(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome back to theCUBE as to continue our coverage here at AWS re:Invent '22. We're in the Venetian. Out in Las Vegas, it is Wednesday. And the PaaS is still happening. I can guarantee you that. We continue our series of discussions as part of the "AWS Startup Showcase". This is the "Global Startup Program", a part of that showcase. And I'm joined by two gentlemen today who are going to talk about what CoreStack is up to. One of them is Ez Natarajan, who is the Founder and CEO. Good to have you- (simultaneous chatter) with us today. We appreciate it. Thanks, EZ. >> Nice to meet you, John. >> And Brad Winney who is the area Sales Leader for startups at AWS. Brad, good to see you. >> Good to see you, John. >> Thanks for joining us here on The Showcase. So Ez, first off, let's just talk about CoreStack a little bit for people at home who might not be familiar with what you do. It's all about obviously data, governance, giving people peace of mind, but much deeper than that. I'll let you take it from there. >> So CoreStack is a governance platform that helps customers maximize their cloud usage and get governance at scale. When we talk about governance, we instill confidence through three layers: solving the problems of the CIO, solving the problems of the CTO, solving the problems of the CFO, together with a single pin of class,- >> John: Mm-hmm. >> which helps them achieve continuous holistic automated outcomes at any given time. >> John: Mm-hmm. So, Brad, follow up on that a little bit- >> Yeah. because Ez touched on it there that he's got a lot of stakeholders- >> Right. >> with a lot of different needs and a lot of different demands- >> Mm-hmm. >> but the same overriding emotion, right? >> Yeah. >> They all want confidence. >> They all want confidence. And one of the trickiest parts of confidence is the governance issue, which is policy. It's how do we determine who has access to what, how we do that scale. And across not only start been a process. This is a huge concern, especially as we talked a lot about cutting costs as the overriding driver for 2023. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> The economic compression being what it is, you still have to do this in a secure way and as a riskless way as possible. And so companies like CoreStack really offer core, no pun intended, (Ez laughs) function there where you abstract out a lot of the complexity of governance and you make governance a much more simple process. And that's why we're big fans of what they do. >> So we think governance from a three dimensional standpoint, right? (speaks faintly) How do we help customers be more compliant, secure, achieve the best performance and operations with increased availability? >> Jaohn: Mm-hmm. >> At the same time do the right spend from a cost standpoint. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. So when all three dimensions are connected, the business velocity increases and the customer's ability to cater to their customers increase. So our governance tenants come from these three pillars of finance operations, security operations and air operations at cloud operations. >> Yeah. And... Yeah. Please, go ahead. >> Can I (indistinct)? >> Oh, I'm sorry. Just- >> No, that's fine. >> So part of what's going on here, which is critical for AWS, is if you notice a lot of (indistinct) language is at the business value with key stakeholders of the CTO, the CSO and so on. And we're doing a much better job of speaking business value on top of AWS services. But the AWS partners, again, like CoreStack have such great expertise- >> John: Mm-hmm. >> in that level of dialogue. That's why it's such a key part for us, why we're really interested partnering with them. >> How do you wrestle with this, wrestle may not be the right word, but because you do have, as we just went through these litany, these business parts of your business or a business that need access- >> Ez: Mm-hmm. >> and that you need to have policies in place, but they change, right? I mean, and somebody maybe from the financial side should have a window into data and other slices of their business. There's a lot of internal auditing. >> Man: Mm-hmm. >> Obviously, it's got to be done, right? And so just talk about that process a little bit. How you identify the appropriate avenues or the appropriate gateways for people to- >> Sure. >> access data so that you can have that confidence as a CTO or CSO, that it's all right. And we're not going to let too much- >> out to the wrong people. >> Sure. >> Yeah. So there are two dimensions that drive the businesses to look for that kind of confidence building exercise, right? One, there are regulatory external requirements that say that I know if I'm in the financial industry, I maybe need to following NIST, PCI, and sort of compliances. Or if I'm in the healthcare industry, maybe HIPAA and related compliance, I need to follow. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> That's an external pressure. Internally, the organizations based on their geographical presence and the kind of partners and customers they cater to, they may have their own standards. And when they start adopting cloud; A, for each service, how do I make sure the service is secure and it operates at the best level so that we don't violate any of the internal or external requirements. At the same time, we get the outcome that is needed. And that is driven into policies, that is driven into standards which are consumable easily, like AWS offers well-architected framework that helps customers make sure that I know I'm architecting my application workloads in a way that meets the business demands. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And what CoreStack has done is taken that and automated it in such a way it helps the customers simplify that process to get that outcome measured easily so they get that confidence to consume more of the higher order services. >> John: Okay. And I'm wondering about your relationship as far with AWS goes, because, to me, it's like going deep sea fishing and all of a sudden you get this big 4, 500 pound fish. Like, now what? >> Mm-hmm. >> Now what do we do because we got what we wanted? So, talk about the "Now what?" with AWS in terms of that relationship, what they're helping you with, and the kind of services that you're seeking from them as well. >> Oh, thanks to Brad and the entire Global Startup Ecosystem team at AWS. And we have been part of AWS Ecosystem at various levels, starting from Marketplace to ISV Accelerate to APN Partners, Cloud Management Tools Competency Partner, Co-Sell programs. The team provides different leverages to connect to the entire ecosystem of how AWS gets consumed by the customers. Customers may come through channels and partners. And these channels and partners maybe from WAs to MSPs to SIs to how they really want to use each. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And the ecosystem that AWS provides helps us feed into all these players and provide this higher order capability which instills confidence to the customers end of the day. >> Man: Absolutely. Right. >> And this can be taken through an MSP. This can be taken through a GSI. This can be taken to the customer through a WA. And that's how our play of expansion into larger AWS customer base. >> Brad: Yeah. >> Brad, from your side of the fence. >> Brad: No, its... This is where the commons of scale come to benefit our partners. And AWS has easily the largest ecosystem. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> Whether or not it's partners, customers, and the like. And so... And then, all the respective teams and programs bring all those resources to bear for startups. Your analogy of of catching a big fish off coast, I actually have a house in Florida. I spend a lot of time there. >> Interviewer: Okay. >> I've yet to catch a big 500 pound fish. But... (interviewer laughs) >> But they're out there. >> But they're definitely out there. >> Yeah. >> And so, in addition to the formalized programs like the Global Partner Network Program, the APN and Marketplace, we really break our activities down with the CoreStacks of the world into two major kind of processes: "Sell to" and "Sell with". And when we say "Sell to", what we're really doing is helping them architect for the future. And so, that plays dividends for their customers. So what do we mean by that? We mean helping them take advantage of all the latest serverless technologies: the latest chip sets like Graviton, thing like that. So that has the added benefit of just lowering the overall cost of deployment and expend. And that's... And we focus on that really extensively. So don't ever want to lose that part of the picture of what we do. >> Mm-hmm. >> And the "Sell with" is what he just mentioned, which is, our teams out in the field compliment these programs like APN and Marketplace with person-to-person in relationship development for core key opportunities in things like FinTech and Retail and so on. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> We have significant industry groups and business units- >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> in the enterprise level that our teams work with day in and day out to help foster those relationships. And to help CoreStack continue to develop and grow that business. >> Yeah. We've talked a lot about cost, right? >> Yeah. >> But there's a difference between reducing costs or optimizing your spend, right? I mean there- >> Brad: Right. >> Right. There's a... They're very different prism. So in terms of optimizing and what you're doing in the data governance world, what kind of conversations discussions are you having with your clients? And how is that relationship with AWS allowing you to go with confidence into those discussions and be able to sell optimization of how they're going to spend maybe more money than they had planned on originally? >> So today, because of the extra external micro-market conditions, every single customer that we talk to wanting to take a foster status of, "Hey, where are we today? How are we using the cloud? Are we in an optimized state?" >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> And when it comes to optimization, again, the larger customers that we talk to are really bothered about the business outcome and how their services and ability to cater to their customers, right? >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> They don't want to compromise on that just because they want to optimize on the spend. That conversation trickled down to taking a poster assessment first, and then are you using the right set of services within AWS? Are the right set of services being optimized for various requirements? >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> And AWS help in terms of catering to the segment of customers who need that kind of a play through the patent ecosystem. >> John: Mm-hmm. Yeah. We've talked a lot about confidence too, cloud with confidence. >> Brad: Yeah. Yeah. >> What does that mean to different people, you think? I mean, (Brad laughing) because don't you have to feel them out and say "Okay. What's kind of your tolerance level for certain, not risks, but certain measures that you might need to change"? >> I actually think it's flipped the other way around now. I think the risk factor- >> Okay. >> is more on your on-prem environment. And all that goes with that. 'Cause you... Because the development of the cloud in the last 15 years has been profound. It's gone from... That's been the risky proposition now. With all of the infrastructure, all the security and compliance guardrails we have built into the cloud, it's really more about transition and risk of transition. And that's what we see a lot of. And that's why, again, where governance comes into play here, which is how do I move my business from on-prem in a fairly insecure environment relatively speaking to the secure cloud? >> Interviewer: Sure. >> How do I do that without disrupting business? How do I do that without putting my business at risk? And that's a key piece. I want to come back, if I may, something on cost-cutting. >> Interviewer: Sure. >> We were talking about this on the way up here. Cost-cutting, it's the bonfire of the vanities in that in that everybody is talking about cost-cutting. And so we're in doing that perpetuating the very problem that we kind of want to avoid, which is our big cost-cutting. (laughs) So... And I say that because in the venture capital community, what's happening is two things: One is, everybody's being asked to extend their runways as much as possible, but they are not letting them off the hook on growth. And so what we're seeing a lot of is a more nuanced conversation of where you trim your costs, it's not essential, spend, but reinvest. Especially if you've got good strong product market fit, reinvest that for growth. And so that's... So if I think about our playbook for 2023, it's to help good strong startups. Either tune their market fit or now that they good have have good market fit, really run and develop their business. So growth is not off the hook for 2023. >> And then let me just hit on something- >> Yeah. >> before we say goodbye here that you just touched on too, Brad, about. How we see startups, right? AWS, I mean, obviously there's a company focus on nurturing this environment of innovation and of growth. And for people looking at maybe through different prisms and coming. >> Brad: Yeah. >> So if you would maybe from your side of the fence, Ez from CoreStack, about working as a startup with AWS, I mean, how would you characterize that relationship about the kind of partnership that you have? And I want to hear from Brad too about how he sees AWS in general in the startup world. But go ahead. >> It's kind of a mutually enriching relationship, right? The support that comes from AWS because our combined goal is help the customers maximize the potential of cloud. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> And we talked about confidence. And we talked about all the enablement that we provide. But the partnership helps us get to the reach, right? >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> Reach at scale. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. We are talking about customers from different industry verticals having different set of problems. And how do we solve it together so that like the reimbursement that happens, in fact healthcare customers that we repeatedly talk to, even in the current market conditions, they don't want to save. They want to optimize and re-spend their savings using more cloud. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> So that's the partnership that is mutually enriching. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. To me, this is easy. I think the reason why a lot of us are here at AWS, especially the startup world, is that our business interests are completely aligned. So I run a pretty significant business unit in a startup neighbor. But a good part of my job and my team's job is to go help cut costs. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> So tell me... Show me a revenue responsibility position where part of your job is to go cut cost. >> Interviewer: Right. >> It's so unique and we're not a non-profit. We just have a very good long-term view, right? Which is, if we help companies reduce costs and conserve capital and really make sure that that capital is being used the right way, then their long-term viability comes into play. And that's where we have a chance to win more of that business over time. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> And so because those business interests are very congruent and we come in, we earn so much trust in the process. But I think that... That's why I think we being AWS, are uniquely successful startups. Our business interests are completely aligned and there's a lot of trust for that. >> It's a great success story. It really is. And thank you for sharing your little slice of that and growing slice of that too- >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> from all appearances. Thank you both. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you very much, John. >> Appreciate your time. >> This is part of the AWS Startup Showcase. And I'm John Walls. You're watching theCUBE here at AWS re:Invent '22. And theCUBE, of course, the leader in high tech coverage.

>> Hello. My name is Ron Kafka, and I'm the senior director for Partner Scale Initiatives for HBE Ezmeral. Thanks for joining us today at Analytics Unleashed. By now, you've heard a lot about the Ezmeral portfolio and how it can help you accomplish objectives around big data analytics and containerization. I want to shift gears a bit and then discuss our Ezmeral Technology Partner Program. I've got two great guest speakers here with me today. And together, We're going to discuss how jointly we are solving data analytic challenges for our customers. Before I introduce them, I want to take a minute to talk to provide a little bit more insight into our ecosystem program. We've created a program with a realization based on customer feedback that even the most mature organizations are struggling with their data-driven transformation efforts. It turns out this is largely due to the pace of innovation with application vendors or ICS supporting data science and advanced analytic workloads. Their advancements are simply outpacing organization's ability to move workloads into production rapidly. Bottom line, organizations want a unified experience across environments where their entire application portfolio in essence provide a comprehensive application stack and not piece parts. So, let's talk about how our ecosystem program helps solve for this. For starters, we were leveraging HPEs long track record of forging technology partnerships and it created a best in class ISB partner program specific for the Ezmeral portfolio. We were doing this by developing an open concept marketplace where customers and partners can explore, learn, engage and collaborate with our strategic technology partners. This enables our customers to adopt, deploy validated applications from industry leading software vendors on HPE Ezmeral with a high degree of confidence. Also, it provides a very deep bench of leading ISVs for other groups inside of HPE to leverage for their solutioning efforts. Speaking of industry leading ISV, it's about time and introduce you to two of those industry leaders right now. Let me welcome Daniel Hladky from Dataiku, and Omri Geller from Run:AI. So I'd like to introduce Daniel Hladky. Daniel is with Dataiku. He's a great partner for HPE. Daniel, welcome. >> Thank you for having me here. >> That's great. Hey, would you mind just talking a bit about how your partnership journey has been with HPE? >> Yes, pleasure. So the journey started about five years ago and in 2018 we signed a worldwide reseller agreement with HPE. And in 2020, we actually started to work jointly on the integration between the Dataiku Data Science Studio called DSS and integrated that with the Ezmeral Container platform, and was a great success. And it was on behalf of some clear customer projects. >> It's been a long partnership journey with you for sure with HPE. And we welcome your partnership extremely well. Just a brief question about the Container Platform and really what that's meant for Dataiku. >> Yes, Ron. Thanks. So, basically I'd like the quote here Florian Douetteau, which is the CEO of Dataiku, who said that the combination of Dataiku with the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform will help the customers to successfully scale and put machine learning projects into production. And this basically is going to deliver real impact for their business. So, the combination of the two of us is a great success. >> That's great. Can you talk about what Dataiku is doing and how HPE Ezmeral Container Platform fits in a solution offering a bit more? >> Great. So basically Dataiku DSS is our product which is a end to end data science platform, and basically brings value to the project of customers on their past enterprise AI. In simple ways, we can say it could be as simple as building data pipelines, but it could be also very complex by having machine and deep learning models at scale. So the fast track to value is by having collaboration, orchestration online technologies and the models in production. So, all of that is part of the Data Science Studio and Ezmeral fits perfectly into the part where we design and then basically put at scale those project and put it into product. >> That's perfect. Can you be a bit more specific about how you see HPE and Dataiku really tightening up a customer outcome and value proposition? >> Yes. So what we see is also the challenge of the market that probably about 80% of the use cases really never make it to production. And this is of course a big challenge and we need to change that. And I think the combination of the two of us is actually addressing exactly this need. What we can say is part of the MLOps approach, Dataiku and the Ezmeral Container Platform will provide a frictionless approach, which means without scripting and coding, customers can put all those projects into the productive environment and don't have to worry any more and be more business oriented. >> That's great. So you mentioned you're seeing customers be a lot more mature with their AI workloads and deployment. What do you suggest for the other customers out there that are just starting this journey or just thinking about how to get started? >> Yeah. That's a very good question, Ron. So what we see there is actually the challenge that people need to go on a pass of maturity. And this starts with a simple data pipelines, et cetera, and then basically move up the ladder and basically build large complex project. And here I see a very interesting offer coming now from HPE which is called D3S, which is the data science startup pack. That's something I discussed together with HPE back in early 2020. And basically, it solves the three stages, which is explore, experiment and evolve and builds quickly MVPs for the customers. By doing so, basically you addressed business objectives, lay out in the proper architecture and also setting up the proper organization around it. So, this is a great combination by HPE and Dataiku through the D3S. >> And it's a perfect example of what I mentioned earlier about leveraging the ecosystem program that we built to do deeper solutioning efforts inside of HPE in this case with our AI business unit. So, congratulations on that and thanks for joining us today. I'm going to shift gears. I'm going to bring in Omri Geller from Run:AI. Omri, welcome. It's great to have you. You guys are killing it out there in the market today. And I just thought we could spend a few minutes talking about what is so unique and differentiated from your offerings. >> Thank you, Ron. It's a pleasure to be here. Run:AI creates a virtualization and orchestration layer for AI infrastructure. We help organizations to gain visibility and control over their GPO resources and help them deliver AI solutions to market faster. And we do that by managing granular scheduling, prioritization, allocation of compute power, together with the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform. >> That's great. And your partnership with HPE is a bit newer than Daniel's, right? Maybe about the last year or so we've been working together a lot more closely. Can you just talk about the HPE partnership, what it's meant for you and how do you see it impacting your business? >> Sure. First of all, Run:AI is excited to partner with HPE Ezmeral Container Platform and help customers manage appeals for their AI workloads. We chose HPE since HPE has years of experience partnering with AI use cases and outcomes with vendors who have strong footprint in this markets. HPE works with many partners that are complimentary for our use case such as Nvidia, and HPE Container Platform together with Run:AI and Nvidia deliver a world class solutions for AI accelerated workloads. And as you can understand, for AI speed is critical. Companies want to gather important AI initiatives into production as soon as they can. And the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, running IGP orchestration solution enables that by enabling dynamic provisioning of GPU so that resources can be easily shared, efficiently orchestrated and optimal used. >> That's great. And you talked a lot about the efficiency of the solution. What about from a customer perspective? What is the real benefit that our customers are going to be able to gain from an HPE and Run:AI offering? >> So first, it is important to understand how data scientists and AI researchers actually build solution. They do it by running experiments. And if a data scientist is able to run more experiments per given time, they will get to the solution faster. With HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, Run:AI and users such as data scientists can actually do that and seamlessly and efficiently consume large amounts of GPU resources, run more experiments or given time and therefore accelerate their research. Together, we actually saw a customer that is running almost 7,000 jobs in parallel over GPUs with efficient utilization of those GPUs. And by running more experiments, those customers can be much more effective and efficient when it comes to bringing solutions to market >> Couldn't agree more. And I think we're starting to see a lot of joint success together as we go out and talk to the story. Hey, I want to thank you both one last time for being here with me today. It was very enlightening for our team to have you as part of the program. And I'm excited to extend this customer value proposition out to the rest of our communities. With that, I'd like to close today's session. I appreciate everyone's time. And keep an eye out on our ISP marketplace for Ezmeral We're continuing to expand and add new capabilities and new partners to our marketplace. We're excited to do a lot of great things and help you guys all be successful. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you, Ron. >> What a great panel discussion. And these partners they really do have a good understanding of the possibilities, working on the platform, and I hope and expect we'll see this ecosystem continue to grow. That concludes the main program, which means you can now pick one of three live demos to attend and chat live with experts. Now those three include day in the life of IT Admin, day in the life of a data scientist, and even a day in the life of the HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric, where you can see the many ways the data fabric is used in your life today. Wish you could attend all three, no worries. The recordings will be available on demand for you and your teams. Moreover, the show doesn't stop here, HPE has a growing and thriving tech community, you should check it out. It's really a solid starting point for learning more, talking to smart people about great ideas and seeing how Ezmeral can be part of your own data journey. Again, thanks very much to all of you for joining, until next time, keep unleashing the power of your data.

>> Hello. My name is Ron Kafka, and I'm the senior director for Partner Scale Initiatives for HBE Ezmeral. Thanks for joining us today at Analytics Unleashed. By now, you've heard a lot about the Ezmeral portfolio and how it can help you accomplish objectives around big data analytics and containerization. I want to shift gears a bit and then discuss our Ezmeral Technology Partner Program. I've got two great guest speakers here with me today. And together, We're going to discuss how jointly we are solving data analytic challenges for our customers. Before I introduce them, I want to take a minute to talk to provide a little bit more insight into our ecosystem program. We've created a program with a realization based on customer feedback that even the most mature organizations are struggling with their data-driven transformation efforts. It turns out this is largely due to the pace of innovation with application vendors or ICS supporting data science and advanced analytic workloads. Their advancements are simply outpacing organization's ability to move workloads into production rapidly. Bottom line, organizations want a unified experience across environments where their entire application portfolio in essence provide a comprehensive application stack and not piece parts. So, let's talk about how our ecosystem program helps solve for this. For starters, we were leveraging HPEs long track record of forging technology partnerships and it created a best in class ISB partner program specific for the Ezmeral portfolio. We were doing this by developing an open concept marketplace where customers and partners can explore, learn, engage and collaborate with our strategic technology partners. This enables our customers to adopt, deploy validated applications from industry leading software vendors on HPE Ezmeral with a high degree of confidence. Also, it provides a very deep bench of leading ISVs for other groups inside of HPE to leverage for their solutioning efforts. Speaking of industry leading ISV, it's about time and introduce you to two of those industry leaders right now. Let me welcome Daniel Hladky from Dataiku, and Omri Geller from Run:AI. So I'd like to introduce Daniel Hladky. Daniel is with Dataiku. He's a great partner for HPE. Daniel, welcome. >> Thank you for having me here. >> That's great. Hey, would you mind just talking a bit about how your partnership journey has been with HPE? >> Yes, pleasure. So the journey started about five years ago and in 2018 we signed a worldwide reseller agreement with HPE. And in 2020, we actually started to work jointly on the integration between the Dataiku Data Science Studio called DSS and integrated that with the Ezmeral Container platform, and was a great success. And it was on behalf of some clear customer projects. >> It's been a long partnership journey with you for sure with HPE. And we welcome your partnership extremely well. Just a brief question about the Container Platform and really what that's meant for Dataiku. >> Yes, Ron. Thanks. So, basically I like the quote here Florian Douetteau, which is the CEO of Dataiku, who said that the combination of Dataiku with the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform will help the customers to successfully scale and put machine learning projects into production. And this basically is going to deliver real impact for their business. So, the combination of the two of us is a great success. >> That's great. Can you talk about what Dataiku is doing and how HPE Ezmeral Container Platform fits in a solution offering a bit more? >> Great. So basically Dataiku DSS is our product which is a end to end data science platform, and basically brings value to the project of customers on their past enterprise AI. In simple ways, we can say it could be as simple as building data pipelines, but it could be also very complex by having machine and deep learning models at scale. So the fast track to value is by having collaboration, orchestration online technologies and the models in production. So, all of that is part of the Data Science Studio and Ezmeral fits perfectly into the part where we design and then basically put at scale those project and put it into product. >> That's perfect. Can you be a bit more specific about how you see HPE and Dataiku really tightening up a customer outcome and value proposition? >> Yes. So what we see is also the challenge of the market that probably about 80% of the use cases really never make it to production. And this is of course a big challenge and we need to change that. And I think the combination of the two of us is actually addressing exactly this need. What we can say is part of the MLOps approach, Dataiku and the Ezmeral Container Platform will provide a frictionless approach, which means without scripting and coding, customers can put all those projects into the productive environment and don't have to worry any more and be more business oriented. >> That's great. So you mentioned you're seeing customers be a lot more mature with their AI workloads and deployment. What do you suggest for the other customers out there that are just starting this journey or just thinking about how to get started? >> Yeah. That's a very good question, Ron. So what we see there is actually the challenge that people need to go on a pass of maturity. And this starts with a simple data pipelines, et cetera, and then basically move up the ladder and basically build large complex project. And here I see a very interesting offer coming now from HPE which is called D3S, which is the data science startup pack. That's something I discussed together with HPE back in early 2020. And basically, it solves the three stages, which is explore, experiment and evolve and builds quickly MVPs for the customers. By doing so, basically you addressed business objectives, lay out in the proper architecture and also setting up the proper organization around it. So, this is a great combination by HPE and Dataiku through the D3S. >> And it's a perfect example of what I mentioned earlier about leveraging the ecosystem program that we built to do deeper solutioning efforts inside of HPE in this case with our AI business unit. So, congratulations on that and thanks for joining us today. I'm going to shift gears. I'm going to bring in Omri Geller from Run:AI. Omri, welcome. It's great to have you. You guys are killing it out there in the market today. And I just thought we could spend a few minutes talking about what is so unique and differentiated from your offerings. >> Thank you, Ron. It's a pleasure to be here. Run:AI creates a virtualization and orchestration layer for AI infrastructure. We help organizations to gain visibility and control over their GPO resources and help them deliver AI solutions to market faster. And we do that by managing granular scheduling, prioritization, allocation of compute power, together with the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform. >> That's great. And your partnership with HPE is a bit newer than Daniel's, right? Maybe about the last year or so we've been working together a lot more closely. Can you just talk about the HPE partnership, what it's meant for you and how do you see it impacting your business? >> Sure. First of all, Run:AI is excited to partner with HPE Ezmeral Container Platform and help customers manage appeals for their AI workloads. We chose HPE since HPE has years of experience partnering with AI use cases and outcomes with vendors who have strong footprint in this markets. HPE works with many partners that are complimentary for our use case such as Nvidia, and HPE Ezmeral Container Platform together with Run:AI and Nvidia deliver a word about solution for AI accelerated workloads. And as you can understand, for AI speed is critical. Companies want to gather important AI initiatives into production as soon as they can. And the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, running IGP orchestration solution enables that by enabling dynamic provisioning of GPU so that resources can be easily shared, efficiently orchestrated and optimal used. >> That's great. And you talked a lot about the efficiency of the solution. What about from a customer perspective? What is the real benefit that our customers are going to be able to gain from an HPE and Run:AI offering? >> So first, it is important to understand how data scientists and AI researchers actually build solution. They do it by running experiments. And if a data scientist is able to run more experiments per given time, they will get to the solution faster. With HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, Run:AI and users such as data scientists can actually do that and seamlessly and efficiently consume large amounts of GPU resources, run more experiments or given time and therefore accelerate their research. Together, we actually saw a customer that is running almost 7,000 jobs in parallel over GPUs with efficient utilization of those GPUs. And by running more experiments, those customers can be much more effective and efficient when it comes to bringing solutions to market >> Couldn't agree more. And I think we're starting to see a lot of joint success together as we go out and talk to the story. Hey, I want to thank you both one last time for being here with me today. It was very enlightening for our team to have you as part of the program. And I'm excited to extend this customer value proposition out to the rest of our communities. With that, I'd like to close today's session. I appreciate everyone's time. And keep an eye out on our ISP marketplace for Ezmeral We're continuing to expand and add new capabilities and new partners to our marketplace. We're excited to do a lot of great things and help you guys all be successful. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you, Ron. (bright upbeat music)

>>Yeah, >>from The Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's the Cube covering IBM. Think brought to you by IBM. >>Hi, everybody. We're back. And you're watching the Cube's coverage of the IBM think digital event for 2020. This is that he's socially distant and socially responsible. You? My name is Dave a lot. David Larose. Who's the general manager of the IBM partner ecosystem? David, Good to see you. >>Likewise. Great to be here. >>Yes, it is. Your first year in running the the ecosystem. You probably don't expect to be managing through the this world crisis this novel Corona virus. But what was your first move? Your outreach to partners? How are you communicating to them? Maybe you could share with us how that's all going. >>It certainly wasn't in the break. So when I took this job, you're right. But, you know, we have a very strong relationship with with our partners, and what we have is we have a global advisory board. So about 25 or 30 of our largest customers across the world, we engaged with them very, very quickly. That's all of the CIOs presidents, vice presidents of styles, um, and we engage with them on a survey and said, How are you thinking about it's what are the what are your big concerns and, you know, not unusually. They came back with a couple of key things. Number one was, and their primary concern is how do they support their clients? That was probably number one on their list of things followed very closely. By enabling their firms that have a financial stability that was number two and then probably number three. I would say it was, you know, managing their work. But they're moving to a digital only type of environment, similar to what IBM has done ever kind of the three, the three big concerns. And then we spent some time talking to them about how we could help, then really deal with that and address some of those problems. And earlier this week, we we announced so therefore very key things around. How do we help them? One. How do we adapt our programs and our incentives and, uh, really looking at providing them with, you know, extension of things like loyalty program. So don't worry about you know, your ability to re validate and recertify. We gotta protect your loyalty for 2020. We added a lot of incentives in the hardware systems program in the second quarter, so we've increased by half a percent off their based incentive from the first dollar that a lot of areas around programs in terms. Then we sort of really tried to address that point of view around digital. Um, some companies were digitally ready, but there are many companies that weren't actually know a digital platform, but also we very quickly rolled out what we call it my digital marketing platform, where partners can come in and download content and curate content from IBM and then wrap their own campaigns around that and get that out and continue to engage with their clients and their partners. Um, and we funding all of that 100% from an IBM perspective on using our car marketing goals. We used to have a 50 50 funding model without with their partners. But in this particular scenario, that's a digital program that they're running with funding at 100%. And then we're also opening up to provide consultancy on how to optimize digital. So I think you know the thing that we've done here is just their programs in terms quickly, um, or money back into the into the program during the second quarter and protect the ability for our partners and then really trying to help them and enable them to get Teoh Digital our workforce and the digital program. >>Yeah, a couple things there. I mean, we were talking earlier to the the folks from IBM Global Finance, and that's a key part that you mentioned liquidity. You know, certainly these partners air obviously very much concerned about the uncertainty ahead. So having a partner like IBM that can, whether it's, you know, pass on, you know, lease terms, etcetera and provide that sort of blacking is this key? I think the other thing, too we've heard from a lot of executives, is you've got to stay close to your clients during we always do, but especially during times like this, And that's where partners are so crucial in IBM huge company, you know, massive direct sales force, but you can't cover everything. And so having the partner who's got intimate relationships, I mean, I was on a call earlier this week with a partner in Minneapolis I mean, he knows everybody in that region. And so you just that level of intimacy, I think becomes very, very important in times like this, doesn't it? >>Absolutely. And stay connected with with that. So we have about, you know, just a lot of, Ah, 21,000 active planners across across the world and staying close to the senior members of our largest partners is is really important to us. We had a We hosted a call earlier this week actually, with with their advisory council to test the programs that we've gotten in the market, Are they getting where they need, where they need the help the most? We take a lot of feedback with adjusted our programs. We're looking at this on a literally a daily basis right now on don't envisage that we would we would update pretty agile in terms of how we move that. But you know, to your point, having a partner network that we do have around by the hardware and software only on and is right, so learn what were wrong. You know what they're hearing from their pot from their clients and, you know, it allows us to more easily and quickly address needs across all of the IBM client set. >>So we interview a lot of partners, and, you know, when you talk to the familiar, they've got to make money. They have. The margin is very important to them, but it's almost it's table stakes. I mean, again, they can make money a lot of different ways. So what differentiates the suppliers is all these other things that you're talking about? Um, So I want to ask you when you came in to this this role, what you're doing priorities in terms of, you know, partner outreach, retaining that, that loyalty And what do you see changing a za result of this pandemic? >>Yeah, it's a great question. So look, four key priorities that we declared very early on and, by the way, you know, took over from John Touched at the time. And John has spent the last two years really transforming, um, your channel and the way we engage with channel. And so there was a lot of hard lifting that was already done, but it was sort of four. Things that we focused in on one was obviously, how do we continue? Accelerate IBM drive into the hybrid multi cloud market, particularly now with the integration of Red Hat into the organization. That's a very different, you know, sales motion that Wei had so accelerating that was one of the key parties, the 2nd 1 waas. And how do we continue to differentiate on the value and so ensuring that that our programs are staying up to speed and that they're being modernized? You know, the IBM possible program is being a program predominantly built on Recile over the last 10 years. Now the microchip that we're now talking about platforms not talking about consumption. And this week during Partner World, we're gonna talk about how we are going to evolve the part of the program to move into the rest partners who are building on platforms. And how about they're moving to consumption again, all around hybrid, multi, multi cloud. That's kind of the second thing skills, skills and expertise for out for a channel. We kind of have declared that we want our channel to be the most skilled channel in the industry, and it's really interesting, Dave, during this period of the pandemic, it's one of these times where we seem to have more recent and more time, and the partners have been giving us a lot of feedback to say during this time around. Workforce is home and is connected digitally. Why don't we? Wasn't IBM help with in enhancing the enablement programme certification? And so we're doing a lot around that. We see a Z great opportunity to CIO to really develop certifications and skills and expertise during this period. Um, and then the full thing is around winning in what we call out selective segments. And so we want our partners to operate across the IBM portfolio and across our client set. But where we really need the help and where we're putting the money in the programs is around the mid size organizations where they can bring the portfolio into places that it doesn't have this today, new clients or existing clients with with IBM. But the Jason like server was that kind of the four priorities and what we're seeing is and this situation that we're going through this pandemic going through, it's actually accelerating the areas around moving. My partner multi cloud cloud is becoming a differentiator for us and accelerating. I need to get a program that is relevant beyond just resell. But you know this, this concept of platforms and building. But as they build with their own light beyond platform and consumption, So I think it's it's actually accelerating what we've seen and have it moving forward. >>It's interesting what you're saying about resale. We've talked many, many years now on the Cube about the partner ecosystem. It really used to be about resale. You know, we have a majority of his box selling, and you could make a lot of money doing that, you know, a decade or two ago. But when Cloud came, partners really started to underst and that that there was a sea change happening in I T. For a while there, they thought, Wow, you know, this is really going to be challenging. Cloud's going to kill us. But what they realized after a while is with five exactly complex hybrid Cloud is it's not simple to cure and create a seamless experience across clouds on prime etcetera. So the huge opportunities open up, add value. So there's been a massive change in the mindset. Uh, and it sounds like particularly with digital, that the pandemic is going to accelerate that on. People are going to come out of this, um, almost having done some exercises, maybe in a little bit better shape than they came into it. You buy that premise? >>My question is no question about it. I mean, if you think about, you know, IBM portfolio for a minute. Um, and over the last really 6 to 9 months, we have containerized out our software portfolio. It's based on the, you know, the kubernetes container ization and an open ship. So we're ready from a portfolio perspective. And, you know, now we're catching up from a program perspective we're introducing this week and out in the world this concept of a build program and a service program, and so that is their will preserve and continue to evolve the cell program that resell. But you know this concept of the build program and the service programs and only extend the reach that we have to the data and the ecosystem that we're operating in new sets of partners. But is that one of transition, that business from recent consumption? We're going to support that. But then you have to your point around this whole digital everything from digital capabilities around, generating amount of opportunity and a little bit about that earlier with my program and the funding that we've got behind that the experience that we're we're offering as consultants, but also this concept of digital selling. You know, there's not all about partners are savvy around digital selling. So we've been doing that for many, many years. And, uh and so we're opening up digital selling Enablement sessions, Webinars consultancy and a bunch of assets that that IBM has and has invested in for many, many years and opening that up to you want to add channel? >>Yes, There was some great opportunities there for our partners. I mean, we The Cube has been covering the Red Hat Summit we had Jim Whitehurst on. We're in the process of scheduling Arvin so great to see, you know, kind of connect the dots between those franchises and identify the opportunities, and they're significant. I mean, Red Hat has a lot of momentum in the market. IBM has a huge presence, great opportunity to modernize applications, And then your point about the hardware side we just saw on IBM s latest earnings, released at the Fisher running in hardware right now on, uh, you know, obviously tailwind of the Z cycle, but other parts of the portfolio storage from 19%. So so some exciting times for partners, even though there's so much uncertainty in the market again, staying close to customers, you know, doing doing right by your employees, leveraging the IBM relationship where you're obviously providing a lot of backdrop in support. David, I wonder if you could just sort of wrap a bow around. You know, think 2020 is the virtual trucks are pulling away away from the virtual digital Mosconi. What's the take? Aways will give us the bumper sticker. >>Look, the bumper sticker is that it's never been a better time to be an idea. We've got a leading portfolio that is now ready for the new world. Will the consumption and the world building on um, we are, you know, we're modernizing our programs to ensure that you can make money here. There's a lot of money to be made as we as we get into this thing, this new world and we are behind you right now to support you financially and to get you develop digitally enabled guy. So never been a time to be an IBM partner right now. >>David. Great message. Thank you very much for coming on the Cube. And best of luck to you. Stay safe and ah, again, really appreciate your time. >>You too, Dave. Thanks very much. Bye. Site. >>You know, uh, and you're watching the Cube here at IBM? Think 2020. Our digital coverage. We'll be right back right after this short break. I'm Dave Volante, and you're watching the Cube? >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering .conf2018. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back to .conf2018 everybody, this is theCUBE the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, wrapping up day one and we're pleased to have Bina Khimani, who's the global head of Partner Ecosystem for the infrastructure segments at AWS. Bina, it's great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're very welcome. >> Pleasure to be here. >> It's an awesome show, everybody's talking data, we love data. >> Yes. >> You guys, you know, you're the heart of data and transformation. Talk about your role, what does it mean to be the global head Partner Ecosystems infrastructure segments, a lot going on in your title. >> Yes. >> Dave: You're busy. (laughing) >> So, in the infrastructure segment, we cover dev apps, security, networking as well as cloud migration programs, different types of cloud migration programs, and we got segment leaders who really own the strategy and figure out where are the best opportunities for us to work with the partners as well as partner development managers and solution architects who drive adoption of the strategy. That's the team we have for this segment. >> So everybody wants to work with AWS, with maybe one or two exceptions. And so Splunk, obviously, you guys have gotten together and formed an alliance. I think AWS has blessed a lot of the Splunk technology, vice versa. What's the partnership like, how has it evolved? >> So Splunk has been an excellent partner. We are really joined hands together in many fronts. They are fantastic AWS marketplace partner. We have many integrations of Splunk and AWS services, whether it is Kinesis data, Firehose, or Macy, or WAF. So many services Splunk and AWS really are well integrated together. They work together. In addition, we have joined go to market programs. We have field engagement, we have remand generation campaigns. We join hands together to make sure that our customers, joint customers, are really getting the best value out of it. So speaking of partnership, we recently launched migration program for getting Splunk on prem, Splunk Enterprise customers to Splunk Cloud while, you know, they are on their journey to Cloud anyway. >> Yeah, Bina let's dig into that some, we know AWS loves talking about migrations, we dig into all the databases that are going and we talk at this conference, you know Splunk started out very much on premises but we've talked to lots of users that are using the Cloud and it's always that right. How much do they migrate, how much do they start there? Bring us instead, you know, what led to this and what are the workings of it. >> So what, you know if you look at the common problems people have customers have on prem, they are same problems that customers have with Splunk Enterprise on prem, which is, you know, they are looking for resiliency. Their administrator goes on vacation. They want to keep it up and running all the time. They help people making some changes that shouldn't have been made. They want the experts to run their infrastructure. So Splunk Cloud is run by Splunk which is, you know they are the best at running that. Also, you know I just heard a term called lottery proof. So Splunk Cloud is lottery proof, what that means the funny thing is, that you know, your administrator wins lottery, you're not out of business. (laughs) At the same time if you look at the the time to value. I was talking to a customer last night over dinner and they were saying that if they wanted to get on Splunk Enterprise, for their volume of data that they needed to be ingested in Splunk, it would take them six months to just get the hardware in place. With Splunk Cloud they were running in 15 minutes. So, just the time to value is very important. Other things, you know, you don't need to plan for your peak performance. You can stretch it, you can get all the advantages of scalability, flexibility, security, everything you need. As well as running Splunk Cloud you know you are truly cost optimized. Also Splunk Cloud is built for AWS so it's really cost optimized in terms of infrastructure costs, as well as the Splunk licensing cost. >> Yeah it's funny you mentioned the joke, you know you go to Splunk cloud you're not out of a job, I mean what we've heard, the Splunk admins are in such high demand. Kind of running their instances probably isn't, you know a major thing that they'd want to be worrying about. >> Yes, yes, so-- >> Dave: Oh please, go. >> So Splunk administrators are in such a high demand and because of that, you know, not only that customers are struggling with having the right administrators in place, also retaining them. And when they go to Cloud, you know, this is a SAS version, they don't need administrators, nor they need hardware. They can just trust the experts who are really good at doing that. >> So migrations are a tricky thing and I wonder if we can get some examples because it's like moving a house. You don't want to move, or you actually do want to move but it's, you have be planful, it's a bit of a pain, but the benefits, a new life, so. In your world, you got to be better, so the world that you just described of elastic, you don't have to plan for peaks, or performance, the cost, capex, the opex, all that stuff. It's 10 X better, no debate there. But still there's a barrier that you have to go through. So, how does AWS make it easier or maybe you could give us some examples of successful migrations and the business impact that you saw. >> Definitely. So like you said, right, migration is a journey. And it's not always easy one. So I'll talk about different kinds of migration but let me talk about Splunk migration first. So Splunk migration unlike many other migration is actually fairly easy because the Splunk data is transient data, so customers can just point all their data sources to Splunk Cloud instead of Splunk Enterprise and it will start pumping data into Splunk Cloud which is productive from day one. Now if some customers want to retain 60 to 90 days data, then they can run this Splunk Enterprise on prem for 60 more days. And then they can move on to Splunk Cloud. So in this case there was no actual data migration involved. And because this is the log data that people want to see only for 60 to 90 days and then it's not valuable anymore. They don't really need to do large migration in this case it's practically just configure your data sources and you are done. That's the simplest part of the migration which is Splunk migration to Splunk Cloud. Let's talk about different migrations. So... you have heard many customers, you know like Capital One or many other Dow-Jones, they are saying that we are going all in on AWS and they are shutting down their data centers, they are, you know, migrating hundreds of thousands of applications and servers, which is not as simple as Splunk Cloud, right? So, what AWS, you know, AWS does this day in and day out. So we have figured it out again and again and again. In all of our customer interactions and migrations we are acquiring ton of knowledge that we are building toward our migration programs. We want to make sure that our customers are not reinventing the wheel every time. So we have migration programs like migration acceleration program which is for custom large scale migrations for larger customers. We have partner migration programs which is entirely focused on working with SI partners, consulting partners to lead the migrations. As well as we're workload migration program where we are standardizing migrations of standard applications like Splunk or Atlassian, or many of their such standard applications, how we can provide kind of easy button to migrate. Now, when customers are going through this migration journey, you know, it's going to be 10 X better like you said, but initially there is a hump. They are probably needing to run two parallel environments, there is a cost element to that. They are also optimizing their business processes there is some delay there. They are doing some technical work, you know, discovery, prioritization, landing zone creations, security, and networking aspects. There are many elements to this. What we try to do is, if you look at the graph, their cost is right now where this and it's going to go down but before that it goes up and then goes down. So what we try to do is really provide all the resources to take that hump out in terms of technical support, technical enablement, you know, partner support, funding elements, marketing. There are all types of elements as well as lot of technical integrations and quick starts to take that hump out and make it really easy for our customers. >> And that was our experience, we're Amazon customer and we went through a migration about, I don't know five or six years ago. We had, you know, server axe and a cage and we were like, you know, moving wires over and you'd get an alert you'd have to go down and fix things. And so it took us some time to get there, but it is 10 X better now though. >> It is. >> The developers were so excited and I wanted to ask you about, sort of the dev-ops piece of it because that's really, it became, we just completely eliminated all the operational pieces of it and integrated it and let the developers take care of it. Became, truly became infrastructure as code. So the dev-ops culture has permeated our small organization, can't imagine the impact on a larger company. Wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. >> Definitely. So... As customers are going through this cloud migration journey they are looking at their entire landscape of application and they're discovering things that they never did. When they discover they are trying to figure out should I go ahead and migrate everything to AWS right now, or should I a refactor and optimize some of my applications. And there I'm seeing both types of decisions where some customers are taking most of their applications shifting it to cloud and then pausing and thinking now it is phase two where I am on cloud, I want to take advantage of the best of the breed whatever technology is there. And I want to transform my applications and I want to really be more agile. At the same time there are customers who are saying that I'm going to discover all my workload and applications and I'm going to prioritize a small set of applications which we are going to take through transformation right now. And for the rest of it we will lift and shift and then we will transform. But as they go through this transformation they are changing the way they do business. They are changing the way they are utilizing different technology. Their core focus is on how do I really compete with my competition in the industry and for that how can IT provide me that agility that I need to roll out changes in my business day in day out. And for that, you know, Lambda, entire code portfolio, code build, code commit, code deploy, as well as cloud trail, and you know all the things that, all the services we have as well as our partners have, they provide them truly that edge on their industry and market. >> Bina, how has the security discussion changed? When Stu and I were at the AWS public sector summit in June, the CIO of the CIA stood up on stage in front of 10,000 people and said, "The cloud on my worst day from a security perspective "is better than my client server infrastructure "on a best day." That's quite an endorsement from the CIA, who's got some chops in security. How has that discussion changed? Obviously it's still fundamental, critical, it's something that you guys emphasize. But how has the perception and reality changed over the last five years? >> Cloud is, you know, security in cloud is a shared responsibility. So, Amazon is really, really good at providing all the very, very secure infrastructure. At the same time we are also really good at providing customers and business partners all of the tools and hand-holding them so that they can make their application secure. Like you said, you know, AWS, many of the analysts are saying that AWS is far more secure than anything they can have within their own data center. And as you can see that in this journey also customers are not now thinking about is it secure or not. We are seeing the conversation that, how in fact, speaking of Splunk right, one customer that I talked to he was saying that I was asking them why did you choose Splunk cloud on AWS and his take was that, "I wanted near instantaneous SOA compliant "and by moving to Splunk cloud on AWS "I got that right away." Even I'm talking to public sector customers they are saying, you know, I want fair DRAM I want in healthcare industry, I want HIPPA Compliance. Everywhere we are seeing that we are able to keep up with security and compliance requirements much faster than what customers can do on their own. >> So they, so you take care of, certainly from the infrastructure standpoint, those certifications and that piece of the compliance so the customer can worry about maybe some of the things that you don't cover, maybe some of their business processes and other documentation, ITIL stuff that they have to do, whatever. But now they have more time to do that presumably 'cause that's check box, AWS has that covered for me, right? Is that the right thinking? >> Yes, plus we provide them all the tools and support and knowledge and everything so that they, and even partner support who are really good at it so that not only they understand that the application and infrastructure will come together as entire secure environment but also they have everything they need to be able to make applications secure. And Splunk is another great example, right? Splunk helps customer get application level security and AWS is providing them infrastructure and together we are working together to make sure our customers' application and infrastructure together are secure. >> So speaking about migrations database, hot topic at a high level anyway, I wonder if you could talk about database migrations. Andy Jassy obviously talks a lot about, well let's see we saw RDS on Prim at VMworld, big announcement. Certainly Aurora, DynamoDB is one of the databases we use. Redshift obviously. How are database migrations going, what are you doing to make those easier? >> So what we do in a nutshell, right for everything we try to build a programatic reputable, scalable approach. That's what Amazon does. And what we do is that for each of these standard migrations for databases, we try to figure out, that let's take few examples, and let's figure out Play Books, let's figure out runbooks, let's make sure technical integrations are in place. We have quick starts in place. We have consulting partners who are really good at doing this again and again and again. And we have all the knowledge built into tools and services and support so that whenever customers want to do it they don't run into hiccups and they have really pleasant experience. >> Excellent. Well I know you're super busy thanks for making some time to come on theCUBE I always love to have AWS on. So thanks for your time Bina. >> Thank you very nice to meet you both. >> Alright you're very welcome. Alright so that's a wrap for day one here at Splunk .conf 2018, Stu and I will be back tomorrow. Day two more customers, we got senior executives coming on tomorrow, course Doug Merritt, always excited to see Doug. Go to siliconangle.com you'll see all the news theCUBE.net is where all these videos live and wikibon.com for all the research. We're out day one Splunk you're watching theCUBE we'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching. >> Bina: Thank you. (electronic music)

Live from Las Vegas, It's the Cube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its Ecosystem Partners (techno music) >> Welcome back to the Cube. We are live on Day 2 in Las Vegas at the Sands Expo Center. Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we are welcoming to the Cube, for the first time, distinguished engineer and VMAX Product Group CTO, Adnan Sahin. Adnan, it's great to have you on the Cube. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> So, big announcements going on at the event this week. Talk to us about the modern data center. Saw that press release this morning. What does the modern data center, how does Dell Technologies define it? And how are you seeing and helping customers implement it? >> Again, it goes into, like when you have, are running an application you need compute, storage and network so that really had to have a modern infrastructure to cover all those bases. So, that's really during the Keynote we heard today from Jeff Clark on our compute capabilities new servers as well as new storage offering from Dell EMC, the PowerMax >> All right, Adnan, PowerMAx, let's start there. (Adnan) Yes. So one of the flagship announcements here at this show, building on the VMAX which of course builds on the Symmetrix history. Why don't you give us a little overview and then we'll dig into some questions I have? >> So, yeah, we've been really following the industry trends. So, we introduced VMAX All Flash a couple years back. And then we are also looking at the industry trends and what we realized is that the industry is transitioning in terms of media interface, from SAS connected drives into NVMe and PCIE connected drives. And the main driver for that one is two-fold. One, is reducing the latency. And with NVMe you can get much leaner, softer layers that really gives you lower latency. And the other one is the media transition that changes from a NAM based non-withheld memories technology into newer and emerging low latency, ultra low latency technology. So with NVMe we can get both at the same time. >> All right, so Adnan, you know, we remember back when it was EMC at the time. It came with the Flash Technologies. Everybody's doing Flash. Now anybody in the storage industry, NVMe, NVMe over fabric. Everyone's talking about it. PowerMax Bob, up on stage, Bob DeCrescenzo (Adnan) Correct, yes, yes. Spent many, many years working on this said, there's a big difference between just having it and really being able to utilize it. So, without going too deep, explain to us some architectural things that have to happen, from a hardware and software standpoint to take advantage of this transition. >> Sure, so VMAX and PowerMax is really a scale-out, multi-controller architecture therefore, we need to have persistent storage, accessible through multiple controllers, at least two. So, in order to really be highly resilient and highly available to system, we need multi ported, dual ported drives available to us. One of the things that we spend quite a lot of time is to really make sure that dual ported NVMe drives are ready for our highly demanding, enterprise resilient storage system. So we spend a lot of time improving drive quality as well as our software to handle all the NVMe related concerns. >> So, at the event, the theme, Make It Real, yesterday Michael Dell kicked things off and talked about these four transformative elements where customers need to transform to be successful. Digital, IT, security, workforce. With what you just talked about and the new enhancements some of the technologies, how is that helping customers make their digital transformations effective, so that they can deliver different shades of products. I know you just came from a customer meeting. Maybe an give us an example of what you're seeing applied out there. >> The important thing is the applications. The customers have been databases, many different variants. There's been some traditional databases and new and emerging databases. Main driver is, of course, available to resilience but at the same time operational simplicity because we have simplified our user interface and overall use experience significantly over years. So that with fewer people, they can manage many, many larger capacities of the systems. And then with latency is an important aspect of application experience. If you lower the latency, either through caching or lower latency media, you give better experience to end user and therefore they can do more with what they have as infrastructure. >> Adnan, are there any specific use cases or verticals where you're finding that, especially the NVMe offering is going to be most helpful at day one. >> I think, any traditional application that has like journals that will benefit. But on top of that, if you are running large queries of random IO access storage they will get lower latency out of NVMe based systems. They could be real-time analytics, for example. You can get ultra-low latency from the back hand. And also if you are using some of the database, data warehouse type of application you can get massive band width out of VMAX and PowerMax systems that helps you process more in shorter time. >> So analytics as a use case attach the storages, of course, really interesting one, heavily growing. One of the other interesting things about PowerMax, is I think it was discussed, predictive analytics inside. So, I think back to, I mean, disclosure, I worked at EMC for 10 years. We think of intelligent storage was something we've been talking about for a long time. Explain what's different about this generation of analytics and predictive compared to previous storage innovations. >> Sure, sure. So we have the infrastructure to keep track of work loads as they find address granularity. So, we keep track of access types and access sizes in as small as five megabytes a piece. So in a larger system that could be 40 million data sets for a 200 terabyte system. And once we have data we can analyze and we have some linear regression, time series analysis that we can predict whether an active address space will remain active or whether if a cold address space will remain cold. And based on that we can make decisions. Previously, we were able to make, use those decisions for queuing in hard drives and flash drives. More recently, we are using it for data reduction technologies. For compression, for example, duplication. If data set is highly active, we don't necessarily compress them because they will be updated frequently therefore the CPUs used will not be effective. So then taking to the next level the storage class memory becomes available. We will be able to use the media based on the strengths. So if for storage class memory, low latency, we can place read heavy and write heavy work loads into storage class memory. >> So giving customers, presumably, the ability to take data, use it as a catalyst in many different lines of the business to combine it, recombine it and be able to use the analytics that are built in, it sounds like, to not just get insights they can take action on but actually act on them. (Adnan) Correct. >> Give us an example of a customer that's maybe doing that to be able to deliver a differentiated product or service to their customer. >> So part of the important features that they are introducing is available both in PowerMax and VMAX systems is service levels. So that's very relevant to all or most of our customers because, for example, if you are a service provider, customer service provider, even though all the data resides on very fast NAM flash media they can still provide differentiated performance to their own tenants. For example, if the tenant is paying a certain amount they may get silver or bronze service level. They may no see the full benefit of Flash with that service level but when they upsold into a higher performance level or service level. With a simple change in Unisphere, for example, they can get Flash response time right away. So it's basic changes and simplify their business models makes it more predictable for them. Another one is also the prioritization. They can also set priorities for applications as long as high priority service level gets it is response time, expected target response time everybody will get enjoy low response time. But if the high priority group or application does not meet its targets then we start to increase response time of lower priority applications to give more resources for high priority applications. So that's really a way that customers can capitalize with this feature. >> All right, Adnan, I wonder if you can give us a little bit, dig into NVMe, NMVe over fabric and you talked about storage class memory. Specifically looking at availability, maturity and what kind of pricing considerations for these that we can expect kind of today and the next 12 months. >> So, NVMe as the interface drives themselves, this day they may be at a premium compared to SAS but the expectation when we talk to industry leaders and vendors there will be crossover expected very soon. So that really is the positioning that we just want to be in this market. Get the product out. And then really be ready when that crossover happens. In terms of storage class memory, again, it comes at a premium. But then we, using our intelligence, if we can direct most of the eyeOS to this premium source media then we can let customers enjoy benefits of that extra premium that would endure. They would help to pay but over time, just remember, early days of Flash, when the first Flash came out. It was very expensive at the time but over time it became more and more prevalent. So what our expectation is storage type class of memory, over time will follow similar path. And it will become very possible in the near future that we will see all storage class memory systems coming out of vendors. >> All right, how about the NVMe over Fabric? >> NVMe over Fabrics, we are looking, definitely we have plans for NVMe over Fabrics. Of course, standards are still evolving and also for enterprise customers there's concerns around multi pathing, support and not sure of that. We are working with standards bodies and other vendors on improving that aspect. >> Okay, so there's one thing about this transition that's a little different than most. It has an impact on the application. So where is Dell getting involved or how are you working with your customers? You talked about getting ready for that storage class memory. This is not just, we've been skuzzy for a long time. So, how do we get ready as an industry? What's Dell's positioning in that discussion of applications? >> I mean, Dell seems very so close to participating in standards bodies and with the industry thought leaders on really getting to come up with standard based solutions. I think that is one direction that we are going after with this. >> Anything on the application side, though? Or is that more on the pivotal VM? >> Application side of course, we have VM we have very deep discussions with VM and NVM over fabrics and how we can work with them more efficiently. >> So, Adnan, when we kicked off this segment we talked about it being the first Dell Technologies World. Indicator of the absorption of the EMC federation. Over your shoulder is the Dell EMC Partner Program. What are some of the feedback that you're hearing from partners, technology partners who are collaborating. You mentioned VMWare. What's some of the feedback that you're hearing at the event in terms of what you have announced and how do your partners influence design of these leading technologies? >> There's great excitement. We've been working with them, listening to them, learning from them and I think overall, everybody is excited with the new product. And we are also, as a group very excited with and been working for awhile. And we are happy to be able to release the product today. >> Adnan, one of the other product lines that, there were a bunch announced around the xtrem IO and the X2. Can you just help us make sure we understand positioning today of things like VMAX and PowerMax and the xtremIO Family. >> Each product platform has strengths. If customers are happy with what they are using, they should continue with the same product line. It think that really makes it easier for everyone. Xtreme, I believe, announced a remote application, as well. So, it's great. >> From a foundational perspective, what are these technologies going to be able to do to enable enterprises to start taking advantage and realizing the possibilities of emerging technologies machine learning, artificial intelligence, IOT? >> I think, important part is. If you look at all those things, what is really needed is ultra low latency high band width, capabilities from storage. Because you have massive compute capability sometimes customers use in memory applications as well. And we need to be close to compute as close as possible to memory. It's not always possible but we want to get to be there. We have significant value add to be clear. For example, we have local and remote reapplication capable. If you're running any of those applications in a mission critical in mind. You want to make sure that you have local application capability as well as remote application disaster recovery. Business continues models built around. And what we have with our infrastructure to really give customers that type of mission critical. You can not take in chances in this day and age with these applications. >> Adnan, I got to talk to Jeff Clark, earlier today on the Cube and he talked about the engineering culture. From the EMC side, I'm curious if working with your Dell team, you've got that whole server team. Has that changed some of the processes there? How does that impact the development and the viewpoint of the engineering team? >> There's very clear, much better communication. We're been talking to the server team very easily and very frequently actually. Just to make sure that, for example, we understand their challenges and then type of solace that they come up with on the service side and we can apply on our storage. And the same from our side. We give feedback on our experiences on the storage to them. And not only with the server side but also across different portfolio components in our storage in our business units as well. >> So last question: Customers that are here in the early stages of transformation and are looking for best practices, where do we start? Do we start with transforming IT to make it into a profit center. What are your recommendations? >> Can you repeat? I could not hear the last one. IT? >> Yeah, what are your recommendations for customers that might be at the very beginning of their transformation journey. What do you recommend? Where do they start, in terms of going, 'hey we've got our business leaders, recognize IET should become a part of our business strategy. It shouldn't be a cost center. It should be a profit center." How do you recommend they start these conversations with Dell EMC/ Dell Technologies to get... >> They just need to talk to their representative about business need and application needs. We have a large portfolio of products available to our customers. Again, on the high end there's the resilient storage with more capabilities that might be VMAX. On the mid range it could be either unity or storage center. And on the sever side, again, similar types of options available. They just need to talk about their application needs, virtualization needs, storage needs, hyper converge says traditional lock storage versus file storage connectivity. Those make all the difference and I think our field people have experience in really helping customers out. >> Well, Adnan, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing with us what's new with the technologies. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you. Thanks. >> We want to thank you for watching the Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are here live Day 2 of Dell Technologies World from Vegas. Stick around. We'll be right back after a short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: From Barcelona, Spain, it's The Cube covering Cisco live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veem and The Cube's ecosystem partner. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is The Cube live in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, co-host of The Cube with my co-host this week, Stu Miniman, the coupon analyst. Our next guest is Denny Trivette, who's the Vice President of Ecosystem Sales Acceleration Global Partner Organization at Cisco. Denny welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you very much glad to be here. >> So you have a good job. You have to on the business side look at commercializing all this great technology everyone's learning. It's important because there's big numbers, billions of dollars involved in the businesses. Depending on who you talk to, this vendor does a billion dollars with Cisco. This vendor does a billion dollars with supplies at Cisco so a lot of happy customers, but an evolving ecosystem. What's the business outlook from your stand point? Obviously there's change happening, positive change at Cisco. What's going on in the business side? Is it bumpy, is it smooth? Give us the weather report. >> Yeah I think first point though you said I have a good job for Cisco? I have a great for Cisco. I love what we do cause our job is all about how do we leverage the full power of the Cisco partner ecosystem to really build new connections that will drive and accelerate our solutions to all kinds of customers. When you say bumpy areas, absolutely. >> Yeah >> There's always going to be trends and different moves in the market or what have you. For us, what we're able to do is expand the opportunity that Cisco is focused on. We're not just selling products, technologies, and architectures into an IT buying center. Now we're opening up buying centers for our good friends at App D or getting into the line of business and engaging in new conversations that unlock real value. >> You guys have always been a company that has a heritage of enabling technologies. You enable other people to create value and speeds and fees and great tech. The question for you is you mentioned in your title sales acceleration, you can't be in a more pressing time now where words like time to value are faster. Customers want more value up front faster than ever before. So that kind of puts the pressure on the business front. How do you get that done? Is there a certain business model that you guys evolved to? Is it tried and true? Can you explain the business model of how you get to that value faster with partners? >> I think it's a very important point because back in the day we used to celebrate successes, and a success was hey we just launched a new joint integration. That was a success, and we'd celebrate that. In the end nobody monetized that, so in the end that doesn't matter. Now what we're trying to figure out is how do we truly unlock the power of these relationships? There's two transformations we've driven. One is how we engage multiple partners in new sales motions. We've never done that effectively as an industry quite frankly and we've launched things like ACES and it stands for accelerating Cisco ecosystem sales. Which is a fully built framework for better engaging multiple partners so that we can actually do all of the things that we all know we need to do as a business to drive and accelerate success, but we do it highly effectively. There's multiple steps to it. >> John: And multiple stake holders too. >> A lot of stake holders yeah. And by the way a big part of it is make sure you actually have agreement from the executive decision makers from the different partners that we're going to go down these paths in the first point. So very very important. >> Soon you can automate that away, it's like deb ops culture, right? >> Actually no that's so real. We work with this one partner who built out the whole ACES framework. Then they built out ACES two dot oh, sorry ACES at scale. Now they just said hey Denny we're building out ACES at hyper scale where we're going to automate this whole process so that we can drive path the revenue plans with close loop selling etcetera. So it's a game changer for us. >> So this is a real, this is actually happening. >> This is actually happening, and when we engage like this with our partners two things happen we accelerate the whole time to revenue. We actually get the sales teams better aligned. We get executive commitment. We engage customers sooner and then we can sell more effectively. For our customers, they love it because now we're bringing the power of the ecosystem in an organized fashion. They see hey these guys really understand my business issues and they're committed to solving those problems with us. >> And they probably make more money too because when you have that efficiency that drops right to the bottom line. >> Yeah that's important for us and them. And by the way part of the business model transformation that we're driving that's important is I also realized we can no longer live in a siloed world. We use to silo all of our resources. We had big teams on this partner, that partner, this technology, this architecture and what we did is we moved our sales acceleration team into a shared tool model. So now we can dynamically allocate talent to whatever the next big thing is. So a hyper flex, the latest launch, or whatever, great. We can dynamically move the right talent to engage the right partners in the right sales motions. >> That's very elastic, very cool. >> Denny, you know we've been watching Cisco's transformation for years. Obviously, networking is still at the core but security, we go to so many shows. We see Cisco in the container space, lots of open stores. Software acquisitions, how's that transformation of Cisco changing and proliferating the various ecosystem models that you have to build? >> This is one of those things that we struggle with in certain days cause if Cisco moves into a new space where we acquire a new company, not only does the sales motion sometimes change and who we sell to change. It's maybe a new buying center an applications dev ops cloud development, but also the ecosystem changes. So we have to get smart about who we bring in. So for instance back in the day Cisco and a reseller we could go sell to the networking buying center, the data center buying center, but now all of a sudden if we want to have a conversation around dev ops and then bring in the line of business, IT and these other dev ops, Cisco and our resellers we can't really sit at the table and bring as much value there. So there's different vendors, like consultancies out there. Companies like Zentars that can actually come to the table and help build the bridge between IT and the line of business, facilitate and drive that conversation. So to your question, we're engaging new partners like that. They don't resell anything but they're a key influence there to connect the multiple different buying centers. There helping Cisco and our resellers generate opportunities we wouldn't have gotten before. >> To follow up on the channel I remember back when converge infrastructure started. There were Cisco channel partners that built whole data center practices. All new lines of business when they were building it. How do you help build that kind of multiply effect for some of your partners to help really accelerate them, drive new businesses? Think about there are so many new areas that Cisco is tapping into. How do you help move that change? People are resistant to change. They're worried about cloud. They're worried about oh you're taking away some of my existing lines of business. Will I make money? >> Actually when you think about digital transformation there's the cloud, there's analytics, there's security. There's so many technologies that come into play. Our resellers have to think about how do I build a practice that includes all of those different foundations. Working with one of my peers in Rob's organization he's got this person Andre Sintez. We're partnered up with them to build out this new model where we can actually help assess our partners to see where they are against all these critical foundational pieces, and then build the training around it. It's not just training because a reseller has an option. If they're going to move into whatever this dev ops cloud space, whatever it happens to be, they have an option to build, buy, or partner. They can build the capability. Train there people, hire new people, etc. Buy a company that does that already, or partner with one of those consultancies or boutique systems integrator. That's where we're spending our time, is building those new connections. >> I'm wondering if you can comment on service providers too. Obviously it's been a big customer for Cisco before, also there's many times we've said the service provider can be the new channel for both Cisco and the partners. Do you look at that very differently than you do the enterprise? >> Service provider as a channel is a big motion without a doubt because they are in those accounts. They're selling in many cases what our customers want to consume in the consumption model that they want. It is critical that we play with them and that we play with them effectively. What's interesting is sometimes based on the verticals or the industries or the segments it's a different set of solutions. So sometimes it's not the motion that my team does by engaging the right ecosystem partners with them. The motion doesn't change as much, what changes is which customer or segment you're going after. Which partners really make sense and can they be delivered in the consumption model that you're looking at? So we might have to pick the right partners and the right solutions to drive. But once we do, we can still leverage a lot of the same practices. So ACES, sales blitzes, overdrives, vertical value plays, all these cool things that we do today could fit with a service provider or any other client. >> Do you guys just flex those resources and go wherever you need to go? Very elastic kind of like a cloud model. >> Absolutely. >> I got to ask you on the organizational front, do you guys have like a big pow wow with your partners? Is it like an annual summit that you do at Cisco live? How do you get your partners together? Is there like a >> Yes, yes, and yes to all of it >> How do you guys handle the partner relationships? >> Each event is a little bit different. Cisco live and here at Cisco live Barcelona, the incredible thing about this event is we have all the people in the world of solutions. The sponsors, the hardware vendors, software vendors, those vendors are here. Our resellers are here. Our sales teams are here. So this type of event we actually have a separate track. Here at Cisco live called the partner experience. Wendy Mars kicked it off this morning. In the room we had resellers, software vendors, hardware vendors, a bunch of different partner types in the room. Then we break out into different tracks. I just left the solution partner forum where it was no resellers, it was software vendors and all these folks. We had an intimate conversation with them about how we're going to accelerate our business together with them as ecosystem partners. >> So you do the big tent events during the lives. You do your own little events with them as well probably with your own teams like a sales kick off? >> Yup and then probably the most popular events is when we regionalized it and do things like partner connections. So like show Shark Tank, we can bring in four or five of these ecosystem partners and any one particular vertical or architecture and have them pitch to a roomful >> Can we film it? >> Yeah we should. I would love to. >> That would be great Cube action. >> That would be awesome. >> You're really on the front lines, super innovation. I love this notion of codifying and putting frameworks around the systems cause that essentially makes it more efficient and you can then flex for these unique situations cause not every deploy is different. A partner might have different vertical requirements. So you can't boiler plate this. It's really one of those things where complexity you have to address at the field level. >> You do exactly. To your point if we can have certain frameworks, so say like a sales blitz. Real actionable item. A sales blitz is where we do a lunch and learn, a cold calling blitz, then we have basically day two support where we can follow up on leads that come from it. We built a sales blitz originally with a partner like a live action, that plays with us in SD Win. Then we said hey this works in data protection. Lets leverage it for a calm vault or veeam. Hey this also works in a healthcare application. So as we build out these best practices we build them in a way so that they can be scaled across any architecture or any partner or any solution type. We also build it so it can be high touched where I use resources of my own to manage it, low touched we just coach em on how to do it, or no touch here it is it's in a box you take it and you go build it yourself. All the best practices are there. >> So this must have a real impact on personnel. Have you seen higher attainments and retention with sales people? It sounds motivating. >> What's so funny and this is a fact, I just heard last week, one of my teams came up and they said hey Denny I talked to one of our new hires, they came into Cisco early in career first and they were on one of these flex teams and they've already done three different projects in three different areas. In the past they would've been hired in the hyper flex team or whatever. Now they've done whatever, hyper flex, the network intuitive launch, and then they did something around the Apple launch. How cool is that from an experience... >> So the old waterfall model of group to group to group now they can essentially go wherever the agile needs are. >> Exactly. >> Denny I know it's tough to choose favorites, but what's buzzing in your partner ecosystem? What's the area where they're seeing big opportunity, customers are getting excited about? >> A lot of the stories that tell the best are these customer experience stories. If I think of a partner called Local Measure for instance, they're a software vendor. They play in retail and other areas. These stories get exciting. Let me tell you real quick. First of all when we partner with these folks we take a customer in approach. We don't go in there and pitch product like, Local Measure by the way works with Marakey and Spark. We don't go into that line of business fire and pitch Marakey and Spark. It probably doesn't come up until later in the conversation. We really start about hey, what's your true business issue, and typically in a retailer they might want to do two things. They might want to accelerate or increase the engagement of the customers so they get better loyalty and repeat buyers. They want people to come back to their amusement park or their retailer or whatever it happens to be, and ultimately the way Local Measure can do that, they can say hey we can change the engagement in the store. For instance if you go into a shoe store and you send out a tweet that says hey the service stinks at this shoe store, they intercept that through Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram and then they can correlate that information with location from a Marakey network and then send it to the store and say hey store associate via Spark message. There's a person, they're in your New York City store. They're standing right in this spot right now. They just sent out this tweet. Here's their profile. Go talk to them, they want help. That engagement is very different than other types of engagements, but when we tell those stories people see the importance of connecting technologies together, cause it's multiple technologies, but also bridging the conversation between the line of business, that retails store person, and IT. You can't do it either or, you got to bring em together and deliver that type of outcome. >> Well, we're always looking for some good stories on The Cube so if you've got any great stories to tell with customers we'd love to see these cases that can really point to the future. >> For things like this, events like this we collected 23 different win stories here and Europe from a small set of ecosystems and partners. So we can bring some of these guys on and have them tell their stories directly to you. >> We love those tech athletes. They're out making it happen every day. Denny great to see you and (unintelligible) the Cube and taking the time. I know you have big partner kick off meetings over there. >> Yes >> We appreciate your time coming on The Cube. >> Yeah thank you. >> Live coverage here with The Cube in Barcelona Spain. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, more coverage after this short break. Day one of two days of wall to wall coverage. You're watching The Cube, we'll be right back. (lively music)