>>long from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering a ws re invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and in along with its ecosystem partners. >>Hey, welcome back to the cubes. Coverage of AWS 19 from Las Vegas. This is Day two of our coverage of three days. Two sets, lots of cute content. Lisa Martin here with Justin Warren, founder and chief analyst. A pivot nine. Justin and I are joined by a couple of guests New to the Cube. We've got David Meister next to meet Global head of sales for Io Tahoe. Welcome. Eddie Edwards with a cool name. Global Data Service is director from Direct Energy. Welcome, Eddie. Thank you. Okay, So, David, I know we had somebody from Io Tahoe on yesterday, but I'd love for you to give her audience an overview of Io Tahoe, and then you gotta tell us what the name means. >>Okay. Well, day pie stir. Io Tahoe thinks it's wonderful event here in AWS and excited to be here. Uh, I, oh, Tahoe were located in downtown on Wall Street, New York on and I Oh, Tahoe. Well, there's a lot of different meanings, but mainly Tahoe for Data Lake Input output into the lake is how it was originally meant So But ah, little background on Io Tahoe way are 2014. We came out way started in stealth came out of stealth in 2017 with two signature clients. When you're going to hear from in a moment direct energy, the other one g e and we'll speak to those in just a moment I owe Tahoe takes a unique approach way have nine machine learning machine learning algorithms 14 future sets that interrogates the data. At the data level, we go past metadata, so solving that really difficult data challenge and I'm gonna let Eddie describe some of the use cases that were around data migration, P II discovery, and so over to you >>a little bit about direct energy. What, you where you're located, What you guys do and how data is absolutely critical to your business. Yeah, >>sure. So direct energy. Well, it's the largest residential energy supplier in the er us around 5000 employees. Loss of this is coming from acquisitions. So as you can imagine, we have a vast amount of data that we need some money. Currently, I've got just under 1700 applications in my portfolio. Onda a lot. The challenges We guys are around the cost, driving down costs to serve so we can pass that back onto our consumers on the challenge that with hard is how best to gain that understanding. Where I alter whole came into play, it was vainly around off ability to use the products quickly for being able to connect to our existing sources to discover the data. What, then, that Thio catalog that information to start applying the rules around whether it be legislation like GDP, are or that way gets a lot of cases where these difference between the states on the standings and definitions so the product gives us the ability to bring a common approach So that information a good success story, would be about three months ago, we took the 30 and applications for our North America home business. We were able to running through the product within a week on that gave us the information to them, consolidate the estate downwards, working with bar business colleagues Thio, identify all the data we don't see the archival retention reels on, bring you no more meaning to the data on actually improve ourselves opportunities by highlights in that rich information that was not known >>previously. Yes, you mentioned that you growing through acquisition. One thing that people tend to underestimate around I t. Is that it's not a heterogeneous. It's not a homogeneous environments hatred genius. Like as soon as you buy another company, you've got another. You got another silent. You got another day to say. You got something else. So walk us through how iota who actually deals with that very disparity set of data that you've night out inherited from just acquiring all of these different companies? >>Yeah, so exactly right. You know, every time we a private organization, they would have various different applications that were running in the estate. Where would be an old article? I say, Hey, sequel tap environment. What we're able to do is use the products to plug in a name profile to understand what's inside knowledge they have around their customer base and how we can number in. That's in to build up a single view and offer additional products value adding products or rewards for customers, whether that be, uh on our hay truck side our heat in a ventilation and air con unit, which again we have 4600 engineers in that space. So it's opening up new opportunities and territories to us. >>Go ahead, >>say additionally to that, we're across multiple sectors, but the problem death by Excel was in the financial service is we're located on Wall Street. As I mentioned on this problem of legacy to spirit, data, sources and understanding, and knowing your data was a common problem, banks were just throwing people at the problem. So his use case with 1700 applications, a lot of them legacy is fits right into what we d'oh and cataloging is he mentioned. We catalogue with that discover in search engine that we have. We enable search cross enterprise. But Discovery we auto tag and auto classify the sensitive data into the catalog automatically, and that's a key part of what we do. And it >>was that Dave is something in thinking of differentiation, wanting to know what is unique about Iota. What was the opportunity that you guys saw? But is the cataloging and the sensitive information one of the key things that makes it a difference >>Way enabled data governance. So it's not just sensitive information way catalog, entire data set multiple data sets. And what makes us what differentiates us is that the machine learning way Interrogate in brute force The data So every single so metadata beyond so 1,000,000,000 rose. 100,000 columns. Large, complex data sets way. Interrogate every field value. And we tell you what this looks like A phone number. This looks like an address. This looks like a first name. This looks like the last name and we tagged at to the catalog. And then anything that sensitive in nature will color coded red green, highly sensitive, sensitive. So that's our big differentiator. >>So is that like 100% visibility into the granularity of what is in this data? >>Yes, that's that's one of the issues is who were here ahead of us. We're finding a lot of folks are wanting to go to the cloud, but they can't get access to the data. They don't know their data. They don't understand it. On DSO where that bridge were a key strategic partner for aws Andi we're excited about the opportunity that's come about in the last six months with AWS because we're gonna be that key geese for migration to the cloud >>so that the data like I love the name iota, How But in your opinion, you know, you could hear so many different things about Data Lake Data's turning into data Swamp is there's still a lot of value and data lakes that customers just like you're saying before, you just don't know what they have. >>Well, what's interesting in this transition to one of other clients? But on I just want to make a note that way actually started in the relational world. So we're already a mess. We're across header genius environment so but Tahoe does have more to do with Lake. But at a time a few years back, everybody was just dumping data into the lake. They didn't understand what what was in there, and it's created in this era of privacy, a big issue, and Comcast had this problem. The large Terry Tate instance just dumping into the lake, not understanding data flows, how they're data's flowing, not understanding what's in the lake, sensitivity wise, and they want to start, you know they want enable b I. They want they want to start doing analytics, but you gotta understand and know the data, right? So for Comcast, we enable data ops for them automatically with our machine learning. So that was one of the use cases. And then they put the information and we integrated with Apache Atlas, and they have a large JW aws instance, and they're able to then better govern their data on S O N G. Digital. One other customer very complex use case around their data. 36 e. R. P s being migrated toe one virtually r p in the lake. And think about finance data How difficult that is to manage and understand. So we were a key piece in helping that migration happen in weeks rather than months. >>David, you mentioned cloud. Clearly weird. We're at a cloud show, but you mentioned knowing your data. One of the aspect of that cloud is that it moves fast, and it's a much bigger scale than what we've been used to. So I'm interested. Maybe, Eddie, you can. You can fill us in here as well about the use of a tool to help you know your data when we're not creating any less stated. There's just more and more data. So at this speed and this scale, how important is it that you actually have tooling to provide to the to the humans who have to go on that operate on all of this data >>building on what David was saying around the speed in the agility side, you know, now all our information I would know for North America home business is in AWS Hold on ns free bucket. We are already starting work with AWS connect on the call center side. Being able to stream that information through so we're getting to the point now is an organization where we're able to profile the data riel. Time on. Take that information Bolts predict what the customers going going to do is part that machine learning side. So we're starting to trial where we will interject into a call to say, Well, you know, a customer might be on your digital site trying to do a journey. You can see the challenges around data, and you could Then they go in with a chop using, say, the new AWS trap that's just coming through at the moment. So >>one of the things that opportunities I'm here. Sorry, Eddie is the opportunity to leverage the insights into the data to deliver more. You mentioned like customer words, are more personalized experience or a call center agent. Knowing this is the problem of this customer is experiencing this way. Have tried X, y and Z to resolve, or this customer is loyal to pay their bills on time. They should be eligible for some sort of reward program. I think consumers that I think amazon dot com has created us this demanding consumer that way expect you to know us. I expect you to serve us up things that you think we want. Talk to me about the opportunity that I owe Ty was is giving your business to be able to delight customers in ways that you probably couldn't even have predicted? >>Well, they touched on the tagging earlier, you know, survive on the stunned in the data that's coming through. Being able to use the data flow technology on dhe categorizing were able than telling kidding with wider estate. So David mentioned Comcast around 36 e. R. P. You know, we've just gone through the same in other parts of our organization. We're driving the additional level of value, turning away from being a manually labor intensive task. So I used to have 20 architects that daily goal through trying to build an understanding the relationship. I do not need that now. I just have a couple of people that are able to take the outputs and then be able to validate the information using the products. >>And I like that. There's just so much you mentioned customer 360. Example at a call centre. There's so much data ops that has to happen to make that happen on. That's the most difficult challenge to solve. And that's where we come in. And after you catalogue the data, I just want to touch on this. We enable search for the enterprise so you're now connected to 50 115 100 sources with our software. Now you've catalogued it. You profiled it. Now you can search Karen Kim Kim Smith, So your your your engineers, your architect, your data stewards influences your business analysts. This is folks can now search anything they want and find anything sensitive. Find that person find an invoice, and that helps enable. But you mentioned the customer >>360. But I can Also. What I'm hearing is, as it has the potential to enable a better relationship between I t in the business. >>Absolutely. It brings those both together because they're so siloed. In this day and age, your data siloed and your business is siloed in a different business unit. So this helps exactly collaborate crowdsource, bring it all together. One platform >>and how many you so 1700 applications. How many you mentioned the 36 or so air peace. What percentage? If you can guess who have you been able to reduce duplicate triplicate at center applications? And what are some of the overarching business benefits that direct energy is achieving? >>So incentive the direct senator, decide that we're just at the beginning about journey. We're about four months in what? We've already decommissioned 12. The applications I was starting to move out to the wider side in terms of benefits are oh, I probably around 300% of the moment >>in a 300% r A y in just a few months. >>Just now, you know you've got some of the basic savings around the story side. We're also getting large savings from some of the existing that support agreements that we have in place. David touched on data Rob's. I've been able to reduce the amount of people that are required to support the team. There is now a more common on the standing within the organization and have money to turn it more into a self care opportunity with the business operations by pushing the line from being a technical problem to a business challenge. And at the end of the day, they're the experts. They understand the data better than any IittIe fault that sat in a corner, right? So I'm >>gonna ask you one more question. What gave you the confidence that I Oh, Tahoe was the right solution for you >>purely down Thio three Open Soul site. So we come from a you know I've been using. I'll tell whole probably for about two years in parts of the organization. We were very early. Adopters are over technologies in the open source market, and it was just the ability thio on the proof of concept to be able to turn it around iTunes, where you'll go to a traditional vendor, which would take a few months large business cases. They need any of that. We were able to show results within 24 48 hours on now buys the confidence. And I'm sure David would take the challenge of being able to plug in some day. It says on to show you the day. >>Cool stuff, guys. Well, thank you for sharing with us what you guys are doing. And I have a Iot Tahoe keeping up data Lake Blue and the successes that you're cheating in such a short time, but direct energy. I appreciate your time, guys. Thank you. Excellent. Our pleasure. >>No, you'll day. >>Exactly know your data. My guests and my co host, Justin Warren. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm gonna go often. Learn my data. Now you've been watching the Cube and AWS reinvent 19. Thanks for watching

(upbeat music) >> We're back at VeeamON 2022. We're here at the Aria in Las Vegas Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Bill Andrews is here. He's the president and CEO of ExaGrid, mass boy. Bill, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I hear a lot about obviously data protection, cyber resiliency, what's the big picture trends that you're seeing when you talk to customers? >> Well, I think clearly we were talking just a few minutes ago, data's growing like crazy, right This morning, I think they said it was 28% growth a year, right? So data's doubling almost just a little less than every three years. And then you get the attacks on the data which was the keynote speech this morning as well, right. All about the ransomware attacks. So we've got more and more data, and that data is more and more under attack. So I think those are the two big themes. >> So ExaGrid as a company been around for a long time. You've kind of been the steady kind of Eddy, if you will. Tell us about ExaGrid, maybe share with us some of the differentiators that you share with customers. >> Sure, so specifically, let's say in the Veeam world you're backing up your data, and you really only have two choices. You can back that up to disc. So some primary storage disc from a Dell, or a Hewlett Packard, or an NetApp or somebody, or you're going to back it up to what's called an inline deduplication appliance maybe a Dell Data Domain or an HPE StoreOnce, right? So what ExaGrid does is we've taken the best of both those but not the challenges of both those and put 'em together. So with disc, you're going to get fast backups and fast restores, but because in backup you keep weekly's, monthly's, yearly retention, the cost of this becomes exorbitant. If you go to a deduplication appliance, and let's say the Dell or the HPs, the data comes in, has to be deduplicated, compare one backup to the next to reduce that storage, which lowers the cost. So fixes that problem, but the fact that they do it inline slows the backups down dramatically. All the data is deduplicated so the restores are slow, and then the backup window keeps growing as the data grows 'cause they're all scale up technologies. >> And the restores are slow 'cause you got to rehydrate. >> You got to rehydrate every time. So what we did is we said, you got to have both. So our appliances have a front end disc cache landing zone. So you're right directed to the disc., Nothing else happens to it, whatever speed the backup app could write at that's the speed we take it in at. And then we keep the most recent backups in that landing zone ready to go. So you want to boot a VM, it's not an hour like a deduplication appliance it's a minute or two. Secondly, we then deduplicate the data into a second tier which is a repository tier, but we have all the deduplicated data for the long term retention, which gets the cost down. And on top of that, we're scale out. Every appliance has networking processor memory end disc. So if you double, triple, quadruple the data you double, triple, quadruple everything. And if the backup window is six hours at 100 terabyte it's six hours at 200 terabyte, 500 terabyte, a petabyte it doesn't matter. >> 'Cause you scale out. >> Right, and then lastly, our repository tier is non-network facing. We're the only ones in the industry with this. So that under a ransomware attack, if you get hold of a rogue server or you hack the media server, get to the backup storage whether it's disc or deduplication appliance, you can wipe out all the backup data. So you have nothing to recover from. In our case, you wipe it out, our landing zone will be wiped out. We're no different than anything else that's network facing. However, the only thing that talks to our repository tier is our object code. And we've set up security policies as to how long before you want us to delete data, let's say 10 days. So if you have an attack on Monday that data doesn't get deleted till like a week from Thursday, let's say. So you can freeze the system at any time and do restores. And then we have immutable data objects and all the other stuff. But the culmination of a non-network facing tier and the fact that we do the delayed deletes makes us the only one in the industry that can actually truly recover. And that's accelerating our growth, of course. >> Wow, great description. So that disc cache layer is a memory, it's a flash? >> It's disc, it's spinning disc. >> Spinning disc, okay. >> Yeah, no different than any other disc. >> And then the tiered is what, less expensive spinning disc? >> No, it's still the same. It's all SaaS disc 'cause you want the quality, right? So it's all SaaS, and so we use Western Digital or Seagate drives just like everybody else. The difference is that we're not doing any deduplication coming in or out of that landing zone to have fast backups and fast restores. So think of it like this, you've got disc and you say, boy it's too expensive. What I really want to do then is put maybe a deduplication appliance behind it to lower the cost or reverse it. I've got a deduplication appliance, ugh, it's too slow for backups and restores. I really want to throw this in front of it to have fast backups first. Basically, that's what we did. >> So where does the cost savings, Bill come in though, on the tier? >> The cost savings comes in the fact that we got deduplication in that repository. So only the most recent backup >> Ah okay, so I get it. >> are the duplicated data. But let's say you had 40 copies of retention. You know, 10 weekly's, 36 monthly's, a few yearly. All of that's deduplicated >> Okay, so you're deduping the stuff that's not as current. >> Right. >> Okay. >> And only a handful of us deduplicate at the layer we do. In other words, deduplication could be anywhere from two to one, up to 50 to one. I mean it's all over the place depending on the algorithm. Now it's what everybody's algorithms do. Some backup apps do two to one, some do five to one, we do 20 to one as well as much as 50 to one depending on the data types. >> Yeah, so the workload is going to largely determine the combination >> The content type, right. with the algos, right? >> Yeah, the content type. >> So the part of the environment that's behind the illogical air gap, if you will, is deduped data. >> Yes. >> So in this case, is it fair to say that you're trading a positive economic value for a little bit longer restore from that environment? >> No, because if you think about backup 95% of the customers restores are from the most recent data. >> From the disc cache. >> 95% of the time 'cause you think about why do you need fast restores? Somebody deleted a file, somebody overwrote a file. They can't go work, they can't open a file. It's encrypted, it's corrupted. That's what IT people are trying to keep users productive. When do you go for longer-term retention data? It's an SEC audit. It's a HIPAA audit. It's a legal discovery, you don't need that data right away. You have days and weeks to get that ready for that legal discovery or that audit. So we found that boundary where you keep users productive by keeping the most recent data in the disc cache landing zone, but anything that's long term. And by the way, everyone else is long term, at that point. >> Yeah, so the economics are comparable to the dedupe upfront. Are they better, obviously get the performance advance? >> So we would be a lot looped. The thing we replaced the most believe it or not is disc, we're a lot less expensive than the disc. I was meeting with some Veeam folks this morning and we were up against Cisco 3260 disc at a children's hospital. And on our quote was $500,000. The disc was 1.4 million. Just to give you an example of the savings. On a Data Domain we're typically about half the price of a Data Domain. >> Really now? >> The reason why is their front end control are so expensive. They need the fastest trip on the planet 'cause they're trying to do inline deduplication. >> Yeah, so they're chasing >> They need the fastest memory >> on the planet. >> this chips all the time. They need SSD on data to move in and out of the hash table. In order to keep up with inline, they've got to throw so much compute at it that it drives their cost up. >> But now in the case of ransomware attack, are you saying that the landing zone is still available for recovery in some circumstances? Or are you expecting that that disc landing zone would be encrypted by the attacker? >> Those are two different things. One is deletion, one is encryption. So let's do the first scenario. >> I'm talking about malicious encryption. >> Yeah, absolutely. So the first scenario is the threat actor encrypts all your primary data. What's does he go for next? The backup data. 'Cause he knows that's your belt and suspend is to not pay the ransom. If it's disc he's going to go in and put delete commands at the disc, wipe out the disc. If it's a data domain or HPE StoreOnce, it's all going to be gone 'cause it's one tier. He's going to go after our landing zone, it's going to be gone too. It's going to wipe out our landing zone. Except behind that we have the most recent backup deduplicate in the repository as well as all the other backups. So what'll happen is they'll freeze the system 'cause we weren't going to delete anything in the repository for X days 'cause you set up a policy, and then you restore the most recent backup into the landing zone or we can restore it directly to your primary storage area, right? >> Because that tier is not network facing. >> That's right. >> It's fenced off essentially. >> People call us every day of the week saying, you saved me, you saved me again. People are coming up to me here, you saved me, you saved me. >> Tell us a story about that, I mean don't give me the names but how so. >> I'll actually do a funnier story, 'cause these are the ones that our vendors like to tell. 'Cause I'm self-serving as the CEO that's good of course, a little humor. >> It's your 15 minutes of job. >> That is my 15 minutes of fame. So we had one international company who had one ExaGrid at one location, 19 Data Domains at the other locations. Ransomware attack guess what? 19 Data Domains wiped out. The one ExaGrid, the only place they could restore. So now all 20 locations of course are ExaGrids, China, Russia, Mexico, Germany, US, et cetera. They rolled us out worldwide. So it's very common for that to occur. And think about why that is, everyone who's network facing you can get to the storage. You can say all the media servers are buttoned up, but I can find a rogue server and snake my way over the storage, I can. Now, we also of course support the Veeam Data Mover. So let's talk about that since we're at a Veeam conference. We were the first company to ever integrate the Veeam Data Mover. So we were the first actually ever integration with Veeam. And so that Veeam Data Mover is a protocol that goes from Veeam to the ExaGrid, and we run it on both ends. So that's a more secure protocol 'cause it's not an open format protocol like SaaS. So with running the Veeam Data Mover we get about 30% more performance, but you do have a more secure protocol layer. So if you don't get through Veeam but you get through the protocol, boom, we've got a stronger protocol. If you make it through that somehow, or you get to it from a rogue server somewhere else we still have the repository. So we have all these layers so that you can't get at it. >> So you guys have been at this for a while, I mean decade and a half plus. And you've raised a fair amount of money but in today's terms, not really. So you've just had really strong growth, sequential growth. I understand it, and double digit growth year on year. >> Yeah, about 25% a year right now >> 25%, what's your global strategy? >> So we have sales offices in about 30 countries already. So we have three sales teams in Brazil, and three in Germany, and three in the UK, and two in France, and a lot of individual countries, Chile, Argentina, Columbia, Mexico, South Africa, Saudi, Czech Republic, Poland, Dubai, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, et cetera. We've just added two sales territories in Japan. We're adding two in India. And we're installed in over 50 countries. So we've been international all along the way. The goal of the company is we're growing nicely. We have not raised money in almost 10 years. >> So you're self-funding. You're cash positive. >> We are cash positive and self-funded and people say, how have you done that for 10 years? >> You know what's interesting is I remember, Dave Scott, Dave Scott was the CEO of 3PAR, and he told me when he came into that job, he told the VCs, they wanted to give him 30 million. He said, I need 80 million. I think he might have raised closer to a hundred which is right around what you guys have raised. But like you said, you haven't raised it in a long time. And in today's terms, that's nothing, right? >> 100 is 500 in today's terms. >> Yeah, right, exactly. And so the thing that really hurt 3PAR, they were public companies so you could see all this stuff is they couldn't expand internationally. It was just too damn expensive to set up the channels, and somehow you guys have figured that out. >> 40% of our business comes out of international. We're growing faster internationally than we are domestically. >> What was the formula there, Bill, was that just slow and steady or? >> It's a great question. >> No, so what we did, we said let's build ExaGrid like a McDonald's franchise, nobody's ever done that before in high tech. So what does that mean? That means you have to have the same product worldwide. You have to have the same spares model worldwide. You have to have the same support model worldwide. So we early on built the installation. So we do 100% of our installs remotely. 100% of our support remotely, yet we're in large enterprises. Customers racks and stacks the appliances we get on with them. We do the entire install on 30 minutes to about three hours. And we've been developing that into the product since day one. So we can remotely install anywhere in the world. We keep spares depots all over the world. We can bring 'em up really quick. Our support model is we have in theater support people. So they're in Europe, they're in APAC, they're in the US, et cetera. And we assign customers to the support people. So they deal with the same support person all the time. So everything is scalable. So right now we're going to open up India. It's the same way we've opened up every other country. Once you've got the McDonald's formula we just stamp it all over the world. >> That's amazing. >> Same pricing, same product same model, same everything. >> So what was the inspiration for that? I mean, you've done this since day one, which is what like 15, 16 years ago. Or just you do engineering or? >> No, so our whole thought was, first of all you can't survive anymore in this world without being an international company. 'Cause if you're going to go after large companies they have offices all over the world. We have companies now that have 17, 18, 20, 30 locations. And there were in every country in the world, you can't go into this business without being able to ship anywhere in the world and support it for a single customer. You're not going into Singapore because of that. You're going to Singapore because some company in Germany has offices in the U.S, Mexico Singapore and Australia. You have to be international. It's a must now. So that was the initial thing is that, our goal is to become a billion dollar company. And we're on path to do that, right. >> You can see a billion. >> Well, I can absolutely see a billion. And we're bigger than everybody thinks. Everybody guesses our revenue always guesses low. So we're bigger than you think. The reason why we don't talk about it is we don't need to. >> That's the headline for our writers, ExaGrid is a billion dollar company and nobody's know about it. >> Million dollar company. >> On its way to a billion. >> That's right. >> You're not disclosing. (Bill laughing) But that's awesome. I mean, that's a great story. I mean, you kind of are a well kept secret, aren't you? >> Well, I dunno if it's a well kept secret. You know, smaller companies never have their awareness of big companies, right? The Dells of the world are a hundred billion. IBM is 70 billion, Cisco is 60 billion. Easy to have awareness, right? If you're under a billion, I got to give a funny story then I think we got to close out here. >> Oh go ahead please. >> So there's one funny story. So I was talking to the CIO of a super large Fortune 500 company. And I said to him, "Just so who do you use?" "I use IBM Db2, and I use, Cisco routers, and I use EMC primary storage, et cetera. And I use all these big." And I said, "Would you ever switch from Db2?" "Oh no, the switching costs would kill me. I could never go to Oracle." So I said to him, "Look would you ever use like a Pure Storage, right. A couple billion dollar company." He says, "Who?" >> Huh, interesting. >> I said to him, all right so skip that. I said, "VMware, would you ever think about going with Nutanix?" "Who?" Those are billion dollar plus companies. And he was saying who? >> Public companies. >> And he was saying who? That's not uncommon when I talk to CIOs. They see the big 30 and that's it. >> Oh, that's interesting. What about your partnership with Veeam? Tell us more about that. >> Yeah, so I would actually, and I'm going to be bold when I say this 'cause I think you can ask anybody here at the conference. We're probably closer first of all, to the Veeam sales force than any company there is. You talk to any Veeam sales rep, they work closer with ExaGrid than any other. Yeah, we are very tight in the field and have been for a long time. We're integrated with the Veeam Data Boomer. We're integrated with SOBR. We're integrated with all the integrations or with the product as well. We have a lot of joint customers. We actually do a lot of selling together, where we go in as Veeam ExaGrid 'cause it's a great end to end story. Especially when we're replacing, let's say a Dell Avamar to Dell Data Domain or a Dell Network with a Dell Data Domain, very commonly Veeam ExaGrid go in together on those types of sales. So we do a lot of co-selling together. We constantly train their systems engineers around the world, every given week we're training either inside sales teams, and we've trained their customer support teams in Columbus and Prague. So we're very tight with 'em we've been tight for over a decade. >> Is your head count public? Can you share that with us? >> So we're just over 300 employees. >> Really, wow. >> We have 70 open positions, so. >> Yeah, what are you looking for? Yeah, everything, right? >> We are looking for engineers. We are looking for customer support people. We're looking for marketing people. We're looking for inside sales people, field people. And we've been hiring, as of late, major account reps that just focus on the Fortune 500. So we've separated that out now. >> When you hire engineers, I mean I think I saw you were long time ago, DG, right? Is that true? >> Yeah, way back in the '80s. >> But systems guy. >> That's how old I am. >> Right, systems guy. I mean, I remember them well Eddie Castro and company. >> Tom West. >> EMV series. >> Tom West was the hero of course. >> The EMV 4000, the EMV 20,000, right? >> When were kids, "The Soul of a New Machine" was the inspirational book but anyway, >> Yeah Tracy Kidder, it was great. >> Are you looking for systems people, what kind of talent are you looking for in engineering? >> So it's a lot of Linux programming type stuff in the product 'cause we run on a Linux space. So it's a lot of Linux programs so its people in those storage. >> Yeah, cool, Bill, hey, thanks for coming on to theCUBE. Well learned a lot, great story. >> It's a pleasure. >> That was fun. >> Congratulations. >> Thanks. >> And good luck. >> All right, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2022, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back right after this short break, stay with us. (soft beat music)

>>Good morning. Welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. We have two live sets here. We've got over a hundred guests on the program this week with our live sets of remote sets, talking about the next decade in cloud innovation. And I'm pleased to be welcoming back. One of our cube alumni timbers. She ran the founder and CPO of Jenny-O to the program. Tom is going to be talking about why 2022 is the year open data architectures surpass the data warehouse Timur. Welcome back to the >>Cube. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. It's >>Great to be here at a live event in person, my goodness, sitting side by side with guests. Talk to me a little bit about before we kind of dig into the data lake house versus the data warehouse. I want to, I want to unpack that with you. Talk to me about what what's going on at Jemena you guys were on the program earlier this summer, but what are some of the things going on right now in the fall of 2021? >>Yeah, for us, it's a big year of, uh, a lot of product news, a lot of new products, new innovation, a company's grown a lot. We're, uh, you know, probably three times bigger than we were a year ago. So a lot of, a lot of new, new folks on the team and, uh, many, many new customers. >>It's good, always new customers, especially during the last 22 months, which have been obviously incredibly challenging, but I want to unpack this, the difference between a data lake and data lake house, but I love the idea of a lake house by the way, but talk to me about what the differences are similarities and how customers are benefiting. Sure. Yeah. >>I think you could think of the lake house as kind of the evolution of the lake, right? So we have, we've had data lakes for a while. Now, the transition to the cloud made them a lot more powerful and now a lot of new capabilities coming into the world of data lakes really make the, that whole kind of concept that whole architecture, much more powerful to the point that you really are not going to need a data warehouse anymore. Right. And so it kind of gives you the best of both worlds, all the advantages that we had with data lakes, the flexibility to use different processing engines, to have data in your own account and open formats, um, all those benefits, but also the benefits that you had with warehouses, where you could do transactions and get high performance for your, uh, BI workloads and things like that. So the lake house makes kind of both of those come together and gives you the, the benefits of both >>Elizabeth talk to me about from a customer lens perspective, what are some of the key benefits and how does the customer go about from say they've got data warehouses, data lakes to actually evolving to the lake house. >>You know, data warehouses have been around forever, right? And you know, there's, there's been some new innovation there as we've kind of moved to the cloud, but fundamentally there are very close and very proprietary architecture that gets very expensive quickly. And so, you know, with a data warehouse, you have to take your data and load it into the warehouse, right. You know, whether that's a, you know, Terra data or snowflake or any, any other, uh, you know, database out there, that's, that's what you do. You bring the data into the engine. Um, the data lake house is a really different architecture. It's one where you actually, you're having, you have data as its own tier, right? Stored in open formats, things like parquet files and iceberg tables. And you're basically bringing the engines to the data instead of the data to the engine. And so now all of a sudden you can start to take advantage of all this innovation that's happening on the same set of data without having to copy and move it around. So whether that's, you know, Dremio for high performance, uh, BI workloads and SQL type of analysis, a spark for kind of batch processing and machine learning, Flink for streaming. So lots of different technologies that you can use on the, on the same data and the data stays in the customer's own account, right? So S3 effectively becomes their new data warehouse. >>Okay. So it can imagine during the last 22 months of this scattered work from Eddie, and we're still in this work from anywhere environment with so much data being generated at the edge of the edge, expanding that bringing the engines to the data is probably now more timely than ever. >>Yeah. I think the, the growth in data, uh, you see it everywhere, right? That that's the reason so many companies like ourselves are doing so well. Right? It's, it's, there's so much new data, so many new use cases and every company wants to be data-driven right. They all want to be, you know, to, to democratize data within the organization. Um, you know, but you need the platforms to be able to do that. Right. And so, uh, that's very hard if you have to constantly move data around, if you have to take your data, you know, which maybe is landing in S3, but move it into, you know, subsets of it into a data warehouse. And then from there move, you know, substance of that into, you know, BI extracts, right? Tableau extracts power BI imports, and you have to create cubes and lots of copies within the data warehouse. There's no way you're going to be able to provide self-service and data democratization. And so really requires a new architecture. Um, and that's one of the main things that we've been focused on at Dremio, um, is really taking the, the, the lake house and the lake and making it, not just something that data scientists use for, you know, really kind of advanced use cases, but even your production BI workloads can actually now run on the lake house when you're using a SQL technology. Like, and then >>It's really critical because as you talked about this, you know, companies, every company, these days is a data company. If they're not, they have to be, or there's a competitor in the rear view mirror that is going to be able to take over what they're doing. So this really is really critical, especially considering another thing that we learned in the last 22 months is that there's no real-time data access is no longer, a nice to have. It's really an essential for businesses in any organization. >>I think, you know, we, we see it even in our own company, right? The folks that are joining the workforce now, they, they learn sequel in school, right. They, they, they don't want to report on their desk, printed out every Monday morning. They want access to the database. How do I connect my whatever tool I want, or even type sequel by hand. And I want access to the data and I want to just use it. Right. And I want the performance of course, to be fast because otherwise I'll get frustrated and I won't use it, which has been the status quo for a long time. Um, and that's basically what we're solving >>The lake house versus a data warehouse, better able to really facilitate data democratization across an organization. >>Yeah. Because there's a big, you know, people don't talk a lot about the story before the story, right. With, with a data warehouse, the data never starts there. Right. You typically first have your data in something like an S3 or perhaps in other databases, right. And then you have to kind of ETL at all into, um, into that warehouse. And that's a lot of work. And typically only a small subset of the data gets ETL into that data warehouse. And then the user wants to query something that's not in the warehouse. And somebody has to go from engineering, spend, you know, a month or two months, you know, respond to that ticket and wiring up some new ETL, uh, to get the data in. And so it's a big problem, right? And so if you can have a system that can query the data directly in S3 and even join it with sources, uh, outside of that things like your Oracle database, your, your SQL server database here, you know, Mongo, DB, et cetera. Well, now you can really have the ability to expose data to your, to your users within the company and make it very self-service. They can, they can query any data at any time and get a fast response time that that's, that's what they need >>At self-service is key there. Speaking of self-service and things that are new. I know you guys dromio cloud launched that recently, new SAS offering. Talk to me about that. What's going on there. Yeah. >>We want to stream your cloud. We, we spent about two years, um, working on that internally and, uh, really the goal was to simplify how we deliver all of the, kind of the benefits that we've had in our product. Right. Sub-second response times on the lake, a semantic layer, the ability to connect to multiple sources, but take away the pain of having to, you know, install and manage software. Right. And so we did it in a way that the user doesn't have to think about versions. They don't have to think about upgrades. They don't have to monitor anything. It's basically like running and using Gmail. Right? You log in, you, you get to use it, right. You don't have to be very sophisticated. There's no, not a lot of administration you have to do. Um, it basically makes it a lot, a lot simpler. >>And what's the adoption been like so far? >>It's been great. It's been limited availability, but we've been onboarding customers, uh, every week now. Um, many startups, many of the world's largest companies. So that's been, that's been really exciting actually. >>So quite a range of customers. And one of the things, it sounds like you want me to has grown itself during the pandemic. We've seen acceleration of, of that, of, of, uh, startups, of a lot of companies, of cloud adoption of migration. What are some, how have your customer conversations changed in the last 22 months as businesses and every industry kind of scrambled in the beginning to, to survive and now are realizing that they need to modernize, to thrive and to be competitive and to have competitive advantage. >>I think I've seen a few different trends here. One is certainly, there's been a lot of, uh, acceleration of movement to the cloud, right? With, uh, uh, you know, how different businesses have been impacted. It's required them to be more agile, more elastic, right. They don't necessarily know how much workload they're gonna have at any point in time. So having that flexibility, both in terms of the technology that can, you know, with Dremio cloud, we scale, for example, infinitely, like you can have, you know, one query a day, or you can have a thousand queries a second and the system just takes care of it. Right. And so that's really important to these companies that are going through, you know, being impacted in various different ways, right? You had the companies, you know, the Peloton and zooms of the world that were business was exploding. >>And then of course, you know, the travel and hospitality industries, and that went to zero, all of a sudden it's been recovering nicely, uh, you know, since then, but so that flexibility, um, has been really important to customers. I think the other thing is just they've realized that they have to leverage data, right? Because in parallel to this pandemic has been also really a boom in technology, right? And so every industry is being disrupted by new startups, whether it's the insurance industry, the financial services, a lot of InsureTech, FinTech, you know, different, uh, companies that are trying to take advantage of data. So if you, as a, as an enterprise are not doing that, you know, that's a problem. >>It is a problem. It's definitely something that I think every business and every industry needs to be very acutely aware of because from a competitive advantage perspective, you know, there's someone in that rear view mirror who is going to be focused on data. I have a real solid, modern data strategy. That's going to be able to take over if a company is resting on its laurels at all. So here we are at reinvent, they talked a lot about, um, I just came off of Adam psyllid speeds. So Lipsey's keynote. But talk to me about the jumbo AWS partnership. I know AWS its partner ecosystem is huge. You're one of the partners, but talk to me about what's going on with the partnership. How long have you guys been partners? What are the advantages for your customers? >>You know, we've been very close partners with AWS for, for a number of years now, and it kind of spans many different parts of AWS from kind of the, uh, the engineering organization. So very close relationship with the S3 team, the C2 team, uh, you know, just having dinner last night with, uh, Kevin Miller, the GM of S3. Um, and so that's kind of one side of things is really the engineering integration. You know, we're the first technology to integrate with AWS lake formation, which is Amazon's data lake security technology. So we do a lot of work together on kind of upcoming features that Amazon is releasing. Um, and then also they've been really helpful on the go-to-market side of things on the sales and marketing, um, whether it's, you know, blogs on the Amazon blog, where their sales teams actually promoting Dremio to their customers, um, uh, to help them be successful. So it's really been a good, good partnership. >>And there they are, every time I talked to somebody from Amazon, we always talk about their kind of customer first focus, their customer obsession sounds like you're, there's deep alignment on from the technical engineering perspective, sales and marketing. Talk to me a little bit about cultural alignment, because when you're going into customer conversations, I imagine they want to see one unified team. >>Yeah. You know, I think Amazon does have that customer first and obviously we do as well. And we, you know, we have to right as a, as a startup for us, you know, if a customer has a problem, the whole company will jump on that problem. Right. So that's where we call it customer obsession internally. Um, and I think that's very much what we've seen, you know, with, with AWS as well as the desire to make the customer successful comes before. Okay. How does this affect a specific Amazon product? Right? Because anytime a customer is, uh, you know, using Dremio on AWS, they're also consuming many different AWS services and they're bringing data into AWS. And so, um, I, I think for both of us, it's all about how do we solve customer problems and make them successful with their data in this case. Yup. >>Solving those customer problems is the whole reason that we're all here. Right. Talk to me a little bit about, um, as we have just a few more minutes here, we, when we hear terms like, future-proof, I always want to dig in with, with folks like yourself, chief product officers, what does it actually mean? How do you enable businesses to create these future-proof data architectures that are gonna allow them to scale and be really competitive? Sure. >>So yeah, I think many companies have been, have experienced. What's known as lock-in right. They, they invest in some technology, you know, we've seen this with, you know, databases and data warehouses, right? You, you start using that and you can really never get off and prices go up and you find out that you're spending 10 times more, especially now with the cloud data warehouses 10 times more than you thought you were going to be spending. And at that point it becomes very difficult. Right? What do you do? And so, um, one of the great things about the data lake and the lake house architecture is that the data stays stored in the customer's own account. Right? It's in their S3 buckets in source formats, like parquet files and iceberg tables. Um, and they can use many different technologies on that. So, you know, today the best technology for, for, you know, sequel and, you know, powering your, your mission critical BI is, is Dremio, but tomorrow they might be something else, right. >>And that customer can then take that, uh, uh, that company can take that new technology point at the same data and start using it right. That they don't have to go through some really crazy migration process. And, you know, we see that with Teradata data and Oracle, right? The, the, the old school vendors, um, that's always been a pain. And now it is with the, with the newer, uh, cloud data warehouses, you see a lot of complaints around that, so that the lake house is fundamentally designed. Especially if you choose open source formats, like iceberg tables, as opposed to say a Delta, like you're, you're really, you know, future-proofing yourself. Right. Um, >>Got it. Talk to me about some of the things as we wrap up here that, that attendees can learn and see and touch and feel and smell at the jumbo booth at this reinvent. >>Yeah. I think there's a, there's a few different things they can, uh, they can watch, uh, watch a demo or play around with the dremmel cloud and they can talk to our team about what we're doing with Apache iceberg. It's a iceberg to me is one of the more exciting projects, uh, in this space because, you know, it's just created by Netflix and apple Salesforce, AWS just announced support for iceberg with that, with their products, Athena and EMR. So it's really kind of emerging as the standard table format, the way to represent data in open formats in S3. We've been behind iceberg now for, for a while. And so that to us is very exciting. We're happy to chat with folks at the booth about that. Um, Nessie is another project that we created an source project for, uh, really providing a good experience for your data, where you have version control and branching, and kind of trying to reinvent, uh, data engineering, data management. So that's another cool project that there, uh, we can talk about at the booth. >>So lots of opportunity there for attendees to learn even thank you, Tomer for joining me on the program today, talking about the difference between a data warehouse data lake, the lake house, did a great job explaining that Jamil cloud what's going on and how you guys are deepening that partnership with AWS. We appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks for having me. My pleasure for Tomer. She ran I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube. Our coverage of AWS reinvent continues after this.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Techniques to protect sensitive data have evolved over thousands of years literally. The pace of modern data protection is rapidly accelerating and presents both opportunities and threats for organizations. In particular, the amount of data stored in the cloud combined with hybrid work models, the clear and present threat of cyber crime, regulatory edicts and the ever expanding edge and associated use cases should put CXOs on notice that the time is now to rethink your data protection strategies. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we're going to explore the evolving world of data protection and share some information on how we see the market changing in the competitive landscape for some of the top players. Steve Kenniston AKA the Storage Alchemist shared a story with me and it was pretty clever. Way back in 4,000 BC the Sumerians invented the first system of writing. Now they used clay tokens to represent transactions at that time. Now, to prevent messing with these tokens, they sealed them in clay jars to ensure that the tokens or either data would remain secure with an accurate record, let's call it quasi immutable and lived in a clay vault. Since that time, we've seen quite an evolution in data protection. Tape, of course, was the main means of protecting data, backing data up during most of the mainframe era and that carried into client server computing, which really accentuated and underscored the issues around backup windows and challenges with RTO, Recovery Time Objective and RPO, Recovery Point Objective, and just overall recovery nightmares. Then in the 2000s data reduction made displace backup more popular and push tape into an archive last resort media data domain then EMC now Dell still sell many purpose built backup appliances as do others as a primary backup target disc base. The rise of virtualization brought more changes in backup and recovery strategies as a reduction in physical resources squeezed the one application that wasn't under utilizing compute i.e backup. And we saw the rise of Veeam, the cleverly named company that became synonymous with data protection for virtual machines. Now the cloud has created new challenges related to data sovereignty, governance latency, copy creep, expense, et cetera but more recently cyber threats have elevated data protection to become a critical adjacency to information security. Cyber resilience to specifically protect against ransomware attacks as the new trend being pushed by the vendor community as organizations are urgently looking for help with this insidious threat. Okay, so there are two major disruptors that we're going to talk about today, the cloud and cyber crime, especially around ransoming your data. Every customer is using the cloud in some way, shape or form. Around 76% are using multiple clouds that's according to a recent study by HashiCorp. We've talked extensively about skill shortages on theCUBE and data protection and security concerns are really key challenges to address given that skill shortage is a real talent gap in terms of being able to throw people at solving this problem. So what customers are doing they're either building out or they're buying, really mostly building abstraction layers to hide the underlying cloud complexity. So, what this does, the good news is it simplifies provisioning and management but it creates problems around opacity. In other words, you can't see sometimes what's going on with the data, these challenges fundamentally become data problems in our view. Things like fast, accurate, and complete backup recovery, compliance, data sovereignty, data sharing, I mentioned copy creep, cyber resiliency, privacy protections these are all challenges brought to fore by the cloud, the advantages, the pros and the cons. Now, remote workers are especially vulnerable and as clouds expand rapidly data protection technologies are struggling to keep pace. So let's talk briefly about the rapidly expanding public cloud. This chart shows worldwide revenue for the big four hyperscalers, as you can see we projected they're going to surpass $115 billion in revenue in 2021, that's up from 86 billion last year. So it's a huge market, it's growing in the 35% range. The interesting thing is last year, 80 plus billion dollars in revenue but a 100 billion dollars was spent last year by these firms in CapEx. So they're building out infrastructure for the industry. This is a gift to the balance of the industry. Now to date legacy vendors and their surrounding community have been pretty defensive around the cloud, "Oh, not everything is going to move to the cloud, it's not a zero sum game we here." And while that's all true the narrative was really kind of a defense posture and that's starting to change as large tech companies like Dell, IBM, Cisco, HPE, and others see opportunities to build on top of this infrastructure. You certainly see that with Arvind Krishna's comments at IBM, Cisco obviously leaning in from a networking and security perspective. HPE using language that is very much cloud-like with its GreenLake strategy. And of course, Dell is all over this. Let's listen to how Michael Dell is thinking about this opportunity when he was questioned on theCUBE by John Furrier about the cloud. Play the clip. >> Well, clouds are infrastructure, right? So you can have a public cloud, you can have an edge cloud, a private cloud, a Telco cloud, a hybrid cloud, multicloud, here cloud, there cloud, everywhere cloud, cloud. Yet, they'll all be there, but it's basically infrastructure. And how do you make that as easy to consume and create the flexibility that enables everything. >> Okay, so in my view, Michael nailed it, the cloud is everywhere. You have to make it easy and you have to admire the scope of his comments. We know this guy, he thinks big, right? He said enables everything. What he's basically saying is that, technology is at the point where it has the potential to touch virtually every industry, every person, every problem, everything. So let's talk about how this informs the changing world of data protection. Now, we've seen with the pandemic there's an acceleration toward digital and that has caused an escalation if you will, in the data protection mandate. So essentially what we're talking about here is the application of Michael Dell's cloud everywhere comments. You've got on-prem, private clouds, hybrid clouds, you've got public clouds across AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba, really those big four hyperscalers. You got many clouds that are popping up all over the place, but multicloud to that HashiCorp data point, 75, 76%, and then you now see the cloud expanding out to the edge, programmable infrastructure heading out to the edge. So the opportunity here to build the data protection cloud is to have the same experiences across all these estates with automation and orchestration in that cloud, that data protection cloud if you will. So think of it as an abstraction layer that hides that underlying complexity, you log into that data protection cloud it's the same experience. So you've got backup, you've got recovery, you can handle bare-metal, you can do virtualized backups and recoveries, any cloud, any OS, out to the edge, Kubernetes and container use cases, which is an emerging data protection requirement and you've got analytics, perhaps you've got PII, Personally Identifiable Information protection in there. So the attributes of this data protection cloud, again, it abstracts the underlying cloud primitives, takes care of that. It also explodes cloud native technologies. In other words, it takes advantage of whether it's machine learning, which all the big cloud players have expertise in, new processor models things like Graviton and other services that are in the cloud natively. It doesn't just wrap it's on-prem stack in a container and shove it into the cloud, no, it actually re architects or architects around those cloud native services and it's got distributed metadata to track files and volumes and any organizational data irrespective of location. And it enables sets of services to intelligently govern in a federated governance manner while ensuring data integrity and all this is automated and orchestrated to help with the skills gap. Now, as it relates to cyber recovery, air gap solutions must be part of the portfolio, but managed outside of that data protection cloud that we just briefly described. The orchestration and the management must also be gapped if you will, otherwise, you don't have an air gap. So all of this is really a cohort to cyber security or your cybersecurity strategy and posture, but you have to be careful here because your data protection strategy could get lost in this mess. So you want to think about the data protection cloud as again, an adjacency or maybe an overlay to your cybersecurity approach, not a bolt on it's got to be fundamentally architectured from the bottom up. And yes, this is going to maybe create some overheads and some integration challenges but this is the way in which we think you should think about it. So you'll likely need a partner to do this, again, we come back to the skills gap if were seeing the rise of MSPs, managed service providers and specialist service providers, not public cloud providers, people are concerned about lock-in and that's really not their role. They're not high touch services company, probably not your technology arms dealer, excuse me, they're selling technology to these MSPs. So the MSPs, they have intimate relationships with their customers. They understand their business and specialize in architecting solutions to handle these difficult challenges. So let's take a look at some of the risk factors here and dig a little bit into the cyber threat that organizations face. This is a slide that, again, the Storage Alchemists, Steve Kenniston shared with me, it's based on a study that IBM funds with the Panama Institute, which is a firm that studies these things like cost of breaches and has for many, many, many years. The slide shows the total cost of a typical breach within each dot and on the Y-axis and the frequency in percentage terms on the horizontal axis. Now it's interesting, the top two are compromised credentials and fishing, which once again proves that bad user behavior trumps good security every time. But the point here is that the adversary's attack vectors are many and specific companies often specialize in solving these problems often with point products, which is why the slide that we showed from Optiv earlier, that messy slide looks so cluttered. So it's a huge challenge for companies, and that's why we've seen the emergence of cyber recovery solutions from virtually all the major players. Ransomware and the SolarWinds hack have made trust the number one issue for CEOs and CSOs and boards of directors, shifting CSO spending patterns are clear. Shifting largely because they're catalyzed by the work from home. But outside of the moat to endpoint security identity and access management, cloud security, the horizontal network security. So security priorities and spending are changing that's why you see the emergence of disruptors like we've covered extensively, Okta, Crowdstrike, Zscaler. And cyber resilience is top of mind and robust solutions are required and that's why companies are building cyber recovery solutions that are most often focused on the backup corpus because that's a target for the bad guys. So there is an opportunity, however to expand from just the backup corpus to all data and protect this kind of 3-2-1, or maybe it's 3-2-1-1, three copies, two backups, a backup in the cloud and one that's air gapped. So this can be extended to primary storage, copies, snaps, containers, data in motion, et cetera, to have a comprehensive data protection strategy. Customers as I said earlier, increasingly looking to manage service providers and specialists because of that skills gap and that's a big reason why automation is so important in orchestration. And automation and orchestration I'll emphasize on the air gap solutions should be separated physically and logically. All right, now let's take a look at some of the ETR data and some of the players. This is a chart that we like to show often, it's a X, Y axis, and the Y-axis is net score, which is a measure of spending momentum and the horizontal axis is market share. Now market share is an indicator of pervasiveness in the survey. It's not spending market share, it's not market share of the overall market, it's a term that ETR uses. It's essentially market share of the responses within the survey set, think of it as mind share. Okay, you've got the pure plays here on this slide in the storage category, there is no data protection or backup category so what we've done is we've isolated the pure plays or close to pure plays in backup and data protection. Notice that red line, that red line is kind of our subjective view of anything that's over that 40% line is elevated, you can see only rubric in the July survey is over that 40% line. I'll show you the ends in a moment. Smaller ends, but still rubric is the only one. Now look at Cohesity and rubric in the January, 2020. So last year pre-pandemic Cohesity and Rubrik they've come well off their peaks for net score. Look at Veeam, Veeam having studied this data for the last say 24 plus months, Veeam has been Steady Eddie. It is really always in the mid to high 30s, always shows a large shared end so it's coming up in the survey, customers are mentioning Veeam and it's got a very solid net score. It's not above that 40% line but it's hovering just below consistently, that's very impressive. Commvault has steadily been moving up. Sanjay Mirchandani has made some acquisitions, he did the Hedvig acquisition. They launched metallic that's driving cloud affinity within a Commvault large customer base so it's a good example of a legacy player, pivoting and evolving and transforming itself. Veritas continues to underperform in the ETR surveys relative to the other players. Now, for context, let's say add IBM and Dell to the chart. Now just note, this is IBM and Dell's full storage portfolio. The category in the taxonomy at ETR is all storage. Okay, this previous slide I isolated on the pure plays, but this now adds in IBM and Dell. It probably representative of where they would be, probably Dell larger on the horizontal axis than IBM, of course and you could see the spending momentum in accordingly. So you could see that in the data chart that we've inserted. So smaller ends for Rubrik and Cohesity, but still enough to pay attention, it's not like one or two when you're 20 plus, 15 plus, 25 plus you can start to pay attention to trends. Veeam again is very impressive. Its net score is solid, it's got a consistent presence in the dataset, it's clear leader here. SimpliVity is small but it's improving relative to last several surveys and we talked about Commvault. Now, I want to emphasize something that we've been hitting on for quite some time now and that's the renaissance that's coming in compute. Now we all know about Moore's law, the doubling of transistor density every two years, 18 to 24 months and that leads to a doubling of performance in that time frame. X86, that X86 curve is in the blue and if you do the math, this is expressed in trillions of operations per second. The orange line is a representative of Apple's A series culminating in the A-15 most recently, the A series is what Apple is now... It's the technology basis for what's inside, and one the new Apple laptops, which is replacing Intel. That's that orange line there we'll come back to that. So go back to the blue line for a minute. If you do the math on doubling performance every 24 months, it comes out to roughly 40% annual improvement in processing power per year. That's now moderated. So Moore's law is waning in one sense so we wrote a piece Moore's law is not dead so I'm sort of contradicting myself there, but the traditional Moore's law curve on X86 is waning. It's probably now down to around 30%, low 30s, but look at the orange line. Again, using the A series as an indicator, if you combine the CPU, the NPU, which is the neural processing unit, XPU, pick whatever PU you want, the accelerators, the DSPs, that line is growing at a 100% plus per year. It's probably more accurately around 110% a year. So there's a new industry curve occurring and it's being led by the Arm ecosystem. The other key factor there you see in a lot of use cases, a lot of consumer use cases Apple is an example but you're also seeing it in things like Tesla, Amazon with AWS Graviton, the Annapurna acquisition, building out Graviton and Nitro that's based on Arm. You can get from design to tape out in less than two years Whereas the Intel cycles we know they've been running it four to five years now, maybe Pat Gelsinger is compressing those, but Intel is behind. So, organizations that are on that orange curve are going to see faster acceleration, lower cost, lower power, et cetera. All right, so what's the tie to data protection? I'm going to leave you with this chart. Arm has introduced it's confidential compute architecture, and is ushering in a new era of security and data protection. Zero Trust is the new mandate and what Arm has done with what they call realms is create physical separation of the vulnerable components by creating essentially physical buckets to put code in and to put data in separate from the OS. Remember the OS is the most valuable entry point for hackers or one of them because it contains privileged access and it's a weak link because of things like memory leakages and vulnerabilities. And malicious code can be placed by bad guys within data in the OS and appear benign even though it's anything but. So in this architecture, all the OS does is create API calls to the realm controller. That's the only interaction. So it makes it much harder for bad actors to get access to the code and the data. And importantly, very importantly, it's an end-to-end architecture so there's protection throughout if you're pulling data from the edge and bringing it back to on-prem and the cloud you've got that end-to-end architecture and protection throughout. So the link to data protection is that backup software vendors need to be the most trusted of applications. Backup software needs to be the most trusted of applications because it's one of the most targeted areas in the cyber attack. Realms provide an end-to-end separation of data and code from the OS and is a better architectural construct to support Zero Trust and confidential computing and critical use cases like data protection/backup and other digital business apps. So our call to action is backup software vendors you can lead the charge. Arm is several years ahead at the moment, head of Intel in our view. So you got to pay attention to that, research that, we're not saying over rotate, but go investigate that. And use your relationships with Intel to accelerate its version of this architecture or ideally the industry should agree on common standards and solve this problem together. Pat Gelsinger told us in theCUBE that if it's the last thing he's going to do in his industry life he's going to solve this security problem. That's when he was at VMware. Well, Pat you're even in a better place to do it now, you don't have to solve it yourself, you can't and you know that. So while you're going about your business saving Intel, look to partner with Arm I know it sounds crazy to use these published APIs and push to collaborate on an open source architecture that addresses the cyber problem. If anyone can do it, you can. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts all you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast, I publish weekly on Wikibon.com and SiliconANGLE.com. Or you can reach me at dvellante on Twitter, email me at Dave.Vellante@SiliconANGLE.com. And don't forget to check out ETR.plus for all the survey and data action. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching everybody, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(soft music begins) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, I'm joined by Jeremy Swift, the CEO and co-founder of Cordial. Jeremy, welcome to theCUBE, it's great to have you on the program. >> Hey, thanks so much Lisa, it's great to be here with you. >> Making this conversation's work very socially distanced, but I'd love to understand a little bit about Cordial. What do you offer and how do you help customers? >> Yeah, yeah, I appreciate the question. I guess for starters Cordial is a cross-channel messaging and data platform. Our clients, let me tell you a little bit about what that actually means. But I would say our clients can collect all of their unstructured, kind of disparate customer and business data from wherever it lives within their tech stack. And then ultimately use that data to build audience segments, gather insights about that data and about their customers. Kind of discover some trends on that too and then ultimately automate and orchestrate hyper-personalized customer experiences at enterprise scale. And when I say experiences too, to define that a little bit. I really am talking about, frankly, kind of a wealth of interactions that a customer might have with a brand. So, that could be things like transforming your promotional, your triggered and your transactional email, communications to your SMS and your MMS messages, to your push in your in-app messages, targeted direct mail, all the way, actually, frankly, to things like in-store devices like clienteling experiences and things like that when you're physically going into the store, whenever we can get back into that, a little bit more consistently, I would say. And then even things like sending targeted audiences to third-party social platforms like a Google Adwords or a Facebook or whatnot. So, in short, I would say we're the underlying data platform and the activation layer that helps brands better communicate with their customers because they ultimately understand their customers better. Um, yeah, go ahead. >> You mentioned hyper-personalized and we've been talking about personalization for a long time. And especially as the more demanding we consumers get, we expect brands to know who we are, offer us the right things that are in sequence and offer me something I've already purchased. But define hyper-personalized customer experiences. >> Yeah, yeah, it's a really good question. You know, I think this is a significant piece that when we think about kind of the marketing language or lingo that gets used out there, this is probably one that gets used a little bit flippantly. It really is this idea of taking the individualized behaviors of you, Lisa, of me, Jeremy, and looking at those in a full view, not just what I did in this moment but what is my history with your brand tell me? And how do also some of those behaviors now also, maybe predict future behaviors as well. And using that data to ultimately drive and derive the content that is being put into the message. So, hyper-personalized meaning truly, one-to-one, like very, very discreet or descriptive pieces of data that ultimately tie to unique pieces of content that are going to drive a great experience or a particular behavior. So, some examples of maybe how we deploy that with folks, we work with brands like Backcountry or Revolve Clothing, Eddie Bauer, 1-800 contacts, we work with brands like that to help them drive revenue growth through things like, again, hyper-personalized messages drives higher revenue per message. It helps them significantly increase their customer lifetime value, again because the experience that they're creating for them is very tailored, very unique to that individual. So, some things that we measure ourselves on with respect to that and things where we're really proud of are things like our clients are generating a 250 X ROI. And typically they're achieving triple digit revenue growth within their first 30 days using Cordial, our platform, because of the data layer that we have there, we built a transformations product to that just last year alone for our clients transformed and activated over 110 billion customer data records, again for our clients there. And probably the thing that I think excites me the most and frankly kind of gets back to some of my roots in my history of why we started this business too, but, it really is our implementation process as well. So, brands want to hyper-personalize, they want to do all these things that we talk about. But often they think, man, the process to get there is going to take me a really long time. Again, one of the things we really pride ourselves on is that implementation process. It's 90% faster than the legacy marketing clouds out there within the market. To give you an idea of how incredibly fast that is. Our enterprise clients are up in sending typically in less than seven days. That really is unheard of to nearly all enterprise brands but we really pride ourselves on the flexibility of cordless technology coupled with our incredibly talented services team that really helps unlock that for many of our brands and customers. >> So, big numbers that you mentioned, customers achieving impressive metrics-based business outcomes. You talked about the 250 X ROI, triple digit revenue growth very quickly. You also talked about your implementation process being 90% faster than legacy marketing clouds. Talk to me about the actual data platform. And I'd like to kind of unpack that into some of the things that differentiate it. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I guess first and foremost, on the data platform side of things, that really is a significant differentiator. And I guess even before I jump into that though, too. I would be remissed actually if... I think that's natural to probably jump right into product as being the key differentiator at the end of the day. But when I really do honestly think about what differentiates Cordial in the market and what are the things that we really hang our hat on, I can honestly say Lisa, like first and foremost it really is our people. Again, I know it's really natural to go straight to product and talk about the features and the functions or how you thought about building a particular thing. And again, those things are highly important in this kind of digital transformation era that we're in. But I would say in a market that is incredibly saturated with a lot of players across it, within marketing technology and brands, trying to differentiate who does what and who they should work with, at the end of the day we really do believe that creating and enabling a culture of world-class human beings that live out for succinct values. Those for us are things like communicate better than the rest, being tenacious about our clients and the problems we solve for them, acting like owners and then really being kind of on-mission, if you will, to be Cordial, we think that those things are differentiated and frankly really necessary, especially in today's society and culture that we're in. I'm happy to talk about some of the product side of things there though, too. But I'll pause in there for a second-- >> I love that you've said that about one of the key differentiators is the corporate culture. That's one of the things that a lot of companies, legacy companies struggle with. Especially in dynamic times like this, but I would always thought for all the tech shows I've been to, over the many, many years that the customer experience is dependent and inextricably linked to the employee experience. It sounds like you've kind of built the company with that in mind. >> I think you have to. Again, robots have not taken over the world yet, right? And so, this really is still about people combined with technology and how those two things married together. Not just on our side, in terms of what we're bringing to bear for our clients but the experiences our clients are having too, you know. Our clients are working with their IT department or with their engineers and their marketing teams, and they have to figure out how do you make all those things very harmonious together. I just think that at the end of the day, the experience that your people are bringing, the empathy that you're bringing to people, especially in this environment where we've been virtual and you don't get that face-to-face contact, you don't get to maybe delve deep into understanding people, relationally. I just think it's really important. And we, as a business, again, I have this said to me often, and in turn, I said often too, is you can't name your company Cordial and be a jerk at the end of the day. So, there really is a level of empathy that I think needs to be brought through in everything that we do. We're not just out to be, you know, a world-class technology company for our clients. We know our clients expect that from us but we really want to be great human beings at the end of the day, which I think that's really the kind of the link that creates really great partnerships at the end of the day. >> I completely agree and I think especially now more than ever, that infusion of empathy is so critical for businesses in any industry. I do want to unpack the data architecture. You talked about customers being able to get to unstructured customer business data from wherever it lives in the stack. How do you enable that? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Again, that product side is from a differentiators perspective, it's significant. I would say we purposely built Cordial with a data architecture to accommodate just that, to accommodate any number of channels but also an infinite amount of data sources. And then in turn I alluded to this earlier but the ability to manipulate and restructure or transform that data coming in, or going out of Cordial to maybe other systems within a client's tech stack. This differentiation really is significant compared to the legacy clouds, but it is also significant, I would say relative to other kind of next gen options within the market. Investing in Cordial for a brand is... it's a huge step forward in terms of digital kind of future-proofing themselves and how they're setting themselves up to meet the needs of a really rapid evolving consumer and the experience the consumer expects to have with the brands. So, brands collect daily more and more information about users' behaviors and patterns, and we've frankly just see an incredible opportunity for our clients to learn from their customers and the massive amount of data that that client is kind of showing or exhibiting to them. And then putting that to action, putting that to work in terms of the experience that they're creating for their customer, you know, this kind of ties that word of empathy back to it as well. Even though we're talking about digital communications for a brand, it's still a human interaction, it's still a relationship. And so, if we can help brands really understand their data, again through a data architecture that's really purpose-built to really ingest all of that in and then activate that in terms, of their messaging that they're sending out to folks. That can create a level of empathy, that might sound altruistic, I don't believe it is. I think we as human beings, as a professional, if my job is to communicate my brand or my products to my end customer, I would want to do that with a level of empathy, with a level of sincerity, with a level of understanding and knowledge that tells that end customer I know who you are, I'm paying attention. I'm not being creepy and big brother-ish about it, but I'm paying attention. I want to show that I understand you, no differently, frankly than the relationships that we all have as human beings. I mean, if I walked into a conversation with you, Lisa, and I've known you for two years but I started asking you all the same boilerplate questions of like, hey, can you tell me your name again? And who are you? And where did you come from? And what school did you go to? You would kind of think that's so odd. You don't... I thought you knew me but you're not acting like you know me. I think we're all about creating an opportunity for brands to be able to do that with their customers and do it with a level that the customer goes, you know me, you get me, you understand what my desires, wishes, or patterns are with your business. >> Right? No, I think that's so interesting. And I agree with you. The opportunity is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. It's not just more data is born and created, more data sources are born and created. The consumer demand is only increasing. So you mentioned, I want to talk about customer tech. You talked about, you mentioned Eddie Bauer being a customer. Eddie Bauer is a legacy organization which has been around for a long time. But I also know you guys work with, with younger, fresher, maybe more cloud native companies. I wonder, though, how an Eddie Bauer goes about fast implementation, you said 90% faster than legacy data platforms. I wonder how an Eddie Bauer goes through that. 'Cause I imagine they replaced a legacy marketing platform with Cordial? >> They did, they did. They actually replaced a handful of kind of legacy platforms and systems that they had in place. And Eddie Bauer is just like, I would say, many other kind of mainstay brands that you and I grew up with to where if they want to compete, if they want to really be on the cutting edge, they need to innovate quickly. They need to evolve from maybe legacy systems to newer systems. Like you said, maybe what more digital native or digital first brands are starting out with, when they launched their business. Eddie Bauer is a really cool story though. Again, it's kind of an iconic brand at the end of the day but they came to us with a really clear set of challenges. And the first and foremost, again, kind of goes back to the point we were talking about, which was Cordial help us consolidate our data from multiple sources that we have. Online, offline order data, loyalty information that they had, a disparate unique customer IDs that they had across all the different databases they had. They had geolocation data, they had product data, customer behavior data, a lot of data all sitting in different places. So first and foremost, like help us get that organized in one central place, being within Cordial's data platform. And then from there they wanted to use those data sources, right? It's not just about bringing it together. It's about now, what do you do with it? How do you activate that? And in the case with Eddie Bauer, they used Cordial to dynamically render... This is a cool example actually, dynamically render a message to each individual customer containing their rewards balance, the expiration date of that reward, a unique bar code specific to that individual to eliminate fraud there... what was it? Nearest store address that they had as well as a map of the store location. All within the message that they were receiving. And by clicking on that message it immediately activated kind of an API sequence behind the scenes, transparent to the user, but something that Eddie Bauer had never been able to do before. And that API sequence that initiated, generated a personalized pass for that particular customer that loaded directly into their wallet, on their device for them to be able to redeem in store. By doing that, it actually then enabled the ability for, if I'm near an Eddie Bauer store, let's say within a mile of it, Eddie Bauer can immediately push a notification to my phone without even having a branded app on the phone, saying, Hey you have a $20 rewards certificate in your wallet, it expires in seven days. You're a mile away from your closest store. Click here and we'll navigate you to that store. Some really cool use cases that really helped them kind of take some big steps forward in that digital transformation for them as a brand. And I would just say kind of going back to even the AWS piece of this too. All of that might sound easy at the end of the day. It's incredibly difficult to do that across millions of customers in minutes, it's very difficult. And I can genuinely say that our experiences and the work that we've done with AWS cloud services is a huge piece of making all of that a reality. And oddly enough, Eddie Bauer actually is an AWS customer as well. And some of those synergies in terms of how we're able to sync up data via Kinesis Streams and S3 buckets and things like that, and be able to make that data very operable was a huge advantage, I think for us, especially in terms of speed to market and the ability to get these kind of programs up and live for a brand like them. >> So, when you were looking at building Cordial and co-founding it back in 2014. Were you drawn to AWS right away? Because you just had this sense that we have to go this direction to enable this complexity to be achieved at scale? >> I mean, yes. I mean, unequivocally 2014 feels like eons ago. It's not really, I guess at the end of the day, but there was... I mean there was no other even remotely viable competitive option at the time to even consider. There are obviously are plenty of cloud services out there now, but I mean that was probably the shortest negotiation we had as co-founders about what we should do with respect to that. It was immediately, I mean that was part of our thesis, was all of the legacy clouds were in co-lo centers and trying to figure out migration plans to even get some of their infrastructure into the cloud. And we said, let's just start straight in the cloud right from day one, it's a huge competitive advantage. It gives us speed, it gives us scale. It gives us all sorts of things that we can immediately start unlocking value with. And so, yeah, when we started Cordial, AWS was, I mean that was day one. We initiated that and they've been an incredibly strategic partner for us ever since then. >> One of the things that are wrapping up here that I always find interesting when you're looking at new technologies like yours, you're right. 2014 does seem like eons ago, but it really wasn't. But you working with legacy, iconic brands like an Eddie Bauer that was probably at one point all paper-based transactions, having to digitize and digitally transform to meet their customers where they are now that need to marry online and offline behaviors to deliver that hyper-personalized experience. I know you guys also work with companies like Revolve as well. So, this is the technology that any type of business, historic, new, can use and implement, sounds like fairly quickly to make big impacts. And I think nowadays being able to deliver information in real-time that's hyper-personalized, it's going to be a make or break for companies that survive this new era that we're living in. >> Yeah, it, it really is. And again, for us, fundamentally goes back to again, why we set out to build Cordial? My co-founders and I actually had history in building one of the first gen, what I characterize as kind of a legacy platform now in this space. And frankly, after seeing or 15 years of seeing marketers struggle to get those platforms to scale to the level of data and sophistication out there, we knew there was a better way for marketers and technologists to work together. And we intimately then knew the way that this should be architected. So, as you said, in 2014, I mean, we set out to build Cordial to really transform the way marketers and technologists, you know, how they collaborated to fundamentally change the experiences their customers were having with their brands. Again, it was very, I guess, heart-centered on some level as the way that I would put that, this was never monetarily driven for us. It was all around, I think our own personal frustrations of not being able to meet those needs of our customers. And it wasn't a fault of the previous kind of legacy platforms. It was just technology had evolved and frankly consumers and digital devices had evolved enough to where there needed to be somebody and some brand or some companies who said, let's rethink this, let's rebuild this from the ground up. You mentioned Revolve, which Revolve Clothing is just a really cool example. They've been a Cordial client now for four years, they're going on their fifth year with Cordial. And they really are an incredible success story. One of the stories that I just, it's kind of like a crown jewel that we take a lot of pride in. I know our teams do with respect to Revolve is, when they came to us, they had, gosh! Two automations in place that it took them roughly about two years working with the legacy cloud, even to get those in place. And in a matter of their first eight months with Cordial they had nearly 30 new automations live using Cordial. And those 30 automations had generated eight times more revenue than they had previously generated with automations. It was an incremental at the time roughly almost $12 million in net new revenue that was unrealized for the business prior to that. And, you know, that's something we take a lot of pride in. We take a lot of pride in again, the speed of how quickly we can help a brand be able to do this, but it's not just a matter of getting something up and running. It's about the results that we can drive for them. We hold ourselves accountable to that and we expect our clients to hold us accountable to that as well. Next gen technology or new technology or modern technology for the sake of just new is uninteresting, unless it is actually... not just incrementally moving things forward for your business but I would say it needs to be an outsized set of results that you're driving for them to frankly make that even just the mental hurdle to get over that, make that worth it at the end of the day. >> Yeah. I was looking at some of the customer stories on your website and was very impressed seeing those metrics-based business outcomes. 'Cause that's what it's about. It's about that and delivering that at speed and with agility. Jeremy, I wish we had more time 'cause I know we could keep talking, but I really enjoyed understanding more about Cordial and what you guys do. And I look forward to seeing what's to come. >> So good, thanks so much, Lisa. It was wonderful. >> My pleasure, for Jeremy Swift, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (soft music ends)

>>okay. >>Just about a year ago, governments around the world forced shutdowns of their respective economies. We've never seen anything like it. Central banks took immediate action and effective monetary policy like none we've ever seen before. They dropped interest rates to near zero, injected a huge amount of cash into the system, and they fueled this liquidity boom to support those individuals and businesses that were in greatest need. Banks were overwhelmed with the volume of paperwork, for instance, small business P, P P loans and other things. Home buying boomed as mortgage rates hit all time lows for several weeks in the spring, it was complete chaos, but the tech industry stepped up and accommodated work from home. Cloud infrastructure was spun up instantly as access to data centers was really restricted, and Saas companies became a fundamental staple of not only keeping the lights on but helping customers thrive in the face of a pandemic. Automation became a >>mandate >>as humans, they couldn't possibly keep up with the tidal wave of demand, a document overload that was hitting the system. Now, one of the companies that was there to help financial firms in particular, get through the knothole was Oculus, a company that focuses on intelligent automation to deploy the power of machines to allow humans to focus on what they do best. Hello, everyone. And welcome to this cube conversation. My name is Dave Volonte, and we're profiling the most interesting SAS startups that are reimagining how we work. And with me is Sam Bobbly, the co founder and CEO of Oculus. Sam, welcome to the Cube. First time. >>Hey, Dave. Thanks so much for having me excited to have the conversation. >>Yeah, me too. So, listen, I know you've told the story of a zillion times, but I want a community here. How and why did you start the company >>for sure. So when I was in college, I was having a conversation with my dad. Uh, he was telling me about a meeting he just had with his elder law attorney. And the other law attorney was complaining about having to review hundreds or thousands of pages of financial documents for every long term care Medicaid application. When you apply for Medicaid coverage to enter a nursing home, you're required to submit 60 months of financials along with your application. And traditionally the elder law attorney or a nursing home would review those documents literally page by page, line by line to find high value transactions, transfers and other financial trends. And when I heard about this, it just it didn't make sense to me. I said, You know why? In this day and age isn't there? Why isn't there a technology solution that can ingest the documents and spit out a digital report replacing the cumbersome manual page by page review? So it really just started as a research project, trying to learn more about optical character recognition, which is the technology of transforming images into text. And, you know, as we kind of kicked around different products in the market, we we realized that there was an opportunity to build a unique platform that could ingest documents of any format quality and produce perfectly accurate results. And that was the genesis behind what ultimately became Oculus. >>You were a young man at this time. How old were you at that time? >>I was 22 when we started >>so fearless. And, uh, now my friend Eddie Mitchell started a company about 20 years ago. We hacked together a >>Dell >>system and this camera. It was all about the modern operating room in the future, and he showed it to a doctor and and it was just a prototype, she said. How much? He said 10 grand. She wrote a check right there. You have a similar story? How did you see the company? >>So we we we do have a pretty similar experience. You know, Our our concept was we want to get perfect results the customer every time. So if a customer sends us a clean bank statement from Chase or a blurry cell phone image with someone's thumb in the picture from a community bank in Maine, and it's rotated sideways or upside down like we want to give consistent, perfectly active results every single time. And you know, our our view was to completely solve the business problem. So the very first version of the software that we built, we had a rudimentary machine process to extract 60 or 70% of the data, and then we had a little tool built on the back end, where literally, me, myself and some of our early employees would clean up the data output, make sure it's perfect and then return When we couldn't submit, we'd returned to the customer accurate data that could be used at the time for for a Medicaid decision. And what happened is, while we were in our beta period, customers fell in love with the product. They felt it was magical and really just superior from an accuracy standpoint to anything they had ever tested before. And And one of our beta testers said to us, uh, where do I submit credit card information? So at that time, I turned to my colleagues and I said, I think we're ready to I think we're ready. Start charging for this thing and and roll it out for prime time. >>When I was researching the company, I learned that you leveraged. At least some of the idea came from the capture, and I never knew this, But the capture that we all hate came from Google where they write, they had at one point you could maybe you still can. You can go online. You can read books and have to It's just scanned. You can't even read the stuff half the time. So they were putting the capture in front of us, quite brilliant to try to solve for those those those white spaces that they didn't know. So So how did you learn from that? Was there an A P I that you could plug into Google's data set, or did you do your own? What was that? How did that all work? >>The the concept of humans in the loop is super powerful, right? So when we first started, we recognize that OCR and machine data capture couldn't do the job completely. OCR, generally speaking, can process financial documents with roughly 80 to 85% accuracy plus or minus machines, particularly struggled with semi structured and unstructured documents where the format is unpredictable as well as lower quality images. So pretty early on, we recognized that we needed human intervention in the process in order to achieve perfect accuracy every single time, and also to create training data to constantly teach our machine learning models to get smarter and drive additional automation. So, as I mentioned, the very first version was myself and other employees verifying the data on our own. But as we started thinking about how to scale this up and, you know, take on millions and millions of documents, we needed to, uh, you know, learn how to better parallelized task and really build the system for for efficiency and for scanning. So we we we learned about the Google Books Initiative and their ability to leverage capture technology and a distributed workforce to verify pieces of information that their systems couldn't automatically read from books. And we took a lot of those learnings into building our human in the loop infrastructure. And, you know, a way to think about our our product is it's the marriage of machines and humans that makes us unique. As much of the heavy lifting as we can do with machines we do. But whatever we can't do automatically, we slice into smaller tasks and intelligently route those tasks to humans to perform verification. We then layer in algorithmic checks to make sure our humans did the review correctly. The customer gets perfect results, and that same perfect output is used in a feedback loop to train our machine learning models to get smarter and smarter, which dynamically improves the product on an ongoing basis. And, you know, the folks at Google were we're onto this pretty early with the capture technology, and we were following in their footsteps with our own unique take on it, but specifically applying it to financial documents. >>I mean on the Cube. We know a lot about this because we were looking at transcriptions of video all the time, and it just keeps getting better and better and better in our systems. Get smarter and smarter, smarter. So we're sort of closing that gap between what humans can can do and machines can't. And I would expect that you're seeing the same thing. I mean, you think there's always going to be kind of humans in the loop in terms of the quality or is that gap going to be, you know, six nines in the, you know, near near term. >>I think it's gonna take a while to get rid of all the edge cases. You know, you mentioned the PPB program like we've been on the back end processing P p P loans for some of the leading players, like Cross River Bank, blue Vine, Square Capital and others. And you know, what we've seen during the ppb process is just a a wide variety of different documents and inputs, Uh, and a lot of difficult to read documents that are, you know, very challenging to automate. So I think we will, you know, incrementally continue to automate more and more of the process. But the value of having humans plus machines is much more powerful than just having machines alone or just having humans alone. And as it relates to the end customer, our our goal is to do as much of the mundane work as possible to free our customer up to do the more cerebral analysis. So in a lending context and and for the record, you know, our our biggest market opportunity is in the limbic space. Despite the fact that we started with medicating attorneys, we quickly pivoted and realized that our technology was super valuable to to lenders to help them automate the underwriting process. And our our thesis is, if we can take out all of the necessary evils like document review and allow underwriters to focus on the actual analysis of financial health, it's a win win win and creates a really fantastic, complementary relationship between us and our customers. >>Yes, I want to ask you about the pivot to financial services. You said you started well, you have the inspiration from elder law because Jimmy McGill. Okay. Saul Goodman breaking bad. You got started. An elder law. But then you made the pivot to financial services. Really pretty early on. You had really good, great product market fit, but you kind of went for it. I get early twenties. You know, you didn't have a big family at the time. I didn't have a lot of a lot of risks. So you went for it, right? But talk about that pivot because a lot of companies wouldn't do that. They get comfortable and just, you know, stay where they're at. But you made that >>call. It was a big risk, for sure. I mean, look, the product was working. We launched the paid version of our product in 2016. Pretty quickly were onboarding dozens of accountants and attorneys, you know, doing Medicaid work. Um, in mid to late 2016, we got introduced to a large small business lender in New York City called strategic funding Source. They've since renamed them their company Capital as the current name, but we met with the CEO and the head of product and showed them a demo of the technology. And they said, You know, quote unquote, we've been looking for this for years. We've been looking for something exactly like this for years, and we said back to them about how many pages of financial documents to review every single month. They pointed out to a bullpen of dozens of people sitting there tearing through bank statements, page by page, line by line. And they said, You know, it's hundreds of thousands. My eyes almost fell out of my head. I couldn't believe the volume, and it was much bigger than what the, you know, single accountants or attorneys were doing. Uh, so we made the strategic decision to pivot at that time and focus on FINTECH. Lenders continue to tailor the product and build additional features for the fintech lending space. And and, you know, lending in general had the perfect mix of short sale cycle and high average customer value that allowed a company like ours to scale and ramp our revenue quite quite quickly. Um, and then the other thing that happened is kind of as we were getting deeper and deeper into the space, the fintech space as a whole started growing massive. So we we kind of had the perfect storm of product market fit, plus the market growing that allowed us to really ramp significantly grow revenue. And, uh, you know, despite the fact that it was the risk it was, it was totally right. Decision to to focus the business on financial services >>much bigger Tam. And you could subjectively measure it by the size of the stack of papers. Um, how how does this relate to our p A. As you know, the R p. A hot space. You probably get this question a lot, and it sounds like there are some similarities with software bots. What's the similarity? What's the difference? >>Good question. It's It's totally a synergistic offering, right? So rrp a companies like UI path and automation anywhere they typically provide a horizontal toolkit to allow you know, banks and lenders to automate much of the mundane work like, for example, collecting information from emails or doing onboarding for a new employee. Or, you know, different types of tasks that a manual worker would have done but could be automated with relatively simple code. Um, what happens in our p a. Workflows is they get hung up on tasks that can't be completely automated. So, for example, a robot might be, uh, trying to complete an intend lending flow. But when a bank statement is submitted as part of that flow, the robot can't parse it. So what they do instead, is they routed to an underwriter who performs a manual analysis, keys information into a back office system that the bank is using and that information then gets handed back to a robot and continues the automation flow. What we do is we plug the gaps that used to be manual so a robot can pass US documents like bank statements or pay stubs or tax stops. We run our unique human in the loop process. We return structure Jason output directly to a robot, and it continues into the, you know, to the next step of the flow. And, you know, in in summary, the combination of robotic process automation and human in the loop, which is what we're doing, creates true and and automated flows rather than R P. A mite by itself might get you 80% of the way there. >>So do you have, like, software integrations or partnerships with those companies. How are you integrating with them? >>We do. We have software integrations with both UI path and automation anywhere in our core fintech lending business. R P A isn't as prevalent, but we are now expanding beyond fintech lenders into mortgage lending and traditional banks. And we're also expanding use cases, right? Like historically small business lending was the core of our business. More recently, we've moved into consumer auto mortgage, additional asset classes. And as we've gotten deeper with financial institutions, we've seen even more opportunity to partner and coexist with broader r p a player's >>Yeah, great. I mean, I was just staring at their s one. I guess it was came up Monday. Half over half a billion dollars in a are are they're actually cash flow positive as you iPad. So we're going to see we're going to see them hit the public market shortly. Um, hang on, folks. Uh, now it's okay. So this is you sell a sas, right? A SAS service. Even though there's that human in the loop, that's all part of the service. How do you How do you price? >>So usage based model. So we we kind of try to model are themselves nerve. A massive company is super powerful. We apply that same concept document processing, so it's a usage based model. Customers will pay us either per application per document or per page, and if they want to subscribe for, you know, one document per month or millions of documents per month, it's up to them. And we're able to flex up and flex down to meet the supply and demand. Um and that that concept that scalability and flexibility was particularly powerful in the P P P program, right? P P. P. Was kind of a very unique situation in the sense that lenders weren't able to predict the amount of loans they needed to process in normal lending. A small business lender can tell you Hey, we expect to get roughly 10,000 applications in the month of April with P P p. They could tell us, Hey, we're going to send out 200,000 marketing emails and we expect 30% of people might reply, but we really don't have any idea, right? So what happened is the big banks ended up hiring without exaggeration. Thousands of temporary employees to come in and review documents and kind of scrambled to do this in a work from home setting during the pandemic. Whereas Cross River, they took a technology first approach. They implemented our A P I in the back end, and it enabled them to instantly scale up their resources. And the result of that is Cross River ended up becoming a top three pp, a top three p p. P lender nationally, outperforming many of the big banks with a super efficient and fast document review process. Because we were able to help them on the back end with the automation. >>That's awesome. I love the pricing model you mentioned. You mentioned Amazon. Is that the cloud you use or >>we do Our Our product is hosted in AWS and we, you know, take a lot of learnings from them from a business model and and positioning point of view. >>Yeah, and and I'm thrilled to hear you say I mean, I think a lot of forward thinking startups are doing the consumption model. I mean, you certainly see that with companies like snowflake and data dog and stripe. I mean, I think that that SAS model of okay, we're gonna lock you into a one year, two year, three year term. Sorry if if you get acquired, you're stuck with some, you know, stranded licenses. That's your problem. I think that, you know, you really thought that out. Well, um, you mentioned you're sort of expanding your your your total available market now, looking at at new markets, what are some of the big trends that you want to ride over the coming decade as you scale your company? >>The biggest one for us is mortgage automation. You know, the kind of the one of fintech small business and consumer loans were optimized, and we went from a place where, uh, you know, you would deal with a loan officer and have an in person transaction to modern day. You can get a loan from small business. If you're a small business, you can get a loan from PayPal online effectively instantly. If you're a consumer, you can get a loan from Sofia or lending club super smooth digital experience and really revolutionized the way that you know, the market thinks about financial products. I think the next wave of that is mortgage, and that's what we're focused on. Uh, you know, mortgage is a massive market in the sense of thousands of lenders. The average application contains a couple 100 pages worth of financial documents, and the pain points of the back end of the mortgage process were really accentuated. During covid, right refi Valium went way up and mortgage lenders were forced to process that volume in a work from home setting. So what happened is mortgage lenders were struggling with the concept of sending personally identifiable financial information to underwriters who aren't working in an office there, working at home and, you know, kids running around a million things going on. And it's just more difficult to manage than ever before. Um, and you know, as as the the volume kind of normalized debate and mortgage lenders thought about their own future of automation, I think there was just clear recognition across the board that these these mortgage lenders needed to learn from some of the fintech and really focus on automating the back office peace and you know, to your point earlier about business model, what we think about is translating cost that used to be a fixed cost and turning them into a variable costs So now, instead of worrying about having to match supply and demand and hire or fire people, depending on the volume that's coming in on any given month, a mortgage lender can instantly flex up, reflects down and have a super fast, accurate process to handle the darks. Um, and you know, we're seeing just awesome traction in the market with that with the mortgage space and we're excited to push >>forward there. That's great. Thank you. I mean you, Sam. You describe the chaos that work from home. The financial industry is very overly officious. If you know it's very security conscious. How do you handle security? Maybe you could comment on that. How you think about that? >>Sure. I mean, we we take a compliance first approach. We built the product from the ground up with compliance in mind, knowing that we were selling into financial institutions. We have a sock to type one and type two certification, which is, you know, an industry standard. All of our our verification happens with the Oculus employees. So there's no third parties involved in our process whatsoever. Um and then lastly, But perhaps most importantly, our product in and of itself is innately, um, you know, innately drives compliance. So every data point that we process from a financial document, we not only return the data, we return an exact bounding box coordinates of where that data field appeared on the original source so that that audit trail lives with the loan throughout its life cycle. What we saw prior to Oculus is a mortgage would go through an underwriting process. They make a decision, and then that loan might be sold downstream and a diligence firm as to come in. And they don't have the resources to review all the loans. So they review 15% of the loan tape and then they say, you know, they give a rating and what we do is we proactively tackle that by creating a a perfect audit trail upon origination that can live with the loan throughout its life cycle and that that process and that traceability has been super valuable to our mortgage and banking partners. >>So you can ensure the providence there. So let me end just by talking about the company a little bit. So you incubated you nailed the product market fit the and you pivoted and re nailed the product market fit. And like a lot of companies in your position, I would imagine you saw your growth come from just having a great product. You know, initially, word gets around, but then you got a scale. Uh, maybe you could talk a little bit about how how you did that. How you're doing that. You know where your hiring how you're hiring, what your philosophy is on on scaling. >>Sure. Look, I think the key for us is just surrounding ourselves with the right people. You know, the right mentors, advisors and investors to help us really take the business to the next level. Uh, you know, we had no pride of authorship. We're building this and recognize that there are a lot of people out there who have been there, done that and can really guide us and show us the way. I know you had interviewed Marc Roberge on on the show previously. Formerly the C r. O of hubspot. Mark was someone that we you know, we we read his book and had taken sales advice from him from an early age. And over the over time, we got him a little bit more familiar with the company. And and ultimately, Mark and his partner, J Po at Stage two Capital ended up investing in Oculus and really helping us understand how to build the right go to market engine. Um, as the company got bigger, we took on investments from really reputable firms in the financial services space. So our largest investors are okay, H C F T fintech collective and and QED investors. Uh, you know, QED was was founded by Nigel Morris, who is the co founder of Capital One. They backed Sophia and Prosper and a lot of big fintech lenders and, you know, bringing the collective expertise from the fintech sector as well as you know, from a sales and go to market strategy. Point of view created the right mix of ingredients for us to to really ramp up significantly. Uh, we had an awesome run over the years. We were pretty recently recognized by magazine as the number one fastest growing fintech company. And, you know, as the momentum is increased and the market conditions have been very favorable to us, we we just want to double down and expand. Mortgage is the biggest area of opportunity for us. And what we're seeking from a hiring perspective is, you know, go to market sales account executive type resources on the mortgage side as well as you know, deeper products expertise both on the mortgage side as well as with machine learning our product. Because we have the human in the loop piece, we create massive amounts of training data on a daily basis. So it's a, I think, a really exciting place for cutting edge machine learning developers to come and and innovate. >>What can you share with our audience about, you know, your company, any metrics and whatever you're comfortable with, how much money you've raised on my head count? If you want to get some companies comfortable giving a r r others on. But what what do you What can you share with us? >>Sure. Um, you know, we we've raised about 50 million in venture capital. We have grown from one to north of 20 million in revenue in the in the last three years. So particularly since you know, 2017, 2018 is what we really started to see. The growth take off, uh, company size. We have about 800 to 900 employees globally. Now we have about 200 corporate employees who perform the, you know, the the day to day functions of Oculus. And then we have a long tail of about 600 or so verifiers who perform data verification and quality control work again, Speaking to the human in the loop piece of the bottle. Uh, we're, you know, we're focused on expanding beyond the fintech customer base, where we serve customers like plaid PayPal lending club so fi square, etcetera into the mortgage space and ultimately into the traditional banking space where you know, the problems, frankly, are extremely similar. Just on a much larger scale. >>San Bobbly. Congratulations on all the success. You You've got a great road ahead. I really appreciate you coming on the Cube, >>Dave. Thanks so much. It's been a great chat. Look forward to keeping in touch. >>Alright, Did our pleasure. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. We'll see you next time

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to today's session of the AWS Startup Showcase, featuring Cordial. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests with me here today. Christy Parrish here, she's the director of client success at Cordial, and Hailey Pettit is here as well. She's the CRM manager at Nurx. Ladies, welcome to today's session. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, happy to be here. >> Excited about this conversation. You're going to be talking about personalizing at scale and we're going to look, learn how Nurx is re-inventing the digital patient experience, such a relevant topic. Let's go ahead and get started So the audience understands about each of your companies. Christy, we'll start with you. Give us an overview of Cordial and how you help customers? >> Absolutely. So Cordial is a cross channel messaging and data platform. So our clients can collect all of their unstructured customer and business data from wherever it lives in their tech stack and really use that data to build audience segments, discover trends and insights, and automate super hyper-personalized customer experiences at enterprise scale. So as someone who essentially grew up in the legacy email space, I actually worked at a legacy ESP for about 13 years. I see Cordial as a radical shift from heavy cumbersome data processes and the need for lengthy delays and heavy lift to send messages. We're activating massive amounts of consumer and business data kind of up to the second, regardless of its underlying structure or format. And we're making that available across any outbound channel to deliver these highly personalized messaging. So I think it's important to also mention that Cordial is more than just a platform. All of that power, all of the AWS powered power is backed by some of the best innovators and support teams in the industry. So I'm especially proud of how it partner with our clients like Nurx to help them build and execute on their business goals. We're enabling some of the best brands out there. You know, we have Eddie Bauer, we have 1-800 Contacts, REVOLVE Clothing. We're really bringing them agility and a solid marriage of art and science. >> Oh, I like that, a marriage of art and science Especially as we become more demanding as consumers. Whether we're consuming something in a retail environment or we're patients, we want the information to be really as you said, hyper personalized. So Hailey, let's talk about Nurx. This is a very interesting brand and I think it's very fitting that we're talking about this during Women's History Month as well. Give us an overview of what you guys do and why you're so radically novel? >> Yeah, so Nurx is a telehealth company and we are really focused on sensitive health needs. We're really a leader in the birth control space right now. So we prescribe and deliver online directly to our patients. So we offer not only birth control, but STI home testing prep, which is HIV preventative medication. We just launched acne treatment, migraine treatment. So really expanding within the healthcare space. I think what really sets Nurx apart is our one-to-one relationship with our providers, with our patients, and really at our core we really believe that healthcare should be accessible and affordable to everyone, no matter what their circumstances. So yeah, it's a very exciting space to be in and definitely being data-driven it really impacts that patient care and helps us really care for our patients in a really innovative, exciting way. >> It's very innovative. Christy let's talk a little bit about some of the other customers. We're going to dig into the Nurx story, but talk to me about some of the other customers that Cordial helps in other industries for example. You mentioned a few, but let's kind of open that up. >> Cordial really is helping a lot customers really in the retail space. So retail is that is a large focus on e-comm for us. What really kind of stands out to me about Cordial with retail and maybe even some of our publishing clients is our ability to sort of take that data agnostic approach. Data can come from anywhere, from anywhere in their tech stack and come into Cordial. And then we're really focused on making it accessible to them and meaningful for their outbound communications. So any channel, anytime kind of if they want to do direct mail or Facebook audiences, we really are able to bring in that data and look at their business goals, look at what they're trying to achieve inside of their vertical and then make that data powerful for them, not only for just talking to their customers and growing things like revenue per email or their lifetime value for their customers but really bringing it into their insights. And one of the things that I think Nurx is doing really well is using that data, using those insights to kind of feed the next evolution of their messaging programs. So that's a lot of what we're doing for our clients, and having some really stellar successes across verticals. >> So the data explosion, we have to address that. It's something that we're also helping to create as consumers, as patients, et cetera. But we also have this demand, like I said earlier. We want information on any channel. It's great if a brand can come to the channel that we want, that's rare to get that. But creating a data-driven customer experience is a really challenging thing to accomplish. Christy, how do you, how does Cordial help your customers in any industry actually do that and in a timely fashion so that the messages are relevant and personalized? >> Yeah, so I think in this case and in many cases, the key to creating that great customer experience is really using that data with empathy, being able to not just go out and check a box, look for the next logical data data point but really grabbing that data, making it into maybe thoughtful cohorts, thoughtful automated customer journeys, and using that not just to blast out marketing messages but to potentially, and like in the case of Nurx, address pain points or gaps in the knowledge on the behalf of the consumer. Or even for retail, faults in the buying cycle, right? So are they going to buy again soon? What is going to happen next? So this will really kind of make or break the customer experience. And in this case with Nurx it's the patient experience with the brand. So we want to be of the moment. We don't want to send out something that's wrong, last week's news or something like that, or push them beyond where they're at in their cycle. So being able to have kind of that empathy with the data and looking at it from a holistic standpoint, I think is kind of the data magic that Cordial is able to bring. >> The empathy point is provocative. How do you look at data with empathy and deliver those customer experiences that relay that, so that that customer actually feels the empathy coming from the vendor? >> Yeah, I love that point as well, especially in the healthcare space it's all about patient care and understanding how each patient is different in their needs. And so utilizing the data, understanding where they are in their journey with healthcare is so important and Cordial really does allow us to do that. And we use that data to craft really empathetic messaging. So we know where they are in the flow. We know what pain points they may have or what questions they may have at that stage. And so addressing those head on is super important and it's like a key strategic goal of decisions that we've made and everything that we do. I also think there's a lot of stigma in the healthcare space and so education is also a very key factor around these service lines. And yeah, it's really exciting to be able to have a voice in this space and really educate our patients and address those needs. >> And meet them where they are. I think, again, as consumers we're more and more demanding. We can get anything anywhere, any time. And we want you to come where we are, rather than us have to go to where you are. And certainly with healthcare that's been a big challenge in the last year or so. But let's talk about some of the, Christy I want to get your perspective on some of the challenges and the roadblocks when businesses are trying to really form synergistic, empathetic customer relationships at scale, what are some the roadblocks that you help customers move out of the way? >> Right, yeah. So every day at Cordial the volume of data increases, right? So data's coming from all places and we're trying to be smart about using it. We're really working on helping marketers figure out ways to apply insights and meaningful communication strategies to get past this concept of data paralysis, right? It's making that data accessible and meaningful and then giving marketers tools to distill that data into more actionable views so that they can take what they have learned from it and then again iterate on it. So building out customer attributes, cohorts, different ways of slicing the data to make sure that it's as meaningful as possible for their program. And then we partner that with offline insights. So best practices, program strategy trends, to push that distilled data even farther on behalf of their marketing programs. >> You mentioned data paralysis, and that's certainly something that no business, especially in the last year as we've seen a demand for real time is no longer a nice to have, it's really table stakes, but that data paralysis can be a big challenge in terms of how to work around it. How do you pull actionable nuggets from the data to make decisions in the fast enough time that are still relevant for your audience? Can you walk us through how you're doing that at Nurx? >> Yeah, at X we definitely stay focused on the patient and when you have that clarity it's easier to navigate through the data and not getting caught up in that paralysis. I mean, I'm not saying we're perfect, because I've definitely experienced that where there's just so much information that you have. And if you were to touch on each point, a lot of your automations would get really thin. So using the data smart and with, but also you're creative is really important. Another roadblock that we've had is, when you have increasing demand, when you're at scale, really automating some of the one-to-one interactions that you have is so important. And digging down into what data is important to automate those interactions. And I think a great example for us is we launched a post prescription flow. So our patients are notified when their prescription is on their way. And our providers told us, "Like clockwork we get these questions once patients are notified. And so we validated that in the data, we put that data within Cordial and we were able to build out a really successful automation that proactively address those questions. And we saw a direct decrease in those types of tickets to our providers asking those questions." So, yeah, that was really great to see too. >> So taking a look at the data and seeing the most common questions for certain types of prescriptions that providers are getting, which I imagine takes time from the provider being able to treat somebody else, condensing those down, automating those and then you're freeing up the provider as well because you know the common questions they could ask. So in terms of the patient then they sort of proactively got messages about questions that they might have. >> Yes, so more specifically how to start their medication. And then also some of the side effects that may be involved with that medication and what would be normal versus abnormal and what you should pay attention to. So just putting that in a very user-friendly format within an email worked really well. And addressing that question that our providers were taking a lot of time to answer. >> So, Hailey, so a prospective patient would go online, order what they want prescription wise, gets to a provider. They write the prescription and then is that sent to the patient's home? So there's no like physical interaction, it's all digital? >> Correct, yeah. It's all digital. We have our own pharmacy that fills the prescriptions and sends it right to your door. >> Yeah, excellent, on demand. So if we look at the last year there's been so many challenges, too many to count. But I'm wondering how, as the channels expand, we're all dependent on text and email and mobile, as the channels expand, Christy, how does the Cordial data architecture allow customers like Nurx to be able to flex as data sources expand, as data volumes grow, as channels expand, how do you allow them to have an architecture that will allow them to grow and continue to scale? >> Yeah, it's really important to ask that we be able to bring in all of this data and then like you said, a really critical point to Nurx and to a lot of our customers and our clients is, "Hey, we want to send it out across any channel." So Nurx, Hailey didn't mention that they're sending not only prescription information and follow up out by SMS or MMS marketing. They're also sending marketing messages too. So they're able to really leverage what we've built in terms of making that data accessible through all of these different channels, this channel agnostic at this point. So leveraging all of the bells and whistles of the platform, and also then using their data smartly, that's really where the clients are seeing a huge lift with the Cordial platform. They're able to visualize their data, see it, access it, even manipulate it, where in a legacy ESP, it's very limited in terms of manipulating data, aggregating it, looking at it from different angles and then being able to actually make it useful inside the platform for them. >> And Hailey, question for you. We talked about that automated prescription workflow a second ago. You also talked about this, each patient patient's journey being unique, wanting to deliver personalized, hyper-personalized actually is the word, Christy that you use. How does Cordial's platform allow you to respect the individual patient journey, customize it, and also do automation at scale? >> Yeah, I think with Cordial it's an incredible platform. We're able to pull in data from multiple sources and then it's very user-friendly in the way that you can interact with that data and manipulate it and really get at the cohorts that you were trying to reach. I think it's really a special platform. Honestly I think I haven't seen a lot of other platforms like this where it does make it really visually accessible to a brand or a company. >> Something, Christy that I wanted to ask you. I saw in the marketing messaging that what you're aiming to do is making marketing not personalized. And I thought, "Ooh, that's an interesting statement." What's the difference between personal and personalized from Cordial's point of view? >> It really goes back to that whole checking a box, right? So the traditional way of doing outbound communications marketing, even going back to the days of direct mail is to sort of wedge our customers into little boxes or even big boxes, and then send out messages that we think will resonate with them. Now we're really looking at it in real time as the messages are being generated and sent out of a platform where at the moment of send we're reading some signals that the customer is giving us, like what did they do on a website? Or did they respond to an SMS message or a text message? And at the moment of said we're actually sending content that is relevant at that time. It's vastly different from the way that we've traditionally marketed in outbound communications across all channels. So looking at real time, Hailey mentioned that she can visualize, we have a feature called orchestration builder that allows Hailey to come in and say, "Okay, based on these signals or triggers, I want to send this message to these users or these patients, but they need to be in that moment ready for that message. Or she could say, "If they're not ready for that message, let's skip them and come back to them later." And be able to really kind of narrow in and get super personal with those messages. Nurx is incredible, the way that they've used the platform and the way that she's built out these orchestrations, all credit to Haley on this. The way that she's smartly used her tools, it's not only effective, but it's sort of revolutionary, just in the way that she's able to find the right message at the right time. And in email we've said that for years. Right message at the right time. But really we haven't said, "Let's make it personal. Let's use the data that we just got 10 seconds ago and send the message now." So it's been great. >> Yeah, that's a game changer. Using the data that we just got about this person. Speaking of that, on-demand culture, that's a game changer for retail, for healthcare, to be able to tune that in an automated way. I imagine that the campaign ROI numbers, Christy are probably pretty much off the wall for your customers? >> In a lot of cases, they are. Yeah, they're doing really well. They're leveraging data in ways that I've never seen before. We've got some clients who are looking across periods of time, especially in retail, looking across periods of time at their customer's behavior. And then looking for ways to communicate them when maybe there wouldn't be a way to communicate with them that day. So it's the day that they send out a sale but they're are a person who doesn't like sales or doesn't respond to sales. So they may send them a different piece of content something lifestyle, or, you know, curating content, that kind of thing. So it's really been it has been a bit revolutionary in the way that the clients have leveraged the ability to let you know to use their data in new and kind of special ways. >> I can only imagine the last year has affected this in a good way, because we've become even more demanding as a society. Everybody everywhere struggling to get certain supplies for example, but Christy, how has the last year affected Cordial's growth and that of your customers? >> Yeah, so I say this frequently, we have sort of trained a new generation of e-com buyers in the last year. We've taught people how to buy online and that has affected a lot of our brick and mortar clients who also have e-comm business. You know, so we have a large group of furniture clients. And so they've really seen some incredible success, retraining their their customers to buy large items online. It's not an easy thing, but they've really become sort of renegade in the way that they're pushing out messaging and finding the right people to send those to these new econ buyers. So it's been really interesting and they've come back and invested in technology that has enabled them to build trust and build out these individualized brand experiences so that they can actually scale those programs. Now this year, as we're reopening, the strategy is shifting, right? We're looking at, "Okay, we had an incredible year in some cases last year with e-com. Now we're going to have a store that's opened." How do we make that experience special? How do we continue the dialogue with these customers? >> Such an interesting thing that sounds like it's Cordial's been a facilitator of the many pivots that so many businesses have needed to go through. And to your point, sort of re-pivoting back towards some mixture of online e-com and in physical retail or store rather experience, it'll be interesting to see how that happens. And then, Hailey, some pretty big statistics you have to share in terms of some of the things that Nurx saw in the last 12 months with respect to use of your platform and personalization. Talk to us about that? >> Yeah, it's been a very interesting year for Nurx for sure. We've seen a 50% increase in our demand for birth control, with medical providers, brick and mortar medical providers, having limited capacity. We've been able to really step up and serve these patients and make sure they have their healthcare needs met during this really difficult time. We've also seen about a three X increase in our demand for emergency contraception, 130% in STI home test kits. Yeah, it's just across the board it's been really incredible to be able to really fill this need in such a difficult time. So it's been exciting. I love being able to help serve these patients during this time, yeah. >> Yeah, and that need to do something so personalized during such an incredibly difficult time. That's a really interesting mix there. And congratulations on the success that you guys have had. I want to wrap things up, Christy with you. Let's just talk a little bit about the Cordial AWS relationship. You guys started on day one back in 2014, or you built on AWS, tell me about that? >> Yep, so definitely built on AWS. We leveraged the AWS system extensively and yeah, we started in 2014. I think the founders were looking for, where do we go for stability? Where do we go for efficiency and reliability? And so came over to AWS and since then we've become an advanced tier independent software vendor. And then I think more recently in the last couple of years, we've kind of gained a couple of competencies, retail and digital customer experience. So super embedded there. And really, I think AWS not only contributed to the foundation of the platform, it allows us to store and manage that massive volume of customer and business data for our clients and be able to actually house it in the cloud. Really it kind of empowers us to do that, to deliver that messaging at scale that we've been talking about. >> So AWS is an enabler of the way that you help your customers create this personalized experience at scale? >> Yeah, absolutely. And it really it helps us solve these challenging problems that we have where we're working with a client like Nurx and we have a few others where we have to be HIPAA compliant. So we rely on the AWS architecture to not only enable our scalability and reliability, but also with those high security and compliance standards. This is incredibly important to us in servicing our clients. >> Well, ladies, thank you so much for joining me today on the Showcase and sharing what your companies are each doing and what they're doing together. Big changes, big opportunities, and that personalized experience that I think we all crave. Thank you so much for joining me today. >> Thanks Lisa. >> Thank you. For my guests, Christy Parrish and Hailey Pettit. I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Voiceover: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience this year. I'm Lisa Martin, pleased to be joined by two CUBE alumni from Dell EMC. Please welcome Joe Caradonna, the VP of Cloud Storage CTO. Joe, good to see you again, even though quite socially distant. >> Yeah, thank you, it's great to be here. >> And Devon Reed is also joining us, the Senior Director of Product Management. Devon, how are you? >> I'm good, how are you doing? >> Good. >> Nice to be here, thank you. >> Nice to be chatting with you guys, although very, very socially distant, following rules. It wouldn't be a Dell Technologies World without having you guys on theCUBE, so we appreciate you joining us. So let's dig in. So much has happened in the world since we last spoke with you. But one of the things that happened last year, around a year ago, was the Dell On Demand program was launched. And now here we are nearly a year later when Michael Dell was just talking about, "Hey, Dell's plan is to go "and deliver everything as a service." We've heard some of your competitors kind of going the same route, some kind of spurned by COVID. Talk to us, Devon, we'll start with you, about what this direction is shift to as-a-service means and what it means specifically for storage. >> Yeah, certainly. So first and foremost, what we talked about last year with respect to On Demand, Dell Technologies On Demand, we've had great success with that program. But before I get into what we're doing with as-a-service, I really want to talk about why we're doing the as-a-service. And when we talk to customers and partners, and when we look at the trends in the market, what we're seeing is that customers are more and more wanting to consume technology infrastructure as a service in an OPEX manner. And analysts are revising those estimates up almost daily. And what we're seeing is one of the things that's driving that is actually why we're here in this remote session as opposed to being in Vegas, doing this. And it's really the global uncertainty around the pandemic. So it's driving the need to free up cash and consume these infrastructure more as a service. Now, as Michael said... Yeah, as Michael said, we have the broadest set of infrastructure offerings in the market and we are number one in most categories. And we're in the process of building out an offer structure that cuts across all the different infrastructure components. But to get real specific on what we're doing with a storage as a service, we are in the process of building out the first true storage or as a service offering for our infrastructure starting with storage. It'll be a private preview as of Q4, by the end of this fiscal year and generally available in the first half of next year. And what we're doing is taking the infrastructure, the Dell Technology's storage and where we're flipping the business model as opposed to buying it outright, the customers actually just consume it as a service. So they have a very simple consumption model where they just pick their outcome, they pick their restored service, they pick their performance, they pick their capacity, and we deliver that service to their on-premise site. >> Let me unpack outcomes of it, 'cause I saw that in some of the information online, outcome driven. What do you mean by that, and can you give us some examples of those outcomes that customers are looking to achieve? >> Yeah, so in today's world, the way people mostly consume infrastructure is, or at least storage, is that they say, "I need a storage product." And what the customers do is they work with our sales representatives and say, "I need a XYZ product. "Maybe it's a PowerStore and I need this much capacity. "I can pick all of the components, "I can pick the number of drives, "the type of drives there are." And that's really from a product perspective. And what we're doing with the, as-a-service, is we're trying to flip the model and really drive to what the business outcome is. So the business outcome here is really, I need block storage, I need this performance level, I need this much capacity. And then we basically ship the infrastructure, we think, that better suits those outcomes. And we're making changes across our entire infrastructure value chain to really deliver these service. So we try to deliver these much quicker for the customer. We actually manage the infrastructure. So it enables customers to spend less time managing their infrastructure and more time actually operating the service, paying attention to their business outcomes. >> Got it, and that's what every customer wants more of is more time to actually deliver this business outcomes and make those course corrections as they need to. Joe, let's talk to you for a bit. Let's talk, what's going on with cloud? The last time we saw you, a lot of change as we talked about, but give us a picture of Dell's cloud strategy. From what you guys are doing on-prem to what you are doing with cloud partners. What is this multi-pronged cloud strategy actually mean? >> Yeah, sure, I mean, our customers want hybrid cloud solutions and we believe that to be the model going forward. And so actually what we're doing is, if you think about it, we're taking the best of public cloud and bringing it on-prem, and we're also taking the best of on-prem and bringing it to the public cloud. So, you know, Devon just talked to you about how we're bringing that public cloud operation model to the data center. But what we've also done is bring our storage arrays to the cloud as a service. And we've done that with PowerStore, we've done that with PowerMax, and we've done that with PowerScale. And in the case of PowerScale for Google cloud, I mean, you get the same performance and capacity scale out in the cloud as you do on-prem. And the systems inter-operate between on-prem and cloud so it makes it easy for fluid data mobility across these environments. And for the first time it enables our customers to get their data to the cloud in a way that they can bring their high performance file workloads to the cloud. >> So talk to me a little bit about, you mentioned PowerScale for Google cloud service, is that a Dell hardware based solution? How does that work? >> Yeah, the adoptions have been great. I mean, we launched back in May and since then we brought on customers in oil and gas and eCommerce and in health as well. And we're growing out the regions, we're going to be announcing a new region in North America soon and we're going to be building out in APJ and EMEA as well. So, customer response has been fantastic, looking forward to growing up. >> Excellent, Devon back to you, let's talk about some of the things that are going on with PowerProtect DD, some new cloud services there too. Can you unpack that for us? >> So Joe, was talking about how we were taking our storage systems and putting them in the cloud. So I just back up in, and kind of introduce real quickly or reintroduce our Dell Technologies Cloud Storage Services. And that's really, we have our primary storage systems from Unity XT, the PowerStore, to PowerScale, to ECS, and that's housed in a co-locations facility right next to hyperscalers. And then that enables us to provide a fully managed service offering to our customers to a multi-cloud. So what we're doing is we're extending the Dell Technologies Cloud Storage Services to include PowerProtect DD. So we're bringing PowerProtect DD into this managed services offering so customers can use it for cloud, longterm retention, backup, archiving, and direct backup from a multicloud environment. So extending what we've already done with the Dell Technologies Cloud Storage Services. >> So is that almost kind of like a cloud based data protection solution for those workloads that are running in the cloud VMs, SaaS applications, physical servers, spiral data, things like that? >> Yeah, there's several use cases. So you could have a primary block storage system on your premises and you could actually be providing direct backup into the cloud. You could have backups that you have on-premise that you could be then replicating with PowerProtect data, data domain replication to cloud. And you could also have data in AWS, or Azure, or Google that you could be backing up directly to the PowerProtect domain into this service. So there's multiple use cases. >> Got it, all right. Joe, let's talk about some of the extensions of cloud you guys have both been talking about the last few minutes. One of the recent announcements was about PowerMax being cloud enabled and that's a big deal to cloudify something like that. Help us understand the nature of that, the impetus, and what that means now and what customers are able to actually use today. >> Yeah sure, I mean, we've launched the PowerMax as a cloud service about a year and a half ago with our partner, Faction. And that's for those customers that want that tier zero enterprise grade data capabilities in the cloud. And not just a cloud, it also offers multicloud capabilities for both file and block. Now, in addition, the Dell Tech World, we're launching additional cloud mobility capabilities for PowerMax, where let's say you have a PowerMax on-prem, you could actually do snapshot shipping to an object repository. And that could be in AWS, that can be in Azure, or it could be locally to our local ECS object store. In addition, in the case of Amazon we go a step further where if you do snapshot shipping into Amazon S3, you can then rehydrate those snapshots directly into EBS. And that way you can do processing on that data in the cloud as well. >> Give us an idea, Joe, the last few months or so what some of your customer conversations have been like? I know you're normally in front of customers all the time. Dell Tech World is a great example. I think last year there was about 14,000 folks there, was huge. And we're all so used to that three dimensional engagement, more challenging to do remotely, but talk to me about some of the customer conversations that you've had, and how they've helped influence some of the recent announcements. >> Yeah sure, customers... It might sound a little cliche, but cloud is a journey. It's a journey for our customers. It's a journey for us too, as we build out our capabilities to best serve them. But their questions are, "I want to take advantage "of that elastic compute in the cloud." But maybe the data storage doesn't keep up with it. In the case of when we go to PowerScale for Google, the reason why we brought that platform to the cloud is 'cause you can get hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput through that. And for our customers that are doing things like processing genomic sequencing data, they need that level of throughput, and they want to move those workloads into the cloud. The computer's there but the storage systems to keep up with it, were not. So by us bringing a solution like this to the cloud, now they can do that. So we see that with PowerScale, we see a lot of that with file in the cloud because the file services in the cloud aren't as mature as some of the other ones like with block and object. So we're helping filling some of those gaps and getting them to those higher performance tiers. And as I was mentioning, with things like PowerMax and PowerStore, it's extending their on-prem presence into the public cloud. So they can start to make decisions not based on a capability, but more based on the requirements for where they want to run their workloads. >> And let's switch gears to talking about partners now. Dell has a huge partner ecosystem. We always talk with those folks on theCUBE as well, every year. Devon, from a product management perspective, tell me about some of the things that are interesting to partners and what the advantages are for partners with this shift in what, how Dell is going to be delivering, from PCs, to storage, to HCI, for example. >> Yeah exactly, so, Joe mentioned that it's really a journey and Joe talked a lot about how customers aren't maybe not (indistinct) completely going to a hyperscale or to a complete public cloud. And what we're hearing is there's a lot of customers that are actually wanting the cloud-like experience, but wanting it on-prem. And we're hearing from our partners almost on a daily basis. I have a lot of partner customer conversations where they want to be involved in delivering this as a service. Through their customers, they want to maintain that relationship, derive that value, and in some cases even provide the services for them. And that's what we're looking do as the largest infrastructure provider with the broadest base of partnership we have an advantage there. >> Is there any specific partner certification programs that partners can get into to help start rolling this out? >> At this point, we are trying to build it, but at this point we had nothing to announce here but that's something that we're actively working on and stay tuned for that. >> I imagine there will be a lot of virtual conversations at the digital tech world this year, between the partner community when all of these things are announced. And you get those brains collectively together although obviously virtually, to start iterating on ideas and developing things that might be great to programmatize down the road. And, Joe, last question for you, second to last question actually, is this, this year as we talked about a number of times, everyone's remote, everyone's virtual. It's challenging to get that level of engagement. We're all so used to being in-person and all of the hallway conversations even that you have when you're walking around the massive show floor for example, what can participants and attendees expect from your perspective this year at Dell Technologies World? Will they be able to get the education and that engagement that Dell really wants to deliver? >> Yeah, well, clearly we had to scale things back quite, there's no way around that. But we have a lot of sessions that were designed to inform them with a new capabilities we've been building out. And not just for cloud, but across the portfolio. So I hope they get a lot out of that. We have some interactive sessions in there as well, for some interactive Q and A. And you're right, I mean, a challenge for us is connecting with the customer in this virtual reality. We're all at home, right? The customers are at home. So we've been on Zoom, like never before, reaching out to customers to better understand where they want to go, what their challenges are and how we can help them. So I would say we are connecting, it's a little different and requires a little more effort on everyone's part. We just can't all do it in the same day anymore. It is just a little more spread out. >> Well, then it kind of shows the opportunity to consume things on demand. And as consumers, we sort of have this expectation that we can get anything we want on demand. But you mentioned, Joe, in the second to last question, this is the last one. But you mentioned, everybody's at home. You have to tell us about that fantastic guitar behind you. What's the story? >> Every guitar has a story. I'll just say for today, look, this is my tribute to Eddie Van Halen. We're going to miss him for sure. >> And I'll have the audience know, I did ask Joe to play us out. He declined, but I'm going to hold them to that for next time, 'cause we're not sure when we're going to get to see you guys in person again. Joe and Devon, thank you so much for joining me on the program today. It's been great talking to you. Lots of things coming, lots of iterations, lots of influence from the customers, influence from COVID and we're excited to see what is to come. Thanks for your time. >> Both: Thank you so much. >> From my guests, Joe Caradonna and Devon Reed, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this episode of "CXO Insights." As you know, we've been grabbing the perspectives of leaders throughout this pandemic and assessing their tips for managing in a crisis and of course, managing in good times as well. But now, as we enter the post-isolation economy, we really want to look at not just how you manage through the crisis but how you manage beyond the crisis. And I'm really excited to have Chris Riley here. He's the newly minted Chief Revenue Officer at Automation Anywhere. Chris, my friend, how you doing? I hope you and the family are well. >> Thank you, David. I wish the same for you. I think getting by as most folks are, it's the new normal, we're all getting used to it but I'm happy to be here and happy to be at Automation Anywhere. >> Yeah, I want to talk about that in detail. Eddie Walsh calls it the new abnormal but so congratulations on the new role. I want to start with your career. I met you in 1987, which ironically was the same year I met Dave Donatelli, the same year I met Michigan I. and Saul Koi, talk about great timing. And then, you came into the industry at a time, really different time. It was, the IBM people don't remember this but IBM was the dominant player and you guys unseated them amazing 12-year career at EMC and then you kind of went to the .com boom. That was amazing. You relive that ride, did a stint at HP and really turned that business around and then came back to Dell, top go to market executive. One of the top in the industry that I know and now, of course at Automation Anywhere we're going to talk about. My first question to you is, a lot of changes have occurred since 1987. What has changed the most? Now we're talking diversity, we're talking all kinds of your different sales models. From your career looking back, what's changed the most? >> I think everything has changed and candidly for the better, Dave. You just led with one of the key areas in an area I'm deeply passionate about and that is diversity and inclusion and I think there's no stronger time, at least in our country's history where the inequalities that exist have been so exposed. So I view this as an opportunity, as I did at Dell to make a difference, lead from the front and make this a destination and a company whose culture really supports and drives diversity and inclusion. So I'd say that's one area, and I know it's very passionate for you as well. The others, it was a time before laptops, desktops. I think Ken Olsen once said, who would ever need a laptop in their home and boy, the world has changed. So I think some of the things though that haven't changed and this is why I'm so excited about Automation Anywhere. At the manual processes we have our workers doing and I think there is a real opportunity. I've lived through explosive growth at EMC, top company performing stock during the 90s, I get to see VMware firsthand. I've seen what's happened with ServiceNow and I believe this RPA space, as to you is in its infancy. It's seeing 30% compounded annual growth and we're just at the beginning and I think it's going to change the way people work and really lead to that digital transformation that so many of us have been talking about for the last decade. >> Yeah and you know kind of my position. Quick aside, I don't know if you saw the Netflix announcement this morning and I've been wondering as a small business, what can we do? What more can we do for inclusion and diversity? Netflix announced they're going to take 2% of their cash and put it into banks, financial institutions that support black causes and I just talked to our CFO. I said, look, why don't we take some of our cash, let's take 2% and stick it into banks, community banks. There's 30 million small businesses in the United States. If just 1% puts 10 grand in each, that's $3 billion that go into black community. So I'm going to start a mission and I just thought I'd share that 'cause I know it's a passion of yours. >> Yeah, and we all need to be in a position to provide equal opportunity for employment and that is reaching out into those communities and starting early on in creating the opportunities for advancement professionally, mentorship and just the path forward. And I'm excited to see what Netflix is doing. I'm sure you'll come up with the right answer for your company and I think all of us are searching, what's the right answer for our respective companies? >> Yeah, so now let's get into it. You're a month in and I want to talk about this project. I've learned a lot about not only RPA but about automation. I've just had a deep dive with your team and it really brought some things into focus. Guys, if you bring up the first slide, I want to get some thoughts on the table here. So this is a chart that sort of came into my focus with a friend of mine, Dave Moschello, who really big thinker on this stuff and he pointed out, this is data from the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics and the EU and it shows the lackluster productivity that's going on in the past decade. So you can see, we had the boost in the 80s and the 90s, we had this sort of productivity uptick from laptops but now, look what's happened since 2007. And the point that Moschello made on the right hand side is we have all these huge issues that we face, whether it's climate change, we have this massive debt, healthcare, an aging population, feeding everyone, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and his point was, there's no way we're going to be able to solve all these problems by throwing humans at the problem. So I've really begun to sort of think about this just in terms of machines and the roles that machines will play. I think overnight, Chris, we've gone from, wow, I'm afraid that machines are going to take my job to you can't operate if you're not digital. >> Yeah, well digital transformation is not a new term. I think it's meant something different each year for the last 10 years and I look at this as an opportunity. The World Economic Forum projected that IA and RPA will create 58 million new jobs. It's an astounding number. What COVID-19 has exposed is this work from home phenomenon that really exposes the risk of manual processes within the enterprise. So I think those two things combined is almost a perfect storm and I think what it'll do is accelerate the adoption of RPA and IPA. So something that might've taken years or decades to really be adopted in force, in this new normal, I think is going to be accelerated quite dramatically. >> So, the combination of your go to market execution, you managed complex sales motions before. Automation Anywhere obviously has some great product capabilities. Guys, I want to bring up the next slide and Chris, you might have seen this in some of the stuff that I wrote but this is data from ETR Enterprise technology research. They're a data partner of ours. Now it's clear that Automation Anywhere has the right product market fit and you can see on this chart, this is a methodology that we use. ETR goes out and they ask people, are you adopting a platform new? Are you increasing spending relative to last year? Are you flat, decreasing or replacing? And you can see here, there is zero churn in the Automation Anywhere base. And so obviously you got product market fit. Churn is the silent killer, obviously of SAS companies and so, you've picked a winner and I'm learning more about this. At first I thought the team office is quite large, I sized it. I actually think it's bigger than I originally thought. Chris, I thought this was going to be a winner-take-all type of market. I'm really rethinking that after, especially the deep dive I've had with your team in terms of how you guys go to market with an end-to-end sort of life cycle approach as opposed to sort of putting point products in. So I wonder if that narrative that I just laid out, resonates with you, is it sort of consistent with what you're seeing and then maybe some of the reasons why you joined Automation Anywhere? >> Yeah, I would say the most aggressive software growth that I've seen in the last decade or so, and two companies stand out for me. That's VMware and ServiceNow. They don't have a point product, they have a platform and that's what attracted me to Automation Anywhere is this platform approach. And Dave as you know, I've spent most of my career calling on the enterprise' strong relationships with those types of companies and they aren't looking to develop a point product solution and then cobble together lots of disparate islands of solutions. They're looking for a platform that can grow as they grow. They can extend from the back office to the front office but all centered around workforce, transformation, productivity and just as importantly, resiliency. And as we start to develop more and more capabilities that will be delivered through this platform approach, I think we're going to see explosive growth as the industry goes through its explosive growth. >> Well, I know your approach and your approach is to stay very close to customers. So as you were doing your due diligence on Automation Anywhere and as you enter your sort of first part of your 100-day journey here, I'm sure you've talked to a lot of customers. What are they telling you? What are the big takeaways right now that you're hearing? >> Yeah, so I think some of the data you pointed out with 4,000 customers in essence, zero churn, the opportunity to upsell those customers with more products and solutions clearly is there. New account acquisition has been a tremendous source of growth for the company in a strong professional services organization that actually is able to deliver the outcomes that our customers expect. From an enterprise perspective, I couldn't have come into a better situation with 4,000 customers, 50% of the fortune 500, 2 million bots deployed, those types of strategic relationships are going to be more and more critical as this company continues to accelerate its growth. Most of the RPA solutions really got in through the back office and candidly, really weren't even a component of an IT solution. Now, as you go to the front of the house, where you're looking at customer facing applications and worker productivity, these are CEO, CFO, COO and IT initiatives. So I really believe we're coming into our own, at the front of the house with senior executives that really want to create a better working environment for their employees and de-risk a lot of these manual processes that have existed for years. >> So I know why you chose Automation Anywhere. My question is, why did Automation Anywhere choose Chris Riley? I know your capabilities but obviously when somebody hires a executive like yourself, they say, "Hey, Chris, we want you to help us "get to the next level," but what does that mean? Are we talking about changes in the go to market? Are we talking about your ability to recruit and coach, to manage complex of sales motions? What is it that you want to bring to Automation Anywhere? >> I think it's all those, Dave. Having built a reputation throughout my 30 plus year career around a people-centric focus, a customer-centric focus and those two things kind of aren't interchangeable. When you look at customers, they put their faith and confidence in people and they put their faith and confidence in companies. And what I see here at Automation Anywhere is that the ability to kind of expand upon the great culture that the company already has but do it with someone whose role in a company at scale globally and can put a lot of the best practices and disciplines in place to do that 'cause it is difficult but also, how do we start to do larger, more complex deals and build relationships with the CIO, the CFO, the CEO? And I think a big reason why I'm here is, that experience in doing that, doing large complex multi-year opportunities but also being able to deliver upon the outcomes that we told our customers we could achieve and do that together with our customers and again we have a strong professional services organization and an incredible ecosystem of partners that have demonstrated year over year, the company's ability to actually deliver upon its promise. >> That was my next question to you, was the ecosystem. One of the big changes from when you started in this business, was it used to be just belly to belly, hardcore, direct sales, the importance and leverage that you get from a partner ecosystem. You point out VMware. In fact ServiceNow, it's interesting. When we first started covering ServiceNow, one of the things we said is we want to see as an indicator of success, the partner ecosystem evolve and then sure enough, it exploded with the SIs and all the kinds of developers. So maybe talk about AA's ecosystem, The Partner System. You obviously have a lot of experience there in your career, how do you see that as a leverage point? >> Yeah, it's huge. This market is far larger than we can cover with a direct sales organization and requires substantial services engagements that go well beyond the kind of professional services organization we want to build out organically in the company. So when you look at that, the company today has 1,900 partners. The global systems integrators are key, especially those with VPO type practices, the regional SIs and candidly, the regional VARs who've built out a strong service malpractice, a strong VMware practice and have the professional services capabilities to do some of these complex automation or automation type work that have also built the trust and confidence of their customers. So, in partnership with these types of companies, we believe we can expand our reach. We believe we can offer a more comprehensive outcome and solution to our customers and we, what I'm going to be looking at is, how do we enhance our channel programs to be the kind of company that the channel partners want to engage with, built upon the reputation of the company, the leadership position we have in the technology and also our willingness to go after this space together. >> So I got to go but last question is, what can you share with us about your 100-day plan? Where are you going to focus? >> On the people. There is a strong culture here, there's incredible sales talent and there's talent throughout the organization. I think Dave, you've seen for me over the years, a clarity of our mission, keep things simple and try and drive a repetitive process to deliver results. I'm very accountability focused. So I think what I'm going to look to assess is where the organization is today, how to get more out of the great talent we have, build stronger and deeper relationships with our customers and really scale and grow through our ecosystem of channel partners. >> Well, Chris, I'm super excited for you. A great hire by Automation Anywhere obviously got my attention. I think it'll get the industry's as well. Best of luck, and of course we'll be watching. >> Good, always great to see you, Dave, take care. >> Yeah, ditto, thanks so much for coming on and thank you for watching everybody. Keep it here because this month we're going to be really digging into the ETR data we've been reporting on that horse race between Automation Anywhere and UI Path. The ETR data is in the field and we'll be reporting on that. So look for that. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's the queue with digital coverage of DockerCon live 2020. Brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome, welcome, welcome to DockerCon 2020. We got over 50,000 people registered so there's clearly a ton of interest in the world of Docker and Eddie's as I like to call it. And we've assembled a power panel of Open Source and cloud native experts to talk about where things stand in 2020 and where we're headed. I'm Shawn Conley, I'll be the moderator for today's panel. I'm also a proud alum of JBoss, Red Hat, SpringSource, VMware and Hortonworks and I'm broadcasting from my hometown of Philly. Our panelists include; Michelle Noorali, Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, joining us from Atlanta, Georgia. We have Kelsey Hightower, Principal developer advocate at Google Cloud, joining us from Washington State and we have Chris Aniszczyk, CTO CIO at the CNCF, joining us from Austin, Texas. So I think we have the country pretty well covered. Thank you all for spending time with us on this power panel. Chris, I'm going to start with you, let's dive right in. You've been in the middle of the Docker netease wave since the beginning with a clear focus on building a better world through open collaboration. What are your thoughts on how the Open Source landscape has evolved over the past few years? Where are we in 2020? And where are we headed from both community and a tech perspective? Just curious to get things sized up? >> Sure, when CNCF started about roughly four, over four years ago, the technology mostly focused on just the things around Kubernetes, monitoring communities with technology like Prometheus, and I think in 2020 and the future, we definitely want to move up the stack. So there's a lot of tools being built on the periphery now. So there's a lot of tools that handle running different types of workloads on Kubernetes. So things like Uvert and Shay runs VMs on Kubernetes, which is crazy, not just containers. You have folks that, Microsoft experimenting with a project called Kruslet which is trying to run web assembly workloads natively on Kubernetes. So I think what we've seen now is more and more tools built around the periphery, while the core of Kubernetes has stabilized. So different technologies and spaces such as security and different ways to run different types of workloads. And at least that's kind of what I've seen. >> So do you have a fair amount of vendors as well as end users still submitting in projects in, is there still a pretty high volume? >> Yeah, we have 48 total projects in CNCF right now and Michelle could speak a little bit more to this being on the DOC, the pipeline for new projects is quite extensive and it covers all sorts of spaces from two service meshes to security projects and so on. So it's ever so expanding and filling in gaps in that cloud native landscape that we have. >> Awesome. Michelle, Let's head to you. But before we actually dive in, let's talk a little glory days. A rumor has it that you are the Fifth Grade Kickball Championship team captain. (Michelle laughs) Are the rumors true? >> They are, my speech at the end of the year was the first talk I ever gave. But yeah, it was really fun. I wasn't captain 'cause I wasn't really great at anything else apart from constantly cheer on the team. >> A little better than my eighth grade Spelling Champ Award so I think I'd rather have the kickball. But you've definitely, spent a lot of time leading an Open Source, you've been across many projects for many years. So how does the art and science of collaboration, inclusivity and teamwork vary? 'Cause you're involved in a variety of efforts, both in the CNCF and even outside of that. And then what are some tips for expanding the tent of Open Source projects? >> That's a good question. I think it's about transparency. Just come in and tell people what you really need to do and clearly articulate your problem, more clearly articulate your problem and why you can't solve it with any other solution, the more people are going to understand what you're trying to do and be able to collaborate with you better. What I love about Open Source is that where I've seen it succeed is where incentives of different perspectives and parties align and you're just transparent about what you want. So you can collaborate where it makes sense, even if you compete as a company with another company in the same area. So I really like that, but I just feel like transparency and honesty is what it comes down to and clearly communicating those objectives. >> Yeah, and the various foundations, I think one of the things that I've seen, particularly Apache Software Foundation and others is the notion of checking your badge at the door. Because the competition might be between companies, but in many respects, you have engineers across many companies that are just kicking butt with the tech they contribute, claiming victory in one way or the other might make for interesting marketing drama. But, I think that's a little bit of the challenge. In some of the, standards-based work you're doing I know with CNI and some other things, are they similar, are they different? How would you compare and contrast into something a little more structured like CNCF? >> Yeah, so most of what I do is in the CNCF, but there's specs and there's projects. I think what CNCF does a great job at is just iterating to make it an easier place for developers to collaborate. You can ask the CNCF for basically whatever you need, and they'll try their best to figure out how to make it happen. And we just continue to work on making the processes are clearer and more transparent. And I think in terms of specs and projects, those are such different collaboration environments. Because if you're in a project, you have to say, "Okay, I want this feature or I want this bug fixed." But when you're in a spec environment, you have to think a little outside of the box and like, what framework do you want to work in? You have to think a little farther ahead in terms of is this solution or this decision we're going to make going to last for the next how many years? You have to get more of a buy in from all of the key stakeholders and maintainers. So it's a little bit of a longer process, I think. But what's so beautiful is that you have this really solid, standard or interface that opens up an ecosystem and allows people to build things that you could never have even imagined or dreamed of so-- >> Gotcha. So I'm Kelsey, we'll head over to you as your focus is on, developer advocate, you've been in the cloud native front lines for many years. Today developers are faced with a ton of moving parts, spanning containers, functions, Cloud Service primitives, including container services, server-less platforms, lots more, right? I mean, there's just a ton of choice. How do you help developers maintain a minimalist mantra in the face of such a wealth of choice? I think minimalism I hear you talk about that periodically, I know you're a fan of that. How do you pass that on and your developer advocacy in your day to day work? >> Yeah, I think, for most developers, most of this is not really the top of mind for them, is something you may see a post on Hacker News, and you might double click into it. Maybe someone on your team brought one of these tools in and maybe it leaks up into your workflow so you're forced to think about it. But for most developers, they just really want to continue writing code like they've been doing. And the best of these projects they'll never see. They just work, they get out of the way, they help them with log in, they help them run their application. But for most people, this isn't the core idea of the job for them. For people in operations, on the other hand, maybe these components fill a gap. So they look at a lot of this stuff that you see in the CNCF and Open Source space as number one, various companies or teams sharing the way that they do things, right? So these are ideas that are put into the Open Source, some of them will turn into products, some of them will just stay as projects that had mutual benefit for multiple people. But for the most part, it's like walking through an ion like Home Depot. You pick the tools that you need, you can safely ignore the ones you don't need, and maybe something looks interesting and maybe you study it to see if that if you have a problem. And for most people, if you don't have that problem that that tool solves, you should be happy. No one needs every project and I think that's where the foundation for confusion. So my main job is to help people not get stuck and confused in LAN and just be pragmatic and just use the tools that work for 'em. >> Yeah, and you've spent the last little while in the server-less space really diving into that area, compare and contrast, I guess, what you found there, minimalist approach, who are you speaking to from a server-less perspective versus that of the broader CNCF? >> The thing that really pushed me over, I was teaching my daughter how to make a website. So she's on her Chromebook, making a website, and she's hitting 127.0.0.1, and it looks like geo cities from the 90s but look, she's making website. And she wanted her friends to take a look. So she copied and paste from her browser 127.0.0.1 and none of her friends could pull it up. So this is the point where every parent has to cross that line and say, "Hey, do I really need to sit down "and teach my daughter about Linux "and Docker and Kubernetes." That isn't her main goal, her goal was to just launch her website in a way that someone else can see it. So we got Firebase installed on her laptop, she ran one command, Firebase deploy. And our site was up in a few minutes, and she sent it over to her friend and there you go, she was off and running. The whole server-less movement has that philosophy as one of the stated goal that needs to be the workflow. So, I think server-less is starting to get closer and closer, you start to see us talk about and Chris mentioned this earlier, we're moving up the stack. Where we're going to up the stack, the North Star there is feel where you get the focus on what you're doing, and not necessarily how to do it underneath. And I think server-less is not quite there yet but every type of workload, stateless web apps check, event driven workflows check, but not necessarily for things like machine learning and some other workloads that more traditional enterprises want to run so there's still work to do there. So server-less for me, serves as the North Star for why all these Projects exists for people that may have to roll their own platform, to provide the experience. >> So, Chris, on a related note, with what we were just talking about with Kelsey, what's your perspective on the explosion of the cloud native landscape? There's, a ton of individual projects, each can be used separately, but in many cases, they're like Lego blocks and used together. So things like the surface mesh interface, standardizing interfaces, so things can snap together more easily, I think, are some of the approaches but are you doing anything specifically to encourage this cross fertilization and collaboration of bug ability, because there's just a ton of projects, not only at the CNCF but outside the CNCF that need to plug in? >> Yeah, I mean, a lot of this happens organically. CNCF really provides of the neutral home where companies, competitors, could trust each other to build interesting technology. We don't force integration or collaboration, it happens on its own. We essentially allow the market to decide what a successful project is long term or what an integration is. We have a great Technical Oversight Committee that helps shepherd the overall technical vision for the organization and sometimes steps in and tries to do the right thing when it comes to potentially integrating a project. Previously, we had this issue where there was a project called Open Tracing, and an effort called Open Census, which is basically trying to standardize how you're going to deal with metrics, on the tree and so on in a cloud native world that we're essentially competing with each other. The CNCF TC and committee came together and merged those projects into one parent ever called Open Elementary and so that to me is a case study of how our committee helps, bridges things. But we don't force things, we essentially want our community of end users and vendors to decide which technology is best in the long term, and we'll support that. >> Okay, awesome. And, Michelle, you've been focused on making distributed systems digestible, which to me is about simplifying things. And so back when Docker arrived on the scene, some people referred to it as developer dopamine, which I love that term, because it's simplified a bunch of crufty stuff for developers and actually helped them focus on doing their job, writing code, delivering code, what's happening in the community to help developers wire together multi-part modern apps in a way that's elegant, digestible, feels like a dopamine rush? >> Yeah, one of the goals of the(mumbles) project was to make it easier to deploy an application on Kubernetes so that you could see what the finished product looks like. And then dig into all of the things that that application is composed of, all the resources. So we're really passionate about this kind of stuff for a while now. And I love seeing projects that come into the space that have this same goal and just iterate and make things easier. I think we have a ways to go still, I think a lot of the iOS developers and JS developers I get to talk to don't really care that much about Kubernetes. They just want to, like Kelsey said, just focus on their code. So one of the projects that I really like working with is Tilt gives you this dashboard in your CLI, aggregates all your logs from your applications, And it kind of watches your application changes, and reconfigures those changes in Kubernetes so you can see what's going on, it'll catch errors, anything with a dashboard I love these days. So Yali is like a metrics dashboard that's integrated with STL, a service graph of your service mesh, and lets you see the metrics running there. I love that, I love that dashboard so much. Linkerd has some really good service graph images, too. So anything that helps me as an end user, which I'm not technically an end user, but me as a person who's just trying to get stuff up and running and working, see the state of the world easily and digest them has been really exciting to see. And I'm seeing more and more dashboards come to light and I'm very excited about that. >> Yeah, as part of the DockerCon just as a person who will be attending some of the sessions, I'm really looking forward to see where DockerCompose is going, I know they opened up the spec to broader input. I think your point, the good one, is there's a bit more work to really embrace the wealth of application artifacts that compose a larger application. So there's definitely work the broader community needs to lean in on, I think. >> I'm glad you brought that up, actually. Compose is something that I should have mentioned and I'm glad you bring that up. I want to see programming language libraries, integrate with the Compose spec. I really want to see what happens with that I think is great that they open that up and made that a spec because obviously people really like using Compose. >> Excellent. So Kelsey, I'd be remiss if I didn't touch on your January post on changelog entitled, "Monoliths are the Future." Your post actually really resonated with me. My son works for a software company in Austin, Texas. So your hometown there, Chris. >> Yeah. >> Shout out to Will and the chorus team. His development work focuses on adding modern features via micro services as extensions to the core monolith that the company was founded on. So just share some thoughts on monoliths, micro services. And also, what's deliverance dopamine from your perspective more broadly, but people usually phrase as monoliths versus micro services, but I get the sense you don't believe it's either or. >> Yeah, I think most companies from the pragmatic so one of their argument is one of pragmatism. Most companies have trouble designing any app, monolith, deployable or microservices architecture. And then these things evolve over time. Unless you're really careful, it's really hard to know how to slice these things. So taking an idea or a problem and just knowing how to perfectly compartmentalize it into individual deployable component, that's hard for even the best people to do. And double down knowing the actual solution to the particular problem. A lot of problems people are solving they're solving for the first time. It's really interesting, our industry in general, a lot of people who work in it have never solved the particular problem that they're trying to solve for the first time. So that's interesting. The other part there is that most of these tools that are here to help are really only at the infrastructure layer. We're talking freeways and bridges and toll bridges, but there's nothing that happens in the actual developer space right there in memory. So the libraries that interface to the structure logging, the libraries that deal with rate limiting, the libraries that deal with authorization, can this person make this query with this user ID? A lot of those things are still left for developers to figure out on their own. So while we have things like the brunettes and fluid D, we have all of these tools to deploy apps into those target, most developers still have the problem of everything you do above that line. And to be honest, the majority of the complexity has to be resolved right there in the app. That's the thing that's taking requests directly from the user. And this is where maybe as an industry, we're over-correcting. So we had, you said you come from the JBoss world, I started a lot of my Cisco administration, there's where we focus a little bit more on the actual application needs, maybe from a router that as well. But now what we're seeing is things like Spring Boot, start to offer a little bit more integration points in the application space itself. So I think the biggest parts that are missing now are what are the frameworks people will use for authorization? So you have projects like OPA, Open Policy Agent for those that are new to that, it gives you this very low level framework, but you still have to understand the concepts around, what does it mean to allow someone to do something and one missed configuration, all your security goes out of the window. So I think for most developers this is where the next set of challenges lie, if not actually the original challenge. So for some people, they were able to solve most of these problems with virtualization, run some scripts, virtualize everything and be fine. And monoliths were okay for that. For some reason, we've thrown pragmatism out of the window and some people are saying the only way to solve these problems is by breaking the app into 1000 pieces. Forget the fact that you had trouble managing one piece, you're going to somehow find the ability to manage 1000 pieces with these tools underneath but still not solving the actual developer problems. So this is where you've seen it already with a couple of popular blog posts from other companies. They cut too deep. They're going from 2000, 3000 microservices back to maybe 100 or 200. So to my world, it's going to be not just one monolith, but end up maybe having 10 or 20 monoliths that maybe reflect the organization that you have versus the architectural pattern that you're at. >> I view it as like a constellation of stars and planets, et cetera. Where you you might have a star that has a variety of, which is a monolith, and you have a variety of sort of planetary microservices that float around it. But that's reality, that's the reality of modern applications, particularly if you're not starting from a clean slate. I mean your points, a good one is, in many respects, I think the infrastructure is code movement has helped automate a bit of the deployment of the platform. I've been personally focused on app development JBoss as well as springsSource. The Spring team I know that tech pretty well over the years 'cause I was involved with that. So I find that James Governor's discussion of progressive delivery really resonates with me, as a developer, not so much as an infrastructure Deployer. So continuous delivery is more of infrastructure notice notion, progressive delivery, feature flags, those types of things, or app level, concepts, minimizing the blast radius of your, the new features you're deploying, that type of stuff, I think begins to speak to the pain of application delivery. So I'll guess I'll put this up. Michelle, I might aim it to you, and then we'll go around the horn, what are your thoughts on the progressive delivery area? How could that potentially begin to impact cloud native over 2020? I'm looking for some rallying cries that move up the stack and give a set of best practices, if you will. And I think James Governor of RedMonk opened on something that's pretty important. >> Yeah, I think it's all about automating all that stuff that you don't really know about. Like Flagger is an awesome progressive delivery tool, you can just deploy something, and people have been asking for so many years, ever since I've been in this space, it's like, "How do I do AB deployment?" "How do I do Canary?" "How do I execute these different deployment strategies?" And Flagger is a really good example, for example, it's a really good way to execute these deployment strategies but then, make sure that everything's happening correctly via observing metrics, rollback if you need to, so you don't just throw your whole system. I think it solves the problem and allows you to take risks but also keeps you safe in that you can be confident as you roll out your changes that it all works, it's metrics driven. So I'm just really looking forward to seeing more tools like that. And dashboards, enable that kind of functionality. >> Chris, what are your thoughts in that progressive delivery area? >> I mean, CNCF alone has a lot of projects in that space, things like Argo that are tackling it. But I want to go back a little bit to your point around developer dopamine, as someone that probably spent about a decade of his career focused on developer tooling and in fact, if you remember the Eclipse IDE and that whole integrated experience, I was blown away recently by a demo from GitHub. They have something called code spaces, which a long time ago, I was trying to build development environments that essentially if you were an engineer that joined a team recently, you could basically get an environment quickly start it with everything configured, source code checked out, environment properly set up. And that was a very hard problem. This was like before container days and so on and to see something like code spaces where you'd go to a repo or project, open it up, behind the scenes they have a container that is set up for the environment that you need to build and just have a VS code ID integrated experience, to me is completely magical. It hits like developer dopamine immediately for me, 'cause a lot of problems when you're going to work with a project attribute, that whole initial bootstrap of, "Oh you need to make sure you have this library, this install," it's so incredibly painful on top of just setting up your developer environment. So as we continue to move up the stack, I think you're going to see an incredible amount of improvements around the developer tooling and developer experience that people have powered by a lot of this cloud native technology behind the scenes that people may not know about. >> Yeah, 'cause I've been talking with the team over at Docker, the work they're doing with that desktop, enable the aim local environment, make sure it matches as closely as possible as your deployed environments that you might be targeting. These are some of the pains, that I see. It's hard for developers to get bootstrapped up, it might take him a day or two to actually just set up their local laptop and development environment, and particularly if they change teams. So that complexity really corralling that down and not necessarily being overly prescriptive as to what tool you use. So if you're visual code, great, it should feel integrated into that environment, use a different environment or if you feel more comfortable at the command line, you should be able to opt into that. That's some of the stuff I get excited to potentially see over 2020 as things progress up the stack, as you said. So, Michelle, just from an innovation train perspective, and we've covered a little bit, what's the best way for people to get started? I think Kelsey covered a little bit of that, being very pragmatic, but all this innovation is pretty intimidating, you can get mowed over by the train, so to speak. So what's your advice for how people get started, how they get involved, et cetera. >> Yeah, it really depends on what you're looking for and what you want to learn. So, if you're someone who's new to the space, honestly, check out the case studies on cncf.io, those are incredible. You might find environments that are similar to your organization's environments, and read about what worked for them, how they set things up, any hiccups they crossed. It'll give you a broad overview of the challenges that people are trying to solve with the technology in this space. And you can use that drill into the areas that you want to learn more about, just depending on where you're coming from. I find myself watching old KubeCon talks on the cloud native computing foundations YouTube channel, so they have like playlists for all of the conferences and the special interest groups in CNCF. And I really enjoy talking, I really enjoy watching excuse me, older talks, just because they explain why things were done, the way they were done, and that helps me build the tools I built. And if you're looking to get involved, if you're building projects or tools or specs and want to contribute, we have special interest groups in the CNCF. So you can find that in the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee, TOC GitHub repo. And so for that, if you want to get involved there, choose a vertical. Do you want to learn about observability? Do you want to drill into networking? Do you care about how to deliver your app? So we have a cig called app delivery, there's a cig for each major vertical, and you can go there to see what is happening on the edge. Really, these are conversations about, okay, what's working, what's not working and what are the next changes we want to see in the next months. So if you want that kind of granularity and discussion on what's happening like that, then definitely join those those meetings. Check out those meeting notes and recordings. >> Gotcha. So on Kelsey, as you look at 2020 and beyond, I know, you've been really involved in some of the earlier emerging tech spaces, what gets you excited when you look forward? What gets your own level of dopamine up versus the broader community? What do you see coming that we should start thinking about now? >> I don't think any of the raw technology pieces get me super excited anymore. Like, I've seen the circle of around three or four times, in five years, there's going to be a new thing, there might be a new foundation, there'll be a new set of conferences, and we'll all rally up and probably do this again. So what's interesting now is what people are actually using the technology for. Some people are launching new things that maybe weren't possible because infrastructure costs were too high. People able to jump into new business segments. You start to see these channels on YouTube where everyone can buy a mic and a B app and have their own podcasts and be broadcast to the globe, just for a few bucks, if not for free. Those revolutionary things are the big deal and they're hard to come by. So I think we've done a good job democratizing these ideas, distributed systems, one company got really good at packaging applications to share with each other, I think that's great, and never going to reset again. And now what's going to be interesting is, what will people build with this stuff? If we end up building the same things we were building before, and then we're talking about another digital transformation 10 years from now because it's going to be funny but Kubernetes will be the new legacy. It's going to be the things that, "Oh, man, I got stuck in this Kubernetes thing," and there'll be some governor on TV, looking for old school Kubernetes engineers to migrate them to some new thing, that's going to happen. You got to know that. So at some point merry go round will stop. And we're going to be focused on what you do with this. So the internet is there, most people have no idea of the complexities of underwater sea cables. It's beyond one or two people, or even one or two companies to comprehend. You're at the point now, where most people that jump on the internet are talking about what you do with the internet. You can have Netflix, you can do meetings like this one, it's about what you do with it. So that's going to be interesting. And we're just not there yet with tech, tech is so, infrastructure stuff. We're so in the weeds, that most people almost burn out what's just getting to the point where you can start to look at what you do with this stuff. So that's what I keep in my eye on, is when do we get to the point when people just ship things and build things? And I think the closest I've seen so far is in the mobile space. If you're iOS developer, Android developer, you use the SDK that they gave you, every year there's some new device that enables some new things speech to text, VR, AR and you import an STK, and it just worked. And you can put it in one place and 100 million people can download it at the same time with no DevOps team, that's amazing. When can we do that for server side applications? That's going to be something I'm going to find really innovative. >> Excellent. Yeah, I mean, I could definitely relate. I was Hortonworks in 2011, so, Hadoop, in many respects, was sort of the precursor to the Kubernetes area, in that it was, as I like to refer to, it was a bunch of animals in the zoo, wasn't just the yellow elephant. And when things mature beyond it's basically talking about what kind of analytics are driving, what type of machine learning algorithms and applications are they delivering? You know that's when things tip over into a real solution space. So I definitely see that. I think the other cool thing even just outside of the container and container space, is there's just such a wealth of data related services. And I think how those two worlds come together, you brought up the fact that, in many respects, server-less is great, it's stateless, but there's just a ton of stateful patterns out there that I think also need to be addressed as these richer applications to be from a data processing and actionable insights perspective. >> I also want to be clear on one thing. So some people confuse two things here, what Michelle said earlier about, for the first time, a whole group of people get to learn about distributed systems and things that were reserved to white papers, PhDs, CF site, this stuff is now super accessible. You go to the CNCF site, all the things that you read about or we used to read about, you can actually download, see how it's implemented and actually change how it work. That is something we should never say is a waste of time. Learning is always good because someone has to build these type of systems and whether they sell it under the guise of server-less or not, this will always be important. Now the other side of this is, that there are people who are not looking to learn that stuff, the majority of the world isn't looking. And in parallel, we should also make this accessible, which should enable people that don't need to learn all of that before they can be productive. So that's two sides of the argument that can be true at the same time, a lot of people get caught up. And everything should just be server-less and everyone learning about distributed systems, and contributing and collaborating is wasting time. We can't have a world where there's only one or two companies providing all infrastructure for everyone else, and then it's a black box. We don't need that. So we need to do both of these things in parallel so I just want to make sure I'm clear that it's not one of these or the other. >> Yeah, makes sense, makes sense. So we'll just hit the final topic. Chris, I think I'll ask you to help close this out. COVID-19 clearly has changed how people work and collaborate. I figured we'd end on how do you see, so DockerCon is going to virtual events, inherently the Open Source community is distributed and is used to not face to face collaboration. But there's a lot of value that comes together by assembling a tent where people can meet, what's the best way? How do you see things playing out? What's the best way for this to evolve in the face of the new normal? >> I think in the short term, you're definitely going to see a lot of virtual events cropping up all over the place. Different themes, verticals, I've already attended a handful of virtual events the last few weeks from Red Hat summit to Open Compute summit to Cloud Native summit, you'll see more and more of these. I think, in the long term, once the world either get past COVID or there's a vaccine or something, I think the innate nature for people to want to get together and meet face to face and deal with all the serendipitous activities you would see in a conference will come back, but I think virtual events will augment these things in the short term. One benefit we've seen, like you mentioned before, DockerCon, can have 50,000 people at it. I don't remember what the last physical DockerCon had but that's definitely an order of magnitude more. So being able to do these virtual events to augment potential of physical events in the future so you can build a more inclusive community so people who cannot travel to your event or weren't lucky enough to win a scholarship could still somehow interact during the course of event to me is awesome and I hope something that we take away when we start all doing these virtual events when we get back to physical events, we find a way to ensure that these things are inclusive for everyone and not just folks that can physically make it there. So those are my thoughts on on the topic. And I wish you the best of luck planning of DockerCon and so on. So I'm excited to see how it turns out. 50,000 is a lot of people and that just terrifies me from a cloud native coupon point of view, because we'll probably be somewhere. >> Yeah, get ready. Excellent, all right. So that is a wrap on the DockerCon 2020 Open Source Power Panel. I think we covered a ton of ground. I'd like to thank Chris, Kelsey and Michelle, for sharing their perspectives on this continuing wave of Docker and cloud native innovation. I'd like to thank the DockerCon attendees for tuning in. And I hope everybody enjoys the rest of the conference. (upbeat music)

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to the Palo Alto students of the cube um John free we're here for a special cube conversation and special report big news from VMware discuss the launch of the availability of vSphere 7 I'm here with Chris Prasad SVP and general manager of the vSphere business and cloud platform business unit and Paul Turner VP a VP of Product Management guys thanks for coming in and talking about the big news thank you for having us you guys announced some interesting things back in march around containers kubernetes and vSphere Chris just about the hard news what's being announced today we are announcing the general availability of vSphere 7 John it's by far the biggest release that we have done in the last 10 years we previewed it this project Pacific a few months ago with this release we are putting kubernetes native support into the vSphere platform what that allows us to do is give customers the ability to run both modern applications based on kubernetes and containers as well as traditional VM based applications on the same platform and it also allows the IT departments to provide their developers cloud operating model using the VMware cloud foundation that is powered by this release this is a key part of our tansu portfolio of solutions and products that we announced this year and it is star gated fully at the developers of modern applications and the specific news is vSphere 7 is general available generally vSphere 7 yes ok that so let's on the trend line here the relevance is what what's the big trend line that this is riding obviously we saw the announcements at VMworld last year and throughout the year there's a lot of buzz pascal Cerner says there's a big wave here with kubernetes what does this announcement mean for you guys with the marketplace trend yeah so what kubernetes is really about is people trying to have an agile operation they're trying to modernize their IT applications and they the best way to do that is build off your current platform expanded and and make it a an innovative a agile platform for you to run kubernetes applications and VM applications together I'm not just that customers are also looking at being able to manage a hybrid cloud environment both on Prem and public cloud together so they want to be able to evolve and modernize their application stack but modernize their infrastructure stack which means hybrid cloud operations with innovative applications kubernetes or container based applications and VMs was excited about this trend Chris we were talking with us at vmworld last year and we've had many conversations around cloud native but you're seeing cloud native becoming the operating model for modern business I mean this is really the move to the cloud if you look at the successful enterprises and even the suppliers the on-premises piece if not move to the cloud native marketplace technologies the on premise isn't effective so it's not so much on premises going away we know it's not but it's turning into cloud native this is the move to the cloud generally this is a big wave yeah absolutely I mean if John if you think about it on-premise we have significant market share by far the leader in the market and so what we are trying to do with this is to allow customers to use the current platform they are using but bring their application modern application development on top of the same platform today customers tend to set up stacks which are different right so you have a kubernetes stack you have a stack for the traditional applications you have operators and administrators who are specialized in kubernetes on one side and you have the traditional VM operators on the other side with this move what we are saying is that you can be on the same common platform you can have the same administrators who are used to administering the environment that you already had and at the same time offer the developers what they like which is kubernetes dial tone that they can come and deploy their applications on the same platform that you use for traditional applications yeah Paul Paul Pat said Cuba is gonna be the dial tone on the internet most Millennials might even know what dial tone is but what he meant is is that's the key fabric there's gonna work a straight and you know we've heard over the years skill gap skill gap not a lot of skills out there but when you look at the reality of skills gap it's really about skills gaps and shortages not enough people most CIOs and chief and major securitizers as we talk to you say I don't want to fork my development teams I don't want to have three separate teams so I don't have to I I want to have automation I want an operating model that's not gonna be fragmented this kind of speaks to this whole idea of you know interoperability and multi clout this seems to be the next big way behind ibrid I think it I think it is the next big wake the the thing that customers are looking for is a cloud operating model they like the ability for developers to be able to invoke new services on demand in a very agile way and we want to bring that cloud operating model to on-prem to Google cloud to Amazon Cloud to Microsoft cloud to any of our VC PP partners you get the same cloud operating experience and it's all driven by kubernetes based dial tone it's effective and available within this platform so by bringing a single infrastructure platform that can one run in this hybrid manner and give you the cloud operating agility that developers are looking for that's what's key in version seven says Pat Kelsey near me when he says dial tone of the Internet kubernetes does he mean always on or what does he mean specifically just that it's always available what's what says what's the meaning behind that that phrase no I the the first thing he means is that developers can come to the infrastructure which is the VMware cloud foundation and be able to work with a set of api's that are kubernetes api s-- so developers understand that they are looking for that they understand that dial tone right and you come to our VMware cloud foundation that one across all these clouds you get the same API said that you can use to deploy that application okay so let's get into the value here of vSphere seven how does vmware vsphere 7 specifically help customers isn't just bolting on kubernetes to vSphere some will say is it that's simple or user you running product management no it's not that easy it's yeah some people say hey use bolton kubernetes on vSphere it's it's not that easy so so one of the things if if anybody has actually tried deploying kubernetes first its highly complicated and so so definitely one of the things that we're bringing is you call it a bolt-on but it's certainly not like that we are making it incredibly simple and you talked about IT operational shortages customers want to be able to deploy kubernetes environments in a very simple way the easiest way that we can you can do that is take your existing environment that are out 90% of IT and just turn on turn on the kubernetes dial tone and it is as simple as that now it's much more than that in version 7 as well we're bringing in a couple things that are very important you also have to be able to manage at scale just like you would in the cloud you want to be able to have infrastructure almost self manage and upgrade and lifecycle manage itself and so we're bringing in a new way of managing infrastructure so that you can manage just large-scale environments both on-premise and public cloud environments and scale and then associated with that as well is you must make it secure so there's a lot of enhancements we're building into the platform around what we call intrinsic security which is how can we actually build in truly a trusted platform for your developers and IT yeah I mean I I was just going to touch on your point about the shortage of IT staff and how we are addressing that here the the way we are addressing that is that the IT administrators that are used to administering vSphere can continue to administer this enhanced platform with kubernetes the same way they administered the older releases so they don't have to learn anything new they are just working the same way we are not changing any tools process technologies so same as it was before same as Italy before more capable they are and developers can come in and they see new capabilities around kubernetes so it's best of both worlds and what was the pain point that you guys are so obviously the ease-of-use is critical Asti operationally I get that as you look at the cloud native developer Saiga's infrastructure as code means as app developers on the other side taking advantage of it what's the real pain point that you guys are solving with vSphere 7 so I think it's it's it's multiple factors so so first is we've we've talked about agility a few times right there is DevOps is a real trend inside an IT organizations they need to be able to build and deliver applications much quicker they need to be able to respond to the business and to do that what they are doing is is they need infrastructure that is on demand so what what we're really doing in the core kubernetes kind of enablement is allowing that on-demand fulfillment of infrastructure so you get that agility that you need but it's it's not just tied to modern applications it's also your all of your existing business applications and your modern applications on one platform which means that you know you've got a very simple and and low-cost way of managing large-scale IT infrastructure so that's a that's a huge piece as well and and then I I do want to emphasize a couple of other things it's we're also bringing in new capabilities for AI and ML applications for sa P Hana databases where we can actually scale to some of the largest business applications out there and you have all of the capabilities like like the GPU awareness and FPGA our FPGA awareness that we built into the platform so that you can truly run this as the fastest accelerated platform for your most extreme applications so you've got the ability to run those applications as well as your kubernetes and container based applications that's the accelerated application innovation piece of the announcement right that's right yeah it's it's it's quite powerful that we've actually brought in you know basically new hardware awareness into the product and expose that to your developers whether that's through containers or through VMs Chris I want to get your thoughts on the ecosystem and then in the community but I want to just dig into one feature you mentioned I get the lifestyle improvement a life cycle improvement I get the application acceleration innovation but the intrinsic security is interesting could you take a minute explain what that is yeah so there's there's a few different aspects one is looking at how can we actually provide a trusted environment and that means that you need to have a way that the the key management that even your administrator is not able to get keys to the kingdom as we would call it you you want to have a controlled environment that you know some of the worst security challenges inside and some of the companies has been your in choler internal IT staff so you've got to have a way that you can run a trusted environment and independent we've got these fair trust authority that we released in version 7 that actually gives you a a secure environment for actually managing your keys to the kingdom effectively your certificates so you've got this you know continuous runtime now not only that we've actually gone and taken our carbon black features and we're actually building in full support for carbon black into the platform so that you've got negative security of even your application ecosystem yeah that's been coming up a lot in conversations the carbon black on the security piece chrishelle see these fear everywhere having that operating model makes a lot of sense but you have a lot of touch points you got cloud hyper scale is that the edge you got partners so the other dominant market share and private cloud we are on Amazon as you well know as your Google IBM cloud Oracle cloud so all the major clouds there is a vSphere stack running so it allows customers if you think about it right it allows customers to have the same operating model irrespective of where their workload is residing they can set policies compliance security they said it wants it applies to all their environments across this hybrid cloud and it's all fun a supported by our VMware cloud foundation which is powered by vSphere 7 yeah I think having that the cloud is API based having connection points and having that reliable easy to use is critical operating model all right guys so let's summarize the announcement what do you guys take dare take away from this vSphere 7 what is the bottom line what's what's it really mean I I think what we're if we look at it for developers we are democratizing kubernetes we already are in 90% of IT environments out there are running vSphere we are bringing to every one of those vSphere environments and all of the virtual infrastructure administrators they can now manage kubernetes environments you can you can manage it by simply upgrading your environment that's a really nice position rather than having independent kind of environments you need to manage so so I think that's that is one of the key things that's in here the other thing though is there is I don't think any other platform out there that other than vSphere that can run in your data center in Google's in Amazon's in Microsoft's in you know thousands of VC PP partners you have one hybrid platform that you can run with and that's got operational benefits that's got efficiency benefits that's got agility benefits yeah I just add to that and say that look we want to meet customers where they are in their journey and we want to enable them to make business decisions without technology getting in the way and I think the announcement that we made today with vSphere 7 is going to help them accelerate their digital transformation journey without making trade-offs on people process and technology and there's more to come that we're laser focused on making our platform the best in the industry for running all kinds of applications and the best platform for a hybrid and multi cloud and so you'll see more capabilities coming in the future stay tuned oh one final question on this news announcement which is this awesome we spear core product for you guys if I'm the customer tell me why it's gonna be important five years from now because of what I just said it is the only platform that is going to be running across all the public clouds right which will allow you to have an operational model that is consistent across the clouds so think about it if you go the Amazon native and then yeah warlord and agile you're going to have different tools different processes different people trained to work with those clouds but when you come to VMware and you use our cloud foundation you have one operating model across all these environments and that's going to be game-changing great stuff great stuff thanks for unpacking that for us graduates on the announcement thank you at vSphere 7 News special report here inside the cube conversation I'm John Fergus thanks for watching [Music] and welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here with the cube we are having a very special cube conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil if you will of the new a VMware vSphere seven dot gonna get a little bit more of a technical deep dive here today we're excited to have a longtime cube alumni kit Kolbert here is the vp and CTO cloud platform at being work it great to see you yeah and and new to the cube jared rose off he's a senior director of product management at VMware and I'm guessin had a whole lot to do with this build so Jared first off congratulations for birthing this new release and great to have you on board alright so let's just jump into it from kind of a technical aspect what is so different about vSphere seven yeah great so vSphere seven baek's kubernetes right into the virtualization platform and so this means that as a developer I can now use kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment and it means as an IT admin I'm actually able to deliver kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run so I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that that might be coming when the with the acquisition of the hefty Oh team so really exciting news and I think it you tease it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments regardless of whether that's on Prem public cloud this public cloud that public cloud so this really is the realization of that vision yes yeah so we talked at VMworld about project Pacific all right this technology preview and as Jared mentioned of what that was was how do we take kubernetes and really build it into vSphere as you know we had a hybrid cloud vision for quite a while now how do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible now part of the broader VMware cloud foundation portfolio and you know as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud on-premises at the edge with service providers there's a secondary question how do we actually evolve that platform so it can support not just the existing workloads but also modern workflows as well right all right so I think you brought some pictures for us a little demo so I don't know yeah why was dive into there and let's see what it looks like you guys can cube the demo yes we're gonna start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware cloud foundation for an vSphere 7 so what you're seeing here is the developers actually using kubernetes to deploy kubernetes the self eating watermelon right so the developer uses this kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole kubernetes cluster and the whole developer experience now is driven by kubernetes they can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of kubernetes api is and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere and so you know that's not just provisioning workloads though this is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed so go look at hey what's the IP address that got allocated to that or what's the CPU load on this you know workload I just deployed on top of kubernetes we've integrated a container registry into vSphere so here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images and you know one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as code standpoint now the developers infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control I can check in not just my code but also the description of the kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app so now we're looking at a sort of a side-by-side view where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application and on the left-hand side we see V Center and what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through kubernetes those are showing up right inside of the V center console and so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things with the same names and so this means what a developer calls their IT department says hey I got a problem with my database we don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about they got the same name they say they see the same information so what we're gonna do is that you know we're gonna push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience and you know what you'll see here is that V Center is the V Center you've already known and loved but what's different is that now it's much more application focused so here we see a new screen inside of V Center vSphere namespaces and so these vSphere namespaces represent logical applications like a whole distributed system now as a single object inside a V Center and when I click into one of these apps this is a managed object inside of East fear I can click on permissions and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces I can hook this into my active directory infrastructure so I can use the same you know corporate credentials to access the system I tap into all my existing storage so you know this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers I can use storage policy based management to provide storage for kubernetes and it's hooked in with things like DRS right so I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory and all that's going to be enforced by DRS inside the cluster and again as an as an admin I'm just using vSphere but to the developer they're getting a whole kubernetes experience out of this platform now vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the kubernetes environment so besides you know seeing the VMS and and things that developers have deployed i can see all of the desired state specifications all the different kubernetes objects that the developers have created the compute network and storage objects they're all integrated right inside the the vCenter console and so once again from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective this data is invaluable it often saves hours just in trying to figure out what what we're even talking about when we're trying to resolve an issue so the you know as you can see this is all baked right into V Center the V Center experience isn't transformed a lot we get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say where's the kubernetes and they're surprised that like they've been managing kubernetes all this time it just looks it looks like the vSphere experience they've already got but all those kubernetes objects the pods and containers kubernetes clusters load balancer stores they're all represented right there natively in the V Center UI and so we're able to take all that and make it work for your existing VI admins well that's a it's pretty it's pretty wild you know it really builds off the vision that again I think you kind of outlined kit teased out it at VMworld which was you know the IT still sees vSphere which is what they want to see when they're used to seeing but devs siku Nettie's and really bringing those together in a unified environment so that depending on what your job is and what you're working on that's what you're gonna see in this kind of unified environment yeah yeah as the demo showed it is still vSphere at the center but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere the kubernetes base one which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks as well as a traditional vSphere interface API is which is great for VI admins and IT operations right and then and really it was interesting to you tease that a lot that was a good little preview of people knew they're watching but you talked about really cloud journey and and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classic old-school apps that are that are running in their classic themes and then kind of the modern you know counting cloud native applications built on kubernetes and youyou outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum and getting from one to the other but not really about kind of the messy middle if you will and this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum they can move their workloads or move their apps ya know I think we think a lot about it like that that we look at we talk to customers and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go their future state architecture and that involves embracing cloud it involves modernizing applications and you know as you mentioned that it's it's challenging for them because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of these two extremes either you're here where you are kind of the old current world and you got the bright Nirvana future on the far end there and they believe it's the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other that you have to kind of change everything out from underneath you and that's obviously very expensive very time-consuming and very error-prone as well there's a lot of things that can go wrong there and so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really to your point as you call it the messy middle I would say it's more like how do we offer stepping stones along that journey rather than making this one giant leap we had to invest all this time and resources how come you able people to make smaller incremental steps each of which have a lot of business value but don't have a huge amount of cost right and its really enabling kind of this next gen application where there's a lot of things that are different about it but one of the fundamental things is we're now the application defines a sources that it needs to operate versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities of what the what the application can do and that's where everybody is moving as quickly as as makes sense you said not all applications need to make that move but most of them should and most of them are and most of them are at least making that journey did you see that yeah definitely I mean I think that you know certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from you know looking historically at how we managed infrastructure one of things we enable in VCR 7 is how we manage applications right so a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or you know your resource allocation you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure you talked about it in terms of this VM is going to be encrypted or this VM is gonna have this firewall rule and what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management so you actually look at an application and say I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU or I want this application to be have these security rules on it and so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level right yeah and like kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say you know if you look back one thing we did was something like V San before that people had to put policies on a LUN you know an actual storage LUN and a storage array and then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array it inherited certain policies right and so these hammer turned that around allows you to put the policy on the VM but what jerez talking about now is that for a modern workload amount and we're closed not a single VM it's it's a collection of different things you've got some containers in there some VMs probably distributed maybe even some on-premise I'm in the cloud and so how do you start managing that more holistically and this notion of really having an application as a first-class entity that you can now manage inside a vSphere it's really powerful and very simplifying one right and why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time that's it's a nice big word but the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications and more importantly how do you continue to evolve them and change them you know based on either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace yeah well you look at something like a modern app that maybe has a hundred VMs that are part of it and you take something like compliance right so today if I want to check of this app is compliant I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down and hardened and secured the right way but now instead what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of each Center set the right security settings on that and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are going to inherit that stuff so it really simplifies that it also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications you know if you think about vCenter today you might log in and see a thousand VMs in your inventory when you log in with vSphere seven what you see is a few dozen applications so a single admin can manage a much larger pool of infrastructure many more applications than they could before because we automate so much of that operation and it's not just the scale part which is obviously really important but it's also the rate of change and this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done done ie building applications well at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security performance concerns these sorts of elements and so being by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level and then have the developer they'll to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction it actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better they're not stepping over each other but in fact now they can both get what they need to get done done and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe and in compliance is a fourth so there's a lot more just this is a very significant release right again a lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves that's a pretty significant you know kind of RER contexture of many many parts of ease of beer so beyond the kubernetes you know kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out and there's a very significant release yeah it's a great question because we tend to talk a lot about kubernetes what was project Pacific but is now just part of vSphere and certainly that is a very large aspect of it but to your point you know VCR 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features and so instead of a demo here let's pull up with some slides I'm ready look at what's there so outside of kubernetes there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere seven so the first first one is simplified lifecycle management and then really focus on security it's a second one and then applications as well out both including you know the cloud native apps that don't fit in the kubernetes bucket as well as others and so we go on that first one the first column there there's a ton of stuff that we're doing around simplifying life cycle so let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics so we have this new technology vSphere lifecycle management VL cm and the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades lifecycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts how do we make them more declarative with a single image you can now specify for an entire cluster we find that a lot of our vSphere admins especially at larger scales have a really tough time doing this there's a lot of in and out today it's somewhat tricky to do and so we want to make it really really simple and really easy to automate as well so if you're doing kubernetes on kubernetes I suppose you're gonna have automation on automation right because upgrading to the sevens is probably not any consequence in consequential tasks mm-hmm and yeah and going forward and allowing you as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great VCR functionality at a more rapid clip how do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well right next big thing you talk about is security yep we just got back from RSA thank goodness yeah we got that that show in before all the badness started yeah but everyone always talked about security's got to be baked in from the bottom to the top yeah talk about kind of the the changes and the security so done a lot of things around security things around identity Federation things around simplifying certificate management you know dramatic simplification is there across the board a one I want to focus on here on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere trust Authority and so with that one what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces and really ensure there's a trusted computing base when we talk to customers what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats including even internal ones right how do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted and obviously if you're hiring someone you somewhat trust them but you know what's how do you implement that the concept of least privilege right or zero trust me yeah topic exactly so they deal with trust authorities that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and sure fully secure those can be managed by a special vCenter server which is in turn very lockdown only a few people have access to it and then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that okay these untrusted hosts haven't been modified we know they're okay so they're okay to actually run workloads on they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing so is this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment right and then the third kind of leg of the stool is you know just better leveraging you know kind of a more complex asset ecosystem if you know with things like FPGAs and GPUs and you know kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application could draw the appropriate resources as needed so you've done a lot of work there as well yeah there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space as you mention all sort of accelerators coming out we all know about GPUs and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases not to mention 3d rendering but you know FPGA is and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there and so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out they have a lot of the same problems that we saw in the very early days of virtualization ie silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using and you know what you find is all things we found before you found we find very low utilization rates inability to automate that inability to manage that well putting security and compliance and so forth and so this is really the reality that we see at most customers and it's funny because and some ones you think well well shouldn't we be past this as an industry should we have solved this already you know we did this with virtualization but as it turns out the virtualization we did was for compute and then storage and network now we really need to virtualize all these accelerators and so that's where this bit fusion technology that we're including now with vSphere it really comes to the forefront so if you see and the current slide we're showing here the challenge is that just these separate pools of infrastructure how do you manage all that and so if you go to the we go to the next slide what we see is that with bit fusion you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization you can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together so they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use we can you know have multiple people sharing a GPU we can do it very dynamically and the great part of it is is that it's really easy for these folks to use they don't even need to think about it in fact integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows so it's pretty it's pretty trick is because the classifications of the assets now are much much larger much varied and much more workload specific right that's really the the the opportunities flash challenge they are they're good guys are diverse yeah and so like you know a couple other things just I don't have a slide on it but just things we're doing to our base capabilities things around DRS and V motion really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads right so you look at some of the massive sa P HANA or Oracle databases and how do we ensure that V motion can scale to handle those without impacting their performance or anything else they're making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing and so forth right now a lot of this stuff is not just kind of brand-new cool new accelerated stuff but it's also how do we ensure the core ass people have already been running for many years we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well right alright so Joe I give you the last word you've been working on this for a while there's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys what do you what do you tell them what should they be excited about what are you excited for them in this new release I think what I'm excited about is how you know IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps right I think today you look at a lot of these organizations and what ends up happening is the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT infrastructure right and so now I think we can shift that story around I think that there's you know there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and appdev teams are gonna be having over the next couple years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team making more productive give you better performance availability disaster recovery and these kinds of capabilities awesome well Jared congratulations that get both of you for for getting a release out I'm sure it was a heavy lift and it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it and thanks for for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep dive I'm sure there's ton more resources from people I even want to go down into the wheat so thanks for stopping by thank you thank you all right he's Jared he's kid I'm Jeff you're watching the cube we're in the Palo Alto studios thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music] hi and welcome to a special cube conversation I'm Stu min a minute and we're digging into VMware vSphere seven announcement we've had conversations with some of the executives some of the technical people but we know that there's no better way to really understand a technology than to talk to some of the practitioners that are using it so really happy to have joined me for the program I have Bill Buckley Miller who is an infrastructure designer with British Telecom joining me digitally from across the pond bill thanks so much for joining us hi Stu all right so Phil let's start of course British Telecom I think most people know you know what BT is and it's a you know a really sprawling company tell us a little bit about you know your group your role and what's your mandate okay so my group is called service platforms it's the bit of BT that services all of our multi-millions of our customers so they we have broadband we have TV we have mobile we have DNS and email systems and one and it's all about our customers it's not a beat to be part of beating you with me we we specifically focus on those kind of multi million customers that we've got in those various services I mean in particular my group is four we were um structure so we really do from data center all the way up to really about boot time or so we'll just past the boot time and the application developers look after that stage and above okay great we definitely gonna want to dig in and talk about that that boundary between the infrastructure teams and the application teams on but let's talk a little bit first you know we're talking about VMware so you know how long's your organization been doing VMware and tell us you know you what you see with the announcement that VMware's making work be cr7 sure well I mean we've had a really great relationship with VMware for about 1213 years some weather and it's a absolutely key part of our of our infrastructure it's written throughout BT really in every part of our of our operations design development and the whole ethos of the company is based around a lot of VMware products and so one of the challenges that we've got right now is application architectures are changing quite significantly at the moment and as you know in particular with the server less bandwidth containers and a whole bunch of other things like that we're very comfortable with our ability to manage VMs and have been for a while we currently use extensively we use vSphere NSX T V ROPS login site network insight and a whole bunch of other VMware constellation applications and our operations teams know how to use that they know how to optimize they know how to capacity plan and troubleshoot so that's that's great and that's been like that for a half a decade at least we've been really really confident with our ability to till we p.m. where environments and Along Came containers and like say multi cloud as well and what we were struggling with was the inability to have a cell pane a glass really on all of that and to use the same people and the same same processes to manage a different kind of technology so we we'd be working pretty closely with VMware on a number of different containerization products for several years now I would really closely with the b-string integrated containers guys in particular and now with the Pacific guys with really the idea that when we we bring in version 7 and the containerization aspects of version 7 we'll be in a position to have that single pane of glass to allow our operations team to really barely differentiate between what's a VM and what's a container that's really the Holy Grail right so we'll be able to allow our developers to develop our operations team to deploy and to operate and our designers to see the same infrastructure whether that's on premises cloud or off premises I'm be able to manage the whole piece in that was bad ok so Phil really interesting things you walk through here you've been using containers in a virtualized environment for a number of years want to understand in the organizational piece just a little bit because it sounds great I manage all the environment but you know containers are a little bit different than VMs you know if I think back you know from an application standpoint it was you know let's stick it in a vm I don't need to change it and once I spin up a VM often that's gonna sit there for you know months if not years as opposed to you know I think about a containerization environment it's you know I really want a pool of resources I'm gonna create and destroy things all the time so you know bring us inside that organizational piece you know how much will there need to be interaction and more in a rack or change in policies between your infrastructure team and your app dev team well yes make absolutely right that's the nature and that the time scales that we're talking about between VMs and containers oh he's wildly different as you say we probably all certainly have VMs in place now that were in place in 2000 and 2018 certainly I imagine I haven't haven't really been touched whereas as you say VMs and a lot of people talk about spinning them all up all the time and there are parts of our architecture that require that in particular the very client facing bursty stuff you know just require spinning up spinning down pretty quickly but some of our smaller the containers do sit around for weeks if not if not months I mean they just depend on the development cycle aspects of that but the Harpeth that we've we've really had was just the visualizing it and there are a number different products out there that allow you to see the behavior of your containers and understand the resource requirements that they are having at any given moment allows Troubleshooters and so on but they are not they need their new products their new things that we we would have to get used to and also it seems that there's an awful lot of competing products quite a Venn diagram if in terms of functionality and user abilities to do that so through again again coming back to to being able to manage through vSphere to be able to have a list of VMs and alongside it is a list of containers and to be able to use policies to define how they behave in terms of their networking to be able to essentially put our deployments on Rails by using in particular tag based policies means that we can take the onus of security we can take the onus of performance management capacity management away from the developers you don't really care about a lot of time and they can just get on with their job which is to develop new functionality and help our customers so that then means that then we have to be really responsible about defining those policies making sure that they're adhered to but again we know how to do that with VMs new vSphere so the fact that we can actually apply that straightaway just towards slightly different completely unit which is really all are talking about here is ideal and then to be able to extend that into multiple clouds as well because we do use multiple cards where AWS and those your customers and were between them is an opportunity that we can't do anything of them be you know excited about take home yeah bill I really like how you described it really the changing roles that are happening there in your organization need to understand right there's things that developers care about you know they want to move fast they want to be able to build new things and there's things that they shouldn't have to worry about and you know we talked about some of the new world and it's like oh can the platform underneath this take care of it well there's some things platforms take care of there's some things that the software or you know your team is going to need to understand so maybe if you could dig in a little bit some of those what are the drivers from your application portfolio what is the business asking of your organization that that's driving this change and you know being one of those you know tailwinds pushing you towards you know urban Eddie's and the the vSphere 7 technologies well it all comes down to the customers right our customers want new functionality they want new integrations they want new content and they want better stability and better performance and our ability to extend or contracting capacity as needed as well so they're the real ultimate challenges that we want to give our customers the best possible experience of our products and services so we have to address that really from a development perspective it's our developers that have the responsibility to design and deploy those so we have to in infrastructure we have to act as a a firm foundation really underneath all of that that them to know that what they spend their time and develop and want to push out to our customers is something that can be trusted is performant we understand where their capacity requirements are coming from in the in the short term and in the long term for that and it's secure as well obviously is a big aspect to it and so really we're just providing our developers with the best possible chance of giving our customers what will hopefully make them delighted great Phil you've mentioned a couple of times that you're using public clouds as well as you know your your your your VMware farm what a minute make sure I if you can explain a little bit a couple of things number one is when it comes to your team especially your infrastructure team how much are they involved with setting up some of the the basic pieces or managing things like performance in the public cloud and secondly when you look at your applications are some of your clouds some of your applications hybrid going between the data center and the public cloud and I haven't talked to too many customers that are doing applications that just live in any cloud and move things around but you know maybe if you could clarify those pieces as to you know what cloud really means to your organization and your applications sure well I mean to us cloud allows us to accelerate development she's nice because it means we don't have to do on-premises capacity lifts for new pieces of functionality or so we can initially build in the cloud and test in the cloud but very often applications really make better sense especially in the TV environment where people watch TV all the time and I mean yes there are peak hours and lighter hours of TV watching same goes for broadband really but we generally we're well more than an eight-hour application profile so what that allows us to do then is to have applications that will it make sense we run them inside our organization where we have to run them in our organization for you know data protection reasons or whatever then we can do that as well but where we say for instance we have a boxing match on and we're going to be seen enormous spike in the amount of customers that want to sign up into an order journey for to allow them to view that and to gain access to that well why would you spend a lot of money on servers just for that level of additional capacity so we do absolutely have hybrid applications not sorry hybrid blocks we have blocks of suburb locations you know dozens of them really to support oil platform and what you would see is that if you were to look at our full application structure for one of the platforms I mentioned that some of the smothers application blocks I have to run inside some can run outside and what we want to be able to do is to allow our operations team to define that again by policy as to where they run and to you know have a system that allows us to transparently see where they're running how they're running and the implications of those decisions so that we can tune those maybe in the future as well and that way we best serve our customers we you know we get to get our customers yeah what they need all right great Phil final question I have for you you've been through a few iterations of looking at VMs containers public cloud what what advice would you give your peers with the announcement of vSphere 7 and how they can look at things today in 2020 versus what they might have looked at say a year or two ago well I'll be honest I was a little bit surprised by base rate so we knew that VMware we're working on trying to make containers on the same level both from a management deployment perspective as we Eames I mean they're called VMware after all right we knew that they were looking at at that no surprise by just quite how quickly they've managed to almost completely reinvent their application really it's you know if you look at the whole town zoo stuff in the Mission Control stuff and I think a lot of people were blown away by just quite how happy VMware were to reinvent themselves and from Asian perspective you know and to really leap forward and this is the vote between version six and seven I've been following these since version three at least and it's an absolutely revolutionary change in terms of the overall architecture the aims to - what they would want to achieve with the application and you know luckily the nice thing is is that if you're used to version six is not that big a deal it's really not that big a deal to move forward at all it's not such a big change to process and training and things like that but my word there's an awful lot of work underneath that underneath the covers and I'm really excited and I think all the people in my position should really just take it as opportunity to greevey will revisit what they can achieve with them in particular with vSphere and with in combination with and SXT it's it's but you know it's quite hard to put into place unless you've seen the slide or slides about it and he's lost you've seen the products just have a revolutionary the the version seven is compared to previous revisions which have kind of evolved for a couple of years so yeah I think I'm really excited to run it and I know a lot of my peers or the companies that I speak with quite often are very excited about seven as well so yeah I I'm really excited about the whole whole base well Phil thank you so much absolutely no doubt this is a huge move for VMware the entire company and their ecosystem rallying around help move to the next phase of where application developers and infrastructure need to go Phil Buckley joining us from British Telecom I'm Stu minimun thank you so much for watching the queue [Music]

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

>>long from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering a ws re invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and in along with its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back here to AWS reinvent 2019. Great show going on here in Las Vegas, where the Sands were live here on the Cube. Once again, covering it from wall to wall will be here until late tomorrow afternoon. David John Walls were doing by Joined by David. She coaches who is the vice president of product management for hybrid idea Century Lake. Good to see you, You guys and Brandon sweetie, who's the SPP of worldwide cloud sales at Veum With you be with you. This is gonna be a New England sports segment actually surrounded by ruin. Celtics, >>ESPN in Vegas, >>I remind you, the Washington Nationals are the reigning world. Serious shit. Wait a moment. Wait. Shark forever. A moment in time I got stuff. Let's talk about your relationship between via wearing set free like And what brings you here? A WSB offering. You're putting you guys that run on AWS. >>Maybe Maggie jumping and jumping. So look VM wear a long time player in the infrastructure space. Obviously incredible relationship with AWS. Customers want to transform their operations. They want to move to the cloud way have Vienna, where Claude, on a video B s. We continue to take tremendous ground helping customers build and build more agile infrastructure. Make that happen, Van. Where was built on our partners. Right centrally great partner MSP. And we think about helping customers achieve their business outcomes. Key partners like centrally make it happen. You've been a long term partner and done a lot of great things with us. >>Yeah, and really what? What Central Lincoln VM Where have done? I mean, really, we sort of created the manage private cloud market in the early days of managing the Empire solutions for customers, but really were and where we differentiate in other working with GM wear on AWS is really with elements of our network or the ability to take those kinds of solutions and make sure that they're connected to the right networks and that they're tied in and integrated with the customer's existing enterprise and where they want to go as they start to distribute the workload more widely. Because we run that network, we see a lot of the Internet traffic. We see a lot of threat patterns. We see a lot of things emerged with our cyber security capabilities and manage service is. So we add value there. And because of that history with BM wear and in sort of creating that hosted private cloud environment, there's There's a lot of complexity, friendliness inside of our service offer, where we can manage the inn where we can manage it in a traditional model that is cloud verified. And then you could manage it as it starts to move on to the AWS platform. Because, as we all know, and as even you know, Andy has referenced in different points, there's a just about every kind of workload can go to eight of us. But there are still certain things that can't quite go there. And building a hybrid solution basically puts customers in a position to innovate is what a hybrid solution is all about. >>That kind of moves the needle on some of those harder to move working in the M, where is such an obvious place to start? So you try to preserve that existing customer of'em, where customer experience but at the same time you want to bring the cloud experience. So how How is that evolving? >>Yes, it's a couple things, right? So l Tingley customers, they all want to move to the cloud for all the reasons we want security, agility, governance, et cetera. Right, but fundamentally need help. And so partners, like essentially help figure out which workloads are cloud ready, right? And figure that out and then to you, get to know the customer. Really well, begin the relationships that you have, right, and you can help them figure out which workloads am I gonna move right? And then that leads into more relationships on How do I set up d r. Right? How do I offer other service is through eight of us against those work clothes. >>There's a lot of things where being a manage service's provider for a V M were based platform or being. Amanda's service is provided for an AWS platform. There's a lot of things that you have in common, right? First and foremost is that ability toe run your operations securely. You've got to be secure. You know, you need to be able to maintain that bond of trust you need to be auditable. Your your your operations model needs to be something that transparent to the customer. You need to not just be about migrating workloads to the new and exciting environment, but also helping to transform it and take advantage of whether it's a V M where feature tool or next generation eight of us feature it's will. It's not just my great lift and shift, but then helped to transform what that that downstream, long term platform could do. You certainly want Teoh be in a posture where you're building a sense of intimacy with the customer. You're learning their acronyms. You're learning their business processes. You're building up that bond of trust where you can really be flexible with that customer. That's where the MSP community can also come in, because there's a lot of creative things we can do commercially. Contracting wise binding service's together into broader solutions and service level agreements that can go and give the customer something that they could just get by going teach individual technology platform under themselves >>and their ways >>where the service provider community really chips in. >>I think you're right and we think about helping Dr customers success manage service providers because of those engine relationship with customers. We've had tremendous success of moving those workloads, driving consumption of the service and really driving better business outcomes based on those relationships you have. >>So let's talk about workloads, guys. Course. Remember Paul Maritz when he was running the M word? He said Eddie Eddie Workload. Any application called it a device. He called it a software mainframe and Christian marketing people struck that from the parlance. But that's essentially what's happened pretty much run anything on somewhere. I heard Andy Jassy Kino talking about people helping people get off on mainframes. And so I feel like he's building the cloud mainframe. Any work less? But what kind of workloads are moving today? It's not. Obviously, he acknowledged, some of the hard core stuff's not gonna move. He didn't specify, but it's a lot of that hard core database ol TV transit transaction, high risk stuff. But what is moving today? Where do you see that going? >>Don't talk about some customers. >>Yeah, >>so a lot of joint customers we have that. I think you fall into that category. In fact, tomorrow on Thursday, we're actually leading a panel discussion that really dives into some customers. Success on the AWS platform that Central Lincoln are managed service is practice has been able to help them achieve what's interesting about that We have. We have an example from the public sector. We have an example from manufacturing and from from food and beverage example from the transportation industry and airlines. What's really interesting is that in all those use cases that will be diagramming out tomorrow, where VM Where's part of all of them, right? And sometimes it's because I am. Where is a critical part of their existing infrastructure? And so we're trying to be able to do is design, you know, sort of systems of innovation, systems of engagement that they were running inside of an AWS or broadly distributed AWS architecture. But it still needs network integration, security and activity back to the crown jewels and what's kept in a lot of those workloads that already running on the BM where platform So that's a lot of ways. See that a good deal with regards to your moving your sort of innovative workloads, your engagement workload, some of your digital experience, platforms you were working with an airline that wants to start building up a series of initiatives where they want to be able to sell vacation packages and and be very creative in how they market deliver those pulling through airline sails along the way. They're gonna be designing those digital initiatives in AWS, but they need access to flight flight information, schedule information, logistics information that they keep inside of there there. Bm where environment in the centralized data center. And so they're starting to look at workloads like that. We started to look at the N word cloud on eight of us being whereas it a zit in and of itself as a workload moving up to eight of us. There's a range of these solutions that we're starting to see, but a lot of it is still there, and he had the graphic up. There were still, in the very early days of clouded option. I still see a lot of work loads that are moving AWS theater in that system of engagement. How can I digitally engaged with my customers better? That's where a lot of the innovation is going on, and that's what a lot of the workload that are running in launching our >>I mean, we're seeing tremendous momentum and ultimately take any workload, wailed, moving to the cloud right and do it in an efficient and speedy path. And we've got custom moving thousands of workloads, right? They may decide over time to re factor them, but first and foremost, they could move them. They relocate them to the cloud. They can save a lot of costs. Out of that, they can use the exact same interface or pane of glass in terms. How they manage those work clothes, whether they're on Kramer, off Prem. It gives them tremendous agility. And if they decide over time, they have to re factor some workloads, which can be quite costly. They have that option, but there's no reason they shouldn't move. Every single worker today >>is their eyes, their disadvantage at all. If if you're left with ex workloads that have to stay behind, as opposed to someone who's coming up and getting up and running totally on the cloud and they're enjoying all those efficiencies and capabilities, are you a little bit of a disadvantage because you have to keep some legacy things lingering behind, or how do you eventually close that gap to enjoy the benefits of new technologies. Yeah, >>there's a sort of an old saying that, you know, if you're if you're if you're an enterprise, you know, that means you've had to make a lot of decisions along the way, right? And so presumably those decisions added value. It's your enterprise, or else she wouldn't be in enterprise. So it really comes out, too. Yeah, to those systems of records of those legacy systems way talk about legacy systems >>on Lian I t. Is the word legacy. I know it's a positive. United is the word legacy. A majority of >>your legacy is what the value you built up a lot of that, whether it's airline flight data or scheduling, best practices are critical. Crown jewels kind of data systems are really important. It really comes down to it. You're on enterprise and you're competing against somebody that is born in the cloud. How well integrated is everything. And are you able to take advantage of and pace layer your innovation strategy so that you can work on the cloud where it makes sense. You can still take advantage of all the data and intelligence you build up about your customers >>so talking earlier, You guys, it seems like you guys do you see that? That cloud is ultimately the destination of all these workloads. But, you know, Pac thinking about PacBell Singer, he talked about the laws of physics, the laws of economics and the laws of the land so that he makes the case for the hybrid >>Murphy's Law. >>Yeah, so that makes the case for the hybrid world. And it seems like Amazon. To a certain extent, it's capitulating on that, and it seems like we got a long way to go. So it's almost like the cloud model will go to your data wherever it iss. You guys, I think, helped facilitate that. How do you look at that? >>Yes. I mean, part of that answer is how much data centers are becoming sort of an antiquated model right there. There there is a need for computing and storage in a variety of different locations. Right, And there's that we've been sort of going through these cycles back and forth of you use the term software mainframe and the on the Palmer. It's kind, a model of the original mainframe decentralizing out the client server now centralizing again to the cloud as we see it starting to swing back on the other direction for towards devices that are a lot smarter. Processors that are, you know, finally tuned for whatever Internet of things use case that they're being designed for being able to put business logic a whole lot closer to those devices. The data. So I think that is what one of things that I think that said that one of the BM wears. A couple of years ago, data centers were becoming centers of data. And how are you able to go and work with those centers of data? First off, link them all together, networking lies, secure them all together and then manage them consistently. I think that's one of the things I am has been really great about that sort of control playing data plane separation inside your product design that makes that a whole lot more feet. >>I mean, it is a multi cloud, and it's a hybrid cloud world, and we want to give customers of flexibility and choice to move their workloads wherever they need, right based on different decisions, geographic implications, et cetera, security regimens and mean fundamentally. That's where we give customers a tremendous, tremendous amount of flexibility. >>And bringing the edge complicates >>edge, data center or cloud. >>It's so maybe it's not a swing back, you know, because it really has been a pendulum swing, mainframe, decentralized swing back to the cloud. It feels like it's now this ubiquitous push everywhere. >>Pendulum stops. >>Yeah, >>because there's an equal gravitational pull between the power of both locals >>and compute explodes everywhere. You have storage everywhere. So bring me my question of governance, governance, security in the edicts of the organization. You touched on that. So that becomes another challenge. How do you see that playing out what kind of roles you play solving that problem >>on the idea of data governance? Governance? Yeah. I mean the best way to think about our. In our opinion, the best way to think about data governance is that is really with abstraction. Layers and being ableto have a model driven approach to what you're deploying out into the cloud, and you can go all in with the data model that exists in the attraction layers in the date and the model driven architecture that you can build inside things like AWS cloud formations or inside things like answerable and chef and been puppet, their model, different ways of understanding what your application known state should be on. That's the foundational principle of understanding what your workloads are and how you can actually deliver governance over them. Once you've modelled it on and you then know how to deploy it against a variety different platforms, then you're just a matter of keeping track of what you've modelled, where you've deployed it and inventorying those number of instances and how they scale and how healthy there that certainly, from a workload standpoint, I think governance discipline that you need in terms of the actual data itself. Data governance on where data is getting stored There's a lot of innovation here at the show floor. In terms of software to find storage and storage abstractions, the embers got a great software to find storage capability called the San. We're working with a number of different partners within the core of our network, starting to treat storage as sort of a new kind of virtualized network function, using things like sifts and NFS and I scuzzy as V n F that you can run inside the network we want. We have had an announcement here earlier in the week about our central bank's network storage offer. We're actually starting to make storage and the data policy that allows you to control words replicated and where it's stored. Just part of the network service that you can add is a value add >>or even the metadata get the fastest path to get to it if I need to. If I prefer not to move it, you're starting to see you're talking about multiplied this multi cloud world. It seems like the connections between those clouds are gonna be dictated by that metadata and the intelligence tow. You know what the right path is, >>And I think we want to provide the flexibility to figure out where that data needs to reside. Cross cloud on, Prem off from, and you can just hear from the conversation, David, level of intimacy some of our partners have with customers to work through those decisions. Right, if you're gonna move those workloads effectively and efficiently, is where we get a lot of value for our joint customers. >>I mean, she's pretty fundamental to this notion of digital transformation that's ultimately what we've been talking about. Digital transformation is all about data putting data at the core, being able to access that, get insights from it and monetize, not directly, but understand how data affects the monetization of your business. That's what your customers >>and I think we >>wantto. Besides, I think we want to simplify how you want to spend more time looking up. Your applications are looking down your infrastructure, right? Based on all the jury, are drivers across the different business needs. And again, if we can figure out how to simplify that infrastructure, then people could spend more time on the applications because that's how they drive differentiation in the market, right? And so let's simplify infrastructure, put it where it needs to be. But we're going to give you time back to drive innovation and focus on differentiating yourself. >>You know, it's interesting on the topic of digital transformation reindeer. So right, sort of an interesting little pattern that plays out for those of us that have been in the service of writer community for a little while that a lot of the digital transformation success stories that you see that really get a lot of attention around the public cloud like eight of us. The big major moves into going all in on the public cloud tend to come from companies that went all in on the service provider model 10 years ago, the ones that adopted the idea. I'm just gonna have somebody do this non differentiating thing for me so that I can focus on innovation, are then in a better position to go start moving to the cloud as opposed to companies that have been downward focused on their infrastructure. Building up skill sets, building up knowledge base, building up career, path of people that, actually we're thinking about the technology itself as part of their job description have had a hard time letting go. It sort of the first step of trusting the service provider to do it for you lead you to that second step of being able to just leverage and go all in on the public lab. >>And customers need that help, right? And that's where if we can help activate moving those workloads more quickly, we provide that ability, put more focus on innovation to Dr Outcomes. >>I know you're talking about legacy a little bit ago and that the negative connotation, I think. Tom Brady, Don't you think I wanna run number seven? I haven't had a home smiling Would always do it back with more. We continue our coverage here. Live with the cube, where a w s rivet 2019.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering AWS re:Invent 2019 brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel along with its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching The Cube. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Velante and I'm excited to have Veeam on the program. Good friend Rick Vanover is here. Rick, it's great to see you again. >> Thanks, Dave. >> He's the Senior Director of Product Strategy at Veeam, and Jim Kruger is the newly minted CMO. Jim, good to see you, thank for coming on. >> Great, thank you Dave. Thanks for having us. >> All right, so, let's talk about re:Invent. You guys are well known in the VMware community of course. Now the cloud comes in, you guys rose like a rocket ship with virtualization. Now cloud's here. How's the show going for you? What are the conversations like? >> Yeah, it's great. I mean, this is a continuation of the relationship that we have with AWS. We were a global sponsor and one of five companies represented in the global summit so that was a lead up to this. >> Which was today, this morning the partner summit, or the earlier partner summit. >> No, throughout the whole year. There's 30 different locations throughout the world that we sponsored and so that was a really good entry into this new audience for us in terms of new buyers and so forth. And re:Invent is huge. I mean, you can't even walk in the hallways out there. Our booth has been packed and just some really good conversations. We had a great announcement as a part of the show, so it's going great. >> Let's talk about that for sure. So, give us the update on 2019. You guys hit the billion dollar milestone. We covered you at VeeamON. We've been there for the last couple years, so congratulations on that. >> Jim: Thank you. Which of course is challenging because you're doing a lot more annual recurring revenue. You're still able to break through that billion dollar mark but give us an update on 2019. >> Yeah, so far so good, it's going well. We're going through a transition here. We call it act one to act two. And act one was really the foundation of the company focusing on virtual environments. Act two is really moving into the cloud and also moving from perpetual to subscription. And so we're going through that transition as we speak and we're finding really good success. We're really letting the market dictate that transition. We're not really forcing things on customers, but we had a really good Q3. We grew our annual recurring revenue by 24%. Our enterprise business is actually the fastest growing business within Veeam. It's growing at, it grew 20% year over year. And our alliances are really on fire. Year over year for our alliances, for our resellers, we have four of them, grew 92%. So, we're outgrowing the market significantly, continuing to gain market share. We're still number one in Europe and number four globally but catching up quick. >> So, Rick, when I first was introduced to Veeam I think it was at some VeeamUG somewhere, like "It's an interesting name, who are these guys?" And then saw you guys take off and it coincided with a big simplification theme and better resource allocation. We got all this wasted server capacity. But the problem was when we consolidated all those servers we now had less utilization or less capacity to drive things like backup which was a compute-hungry workload. You guys figured that out from a product standpoint. You simplified things and you took off. So, check, great job. Now there's cloud, so what's different about cloud? You guys have some announcements. What are you doing to take advantage of the cloud? >> Well so, our cloud journey, Dave, is starting but it's actually evolving from some technologies that have been out for a while. So, actually earlier this year, this isn't new, but we implemented a technology that puts data into the cloud which is a very important first step. Back up data into the cloud, very transparent, very easy to do with Veeam, but everything is different in the cloud. I think the plumbing is different. The use cases are different. The expectations of customers are different. So, when we look at how we're going to go into a market from a product standpoint, my team works with Jim's team as well as the product management team on this very purposefully, but the thought is we need to put in the right platform and the right capabilities for the cloud. So, that's the big news today here at AWS re:Invent and yesterday. We had a great session today where we showed off the new product being back up for AWS. And we have been through a lot of iterations on how we're going to get to this milestone. And I'm really stoked that it was available for this event, live in the marketplace. And I think about why we're going to go with this new product now this way. Ratmir, our co-founder, likes to say he wants to capture the hearts and minds of IT pros, and this product will do it. File level recovery, free edition, easy, it just works. Whatever you want to save, we've got it in this product. So, I'm really hoping that this will be the year of an additional disruption as we kick off act two that Jim mentioned. >> You guys have always been feature-rich. I was sharing with your audience the spending data that I have access to and when you look at it, when you look at spending momentum it shows some of the new guys, obviously you wouldn't be surprised. You're seeing some people experimenting, and okay, that's cool. And then some of the legacy guys you see, they're hanging on to the install base. Veeam interestingly is right there with the leaders but really consistent spending momentum for years. And so my question is, how is that, why are you able to sustain that momentum over time? What is your unique approach? >> Yeah, I mean I think there's a couple of key factors there that we've done as a business. One of the key strategies of the company is to remain agnostic and to build partnerships. And so one of the key strategies that we've had over the past few years is to work with partners. And so we've done go to markets, some engineering work, and as I mentioned in Q3 alone we saw 92% year over year growth and so that's helping us to drive growth. We've added some new products and so we have backup for Microsoft Office 365, which is a whole new market for us. And we're seeing tremendous growth there year over year, so that's helping us to keep steady. And then just the innovation engine. The development team that we have is one of the reasons why I joined Veeam, is because of the innovation and the development team and how they approach the market in terms of really focusing on the user and building products that aren't just a check box but they're products that add a tremendous amount of value. And so, we have a new, we made announcements here with specifically with AWS, but to continue our innovation track we have a new release that's coming out in the January timeframe called Version 10 which adds another 150 plus capabilities. And so, I think that's one of the biggest reasons we continue to add value to the system and to our customers. We're adding between three to four thousand new customers a month and our customer count is continuing to, we're at 365 thousand customers today and growing fast. >> So, Rick, I wonder if you can talk from a product standpoint. I said virtualization, I'm generalizing in cloud. There's specific things for VMware obviously that you do and I presume the same thing for cloud. What's unique about, well, first of all your relationship with AWS and what's unique about making your software work in the AWS ecosystem? >> Well, the unique part is really our go to market of partnering first. I like to say that partnership is in Veeam's DNA. We sell through the channel and we have the alliance relationships. We have the platform relationships like AWS as well as other clouds. And the thought here is that by going in software only I am actually completely convinced we're very well positioned in the market to come in with a solution that will work for literally everybody no matter what their preference, what brands of technology they use, what clouds they use. And so I think about what becomes interesting, what becomes unique with that. And I'll give you an Amazon example and this is something that's coming in the Version 10 that Jim alluded to. Amazon has a capability called object lock which can be used for immutable backups or immutable data. We're using it for backups and that's something that we're going to leverage in our upcoming release that is actually going to be a huge thing, a huge amount of capabilities where organizations can have their backup data resilient against ransomware, resilient against malicious admins, insider threats or accidental deletion. And that is only possible in the cloud. So, we're walking into a situation where Veeam, if we're going to leverage S3 and some of these capabilities provided by Amazon, along with our laser-focused approach for backups, we're going to give the market some things that honestly it'd be really hard to say no to. >> So, can you talk more about that immutability capability? Timestamp that and then go across the old stuff? >> It's smarter than a timestamp. Actually the thought here is that there's this governance and compliance mode that comes with AWS S3 storage which is a property of a bucket that's set at the top level. And from a API standpoint when an ISV like Veeam wants to put data into S3, that along with a lot of other elements of the consumption of the storage can be set. And what we're doing is we're actually working backwards into the user interface, and if I want to put my backup data into S3, I'm actually going to say make this data immutable, meaning unable to be deleted or changed. Or actually you can't change in S3, it's only a delete. But anyways, you can't delete it. So, the thought is I'm going to put, I'm just going to make up an example, Dave, seven days into S3, mark it as immutable. No matter what, that data can not be removed. >> You got a policy on it. >> Yeah, and it's there, it will not be deleted. No ransomware, no malicious admin, no insider threat. And then we're doing it with a lot of API intelligence so it's very efficient on how it goes in there and shared metadata. We just did a session on part of that today and we're going to have a huge splash event in January where we take it to the market. So, if anybody listening is going to be concerned about ransomware, Veeam has a technology that's evolving for you. >> So, I can set my RPO to whatever I want based on my objectives for the business, the cost equation. >> Yeah, and it's actually transparent to that. To me, it's a restore point but I have this ability to sleep at night because I know that it's in Amazon and it's object locked and I can't do anything to it. >> Yeah, but that was seven days ago, so I now want to update it. So, you've set a policy to say, okay. >> So, yeah, so that the eighth day the backup will go and day one will drop and then we'll be at two through eight. And then the next day three through nine. It will just, it will be a window of sorts. And the best part is, Dave, it's going to be transparent. It's in the user interface. It's a restore point and the ease of use. I look at the product team and we really have this mantra. Simple, reliable, flexible, and who doesn't want those types of capabilities in a product today? And actually it works backwards. So, one of our co-founders, Andre, like's to say, his expectation is somebody can download the product and do their first backup within ten minutes without using the manual. The ease of use has to be like that and with the newest product from Monday we're doing it again. >> So, Jim, I wonder if I could ask you about messaging. It's interesting, it was interesting to see at VeeamON. You guys got back to basics. There's a lot of money flowing into the data protection industry. You're still seeing new startups. Storage overall is a little soft right now because the cloud's eating away at the big guys, but data protection is still pretty hot as evidenced by some of the spending data that I talked about. A lot of guys talking about data management. You talk about data management, too, but you got back to the basics at VeeamON. You talked about it starts with backup. I wonder if you can talk about that messaging and then how that does relate to some of the new use cases. And you mentioned some, but what's your point of view there? >> Yeah, absolutely, so, yeah so, that is a key initiative for us in 2020 is to shift the pure speeds and feeds and features and talk more about use cases. As you'll see that come out and across our portfolio, that's one of our key marketing initiatives, but yeah. The messaging we did back in 2018, I think we over-rotated a little bit and focused a little bit too much on the enterprise and as you know our business is very spread across multiple segments. From SMB to commercial to enterprise. And enterprises is of course the key market that we want to go after but we have this great business at the lower end of the market which I think is unique and a differentiator for Veeam in terms of the number of customers that we have and the customer base that we have. So, what we've done is gone back to using words like backup because there's budget for backup. And that's a word that people automatically know what it means. You don't want to get too cute about it. So, we've come out with a new campaign around cloud data management, "Backup for what's next", and we're pushing that really hard because I think a lot of people know Veeam as the virtual leader and now we're moving into the cloud area so it's important for us to position the company to not only virtual but virtual, physical and cloud. And so you're going to see a lot more push into the cloud with the new solutions we're launching and pushing that hard in 2020. >> Now, Veeam's always had strong no BS engineering. You know the tagline, "It just works." It's true, you talk to your customers. And it's interesting, when you go to VeeamON, I've been to several, you're right. I mean, you've got guys there that are loyal to Veeam. They may not be huge buyers just in terms of ASPs, but there's a zillion of them and they're very loyal. And I think it's very smart strategy. You just keep moving up markets. You guys are like Steady Eddie. Give us, last question is 2020, what should we expect from you guys? You got VeeamON, The Cube is going to be there. We're excited, it's always a fun show. You get a passionate crowd. >> Yeah, so we have some exciting announcements that we're going to be making in the first of the year and in the mid part of the year which we think are going to be game changers and continue us on the trajectory of growth. So, we're very excited about that and yeah, continuing to focus on satisfying our customers. We're super proud of our net promoter score of 75, which is three times, three and a half times the industry and so keeping that momentum going with our customers is critically important. >> Well, guys, congratulations on all your success. Great, you mentioned your NPS. Great customer loyalty, the billion dollar milestone. Ratmir is on, he's on the record last year at VeeamON saying, "Hey, no, we're open to IPO." So, we'll be watching that and we'll ask him. We won't hit you with that. But guys, thanks so much for coming on. >> All right, thank you, Dave. >> Dave: Jim, Rick, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you, everybody, for watching. This is The Cube, live from AWS re:Invent 2019 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back right after this short break.