it's very hard to predict, but, but it's coming back, you know, we, we can see that David and so, so spending is really gonna accelerate. There's probably some pent-up demand for that application modernization. Maybe it's been a little bit, uh, neglected as we've done, as Maria was saying. And you were saying the work from home. So maybe you could talk a little bit more about the modernization aspects and maybe I'm really interested in the things that you guys deliver in your portfolio with IBM. >>Sure. Uh, so what I have customers in multiple phases within this, uh, current digital transformation, their customer, uh, moving everything to next gen, uh, development, which is, uh, only containerized code, uh, being able to, you know, swiftly go through their development tests, uh, and, uh, hybrid cloud environments where they're, um, they haven't made an investment yet, but they're sampling what it might be like to, uh, change into that world. And then there are customers are still in the, uh, typical environment, uh, the traditional environment, and are looking at what the solutions, as far as packages are available for them moving forward. So they can kind of skip over, uh, any kind of development and being able to, uh, leverage, uh, what I call them next, gen development or next gen systems, uh, immediately, as you know, you asked, you know, what are the, what are the systems that are available? IBM's cloud pack, uh, solution set. It provides a portfolio of capabilities, uh, both in the application, suite, database, suite security. Uh, I have customers today leveraging that. Uh, and, and so that is one of the first pieces, uh, that, that customers I see who are on the leading edge, or are also kind of trailing, are looking at, uh, these cloud packs to be able to, uh, uh, go time to market and time to value, uh, quickly. >>Yeah. So when I look at your portfolio, I just sort of scan the web. Uh, David just mentioned Marie cloud pack. I mean, we're talking software here. You guys do have a lot of expertise in ZZ Linux power, you mentioned is not a commodity. And it's one of the few pieces of hardware that, and Z they're not a commodity storage. I would think business resiliency fits in there beyond disaster recovery, your red hat, we're talking, you know, things like open OpenShift and Ansible for automation. So these are, these are not your grandfather's main line. These are toolkits are a piece of, you know, parts of the tool bag that you bring to bear to focus on on client outcomes and solutions is, am I getting that right? >>Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Um, and again, right, that goes back to the original opening comment about how we've transformed as a business, right. To become, uh, an integrator, um, putting all of these different pieces together. I mean, I know that, um, something that, that David recently had worked on, Oh my goodness. If you would have looked at the list of pieces of elements to that solution, um, it was really quite incredible between, um, open source stuff, you know, and a bunch of IBM stuff. Um, yes, it was some storage and yeah, there was some power, um, yes, there was red hat. Right. But then there was other stuff there was VMware. Um, there was, um, some things that, um, I can't even remember now all the names to all the components, but it was, it was a laundry list. Right. And so that's where though mainline stepped in and put the pieces together, uh, for the customer so that the customer then can get done what they needed to get done, which was, which was really solve their business problem, which was trying to become more competitive in their market space. >>Okay, David, so when Maria was sustained was basically, my takeaways is as a system integrator, you've got all these piece parts with these technologies, you've got virtualization, you've got automation, you've got containers and so forth. Uh, and yes, there's there's hardware, but there's this integration that has to occur. And your job is to abstract that complexity, that underlying complexity away so that the customers can focus on the outcome. Maybe you could talk about that and how you do that. >>Sure. I'll give you a good example of a recent customer that we work with who was, uh, basically, I mean, we consider an enterprise data platform that, that, uh, was going to rework their entire data warehouse into something that had governance surrounding it, uh, where they could validate all the data that was coming into their warehouse. And so we underpinned that, uh, with an infrastructure of power, uh, we're running, uh, obviously IBM, uh, uh, pack for data, uh, with DB two warehouse. Uh, we use a combination of that with, uh, Cloudera data flow through IBM, uh, with the streaming and, uh, the governance, uh, IBM governance catalog piece, which is, uh, lots of knowledge catalog. So, uh, we've been able to take not only what their base requirements were, but all the microservices that are packaged in with cloud pack, uh, all running on OpenShift, uh, which was a great acquisition that IBM did last year. And, uh, then, uh, they also required other microservices outside, uh, to support that environment and paint a picture for >>Us as to what the future looks like. Uh, it's, it's much different than the past 30 years, uh, and bring us home please >>Or so, um, I think the future for us is to continue to, um, to find all of the solutions, um, that will, that will help our customers, um, you know, get to their next steps. Right. And, and there's a lot, as you know, there's lots of solutions out there. There's lots of new companies that are popping up all the time. Um, you know, inherently, you know, mainline is an IBM partner. We've been an IBM partner for 30 plus years since our inception. And that's the base of our business is, is IBM. But, but there are other requirements that are needed by, by businesses, by our customers. And that's where we, we reach out and partner up. We probably have gone my goodness, 200 plus partnerships with various companies, various technology companies that we can then, um, lean on and pull in those ancillary solutions, um, to, to, to complete that, that solution for the customer. >>So I think we're going to continue going down that path. We're going to continue making sure that we're partnered with the, um, the, the leading technology companies. So we can build that IBM solution for our customer and, and bolt on the other pieces that are needed. Uh, we're going to continue to grow and enhance our services business because we've got quite a large services business, whether it's implementation services, uh, we do managed services. We have staffing services. I think you're going to see if we're still going to continue to, to grow that business, because that is a piece where companies, you know, they don't want to worry about running all of that stuff, right. They want to know that their system's going to be running 24 seven. And if there is a bump or a burp or something happens, Hey, they could pick up the phone, they can call mainline. We can help them get things corrected. So I think we're going to still see a lot of that going on as well, um, within our, our, our offerings. >>Excellent. Well, congratulations for making it through that. Not a whole lot, not, not every, uh, hardware seller reseller made it through and you guys transformed. It's a, it's an inspiring story. Maria, David, thanks so much for coming on the cube. Thank you. Thank you very much. You're really welcome. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante in our continuous coverage and the cube of IBM think 20, 21. Keep it right there.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's theCUBE, with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Today I have a new guest, new to theCUBE, Madhuri Chawla. The Director of Strategic Partnerships for Enterprise Application Services, is joining me. Madhuri, it's nice to have you on the program. >> Thank you Lisa, very excited to be here. And hello everyone. >> So different this year again, virtual like last year, we're going to talk about digital transformation. We saw this huge acceleration in 2020 the massive adoption of SAS applications. We want to to talk though about IBM Managed Services for SAP applications. So before we get into that, I'd love for you to be able to describe what your role is to our audience. >> Absolutely Lisa, so good day everyone, I've been with IBM for over 23 years. And my current role, I run the strategic alliances for IBM basically in the ERP space. SAP being our primary strategic partner. I have a global team of architects and we basically look at market requirements, talk to a lot of customers talk to our business partner SAP obviously, you know try to help them with come up with a solution for their transformation journey to the cloud. And hopefully today, you know we'll elaborate a little bit more on the exact walk that we do in this space. So very happy to be here. Thank you Lucy. >> Sure, so we're going to dissect the IBM SAP relationship. I think you even worked at SAP before your 23-year tenure at IBM. So we'll get to some of that as well, but help us understand, customers have so much choice, each day there's more and more choice. Why should a customer choose IBM as their strategic partner for this digital transformation journey? >> Well, really IBM has been in this SAP business for many, many decades, as you know. We have many, many certified people in SAP, close to 40,000 people actually globally. And we can help the clients in various aspects of their journey. So, you know, the typical cloud journey has four different aspects to it. You will need the advice. So you need basically systems integration services to help customers actually define the scope on you know, what they actually want to either upgrade, bring it to current as well as you know what workloads they want to move to the cloud. We can help customers with our systems integration services called the Global Business Services in IBM. We can help them with their entire planning. We can help them with the actual move to the cloud. So IBM offers a whole different variety of services for migration. Well, not only just the SAP workloads, I mean SAP typically ends up being the heart of the workloads than any of the major customers run, but surrounding SAP there's a lot of other applications so we can help plan that entire journey for advice and then, you know move it as well as in the interim, you know there's also another step which can be some customers that need to build net new, and you know, upgrade their applications to the latest technologies. So we can help them with that. And then once the build and move is over, obviously customers need help with the actual steady state run state environment. That's where this key service that we have Managed Services for SAP applications helps them. So our certifications with SAP and the fact that we have consultants that are certified in all these different aspects of the journey, can really help your clients. The other part I would say that IBM is really a hybrid cloud provider. So obviously we have our cloud service the IBM Cloud, but we can offer this service meeting the customer where they need to be. So we are a client centric service. So if the customer has a choice of AWS or Azure we can meet them there. So this is how, you know we can really help our customers with our expertise. Another data point to note that, you know, 70, 80% of the enterprise customers still have not moved their workloads to the cloud. So this is a space, especially with COVID as you've seen what's happened. You know, customers now are really really looking to accelerate the journey because it's become a necessity. It's no longer something that a CEO and CIO can push to the right, right? This is something they have to act now. So IBM with all these various services specifically geared in the SAP area. And given that we've been managing these production workloads for a lot of these enterprise customers on our cloud services for many, many years we have the experience. We can truly help them with their journey. >> And as you said, that's so critical these days. One of the things that I think we learned in 2020 is there was no time like the present. It really became such a massive shift that for business survival, those that weren't digitized, definitely were in some hot water. But talk to me so you talked about the IBM, SAP relationship being longstanding. Can you talk to me about the different aspects of the alliance and how that helps you guys to meet customers where they are? >> Sure, so SAP and IBM, we've been strategic partners for over 46 years, that's a long time. The partnership obviously has evolved over the years and I'll talk about, you know, a few of the different aspects where we've been partners. You know, the alliance initially obviously started you know, IBM is in multiple businesses as you know, we are one of the largest systems integrators in the world From a global business services point of view. As well as one of the largest application managed services providers. So that's, you know, part of the alliance. Then we have our server groups, the power systems that IBM has. So that's another dimension of the alliance where you know, 5, 6,000 plus SAP clients even today are still running their SAP applications on the power systems, whether it's on-premise or also in some of the cloud deployment models. Historically, we also had obviously the database Db2 alliance, but now with the SAP's move to HANA. That's kind of little bit of a mute point, obviously it still exists but most of the clients are now obviously being encouraged really to adopt SAP's latest S/4HANA. From the services standpoint, the other facet is really around the cloud services. So that's really our topic today, right? In the cloud services area, we have alliances with SAP, very very strong alliances that have existed for you know, almost a decade now. As I said, we've been managing the production workloads for very, very large customers in many different industries, their entire supply chains HR financial systems are running on IBM, either in the old traditional hosting models or also in our cloud models for the past 10 plus years, right, as IBM has evolved. So we have made sure that we do a whole different types of certifications with SAP to stay current. Many of these certifications are done either, you know every two years, some are done every year. And if anyone checks, you know the SAP service marketplace website, which is owned by SAP you can see IBM listed in all these different angles as a certified provider. There isn't another provider that can claim this breadth in terms of certifications that IBM has done. And that's why customers can benefit either from one or two of these services that IBM provides or obviously a combination as a single vendor, if the customer needs. So, you know we have the sets we have the credibility, we have decades of you know, delivery excellence in these areas, servicing these clients. Lots of the Fortune 100 customers actually are running their SAP workloads on the IBM systems, whether in traditional hosting or in a hybrid cloud deployment. some cases we're actually providing services for customers that run their SAP workloads on-premise. So we cater to that, you know, sets of clients as well. And then of course, others that are purely on our cloud, IBM cloud, as well as hyperscalers. Yeah. >> So long list of certifications, that seems to be one of the biggest differentiators that you talked about. Talk to me a little bit about how things have evolved over the last, you know, 12 to 18 months in terms of how has IBM's focus changed for hybrid cloud with SAP? >> Yeah, so the focus changed, you know until last year, we were called the cloud and cognitive company. This year of course the whole company has changed and we're going through a major transformation at the moment. We are the Hybrid Cloud Company now, and that name change means a lot. It means a lot in the sense that it gives choices to the customer. That's what the whole mission is all about. We want to make sure that customers are consuming IBM services and IBM wants to meet them where they want to be. So there's, you know, flexibility of choices in terms of hybrid in a cloud deployment model. So most customers in the SAP area you know, they're looking for either just a pure private cloud deployment or they're looking for a Puppet cloud deployment or a combination. And some are because, you know their SAP's footprint sizes are so large. Think about the multinational global companies, you know and then they operate in so many different regions of the world and their data sizes of their databases are so large. Perhaps you know the public cloud really isn't a good fit. Yet these customers are looking to move some sort of their workloads to the cloud. So that's where this hybrid cloud helps them because customers, you know, 90 plus percent of the clients today are really not choosing one hyperscaler as their deployment option. They're really looking at multiple. So because they're running their workloads not just SAP, but everything else, you know SAP always brings along a whole bunch of other applications like tax applications and other interfaces, homegrown applications analytics that the customers are using. So if you want to take advantage of the true hybrid cloud and the benefits of all the various deployments and hyperscalers available in that region, really the hybrid cloud strategy from IBM is a perfect fit. Because we give them choices of deployment. We're not saying that you have to deploy an IBM cloud. We're saying you can deploy either on-premise, AWS, Azure IBM cloud, really what makes sense, you know, best sense for the types of workloads that the customer is looking at. So that's how the strategy for IBM has completely changed to meet the clients you know, for what they're actually looking for. >> Talk to me a little bit about the go-to-market. So IBM and SAP, long-standing decades-old relationship lot of certifications that you talked about. We're talking about business critical applications. You mentioned supply chain a minute ago and I can't help, but think of how supply chain has been affected in the last year. What is the go-to-market approach with respect to providing consultation services to help customers determine, should we migrate to what hyperscaler and how and when? >> Yeah, so we can help them with that. So hybrid hyperscalers, obviously, you know IBM has been listed for example, as the leader in Gartner 2020. And you know there's lots of other stats that show them that IBM is a leader in application services, in consulting services, application management services as well as managed services. So these are all different, right? And you can see us being listed as a leader either it's in Gartner or IDC or Forrester Wave, and for many reasons. And you know, IBM actually has one series of pinnacle awards from SAP over the years. How this helps the clients really determine is that you know, IBM obviously does a lot of studies externally. We have internal as well as external facing views of comparatives of the various hyperscalers, you know including AWS Azure or GCP and so on. So when a customer comes to us for asking for advice and so on, we basically look at our own intellectual properties all the analysis that has been done. And more importantly, we look at the full scope of services that the customer is doing. What sort of a business are they in? We have industry experts there's ERP strategy folks within IBM. So, you know, they go off for a certain industry. And when they let's say, you know, they've gone off to the oil and gas industry, for example, they will look at multiple customers in that particular space. So based on their experiences, we can actually define the right roadmap for the client to be able to help them to move their workloads to this hybrid cloud strategy that I just mentioned right? So that's how we can help them because we have the expertise in that industry as well. >> And I'm curious, Madhuri in the last year, with so much flux and rapidly changing market conditions did you see any one or two industries in particular really leading the charge here and coming to IBM, SAP for help on this transformation journey which hasn't been accelerated by a couple of years? >> Certainly the retail industry, for sure, right? I mean, in spite of the crisis I think the retail industry did pretty well right? Because people still had to buy stuff. Of course the whole buying behavior changed no question. You and I, don't know about you, Lisa but for me, you know, I was never a major online shopper now I am, you know I buy just about everything. Previously it used to be select things here and there but now it's totally changed, right? So that industry certainly has accelerated no question. We've had a lot of those coming. The other industries that I've seen the change in the last 12, 18 months is really for for example you know the banking industry and so on. IBM basically, you know launched a lot of services in the financial services sector for this reason. So those are of course transforming very fast to keep up with the market. And I'm sure there's others, right. But these are the two that come to mind yeah. >> Yeah, two that have been most affected and needed to pivot so quickly in addition to healthcare. Let me ask you one final question here, before we wrap. Talk to me about the advantages of using the PMC Partner Managed Cloud SAP License resell model the advantages of using that and the benefits. >> Sure, so you know so far our discussion was really focused around, you know the various service capabilities that IBM has in terms of our capabilities for helping clients with hyperscalers and hybrid cloud. We also need to spend a little bit of time, you know talking about the operations model, right? So when they're running their production workloads on IBM PMC is yet another dimension. So what PMC, Partner Managed Cloud is really some very limited partnerships that SAP does. And IBM is the lead on that one. In this space, what SAP allows is the partner, which in this case is IBM to resell the SAP software license to a customer. So IBM has the rights globally to resell the license. And why is that beneficial to the client? Because now IBM can actually turn around the SAP license and have the customer pay us in a SAS model. So it basically is now an OPEX model where the customer is basically paying, you know a monthly fee as an example. So there's no upfront cost to the client and they basically pay IBM and then IBM pays SAP. So IBM is kind of holding the risk, if you will, on behalf of the customer it gives customers more choices, more flexibilities better pricing approach. So if the customer wants as an example to buy everything the full package, including systems implementation services, deployment models, with choices you know, on a cloud, whether it's IBM cloud or others as well as the license itself IBM has this end-to-end capability today. We've been selling it to several clients for a few years in several geographies right? So that's really the advantage behind it. >> Got it, excellent, thanks for breaking that down Madhuri. And joining me today, talking about what's new with IBM and SAP, the opportunities for customers to accelerate their digital transformation. We appreciate you stopping by. >> Thank you very much Lisa, I truly enjoyed it, thank you. >> Good me too. For Madhuri Chawla, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE coverage of IBM. Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. And this is theCUBE virtual and Uli Homann who's here Corporate Vice President, of cloud and AI at Microsoft. Thanks for coming on. I love this session, obviously, Microsoft one of the big clouds. Awesome. You guys partnering with IBM here at IBM Think. First of all, congratulations on all the success with Azure and just the transformation of IBM. I mean, Microsoft's Cloud has been phenomenal and hybrid is spinning perfectly into the vision of what enterprises want. And this has certainly been a great tailwind for everybody. So congratulations. So for first question, thanks for coming on and tell us the vision for hybrid cloud for Microsoft. It's almost like a perfect storm. >> Yeah. Thank you, John. I really appreciate you hosting me here and asking some great questions. We certainly appreciate it being part of IBM Think 2021 virtual. Although I do wish to see some people again, at some point. From our perspective, hybrid computing has always been part of the strategy that Microsoft as policed. We didn't think that public cloud was the answer to all questions. We always believed that there is multiple scenarios where either safety latency or other key capabilities impeded the usage of public cloud. Although we will see more public cloud scenarios with 5G and other capabilities coming along. Hybrid computing will still be something that is important. And Microsoft has been building capabilities on our own as a first party solution like Azure Stack and other capabilities. But we also partnering with VMware and others to effectively enable investment usage of capabilities that our clients have invested in to bring them forward into a cloud native application and compute model. So Microsoft is continuing investing in hybrid computing and we're taking more and more Azure capabilities and making them available in a hybrid scenario. For example, we took our entire database Stack SQL Server PostgreSQL and recently our Azure machine learning capabilities and make them available on a platform so that clients can run them where they need them in a factory in on-premise environment or in another cloud for example, because they trust the Microsoft investments in relational technology or machine learning. And we're also extending our management capabilities that Azure provides and make them available for Kubernetes virtual machine and other environments wherever they might run. So we believe that bringing Azure capabilities into our clients is important and taking also the capabilities that our clients are using into Azure and make it available so that they can manage them end to end is a key element of our strategy. >> Yeah. Thanks Uli for sharing that, I really appreciate that. You and I have been in this industry for a while. And you guys have a good view on this how Microsoft's got perspective riding the wave from the original computer industry. I remember during the client server days in the 80s, late 80s to early 90s the open systems interconnect was a big part of opening up the computer industry that was networking, internetworking and really created more lans and more connections for PCs, et cetera. And the world just went on from there. Similar now with hybrid cloud you're seeing that same kind of vibe. You seeing the same kind of alignment with distributed computing architectures for businesses where now you have, it's not just networking and plumbing and connecting lans and PCs and printers. It's connecting everything. It's almost kind of a whole another world but similar movie, if you will. So this is really going to be good for people who understand that market. IBM does, you guys do. Talk about the alignment between IBM and Microsoft in this new hybrid cloud space? It's really kind of now standardized but yet it's just now coming. >> Yeah. So again, fantastic question. So the way I think about this is first of all, Microsoft and IBM are philosophically very much aligned. We're both investing in key open source initiatives like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, CNCF something that we both believe in. We are both partnering with the Red Hat organizations. So Red Hat forms a common bond if you still want to between Microsoft and IBM. And again, part of this is how can we establish a system of capabilities that every client has access to and then build on top of that stack. And again, IBM does this very well with their cloud packs which are coming out now with data and AI and others. And again, as I mentioned before we're investing in similar capabilities to make sure that core Azure functions are available on that CNCF cloud environment. So open source, open standards are key elements. And then you mentioned something critical which I believe is misunderstood but certainly not appreciated enough is, this is about connectivity between businesses. And so part of the power of the IBM perspective together with Microsoft is bringing together key business applications for healthcare, for retail, for manufacturing and really make them work together so that our clients that are critical scenarios get the support they need from both IBM as well as Microsoft on top of this common foundation of the CNCF and other open standards. >> It's interesting. I love that point. I'm going to double down and amplify that late and continue to bring it up. Connecting between businesses is one thread. But now people, because you have an edge, that's also industrial business but also people. People are participating in open source. People have wearables, people are connected. And also they're connecting with collaboration. So this kind of brings a whole 'nother architecture which I want to get into the solutions with you on on how you see that playing out. But first I know, you're a veteran with Microsoft for many, many years of decades. Microsoft's core competency has been ecosystems developer ecosystems, customer ecosystems. Today, that the services motion is built around ecosystems. You guys have that playbook IBM's well versed in it as well. How does that impact your partnerships, your solutions and how you deal with down this open marketplace? >> Well, let's start with the obvious. Obviously Microsoft and IBM will work together in common ecosystem. Again, I'm going to reference the CNCF again as the foundation for a lot of these initiatives. But then we're also working together in the ed hat ecosystem because Red Hat has built an ecosystem and Microsoft and IBM are players in that ecosystem. However, we also are looking a higher level there's a lot of times when people think ecosystems it's fairly low level technology. But Microsoft and IBM are talking about partnerships that are focused on industry scenarios. Again retail, for example, or healthcare and others where we're building on top of these lower level ecosystem capabilities and then bringing together the solution scenarios where the strength of IBM capabilities is coupled with Microsoft capabilities to drive this very famous one plus one equals three. And then the other piece that I think we both agree on is the open source ecosystem for software development and software development collaboration and GitHub is a common anchor that we both believe can feed the world's economy with respect to the software solutions that are needed to really bring the capabilities forward, help improve the wealth economy and so forth by effectively bringing together brilliant minds across the ecosystem. And again, just Microsoft and IBM bringing some people but the rest of the world obviously participating in that as well. So thinking again, open source, open standards and then industry specific collaboration and capabilities being a key part. You mentioned people. We certainly believe that people play a key role in software developers and the get hub notion being a key one. But there are others where, again, Microsoft with Microsoft 365 has a lot of capabilities in connecting people within the organization and across organizations. And while we're using zoom here, a lot of people are utilizing teams because teams is on the one side of collaboration platform. But on the other side is also an application host. And so bringing together people collaboration supported and powered by applications from IBM from Microsoft and others is going to be, I think a huge differentiation in terms of how people interact with software in the future. >> Yeah, and I think that whole joint development is a big part of this new people equation where it's not just partnering in market, it's also at the tech and you got open source and just phenomenal innovation, a formula there. So let's ask what solutions here. I want to get into some of the top solutions you're doing with Microsoft and maybe with IBM, but your title is corporate vice president of cloud and AI come on, cause you get a better department. I mean, more relevant than that. I mean, it's exciting. Your cloud-scale is driving tons of innovation. AI is eating software, changing the software paradigm. We can see that playing out. I've done dozens of interviews just in this past month on how AI is more certainly with machine learning and having a control plane with data, changing the game. So tell us what are the hot solutions for hybrid cloud? And why is this a different ball game than say public cloud? >> Well, so first of all let's talk a little bit about the AI capabilities and data because I think there are two categories. You're seeing an evolution of AI capabilities that are coming out. And again, I just read IBM's announcement about integrating the cloud pack with IBM Satellite. I think that's a key capability that IBM is putting out there and we're partnering with IBM in two directions there. Making it run very well on Azure with our Red Hat partners. But on the other side, also thinking through how we can optimize the experience for clients that choose Azure as their platform and IBM cloud Pak for data and AI as their technology, but that's a technology play. And then the next layer up is again, IBM has done a fantastic job to build AI capabilities that are relevant for industries. Healthcare being a very good example. Again, retail being another one. And I believe Microsoft and IBM will work on both partnerships on the technology side as well as the AI usage in specific verticals. Microsoft is doing similar things within our dynamics product line. We're using AI for business applications for planning, scheduling, optimizations, risk assessments those kinds of scenarios. And of course we're using those in the Microsoft 365 environment as well. I always joke that despite my 30 years at Microsoft, I still don't know how to read or use PowerPoint. And I can't do a PowerPoint slide for the life of me but with a new designer, I can actually get help from the system to make beautiful PowerPoint happen. So bringing AI into real life usage I think is the key part. The hybrid scenario is critical here as well. And especially when you start to think about real life scenarios, like safety, worker safety in a critical environment, freshness of product we're seeing retailers deploying cameras and AI inside the retail stores to effectively make sure that the shelves are stocked. That the quality of the vegetables for example, continues to be high and monitored. And previously people would do this on a occasional basis running around in the store. Now the store is monitored 24/7 and people get notified when things need fixing. Another really cool scenario set, is quality. We're working with a finished steel producer that effectively is looking at the stainless steel as it's being produced. And they have cameras on this steel that look at specific marks. And if these marks show up, then they know that the stainless steel will be bad. And I don't know if you've looked at a manufacturing process, but the earlier they can get a failure detected the better it is because they can most likely or more often than not return the product back into the beginning of the funnel and start over. And that's what they're using. So you can see molten steel, logically speaking with a camera and AI. And previously humans did this which is obviously a less reliable and be dangerous because this is very, very hot. This is very blowing steel. And so increasing safety while at the same time, improving the quality is something that we see hybrid scenarios. Again, autonomous driving, another great scenario where perception AI is going to be utilized. So there's a bunch of capabilities out there that really are hybrid in nature and will help us move forward with key scenarios, safety, quality and autonomous behaviors like driving and so forth. >> Uli, great insight, great product vision great alignment with IBM's hybrid cloud space with all customers are looking for now and certainly multi-cloud around the horizon. So great to have you on, great agility and congratulations for your continued success. You got great area cloud and AI and we'll be keeping in touch. I'd love to do a deep dive sometime. Thanks for coming on. >> John, thank you very much for the invitation and great questions. Great interview. Love it. Appreciate it. >> Okay, CUBE coverage here at IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>From Miami beach, Florida. It's the cube covering a Cronus global cyber summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >>So Ron, welcome back to the keeps coverage of kronas cyber global cyber summit 2019. I'm John furrier here in Miami beach. Our next guest is Pat Hurley, vice president, general manager of the Americas in sales and customer relationships. Get Debbie Juan. Hey, thanks for having me. Welcome to Miami beach. Lovely place to have an event. So I hear ya. You got a lot of competition going on between the U S America's in the AMIA teens and it's very competitive group. >> The European team is very confident. I think we'll show them tomorrow what we're made of. We've been recruited very hard for some players that are Latin American. I think we'll show them a finger too. You've got a big soccer story there. We do. Yeah. We've, uh, we've got a few sports partnerships that we have across the globe. Uh, some of the first partnerships we had were actually within formula one. >>And we really try to correlate the story of the importance of, uh, data protection and cyber protection in the sporting industry because a lot of people don't think about the amount of data that's actually being generated in the space. A formula one car generates between, you know, two and three terabyte through three gigabytes of data on every lap, tons of telemetry devices that are kicked, collecting information from the car, from the road service, from the, the general environment. They're taking that data and then sending it back to the headquarter, analyzing it and making very small improvements to the car to make sure that they can qualify faster, run a faster lap, make the right type of angle into a turn, uh, which can really differentiate them from being, you know, first, second, third, 10th in a qualifying session. On the soccer side. We do have some partnerships with uh, arsenal, Manchester city, inter Milan, and we just signed a partnership as well with Liverpool. >>So we are very popping in that space here in the U S we have some other sports that we're big fans of. I'm personally a big Boston red Sox fan, being a Boston native and we do have a sports partnership with the red Sox, which has been an unbelievable partnership with them. And learning more about the use cases that they solve and using our technology has been really cool. >> You know, Patty, you bring up the sports thing and we were kidding before we on camera around the trading, you know how people do sports deals and they trade, you know, merchandise for consumer benefit or customer benefits. But really what is happening is sports teams encapsulate really the digital transformation in a nutshell because most sports franchises are, have been traditionally behind. But now with the consumerization of it and digital can go back to 2007 since the mobile phone. >>Really, I mean it's iPhone. Yeah. Since that time, sports and capsulates every aspect of it, consumer business fan experience. And it really has every, every, almost every element of what we see now as a global IOT problem opportunity. So it really encapsulates the use case of an integrated and and needed solution. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about the amount of data that's, that's out there today and the fast way that it's growing, you know, the explosion of, uh, of data in the, in the world today, sports have different unique challenges. So obviously they have large fan bases that need to be able to access the data and understand what's going on with their favorite sports teams. Um, for us it's really, you know, these technology partnerships that we have with these guys, it runs through all these different areas of, you know, in many cases we didn't really understand that they were using it for. >>So, you know, the red Sox for example, they've got Fenway park and iconic stadium, you know, the Mecca of baseball. If you haven't been there yet, I suggest all your viewers that they go and check it out, give me a call, we'll try and get you set up there. But, um, you know, the, the, the experience that the fans have there is all around their data experienced there. Right? And it's not just baseball games. It could be hockey games that Fenway park, it could be a concert that they're having. A phone buys a lot of different events. These stadiums are open year round and the ability to move, share access, protect the data in that stadium is really important to how they're functioning as an organization. We talked to their I-Team quite regularly about how they're using our solutions. They're talking about uh, different aspects of artificial intelligence, different ways they can use our products and machine learning. >>Obviously with the new solutions that we have in the market today around cybersecurity or helping them to address other challenges that they face. Um, as an organization, these are realtime challenges in their physical locations, national security issues, terrorist attacks could happen. There are venues, there are public gathering places too. Absolutely. We announced our partnership with them back in may and I was shocked to hear them on the main stage announcing that they had this great partnership with the Kronos was talking about their unique cyber security needs. They started talking about drone technology and I'm thinking, all right, a drone flies in the stadium. Maybe at breaks and it falls on a player and we're paying $20 million for one of these pitchers to be out there on the Hill or an interest, a fan or maybe they're collecting some video data to then share it out. >>And that's red Sox IP. No, they're talking about cybersecurity threats in the sense that a drone, a remotely controlled device could come in and lightened incendiary device in the, in the stadium and that to them as a real security server. And that's frontline for the it guys. That's what keeps them up at night. Yeah. And that's really an attack take time. Oh yeah, absolutely. What are the use cases that are coming out of some of your customers, cause you guys have a unique integrated solution with a platform as an end to end component too. You have a holistic view on data, which is interesting and unique. People are kind of figuring this out, but you guys are ahead of the game. What are some of the use cases that you've seen in the field with customers that highlight the benefits of taking a holistic view of the data? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we look at it as kind of backups dead, right? We have, we've combined the old world of backup and disaster recovery with the new world of cybersecurity and we combine that to a term we're calling cyber protection because it really requires an end to end solution and a lot of different things need to be working properly to prevent these attacks from happening. Uh, you need to be very proactive in how you're going about that. We address it with what we call 'em, the Kronos cyber platform. And what this is, is a unique, multi-tiered multi-tenant offering that's designed specifically for service providers. We have just under 6,000 servers, providers actively selling our cyber protection solutions today and they use this for are for a multiple different aspects. And usually the beachhead has something like backup. Every company needs backup. It's more of a commodity type solutions, a lot of different players in the game out there, but they take it a step further, use that same backup technology to then do disaster recovery. >>They can do files, they can share, they can do monitoring. We have notary solutions based on blockchain technologies. Now, this whole suite of cybersecurity solutions, all of this is with a single pane of glass, one platform that of a service provider can go in and work with their customers and make sure that their data is protected, make sure that their physical machines are virtual machines, they're PCs, their Macs are all protected, that data's protected, it's secure, but it's also accessible, which is an important part of you can take your data wrapping a nice bow buried a hundred feet underground, but then you can't use it, right? So you want to be able to make sure that you can actually, uh, leverage the technology there. Um, we've seen explosive growth, especially in, in my market. I think the numbers are pretty crazy. It's something like 90% of the market today in the U S has served in some capacity by a service provider. >>And this could be a small to medium size business that's served by local service fire to those really big guys that are out there. Let's on with how large your target audience, you mentioned search probably multiple times when you're out selling your target persona, your target audience, and you're trying to reach into, so we touch, everybody know, you equate it to kind of what we do with the red Sox, right? You walk into that city and the 38,000 people that, well, some of those people are just, you know, regular Joe's, right? They, they go to work every day. They have a computer at home, they have a mobile device. They probably have multiple mobile devices. We protect that for them. We call them a consumer. Slash. Prosumers. We work at a lot of very large retail organizations. If you walk into some of those shops today, you'll be able to see our software on a shelf there. >>You work with one of those tech squads where they're starting to attach services to it and you get more of a complete offering there. We then scale up a little bit further to some OEM providers. You work with companies like Honeywell and Emerson that are manufacturing devices that embed our software on there. They white label it and deliver it out. These are connected devices. You think about the, you know the, the explosion of IOT devices in the market today. We're protecting that stuff as well. We work with very large enterprises, so some of the, the major players that you see in the manufacturing space are standing up standardizing on Acronis process control process automation vendors are using our Chronis and we can deliver the solution because of the way it's so flexible in a very consumable way for them. Those enterprises can actually act as a service provider for their employees so we can actually take our technology, deploy the layer in their infrastructure where they have complete control. >>They might not want to be in an Uber cloud, they might not want to work with Chrome OS data center. They want to have and hold that data. They want to make sure it's on site. We enable that type of functionality and then the fastest growing area for us is what I hit on earlier within the service provider community. We're recruiting hundreds of service providers every quarter. We've got some great partners here. Give you an example of a service provider. You mentioned the red size, I'm assuming is that a vendor that might be working within that organization, but still it sounds like that's a supplier to the red Sox. How, how broad is that definition? It gives us many points. Yeah, it's a really good point. So we work with hosting providers. Look, can be regional hosting providers to multinational hosting providers. Some of the very big names that you've, you're probably familiar with. >>We work with, uh, we work with, uh, telco providers who work with ISV providers or sorry, ISP providers, um, kind of regional telco providers that provide a myriad of different services all the way down to your kind of local mom and pop type service providers where you've got a small business, maybe they've got 30 to 50 employees, they're servicing probably 200 to 300 customers and they want to provide a very secure, safe, easy to use complete solution to their customers. Uh, those could be focused on certain verticals so they could be focused on healthcare, financial services, construction, et cetera. Um, we have some that are very niche within like dental services or chiropractice offices, small regional doctor's offices. Uh, and the, the beauty of that, and I was getting the partners earlier, is we have partnerships with companies like ConnectWise where those are tools that service providers are using on a very daily basis. >>So essentially the platform gives you that range and that's the typical typical platform. So you have that broad horizontally scalable capability and the domain expertise either be what solution from you guys or can ISV or someone within your ecosystem is that they get that. Right? Absolutely. And that's what really differentiates us is our ability to integrate into that plat, into our platform, into their platform and make those connections. So you don't need to learn 12, 14, 15 different technologies. You've got a small suite of offerings in a single pane of glass, very easy to use, very intuitive. Um, the integrations that we have with these partners like ConnectWise, like Ingram micro, really differentiate us because what they do is they provide open API capabilities. They provide software development kits where these partners can go ahead and build it the way they want to sell it. >>You know, it's interesting when the cloud came out and as on premise has changed to a much more agile dev ops kind of mindset that forced it to think like a service provider. I think like an operating system, it's an operating environment basically. So that service provides an interesting angle and I want to get your thoughts on this because I think this is where you guys have such a unique opportunity to just integrate solution because you could get into anything and you got ISV to back that up. So I guess the question I would have is for that enterprise that's out there that's looking to refactor and replatform their entire operation, or it could be a large enterprise, it has a huge IOT opportunity or challenge or a service provider is looking at having a solution. What's the pitch that you would give me if I'm the one of those customers? >>Say, Hey Pat, what's the pitch? So you need a, you need a trusted provider that's been in the business for a number of years that understands the data protection and security markets that Kronos has that brand. We've been doing this for about 16 years. We were founded in Singapore, we're headquartered out of Switzerland and we've got a lot of really smart guys in the back room. Was building good technologies that our partners were able to use. Um, we look at it a lot of different ways. I mentioned our go to market across a lot of different verticals and a lot of different um, kind of routes for those. The way we deliver our solution. It provides the flexibility for an enterprise to a classic reseller to um, you know, a VAR or a service, right? It's delivering services. It can be delivered to those guys how they want to consume it. >>So as an example, we may work with a smaller service provider that doesn't have any colo capabilities. We provide data centers so they could have a very quick turnkey solution, allows them to get up and running with their business, selling backup within minutes to their customers. We can also work with very large enterprises where we can deliver the complete platform to them and then they have complete control over it. We sprinkle in some professional services to make sure that we're giving them the support that they need and then they're running the service for themselves. What we've really seen in terms of a trend is that a lot of these VARs, we have about 4,500 of them in North America and they're starting to look at their businesses differently. Say, I gotta adapt or die here. I gotta figure out what my next business model is. >>How am I going to be the next one that's in the news flash that says, Hey, they've been acquired, or Hey Thoma Bravo made a big investment in me. Right? They need to convert to this services business or Kronos enables that transformation to happen. I mean, I can see you guys really making money for channel partners because they want solutions. They want to touch the customer, they want to maybe add something they could bring into it or have high service gross profits around services. Absolutely. So, yeah, our solution is unique in the sense that allows partners to sell multiple offerings to, you're getting an additional layer of stickiness providing multiple solutions to a customer. You're using the same technology, so your it team is very familiar with what they're using on a daily basis. Um, you're reducing the amount of churn for your customers because you're selling so much additional there that they're really stuck with you. >>That's a good thing. Uh, and beyond that, your increasing ARPU, average revenue per user is a key metric that all of our partners are looking at. And these guys are owner operators, right? They're business owners. They're looking at the bottom line. I mean, it's interesting the operating leverage around the consistent platform just lowers, it gives them software economic model. They can get more profit over time as they make that investment look at at the end of the day, channel partners care about a couple things, money, profit and customer happiness. Absolutely. And it helps to have them want to have a lot of one offs and a lot of, you know, training, you know, anything complicated, anything confusing, anything that requires a lot of resources, they're not going to like a, it's also great to have events like this where you're able to, to press the flesh with these guys and, and being face to face and understand their real world challenges that they're dealing with on a daily basis. >>How has the sport's a solution set that you've been involved in? How has that changed the culture of Acronis? Is that, has that, has that changed as, you know, sports is fun. People love sports, they have real problems. It's a really great use case as well. How's that change the culture? It's been amazing. I, so one from a branding perspective, we are a lot more recognized, right? Um, the most important thing about these partnerships for us is that they're actually using the technology. So, you know, we've got the red Sox here with us today. We've got arsenal represented, we've got Williams, we've got Roush racing, we've got a NASCAR car back here. Um, they use our technology on a daily basis and for each one of them we solve different types of use cases. Whether it's sending them large amount of video data from an essence studio over to Fenway park, or if it's a scout out in the field that needs to send information back and their laptop crashes, how do they recover? >>A lot of these different use cases, you can call them right back to a small business owner. You don't have to be a multibillion dollar sports organization with the same challenge. Well, I'm smiling because we've been called the ESPN of tech to they bring our set. We do let the game day thing. We certainly could love to come join you in all these marquee events that you have. We'd love to have it. Yeah, so if you follow us on social, we're out there and that, that's a big part of it. You mentioned one of ours looking for what our partners looking for. They want a personal relationship too. A lot of that goes away with technology nowadays and being able to really generate that type of a, of a personal relationship. These partnerships enable that to happen and they're very anything, I don't know anything about cars. >>We started partnering with formula one. All of a sudden I know everything about 41 I go to these races. I tell everybody I don't know anything about cars and I ended up being the, the subject matter export for him over over the weekend. So we'd love to have you guys join us. We'd love all of our partners. They get more engaged in the sports aspect of it because for us, it really is something that, um, again, they're using us in real life scenarios. We're not paying to put a sticker on a car that's going 300 miles. It's not traveling as a real partnership. Exactly. Pat, congratulations on your success and good luck on people owning away the numbers. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Just the cube coverage here at the Chronis global cyber summit 2019 I'm John furry. More coverage after this short break.

>>From San Francisco. It's the cube covering PagerDuty summit 2019 brought to you by PagerDuty. >>Okay, welcome back everybody. Jeffrey here with the Q. We're in San Francisco at the Western st Francis historical hotel. It's our third year coming to PagerDuty sound, but I think it's the fourth year of the show. Jennifer tahana just finished the keynote. You can see those places packed with people packed with energy. We're excited to be back and have our first guest of the day. He's Josh Cade and chief evangelists at Cherwell. Josh, great to see you. Great to see you. Thanks for having me today. Absolutely. So have you been to a PagerDuty, sung it before? This is actually my first event with PagerDuty. What do you think yeah, I mean they've really grown. I mean Patriot and he's been a partner of ours for awhile, but they have grown so much so rapidly and I think, you know after the IPO especially, you know, they've, they've really grown pretty crazy. >>A lot of gasoline on the fire with the IP. Exactly right. So let's jump into with the Cherwell for people aren't familiar with Cherwell, what are you guys all about? So Sheryl software is a company that we specialize in it service management and enterprise service management. So we recognize that the world of what we used to know is like help desk management and whatnot has grown. You know, digital transformation means that more people are involved in more revenue bearing activities across the company. And just like PagerDuty recognizes, you're always on, you've got to keep doing all of these things across the company. And so what we do is we act as a system of record to move request to move orchestration across an organization across all teams. So it's not just an it focus and we build a platform basically to enable the building out of all of your processes, automation, orchestration, et cetera. >>We focus in ITSs because the it group is, is the best entry point for this kind of functionality inside of an organization because they have the best broad kind of horizontal view across all departments. Um, but again, we've got customers that use it in a pretty much any kind of way from running public housing development to all kinds of just uses that we never even imagined. Right. Okay. So I think what's confusing to people, certainly the layman certainly me, is you know, there's kind of all these competing system of records, it appears from the outside and we know ITSMs space, we've covered it for a long time. You know, you need to have a single system of record to know what the answer is. And yet, you know, PagerDuty announces all these integrations with all these systems like Cherwell. How do those systems work together to still maintain kind of system of record integrity and yet leverage the capabilities of the different platforms? >>Yeah. You know, it's an interesting thing because we're seeing so much convergence in the industry and we're seeing that, you know, pretty much all of our software has to talk to all of our software, right? And so what we're seeing a lot is system of record doesn't necessarily mean the same thing that it used to. You may have a system of record for your customer data, you may have a system of record for your financial data, you may have a system of record for your request management and workflow data. And the key is really making those things talk to each other. And so, you know, between the, you know, the cloud and all of the growth that we've had there and, and the way that software just works, it's really about being able to handshake and talk to other companies. Software. Okay. And you know, so it's also about companies, one of the problems that happens in a lot of companies is you choose too many systems of record and you know, so you've got this team that all has different data. >>So I think that's part of what we'll see the kind of the future battle of the next few years is either we all got to talk together or somebody has to, you know, become more prevalent and become a bigger system of record if you get what I mean. So what are some of the use cases where the two systems, PagerDuty system, the Cherwell system would interact around a particular type of customer interaction? Yup. So there's a couple of different entry points, but uh, one of them is, so let's say a customer has a request so it's not even an incident for example. So they have a request and you've got SLS where you've got to fulfill a request very quickly. Um, you know, Sharewell is great at getting that request, interacting with the customer, making sure that they know, you know what to expect and whatnot. PagerDuty is great at getting the team together and getting people together to fulfill those things. >>And so there's that kind of transition point where that request goes to PagerDuty and PagerDuty gets to bring the team together, work on fulfilling that thing and get back to the customer, Hey, your thing has been fulfilled. Okay. So another one that happens, a great use case is, you know, we have a lot of links to different event monitoring. You know, just like PagerDuty does. But a lot of times those things will come to our system and turn into, uh, incidents, you know, in our system. So we're able to send that data over to PagerDuty and basically with up the team and get things moving so that we can resolve that event. And we have a upcoming integration to basically share that back and forth. I believe we're actually officially announcing it next week at our conference in Nashville. Um, but so we have an upcoming integration so that we'll be pushing stuff to directional and getting things from pager duty and pushing things back in. >>Great example. That's a great uh, example cause what you're basically doing is breaking the problem down into the pieces that each of the different software takes care of and PagerDuty's really good at figuring out kind of who the team needs to be pulling together the teams and having a relatively low impact, uh, task group to come in and fix that, that the resolution. Well, and you know, while being a system of record for request management and workflow and whatnot, you know, one of the things that we see in the industry is so many of the customers want best of breed. They don't necessarily want one piece of software to come in and try to be everything cause nobody can be everything. Right? And so that key of lets you know, PagerDuty does what they're really good at. We do what we're really good at. Um, our customers really like that. >>So that's how we partner with other companies. Okay. So later today I think you're giving a session on low code. Um, what does low code, I mean I I have an opinion but share would, do you guys think it's low code or why is low code so, so low code is really important for a few reasons, but the first is really, I would say time to value. So when you have to spin up a development team and spend a lot of time to build everything that you want to do in your organization, just a simple business process that can take a lot of time and expense. So the Sharewell platform is built in a low code way. Most of the things that you can do in our software you do through drag and drop interfaces. And a lot of times we'll have people a little skeptical. >>You know, when they first encounter us, no, we need to write Java script or we need to write some language and we bring them into the system and they find, no, not only do not have to, but you can accomplish what you needed to before you got done planning what code you were going to go. Right. You know, forget testing and all that kind of stuff. So most of what you can do in Sharewell is actually no code, but we call it low code because when it comes to integrating, oftentimes you need to speak to other API. So you know, not every piece of software out there is no code. So talking to rest API is talking to other API APIs, you know, integrating things together. That's where a little bit of code comes in. But we also have, you know, basically drag and drop interfaces for even integrating to other things. >>We have something in tune of 80 partnerships right now, partners that we integrate with and that number is growing all the time. Okay. So is the main benefit of low code just the existing developers being able to move faster or we're hearing a lot of conversation about is really kind of democratization and letting people at maybe kid code in the ed are not qualified to do that last integration step, but the start to build absolute lows and processes without having to figure out if I'm doing it in Java or Perl. Yeah, no, it's, it's definitely both of those things. I mean, you know, so you know, the time to value aspect is important for those devs, but often, you know, companies can be utilizing those resources in a much more fruitful manner. And so if you allow the service owners or business analysts to be able to go in and actually affect those processes, just like you're saying, that democratization really helps speed up a business. >>Right? So in terms of engines for your guys' growth, you know, there's a bunch of them that are talked about all the time. There's dev ops, um, which, which is clearly the right bet to make 10 years ago. There's cloud, which has worked out pretty well. Um, and then this whole thing, that digital transformation that everyone is, is, is a, is trying to get done. Yup. No. Which of those three do you think are most important? How do you see those kinds of playing out in your business? So, you know, I think all three are very important. I think digital transformation though is, you know, if you don't transform your business and take advantage of digital transformation right now, you're liking amoeba in the primordial goo. Watching those first fish walk on land and laughing at, that's just a trend. You know, I think all businesses need to transform themselves and take advantage of the digital technologies that they can get ahold of. >>So I think for us, you know, being an accelerator for that being a way that you can bring inputs and outputs into a singular platform and basically, you know, speed up that ability to transform and make it more predictable, uh, utilizing governance and auditability and all those things that don't generally happen in a dev ops or a transformation environment. Right. That's really our key and that's, I think where we're going to see the industry. You know, everybody has to transform to stay competitive and so we're focused on that transformation or I'm distracted. Jen just walked by the star of the show and really make it. Absolutely. All right, Josh, thanks for taking a few minutes. Good luck on your talk. No brag, good luck at your event in Nashville. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Josh on Jeff here watching the cube words PagerDuty summit at the historic Wetsons de France. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are high atop San Franciscso, in the Salesforce Tower in the brand new Accenture, the Innovation Hub. It opened up, I don't know, six months ago or so. We were here for the opening. It's a really spectacular space with a really cool Cinderella stair, so if you come, make sure you check that out. We're talking about cloud and the evolution of cloud, and hybrid cloud, and clearly, two players that are right in the middle of this, helping customers get through this journey, and do these migrations are Accenture and HPE. So we're excited to have our next guest, Melissa Besse. She is the Managing Director, Intelligent Cloud and Infrastructure Strategic Partnerships, at Accenture. Melissa, welcome. >> Thanks Jeff. >> And joining us from HP is David Stone. He is the VP of Ecosystem Sales. David great to see you. >> Great, thanks for having me. >> So, let's just jump into it. The cloud discussion has taken over for the last 10 years, but it's really continuing to evolve. It was kind of this new entrance, with AWS coming on the scene, one of the great lines that Jeff Bezos talks about, is they had no competition for seven years. Nobody recognized that the bookseller, out on the left hand edge, was coming in to take their infrastructure business. But as things have moved to public cloud, now there's hybrid cloud, now all applications, or work loads, are right for public clouds, so now, all the Enterprises are trying to figure this out, they want to make their moves but it's complicated. So, first of all, let's talk about some of the vocabulary, hybrid cloud versus Multi-Cloud. What do those terms mean to you and your customers? Let's start with you, Melissa. >> Sure. So when you think of Multi-Cloud, right, we're seeing a big convergence of, I would say, a Multi-Cloud operating model, that really has to integrate across all the clouds. So, you have your public cloud providers, you have your SaaS, like Salesforce, work day, you have your PAS, right. And so when you think of Multi-Cloud, any customer is going to have a plethora, of all of these types of clouds. And really being able to manage across those, becomes critical. When you think of Hybrid-Cloud, Hybrid-Cloud is really thinking about the placement of Ous. We usually look at it from a data perspective, right. Are you going to in the public, or in the private space? And you kind of look at it from that perspective. And it really enables that data movement across both, of those clouds. >> So what do you see, David, in your customers? >> I see a lot of the customers, that we see today, are confused, right? The people who have gone to the Public Cloud, had scratched their heads and said, "Geez, what do I do?", "It's not as cheap as I thought it was going to be." So, the ones who are early adopters, are confused. The ones who haven't moved, yet, are really scratching their head as well, right. Because if you don't the right strategy, you'll end up getting boxed in. You'll pay a ton of money to get your data in, and you'll pay a ton of money to get your data out. And so, all of our customers, you know, want the right hybrid strategy. And, I think that's where the market, and I know Accenture and HPE, clearly see the market really becoming a hybrid world. >> It's interesting, you said it's based on the data, and you just talked about moving data in and out. Where we more often here it talked about workload, this kind of horses for courses, you know. It's a workload specific, should be deployed in this particular, kind of infrastructure configuration. But you both mention data, and there's a lot of conversation, kind of pre-cloud, about data gravity and how expensive it is to move the data, and the age old thing, do you move the compute to the data, or move the data to the compute? There's a lot of advantages, if you have that data in the cloud, but you're highlighting a couple of the real negatives, in terms of potential cost implications, and we didn't even get into regulations, and some of the other things that drive workloads to stay, in the data center. So, how should people start thinking about these variables, when they're trying to figure out what to do next? >> Accenture's position definitely, like when we started off on our Hybrid Cloud journey, was to capture the workload, right. And, once you have that workload, you could really balance the public benefits of speed, innovation, and consumption, with the private benefits of, actual regulation, data gravity, and performance, right. And so, our whole approach and big bet, has been to- Basically, we had really good leading public capabilities, cause we got into the market early. But we knew our customers were not going to be able to, migrate their entire estate over to public. And so in doing that, we said okay, if we create a hybrid capability, that is highly automated, that is consumed like public, and that is standard, we'd be able to offer our customers a way to pick really, the right workload, in the right place, at the right price. And that was really what our whole goal was. >> Go ahead. >> Yeah, and so just to add on to what Melissa said, I think we also think about, at least, you know, keeping the data in a place that you want, but then being cloud adjacent, so getting in the right data centers, and we often use a cloud saying, to bring the cloud to the data. So, if you have the right hybrid strategy, you put the data where it makes the most sense. Where you want to maintain the security and privacy, but then have access to the APIs, and whatever else you might need to get the full advantages, of the public cloud. >> Yeah, and we here a lot of the data center providers like, Equinix and stuff, talking about features, like direct connect and, you know, to have this proximity between the public cloud, and the stuff that's in your private cloud, so that you do have, you know, low latency, and you can, when you do have to move things, or you do need to access that data, it's not so far away. I'm curious about the impact of companies like, Salesforce in the Salesforce tower, here in San Francisco, at the center offices, and office 365, and Work Day, on how can the adoption of the SaaS applications, have changed the conversation about cloud, and what's important and not important, it used to be security, I don't trust anything outside my data center, and know I might argue that public clouds are more secure, in some ways that private cloud, you don't have disgruntled employees per se, running around the data centers unplugging things. So, how it the adoption of things like Office 365, clearly Microsoft's leveraged that in a big way, to grow their own cloud presence, change the conversation about what's good about cloud, what's not good about cloud, why should we move in this direction. David, you have a thought? >> No, look, I think it's a great question, and I think if you think about the, as Melissa said, the used cases, right. And, how Microsoft has successfully pivoted, their business to it as a service model, right. And so what I think it's done, it's opened up innovation, and a lot of the Salesforces of the world, have adapted their business models. And that's truly to your point, a SaaS based offer, and so when you can do a Work Day, or Salesforce.com implementation, sure, it's been built, it's tested and everything else. I think what then becomes the bigger question, and the bigger challenge is, most companies are sitting on a thousand applications, that have been built over time. And what do you do with those, right? And so, in many cases you need to be connected, to those SaaS space providers, but you need the right hybrid strategy, again, to be able to figure out, how to connect those SaaS space services, to whatever you're going to do, with those thousand workloads. And those thousand workloads, running on different things, you need the right strategy, to figure out where to put the actual workloads. And, as people are trying to go, I know one of the questions that comes up is, do you migrate? Or do you modernize? >> David: And so, as people put that strategy together, I think how you tie to those SaaS space services, clearly ties into your hybrid strategy. >> I would agree, and so, as David mentioned, right. That's where the cloud adjacency, you're seeing a lot of blur, between public and private, I mean, Google's providing Bare-metal as a service. So it is actually dedicated, hybrid cloud capabilities, right. So you're seeing a lot of everyone, and as David talked about, all of the surrounding applications around your SAP, around your oracle. When we created our Exensor Hyper Cloud, we were going after the Enterprise workload. But there's a lot of legacy and other ones, that need that data, and or, the Salesforce data. Whatever the data is, right. And really be able to utilize it when they need to, in a real low latency. >> So, I was wondering I we could unpack, the Accenture Hybrid Cloud. >> Melissa: Sure. >> What is that? Is that your guys own cloud? Is this, you know, kind of the solution set? I've heard that mentioned a couple times. So what is the Accenture Hybrid Cloud? >> So Accenture Hybrid Cloud, was a big bet that we made, as we saw the convergence of MultiCloud. We really said, we know, everything is not going to go public. And in some cases, it's all coming back. And so, customers really needed a way, to look at all of their workloads, right. Because part of the issue with, the getting the cost and benefits out of public is, the workload goes but you really aren't able, to get out of the data center. We term it the "Wild Animal Park", because there's a lot of applications that, right, are you going to modernize, are you going to let them to end of life. So there's a lot of things you have to consider, to truly exit the data center strategy. And so, Accenture Hybrid Cloud is actually, a big bet we made, it is a highly automated, standard private cloud capability, that really augments all of the leading capability, we had in the cloud area. It is, it's differentiated, we made a big bet with HPE, it's differentiated on it's hardware. One of the reasons, when we were going after the Enterprise, was they need large compute, and large storage requirements. And what we're able to do is, when we created this, use some of our automation differentiation. We have actually a client, that we had in the existing I-O-N environment, and we were actually able to achieve, some significant benefits, just from the automation. We got 50 percent in the provisioning of applications. We got 40 percent in the provisioning of the V.M. And we were able to take a lot of what I'll call, the manual tasks, and down to, it was like 62 percent reduction in the effort. As well as, 33 percent savings overall, in getting things production ready. So, this capability is highly automated. It will actually repeat the provisioning, at the application level, because we're going after the Enterprise workloads. And it will create these, it's an ASA that came from government, so it's highly secured, and it really was able to preserve, I think what our customer needed. And being able to span that public/private, capability they need out there in the hybrid world. >> Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know that there's enough talk, about the complexity of the management in these worlds. Nobody ever wants to talk about writing, the CIS Admin piece of the software, right? It's all about the core functionality. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about HPC, a lot of conversation about high performance computing, a lot going on with A.I. and machine learning now. Which, you know, most of those benefits are going to be, realized in a specific application, right? It's machine learning or artificial intelligence, applied to a specific application. So, again, you guys make big iron, and have been making big iron for a long time, what is this kind of hybrid cloud open up, in terms of, for HPE to have the big heavy metal, and still have kind of the agility and flexibility, of a cloud type of infrastructure. >> Yeah, no, I think it's a great question. I think if you think about HPE's strategy has been, in this area of high performance compute. That we bought the company S.G.I. And as you have seen the announcements, we're hopefully going to close on the Cray acquisition as well. And so we in the world of the data continuing to expand, and at huge volumes. The need to have incredible horsepower to drive that, that's associated with it, now all of this really requires, where's your data being created, and where's it actually being consumed? And so, you need to have the right edge, to cloud strategy in everything. And so, in many cases, you need enough compute at the edge, to be able to compute and do stuff in real time. But in many cases you need to feed all that data, back into another cloud or some sort of mother. HPE, you know, type of high performance compute environment, that can actually run the more, advanced A.I. machine learning type of applications, to really get the insights and tune the algorithms. And then, push some of those APIs and applications, back to the edge. So, it's an area of huge investment, it's an area where because of the latency, you know, things like the autonomous driving, and things like that. You can't put all that stuff into the public cloud. But you need the public cloud, or you need cloud type capability, if you will, to be able to compute and make the right decisions, at the right time. So, it's about having the right compute technology, at the right place, at the right time, at the right cost, and the right perform. >> A lot of rights, good opportunity for Accenture. So, I mean it's funny as we talk about hybrid cloud, and that kind of new, verbs around cloud-like things. Is where we're going to see the same thing, kind of the edge versus the data center comparison, in terms of where the data is, where the processing is, because it's going to be this really dynamic situation, and how much can you push out of the edge, cause, you know, there's no air conditioning a lot of times, and the power might not be that great, and maybe connectivity is a little bit limited. So, you know, Edge offers a whole bunch of, different challenges that you can control for, in a data center but it is going to be this crazy, kind of hybrid world there too, in terms of where the allocation of those resources are. You guys get into the deeper end of that model, Melissa? >> Yeah, so we're definitely working with HPE, to create some of, I'll call it our edge managed services, again, going back to what we were saying about the data, right, we saw the centralization of data with the cloud, with the initial entrance into the cloud, now we're seeing the decentralization of that data, back out to the Edge. With that, right, in these hybrid cloud models, you're really going to need- They require a lot of high performance compute, especially for certain industries, right? If you take a look at gas, oil, and exploration, if you look at media processing, right, all of these need to be able to do that. One of the things, and depending on where it's located, if it's on the Edge, how you're going to feedback the data as we talked about. And so, we're looking at, how do you take this foundation, right, this, I'll call it Exensor Hybrid architecture, right. Take that, and play that intermediate role. I'm going to call it intermediary, right, because you really need a really good, you know, global data map, you need a good supply chain, right. Really to make sure that the data, no matter where it's coming from, is going to be available for that application, at the right time. With, right, the ability to do it at speed. And so, all of these things are factors, as you look at our whole Exensor Hybrid Cloud strategy, right. And being able to manage that, Edge to core and then back up to Cloud, etcetera. >> Right, now I wonder if you could share some stories, cause the value proposition around Cloud, is significantly shifted for those who are paying attention, right. But it's not about cost, it's not about cost savings, I mean there's a lot of that in there and that's good, but really the opportunity is about speed. Speed and innovation. And enabling more innovation across your Enterprise, with more people having more access to more data, to build more apps, and really, to react. Are people getting that? Or, are they still, the customer still kind of encumbered, by this kind of transition phase, they're still trying to sort it out, or do they get it? That really this opportunity is about speed, speed, speed. >> No, go ahead. I mean we use a phrase first off, it's, "fear no cloud", right. To your point, you know, how do you figure out the right strategy. But, I think within that you get, what's the right application? And how do you, you know, fit it in to the overall strategy, of what you're trying to do. >> Yeah. >> And I think the other thing that we're seeing is, you know, customers are trying to figure that out. We have a whole, right, when you start with that application map, you know, there could be 500 to 1000 workloads, right, and applications, and how are you going to, some you're going to retain, some you're going to retire, some you're going to (stutters) refactor for the cloud, or for your private cloud capability. Whatever it is, you're going to be looking at doing, I think, you know, we're seeing early adopters, like even the hyperscalers, themselves, right. They recognize the speed, so you know, we're working with Google for instance. They wanted to get into the Bare-metal, as a service capability, right. Them actually building it, getting it out to market would take so much longer. We already had this whole Exensor Hybrid Cloud architecture, that was cloud adjacent, so we had sub-millisecond latency, right. And so, they're the ones, right, everyone's figuring out that utilizing all of these, I'll call it platforms and prebook capabilities. Many of our partners have them as well, is really allowing them that innovation, get products to market sooner, be able to respond to their customers. Because it is, as we talked about in this multicloud world, lots of things that you have to manage, if you can get pieces from multiple, you know, from a partner, right, that can provide more of the services that you need, it really enables the management of those clouds sources. >> Right, so we're going to wrap it up, but I just want to give you the last word in terms of, what's the most consistent blind spot, that you see when you're first engaging with a customer, who's relatively early on this journey, that they miss, that you see over, and over, and over, and you're like, you know, these are some of the thing you really got to think about, that they haven't thought about. >> Yeah so, for me, I think it's- the cloud isn't about a destination, it's about an experience. And so, how do you get- you talked about the operations, but how do you provide that overall experience? I like to use this simple analogy, that if you and I needed a car, for five or 10, or 15 minutes, you go get an Uber. Cause it's easy, it's quick. If you need a car for a couple days, you do a rental car. You need a car for a year, you might do a lease. You need a car for three, four year, you probably by it, right? And so, if you use that analogy and think, Hmmm, I need a workload application for five/six years, putting something at a persistent workload, that you know about on a public cloud, may be the right answer, but it might be a lot more cost prohibited. But, if you need something, that you can stand up in five minutes, and shut it right back down, the public cloud is absolutely, the right way to go, as long as you can deal with the security requirements, and stuff. And so, if you think about, what are the actual requirements, is it cost, is it performance, you've talked about speed and everything else. It's really trying to figure out how you get an experience, and the only experience that can really hit you, what you need to do today, is having the right hybrid strategy. And every company, I know Accenture was out, way in front of the market on public cloud, and now they've come to the realization, so has many other places. The world is going to be hybrid, it's going to be multicloud. And as long as you can have an experience, and a partner, that can manage, you know, help you define the right path, you'll be on the right journey. >> Jeff: Melissa. >> I think blind spot we run into is, it does start off as a cost savings activity. And there really, it really is so much more about, how are you going to manage that enterprise workload? How are you going to worry about the data? Are you going to have access to it? Are you going to be able to make it fluid, right? The whole essence of cloud, right, what it disrupted was the thought, that something had to stay in one place, right. And, where the real time decisions were being made. Where things needed to happen. Now, through all the different clouds, as well as, that you had to own it yourself, right. I mean, everyone always thought, okay, I'll take all the, you know, I.T. department, and very protective of everything that it wanted to keep. Now, it's about saying, all right, how do I utilize, the best of each of these multiclouds, to stand up, what I'll call, what their core capability is as a customer, right. Are they doing the next chip design? Are they, you know, doing financial market models, right? That requires a high performance capability, right. So, when you start to think about all of this stuff, right, that's the true power, is having a strategy that looks at those outcomes. What am I trying to achieve in getting my products, and services to market, and touching the customers I need. Versus, oh, I'm going to move this out to an infrastructure, because that's what cloud, it'll save me money, right. That's typically the downfall we see, because they're not looking at it from the workload, or the application. >> Same old story, right? Focus on your core differentiator, and outsource the heavy lifting on the stuff, (laughs) that's not your core. Alright, well Melissa, David, thanks for taking a minute, and I really enjoyed the conversation. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> She's Melissa, He's David, and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We are high above the San Francisco skyline, in the Salesforce tower at the Accenture Innovation Hub. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (tech music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are high atop San Franciscso, in the Salesforce Tower in the brand new Accenture, the Innovation Hub. It opened up, I don't know, six months ago or so. We were here for the opening. It's a really spectacular space with a really cool Cinderella stair, so if you come, make sure you check that out. We're talking about cloud and the evolution of cloud, and hybrid cloud, and clearly, two players that are right in the middle of this, helping customers get through this journey, and do these migrations are Accenture and HPE. So we're excited to have our next guest, Melissa Besse. She is the Managing Director, Intelligent Cloud and Infrastructure Strategic Partnerships, at Accenture. Melissa, welcome. >> Thanks Jeff. >> And joining us from HP is David Stone. He is the VP of Ecosystem Sales. David great to see you. >> Great, thanks for having me. >> So, let's just jump into it. The cloud discussion has taken over for the last 10 years, but it's really continuing to evolve. It was kind of this new entrance, with AWS coming on the scene, one of the great lines that Jeff Bezos talks about, is they had no competition for seven years. Nobody recognized that the bookseller, out on the left hand edge, was coming in to take their infrastructure business. But as things have moved to public cloud, now there's hybrid cloud, now all applications, or work loads, are right for public clouds, so now, all the Enterprises are trying to figure this out, they want to make their moves but it's complicated. So, first of all, let's talk about some of the vocabulary, hybrid cloud versus Multi-Cloud. What do those terms mean to you and your customers? Let's start with you, Melissa. >> Sure. So when you think of Multi-Cloud, right, we're seeing a big convergence of, I would say, a Multi-Cloud operating model, that really has to integrate across all the clouds. So, you have your public cloud providers, you have your SaaS, like Salesforce, work day, you have your PAS, right. And so when you think of Multi-Cloud, any customer is going to have a plethora, of all of these types of clouds. And really being able to manage across those, becomes critical. When you think of Hybrid-Cloud, Hybrid-Cloud is really thinking about the placement of Ous. We usually look at it from a data perspective, right. Are you going to in the public, or in the private space? And you kind of look at it from that perspective. And it really enables that data movement across both, of those clouds. >> So what do you see, David, in your customers? >> I see a lot of the customers, that we see today, are confused, right? The people who have gone to the Public Cloud, had scratched their heads and said, "Geez, what do I do?", "It's not as cheap as I thought it was going to be." So, the ones who are early adopters, are confused. The ones who haven't moved, yet, are really scratching their head as well, right. Because if you don't the right strategy, you'll end up getting boxed in. You'll pay a ton of money to get your data in, and you'll pay a ton of money to get your data out. And so, all of our customers, you know, want the right hybrid strategy. And, I think that's where the market, and I know Accenture and HPE, clearly see the market really becoming a hybrid world. >> It's interesting, you said it's based on the data, and you just talked about moving data in and out. Where we more often here it talked about workload, this kind of horses for courses, you know. It's a workload specific, should be deployed in this particular, kind of infrastructure configuration. But you both mention data, and there's a lot of conversation, kind of pre-cloud, about data gravity and how expensive it is to move the data, and the age old thing, do you move the compute to the data, or move the data to the compute? There's a lot of advantages, if you have that data in the cloud, but you're highlighting a couple of the real negatives, in terms of potential cost implications, and we didn't even get into regulations, and some of the other things that drive workloads to stay, in the data center. So, how should people start thinking about these variables, when they're trying to figure out what to do next? >> Accenture's position definitely, like when we started off on our Hybrid Cloud journey, was to capture the workload, right. And, once you have that workload, you could really balance the public benefits of speed, innovation, and consumption, with the private benefits of, actual regulation, data gravity, and performance, right. And so, our whole approach and big bet, has been to- Basically, we had really good leading public capabilities, cause we got into the market early. But we knew our customers were not going to be able to, migrate their entire estate over to public. And so in doing that, we said okay, if we create a hybrid capability, that is highly automated, that is consumed like public, and that is standard, we'd be able to offer our customers a way to pick really, the right workload, in the right place, at the right price. And that was really what our whole goal was. >> Go ahead. >> Yeah, and so just to add on to what Melissa said, I think we also think about, at least, you know, keeping the data in a place that you want, but then being cloud adjacent, so getting in the right data centers, and we often use a cloud saying, to bring the cloud to the data. So, if you have the right hybrid strategy, you put the data where it makes the most sense. Where you want to maintain the security and privacy, but then have access to the APIs, and whatever else you might need to get the full advantages, of the public cloud. >> Yeah, and we here a lot of the data center providers like, Equinix and stuff, talking about features, like direct connect and, you know, to have this proximity between the public cloud, and the stuff that's in your private cloud, so that you do have, you know, low latency, and you can, when you do have to move things, or you do need to access that data, it's not so far away. I'm curious about the impact of companies like, Salesforce in the Salesforce tower, here in San Francisco, at the center offices, and office 365, and Work Day, on how can the adoption of the SaaS applications, have changed the conversation about cloud, and what's important and not important, it used to be security, I don't trust anything outside my data center, and know I might argue that public clouds are more secure, in some ways that private cloud, you don't have disgruntled employees per se, running around the data centers unplugging things. So, how it the adoption of things like Office 365, clearly Microsoft's leveraged that in a big way, to grow their own cloud presence, change the conversation about what's good about cloud, what's not good about cloud, why should we move in this direction. David, you have a thought? >> No, look, I think it's a great question, and I think if you think about the, as Melissa said, the used cases, right. And, how Microsoft has successfully pivoted, their business to it as a service model, right. And so what I think it's done, it's opened up innovation, and a lot of the Salesforces of the world, have adapted their business models. And that's truly to your point, a SaaS based offer, and so when you can do a Work Day, or Salesforce.com implementation, sure, it's been built, it's tested and everything else. I think what then becomes the bigger question, and the bigger challenge is, most companies are sitting on a thousand applications, that have been built over time. And what do you do with those, right? And so, in many cases you need to be connected, to those SaaS space providers, but you need the right hybrid strategy, again, to be able to figure out, how to connect those SaaS space services, to whatever you're going to do, with those thousand workloads. And those thousand workloads, running on different things, you need the right strategy, to figure out where to put the actual workloads. And, as people are trying to go, I know one of the questions that comes up is, do you migrate? Or do you modernize? >> David: And so, as people put that strategy together, I think how you tie to those SaaS space services, clearly ties into your hybrid strategy. >> I would agree, and so, as David mentioned, right. That's where the cloud adjacency, you're seeing a lot of blur, between public and private, I mean, Google's providing Bare-metal as a service. So it is actually dedicated, hybrid cloud capabilities, right. So you're seeing a lot of everyone, and as David talked about, all of the surrounding applications around your SAP, around your oracle. When we created our Exensor Hyper Cloud, we were going after the Enterprise workload. But there's a lot of legacy and other ones, that need that data, and or, the Salesforce data. Whatever the data is, right. And really be able to utilize it when they need to, in a real low latency. >> So, I was wondering I we could unpack, the Accenture Hybrid Cloud. >> Melissa: Sure. >> What is that? Is that your guys own cloud? Is this, you know, kind of the solution set? I've heard that mentioned a couple times. So what is the Accenture Hybrid Cloud? >> So Accenture Hybrid Cloud, was a big bet that we made, as we saw the convergence of MultiCloud. We really said, we know, everything is not going to go public. And in some cases, it's all coming back. And so, customers really needed a way, to look at all of their workloads, right. Because part of the issue with, the getting the cost and benefits out of public is, the workload goes but you really aren't able, to get out of the data center. We term it the "Wild Animal Park", because there's a lot of applications that, right, are you going to modernize, are you going to let them to end of life. So there's a lot of things you have to consider, to truly exit the data center strategy. And so, Accenture Hybrid Cloud is actually, a big bet we made, it is a highly automated, standard private cloud capability, that really augments all of the leading capability, we had in the cloud area. It is, it's differentiated, we made a big bet with HPE, it's differentiated on it's hardware. One of the reasons, when we were going after the Enterprise, was they need large compute, and large storage requirements. And what we're able to do is, when we created this, use some of our automation differentiation. We have actually a client, that we had in the existing I-O-N environment, and we were actually able to achieve, some significant benefits, just from the automation. We got 50 percent in the provisioning of applications. We got 40 percent in the provisioning of the V.M. And we were able to take a lot of what I'll call, the manual tasks, and down to, it was like 62 percent reduction in the effort. As well as, 33 percent savings overall, in getting things production ready. So, this capability is highly automated. It will actually repeat the provisioning, at the application level, because we're going after the Enterprise workloads. And it will create these, it's an ASA that came from government, so it's highly secured, and it really was able to preserve, I think what our customer needed. And being able to span that public/private, capability they need out there in the hybrid world. >> Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know that there's enough talk, about the complexity of the management in these worlds. Nobody ever wants to talk about writing, the CIS Admin piece of the software, right? It's all about the core functionality. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about HPC, a lot of conversation about high performance computing, a lot going on with A.I. and machine learning now. Which, you know, most of those benefits are going to be, realized in a specific application, right? It's machine learning or artificial intelligence, applied to a specific application. So, again, you guys make big iron, and have been making big iron for a long time, what is this kind of hybrid cloud open up, in terms of, for HPE to have the big heavy metal, and still have kind of the agility and flexibility, of a cloud type of infrastructure. >> Yeah, no, I think it's a great question. I think if you think about HPE's strategy has been, in this area of high performance compute. That we bought the company S.G.I. And as you have seen the announcements, we're hopefully going to close on the Cray acquisition as well. And so we in the world of the data continuing to expand, and at huge volumes. The need to have incredible horsepower to drive that, that's associated with it, now all of this really requires, where's your data being created, and where's it actually being consumed? And so, you need to have the right edge, to cloud strategy in everything. And so, in many cases, you need enough compute at the edge, to be able to compute and do stuff in real time. But in many cases you need to feed all that data, back into another cloud or some sort of mother. HPE, you know, type of high performance compute environment, that can actually run the more, advanced A.I. machine learning type of applications, to really get the insights and tune the algorithms. And then, push some of those APIs and applications, back to the edge. So, it's an area of huge investment, it's an area where because of the latency, you know, things like the autonomous driving, and things like that. You can't put all that stuff into the public cloud. But you need the public cloud, or you need cloud type capability, if you will, to be able to compute and make the right decisions, at the right time. So, it's about having the right compute technology, at the right place, at the right time, at the right cost, and the right perform. >> A lot of rights, good opportunity for Accenture. So, I mean it's funny as we talk about hybrid cloud, and that kind of new, verbs around cloud-like things. Is where we're going to see the same thing, kind of the edge versus the data center comparison, in terms of where the data is, where the processing is, because it's going to be this really dynamic situation, and how much can you push out of the edge, cause, you know, there's no air conditioning a lot of times, and the power might not be that great, and maybe connectivity is a little bit limited. So, you know, Edge offers a whole bunch of, different challenges that you can control for, in a data center but it is going to be this crazy, kind of hybrid world there too, in terms of where the allocation of those resources are. You guys get into the deeper end of that model, Melissa? >> Yeah, so we're definitely working with HPE, to create some of, I'll call it our edge managed services, again, going back to what we were saying about the data, right, we saw the centralization of data with the cloud, with the initial entrance into the cloud, now we're seeing the decentralization of that data, back out to the Edge. With that, right, in these hybrid cloud models, you're really going to need- They require a lot of high performance compute, especially for certain industries, right? If you take a look at gas, oil, and exploration, if you look at media processing, right, all of these need to be able to do that. One of the things, and depending on where it's located, if it's on the Edge, how you're going to feedback the data as we talked about. And so, we're looking at, how do you take this foundation, right, this, I'll call it Exensor Hybrid architecture, right. Take that, and play that intermediate role. I'm going to call it intermediary, right, because you really need a really good, you know, global data map, you need a good supply chain, right. Really to make sure that the data, no matter where it's coming from, is going to be available for that application, at the right time. With, right, the ability to do it at speed. And so, all of these things are factors, as you look at our whole Exensor Hybrid Cloud strategy, right. And being able to manage that, Edge to core and then back up to Cloud, etcetera. >> Right, now I wonder if you could share some stories, cause the value proposition around Cloud, is significantly shifted for those who are paying attention, right. But it's not about cost, it's not about cost savings, I mean there's a lot of that in there and that's good, but really the opportunity is about speed. Speed and innovation. And enabling more innovation across your Enterprise, with more people having more access to more data, to build more apps, and really, to react. Are people getting that? Or, are they still, the customer still kind of encumbered, by this kind of transition phase, they're still trying to sort it out, or do they get it? That really this opportunity is about speed, speed, speed. >> No, go ahead. I mean we use a phrase first off, it's, "fear no cloud", right. To your point, you know, how do you figure out the right strategy. But, I think within that you get, what's the right application? And how do you, you know, fit it in to the overall strategy, of what you're trying to do. >> Yeah. >> And I think the other thing that we're seeing is, you know, customers are trying to figure that out. We have a whole, right, when you start with that application map, you know, there could be 500 to 1000 workloads, right, and applications, and how are you going to, some you're going to retain, some you're going to retire, some you're going to (stutters) refactor for the cloud, or for your private cloud capability. Whatever it is, you're going to be looking at doing, I think, you know, we're seeing early adopters, like even the hyperscalers, themselves, right. They recognize the speed, so you know, we're working with Google for instance. They wanted to get into the Bare-metal, as a service capability, right. Them actually building it, getting it out to market would take so much longer. We already had this whole Exensor Hybrid Cloud architecture, that was cloud adjacent, so we had sub-millisecond latency, right. And so, they're the ones, right, everyone's figuring out that utilizing all of these, I'll call it platforms and prebook capabilities. Many of our partners have them as well, is really allowing them that innovation, get products to market sooner, be able to respond to their customers. Because it is, as we talked about in this multicloud world, lots of things that you have to manage, if you can get pieces from multiple, you know, from a partner, right, that can provide more of the services that you need, it really enables the management of those clouds sources. >> Right, so we're going to wrap it up, but I just want to give you the last word in terms of, what's the most consistent blind spot, that you see when you're first engaging with a customer, who's relatively early on this journey, that they miss, that you see over, and over, and over, and you're like, you know, these are some of the thing you really got to think about, that they haven't thought about. >> Yeah so, for me, I think it's- the cloud isn't about a destination, it's about an experience. And so, how do you get- you talked about the operations, but how do you provide that overall experience? I like to use this simple analogy, that if you and I needed a car, for five or 10, or 15 minutes, you go get an Uber. Cause it's easy, it's quick. If you need a car for a couple days, you do a rental car. You need a car for a year, you might do a lease. You need a car for three, four year, you probably by it, right? And so, if you use that analogy and think, Hmmm, I need a workload application for five/six years, putting something at a persistent workload, that you know about on a public cloud, may be the right answer, but it might be a lot more cost prohibited. But, if you need something, that you can stand up in five minutes, and shut it right back down, the public cloud is absolutely, the right way to go, as long as you can deal with the security requirements, and stuff. And so, if you think about, what are the actual requirements, is it cost, is it performance, you've talked about speed and everything else. It's really trying to figure out how you get an experience, and the only experience that can really hit you, what you need to do today, is having the right hybrid strategy. And every company, I know Accenture was out, way in front of the market on public cloud, and now they've come to the realization, so has many other places. The world is going to be hybrid, it's going to be multicloud. And as long as you can have an experience, and a partner, that can manage, you know, help you define the right path, you'll be on the right journey. >> Jeff: Melissa. >> I think blind spot we run into is, it does start off as a cost savings activity. And there really, it really is so much more about, how are you going to manage that enterprise workload? How are you going to worry about the data? Are you going to have access to it? Are you going to be able to make it fluid, right? The whole essence of cloud, right, what it disrupted was the thought, that something had to stay in one place, right. And, where the real time decisions were being made. Where things needed to happen. Now, through all the different clouds, as well as, that you had to own it yourself, right. I mean, everyone always thought, okay, I'll take all the, you know, I.T. department, and very protective of everything that it wanted to keep. Now, it's about saying, all right, how do I utilize, the best of each of these multiclouds, to stand up, what I'll call, what their core capability is as a customer, right. Are they doing the next chip design? Are they, you know, doing financial market models, right? That requires a high performance capability, right. So, when you start to think about all of this stuff, right, that's the true power, is having a strategy that looks at those outcomes. What am I trying to achieve in getting my products, and services to market, and touching the customers I need. Versus, oh, I'm going to move this out to an infrastructure, because that's what cloud, it'll save me money, right. That's typically the downfall we see, because they're not looking at it from the workload, or the application. >> Same old story, right? Focus on your core differentiator, and outsource the heavy lifting on the stuff, (laughs) that's not your core. Alright, well Melissa, David, thanks for taking a minute, and I really enjoyed the conversation. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> She's Melissa, He's David, and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We are high above the San Francisco skyline, in the Salesforce tower at the Accenture Innovation Hub. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (tech music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Boomi World 2018. Brought to you by Dell Boomi. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at the Encore in Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier. We're at Dell Boomi World 2018, second annual Dell Boomi World, and we're here with one of Dell Boomi and Dell's biggest GSIs. We've got Jason Cook, the Global Client Account Lead at Accenture serving Dell. Jason, thanks for joining John and me today. >> Thank you. >> So, second annual Dell Boomi World, bigger than last year. They were talking today, a lot of interesting numbers. 7,500 plus customers to date. They're adding five new customers everyday. I saw the Gartner Magic Quadrant from earlier this year and iPaaS, they are right up there in that strong leader category. Talk to us about the relationship that you have with Dell Technologies and the business heat of Dell Boomi. >> Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting one. So, Accenture has become very big. I think we now have 470,000 global employees, and our brand and presence is technology advisory and delivery, it predominates what we did. What's interesting about Dell and, specifically, Boomi is being so central to the technology ecosystem, there's much opportunity for partnership. Where Dell is present with enterprise clients, we're present too. And we tend to have long-running relationships with those clients. Most of our clients are tenured over 15 years. So it gives us an opportunity to have the type of longstanding relationship that Dell has with clients and advise on technology trends, and change, and break into the best thinking of the marketplace in their clients as they look to solve problems, of course, Dell is central to that solution set, as Boomi is too. >> And yesterday, they announced a new technology partner program. Dell Boomi has a broad partner ecosystem that it partners, implementation, GSIs, talk to us about that and the maybe new business opportunities that it will give to Accenture. >> Yeah, so we've enjoyed a relationship over the past several years in Europe working with Boomi. And we incubated a program over there called Eccentric Growth Partnerships, where with emerging companies such as Boomi, we've gone to market, leveraged the Accenture channel, and then brought scale to those technologies to deliver at enterprise level for their expectations. It's been very successful, you know, seen on both sides is a real win. And we're now transferring that into the North American market, so we're based on the heels of that success. We're looking to formalize some of the things we've been doing internationally in North America. A larger market for both of us, and so it's expanded opportunity in both places. >> Jason, talk about Accenture's own transformation. We've been following you guys for, I've been following Accenture when they changed their name. But recently you guys have invested, in the past decade, really early in data science. You guys have been on the public cloud very early. You've been partnering with your customers. And so that's all great, you guys do a good job with that. But what's interesting is you're actually helping them change their business model. >> Yes. >> So how has your own transformation within Accenture dealing with Dell, he's been doing a trillion dollars in business. Millions and millions of servers sold. His customers are changing. You guys are in that business model, enablement business, you're helping customers. What's the big business model impact that's happening in the market right now. >> Well, I think you know, as it pertains to Accenture, yeah, we've grown. I would say one of the hallmarks of the growth has been around digital, and I think 60% of our revenues are now digitally oriented, which are in the areas you described. So that's become our brand and presence, and the majority of what we do in the marketplace. I think the things that we're doing to serve clients, which are several of the things we've done internally, have been around all sorts of digitally-enabled journeys, whether it's the intelligent enterprise, the connected customer, the adoption of platforms, and the expanded use as a service within enterprises. There are plays within all those spaces where we end up bringing enablement to those clients. You know, examples would be, in the retail space, you know, growth and expansion of omnichannel techniques, so that the same customer experience exists across anywhere in retail. Programs around single views of customer are very, very common for us globally. Traditionally, less technical areas of the business, like a supply chain operating that's dominated by manufacturing and fulfillment and brick and mortar in the retail space. The real time visibility challenges that have historically been there are only now being able to be solved by technologies, and so there's several different. >> And the cloud certainly is horizontally scaled, so it impacts all industries that you play in, so, good for business. But the challenge that the CIOs have that we talked to, we hear and want to get your reaction to is, okay, I loved technology scale. I need to have proof points. I got to have mile markers that are going to be attainable with time-to-value. But the number one thing they say is I got to bring a competitive advantage into I.T., in a cloud construct that's horizontally scalable and work with partners in areas that aren't core. So, leverage supplier relationships, but build a core intellectual property or competitive advantage with I.T. How do you guys help them? What are some trends? What are those I.P. moments for your large and medium-sized customers? >> Yeah, I think that because we have the heritage of both advising on and delivering technology, where we tend to work closely with CIOs is around the speed-to-value, delivering on programs. We represent a wealth of experience and work in the marketplace, and those learnings can be brought to different clients, and fundamentally that's what's valuable to them. So I think that when we talk about cloud enablement, it's often a matter, too of thinking through, what are the specific business outcomes that can be delivered from the use of technology. And so, clients for example, I can think of some clients, that one company that has 1,400 legacy applications in a cloud footprint. And yet the business initiatives that come into the IT-- >> They must use containers a lot. >> Yeah, well exactly. The questions that come into the I.T. organization are often ones around how can we improve our visibility to product line profitability, as an example. And so, the use of cloud, the use of integration technologies like Boomi accelerates the ability to connect information from that disparate environment and deliver outcomes. >> And specifically more tactical, to get those outcomes, what specific things do you see? Is the cloud native? Is it the role of data? How are CIOs getting down and dirty, saying okay, I'm going to lock in on this as territory, we're going to build around and build on top of. Data, cloud, and IoT's new, and everyone knows what IoT is, it's going to be part of, either physical and/or low-hanging fruit. But what are they building on from an I.T. standpoint? Is it the data, is it the network? Is it the storage? So what do you see there? >> Yeah, I think it is the data. I think that's where we see, data-led seems to be the thinking in most of these cases around getting information consistently consumed throughout. 'Cause the world has become so data intensive that access to data is not the problem. It's the integration, and the derivation of value from it that's-- >> And scale, too, I mean. >> And scale, right, yeah. >> Hello cloud, so cloud and data seem to be. >> And it's become more distributed, too. And so dealing with distributed data sources and normalizing has been a-- >> That's where Boomi comes in, integrating all that stuff in, so cloud and data seem to be the pattern across the board generically speaking. I mean, obviously certain industries financial, service, oil, and gas have unique requirements. >> They all have their own cases for it, whether you're a distributed bank, or whether you're a distributed retailer, or whether you're dealing with oil wells in distributed locations, you run into common problems across all industries. >> And integration is so much more, as the iPaaS market has evolved, it's so much more than integrating applications. It's integrating applications, data from existing sources, from new sources, the API economy is essential for that. To enable an organization to create a customer experience that's going to allow them to use that data, and continue to get more customers, more data, and evolve faster than their competition. But transformation is a big challenge, right? And here, well, and even Dell Technologies were, the theme was about making it real, making it real for digital transformation, security transformation, huge priority, workforce. How, when Accenture is going in to integrate at, whether it's a retailer or an oil and gas company, how do you help them start? What's that start of a transformation? >> Well, it often is the transformations you were just referring to. Our typical engagement profile ranges from how do I engage my workforce in a new way? Or how do I improve visibility across a distributed network of retail stores, or banks, or what have you? And so those are the transformations, and then inevitably, the connection of information across those things become the enabling source. If you take, as an example, a customer experience program where, let's talk about a government example where they want a single view of a citizen, a tax payer, whatever it may be. There's so much information on that person in so many disparate places that has to be brought together in a cohesive way. Not only that, but brought together and then used effectively in serving that person. And that's where you see a lot of value. >> Jason, I want to pick your brain while you're here, 'cause Accenture's always got the smart people who know what's going on. And you got big customers, big examples. There's a dynamic right now between two kind of personas. Kind of making it generic for the conversation now. Persona one is the business executive who is responsible and chartered to drive the digital transformation with new and improved applications. Taking advantage of the legacy, bringing in the new, managing them either on their own schedule. And the second persona is the person deploying cloud. So how are companies organizing around these personas? One's got to be under the hood, I got to do multicloud I got to do Kubernetes, I got to do all these things. Stateless applications, stateful applications, integrate them all together. I'm deploying it. And then the business persona, hey, take that hill, more apps, more outcomes. So how are companies organizing around these dynamics? What's the best practice? >> Yeah, along the lines you describe. So, specifically, the business functions are becoming aligned with application domains, and those tend to be programmatically managed. And so we see structures around that programmatic management. To be very responsive to business needs, and particularly as clock speeds accelerate on delivery, maintaining that partnership is very, very important. Likewise, on the infrastructural side, we see alignment there too to take advantage of creating platforms, and enablement, and infrastructure, and delivery capabilities that can deliver on that promise. >> So they're working together on pizza teams, or like agile teams? >> So it's a customer-focused model for the programmatic work and it's an industrialization and an acceleration on the infrastructural side. And that's, again, where there's a strong fit with some of these-- >> Do you have a favorite example, speaking of that? So many departments, lines of business, need to have access to the same data to be able to develop new products and services, tune things, make things better, faster than their competition. So there's this sort of democratization and this need to be able to share the information so that the entire business can grow together. Do you have a favorite example of an organization of any industry that you've worked with that you've seen really do that well, so that business, at the end of the day, everyone's playing well together because they have to. The business now is connecting customers, vendors, partners, and delivering experiences that are truly differentiating. >> Integration programs, data programs, data lake programs, data science programs often have a governance mechanism out in front of them to prioritize the needs of their business. Both in the back, in terms of enablement of different sources of information being accessed, but also the uses on the front end. And so that is a practice that we're seeing grow exponentially. The other thing that's interesting, I think, in terms of best practice is that as intelligence accelerates and companies become more analytically driven, the traditional process of continuous improvement which used to be defined in terms of Six Sigma events and other things, where once in a while a function would be evaluated for efficiencies becomes a continuous capability. So in this governance model, the ability to refine, and tune, and improve things like integration, AI, analytics on a continuous cycle as opposed to having it be event-driven is certainly an emerging trend and a best practice that we see a lot of. >> Well, Jason, thanks so much for joining the program with John and me today, and sharing with us what's new with Accenture and Dell Boomi and how you're helping customers globally truly transform. >> It's a pleasure, thank you for having me. >> And for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Boomi World 2018 in Las Vegas. John and I will be right back with our next guest. (electronic music)

[Music] [Applause] hello everyone welcome to the cube conversation here in palo alto california i'm john furrier host of thecube we got a special breaking news at scale has hired a new ceo chris lynch is the big news and taking over dave mariano with the evp of technology important because one cube alumni and also we've seen about all the big data events doing amazing work in the cloud scale data market for many many years we're very familiar at scale both david and chris lynch both cube alumni chris great to see you congratulations new ceo of atscale thanks john i really appreciate being here so um we know each other you've been on the cube before you're formerly the ceo of vertica sold to hp other ceos before that also a venture capitalist at atlas ventures for that distinguished career why this move right now what's attracted you to at scale take over the helm from the co-founder who will be partnering with you on this it's a great question um i'm still asking myself that but i think what it comes down to is i met dave years ago when i was at atlas and um it didn't work out the time for us to make an investment but i tracked the company and what they were doing and i left accomplished a little over a year ago and working with some companies out in the west coast app and be out here and i reached out to dave and said hey you want to grab dinner which we did and um by the end of the evening he was like you know you should come help us really commercialize this and take it to the next level they've been on our radar they've been on our radar for a while obviously i mean david at hadoop summit i think three four years ago and he was formerly a cloud we kind of hit it off clearly a big data um visionary and also entrepreneur but they had a unique model at that time hadoop was certainly viewed as you know the king of the castle for in big data at that time but cloud scale wasn't on everyone's radar on the mainstream they had a unique perspective has anything changed with the tech is that what's attracted to you the scaled piece of it what's the what's the secret sauce that that got you enticing so so i'm aware of the company's history that's not what got me interested um what got me interested is i think that they're the only player today in in the market that has a production product that can actually take customers from the data center to the cloud and do so transparently and i liken it to what we did at copia we virtualized file systems and frankly when we virtualized http traffic at arrow point so the idea of an abstraction layer a federation layer made sense to me and um you know as a venture capitalist i've seen the lack of adoption of big data workloads in the cloud you know there's a 200 billion dollar opportunity i think these guys are uniquely qualified to take advantage of it so that's really what drove me from a from a business perspective i see this opportunities unique versus anything i've seen on either coast we get a great reputation as an operator also someone who can manage and operate businesses and grow them and ultimately you have some great exits in your day vertica is well known in in the history of tech for two reasons one is it was probably the best deal hp ever has ever done on acquisition value-wise also it was before and during the whole vertica and autonomy autonomy acquisition was billions of dollars so and they ended up throwing that away keeping vertica and that became the flagship so you've seen how companies can take a wave and get in the right position you've done that with stone breaker in the past founder of vertica do you get the same movement here with this company it's the same playbook what's different is it the same what's the opportunity for this company so i think the opportunity for this company is different at vertica it was about executing against the excellent product that they had built in a known market they were targeted for my vision for at scale is to move beyond the data lake hadoop market and really take all the legacy warehousing vendors to the cloud cloud proof those solutions behind the firewall and begin to deliver those workloads in earnest to the cloud transparent to the user irrespective of the bi tool whether the the technology is behind the firewall in front of the firewall and i think that's a game changer certainly we've seen on the cube and the big conversation in the industry has been hybrid cloud multi-cloud but if you squint through that those trend lines it's really about integration right so you mentioned getting people to the cloud how big is that right now from an action standpoint is it is it accelerating is it early stages where is the progress bar on companies accelerating to the cloud it's it's stalled frankly because there are thousands of tens of thousands of applications in the fortune 500 that the the ability to take those applications and that data and move it to the cloud is it's on par with trying to operate do heart surgery on a patient while they're running the boston marathon so it's too difficult it's too disruptive to a business too risky what we do is we create a federation layer that basically abstracts all that complexity from the user and makes that transition transparent so to the user they don't have to care whether it's behind the firewall in front of the firewall what cloud it sits on what analytics store you're drawing from what bi tool it doesn't matter to the user so they've basically been able to separate those two things and that's going to allow people to scale and evolve into the cloud right today cloud is a revolution not an evolution it needs to be an evolution for fortune 500 companies to take advantage of it i got to ask you the hard question because ultimately let amazon they're kicking ass 10 ways from saturday they're obviously the numbers are off the chart even in public sectors just down there last week you got azure retooling and essentially they're going to try to replicate the the uh the congress of scale i think they're going to have a hard time but still no they're not going anywhere either and you get google changing the game focusing on their core competencies and where they can differentiate all that is potentially competition so this company at scale they definitely have tech chops so that's you know we know the team there so they had a lot of credit for that but 25 million dollars raised in their last round of funding total capital day 45 million how are you going to compete how are you going to take this and commercialize this opportunity and not be driftwood instead ride that wave it's a terrific question i actually think that one of the things that excites me about this opportunity it's the first opportunity as an operator that i've had that i haven't been in the david goliath thing i actually don't think that any of those people are competitors i think when atscale wins bi vendors win traditional data stores win and the cloud provider wins and ultimately the customer wins so my view is all those companies you mentioned if google wants to be relevant in the enterprise they need to get those big data workloads to their cloud we can do that we can continue to help amazon do that we can help oracle secure cloud do that we can help microsoft do that and all the time we're future proofing the legacy data stores of the teradatas and the oracles and the ibms so this is the first opportunity that i've seen where the game isn't to go disrupt and call out the competition it's to work with all these people to drive workloads to the cloud in a in a scale that hasn't been done before so you'd have to unseat anyone you've got to ride the cloud wave pretty much yeah we have to we have to demonstrate to these guys that we do what we say we we do um but my view is when we win all those participants can potentially win awesome how about uh staff funding you feel good that enough try powder in there is there another round of funding on the horizon or yeah i mean you know i haven't even started yet but you know my expectation is that in this marketplace with my track record raising capital or attracting capital will not be an issue it'll be about figuring out the business model and making sure it's right and then investing behind that business model it's enough cash now certainly do that talk about the boston california you're going to stay in boston that's news companies based in california you have a pedigree in boston certainly and being a vc down there but also you run businesses down there there's talent down there is there plans for a boston expansion a boston bi-coastal situation what's their opportunity so the company will remain headquartered in san mateo and i'll take up residence here and i'll go back and forth so my family's not moving so i'll have a residence in boston and one here um but you can absolutely expect that i'm going to leverage the ecosystem that i've grown up in and we will have a significant presence on the east coast awesome chris final question machine learning you guys were close to that for a long time at vertica you guys were doing some of the most cutting-edge machine learning before it became super popular as it is now as they call it ai now but essentially that was the beginning of the commodore store database which you guys pioneered speed and using data for competitive advantage how is that now scaled up in the market now how how robust is it how mature is it how ready is it and how does atscale take advantage of of that of that growth so i think that the world of data science in general has matured if you look at one of my proudest investments company called data robot they are the leaders in automated machine learning and their business is growing triple digits every year the level of adoption is really only gated by practitioners and people to apply the technology to these business problems but it's gaining incredible momentum for us i plan to integrate automated ai into components of our architecture which i think makes it really a game changer so of course we expect competition um but by the time that you know they get you know 100 miles behind us you know we're going to hit that what's that button that you have in those teslas you guys drive out here insane mode and it'll be automated machine learning will be powering that what's your impression of the marketplace right now is that um you know obviously you're seeing global landscape you know we see the china situation going on asia a lot of activity a lot of growth outside the united states um and obviously cloud you're seeing region specialties any thoughts on how that's going to play into it is it not relevant to you guys right now what's the what's your thoughts on the global landscape i mean i think it's it's relevant to everyone because i think it's what's driving valuations and this influx of money coming from these different places i mean if if you look at the middle east you know they're writing checks to any sort of tech company they can because they're pr trying to divest of what they know is a dead business right so that's going to drive valuations it's going to drive in my opinion um a lack of discipline and and bad behavior as we've seen you know in 2000 and other times in 2008 um i think for us as a company we're going to be disciplined and you know the fact that we can raise money and raise money attractive valuations isn't a reason to do it if you have a business model of fund that's a reason to do it so you know i don't think it'll be a distraction for us but i think it will increase you know the amount of noise in all the key markets and i think cyber we've seen it you know ai for sure um iot bitcoin all these what's the most exciting thing in the data business that's as it evolves now to the center value proposition that you see and as the ceo now of at scala you're going to capture this i think i would say two things in the in the ai machine learning space i think the fact that with democratization of data you're now actually seeing people applying machine learning way broader in organizations and way deeper than ever before and that's going to transform businesses low-tech business as well as high-tech businesses for us i think that the real opportunity exists it's a question of just taking these lit these legacy workloads and moving them to the cloud and that's not a trivial task not just technically but um you always have to be sensitive to companies ability to absorb technology i think one of the challenges is you know you're trying to transform a business that you know basically was informed as it developed in technology that was 1980. well chris congratulations on the ceo opportunity at at scale um what can people expect from you what what if you can write the narrative of the first couple moves off the line of scrimmage here what are you going to do what's your order of business what can they expect from you well the first thing i'd like to do after i meet the customers and the employees and the par existing partners is go out and get two significant partnerships i like to see a couple partnerships in cloud a couple partnerships with the classic data store vendors so that's probably going to be my first mission to get that moving and you know we'll see how quickly it goes but i think that's super important to do yeah and certainly scale right now has been a big competitive advantage here's a company at scale five year on their five year anniversary interesting gestation period for this big data world because hadoop you can look back into 2010 days hadoop was supposed to be the biggest thing since sliced bread but what happened was the world became bigger and from a date not just outside hadoop gave these guys an opportunity and their architecture fits well you see it's scaling quicker what's your what's your where's your point of scale how do you see this so i think i think that the company probably rightly so at the time hitch their wagon to hadoop but i think as you said it's it's really a subset of the data landscape and it's actually a pretty small one the real opportunity is in driving all the legacy data and analytics stores those islands of analytics and bringing them to the cloud and that like i said i think is a you know 100 billion dollar business well certainly great to see you congratulations getting back at the chief position and did a great job at vertica great journey we followed you on that one that was fantastic and then certainly watch it unfold certainly at hpe create a lot of value congratulations and at scale's got a good hire there congratulations thank you i appreciate it alright this is thecube conversation here inside the palo alto studios i'm john furrier thanks for watching [Music]