>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back inside the Sands. We are in Las Vegas. We are live here on theCUBE along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. We continue our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2019 by welcoming in Erik Kaulberg, VP of cloud solutions at Infinidat. Erik, good to see you today. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks, it's nice to see you too. >> So share a little bit at home for the folks who might not be too familiar with Infindat. I know you guys, big in the, in data storage, in terms of what's happening in the enterprise, but shed a little bit of light on that for us. >> Yeah, so Infinidat's all about re-inventing the next generation of data storage at multi-petabyte scale, whether that's for on-prem appliances where we have over 5.4 exabytes deployed now around the world, large enterprises, or whether that's through our cloud services like Neutrix Cloud, which we're talking a lot about today and through the conference, we're solving large data challenges for customers with blocker file storage requirements. We're doing that through technology that gets the price point of hard drives with the performance capabilities of solid state media, DRAM and flash, and we're doing it at very large scale, even though we kind of fly under the radar a bit from a marketing standpoint. >> So there's a lot of interesting things going on. Good storage demand. There's no question that the cloud is eating away at some of the traditional on-prem, and there's very few companies that are gaining share rapidly. You happen to be one of them. You know, Pure Storage grew 15% this quarter. Much, much lower. You know, generally HBE's shrinking. I think Delium C grew a little bit. You know, IBM has been down. I don't think they've announced yet. So you're seeing a couple of things. Cloud eating away, and then all this injection of flash. You're really the only guys who can make spinning disk run faster, as fast as flash. Everybody else is just throwing flash at the problem. And that's created headroom. So what are you guys seeing, 'cause you're clearly growing. You're a market share gainer. You have the advantage of being new and smaller. Talk about your business and how you're growing and why you're growing. >> It's nothing but growth, and it comes from this increase in the overall data that, requirements that customers have, and it comes from the economic aspects of that data. Fundamentally, data storage is all about economics, and we're able to deliver through our technical advantage of blending disk, flash, and DRAM an order of magnitude cost basis advantage, and that translates into direct financial benefits that allow ultimately enterprises to do more with their data. That's what we're all about. >> So as workloads shift to the cloud, there's an on-prem component. We're going to talk about cloud, multicloud, hybrid cloud, et cetera. But you've got a product called Neutrix. Talk about that and where it fits into this big macro trend that we've just been talking about. >> Absolutely. So Neutrix fits into the broader landscape in a couple of ways. First of all, many of the clients that we deal with are large enterprises, and they're in their relatively early stages of cloud transformation. So Neutrix provides an easy on ramp for them to come from our best in class on-prem infrastructure and make that data accessible in one or multiple clouds. And that kind of, maybe it's for test dev. Maybe it's for a disaster recovery, a pilot light scenario, or a couple other use cases for general purpose primary data storage. That's their on ramp to then taking advantage of the more strategic value of Neutrix, which is allowing clouds to compete for the business on the compute side of things. >> You kind of hit a key word in there. I'm talking about transform. And we've talked about that a lot, transformation versus transition, in terms of storage capabilities, enterprise storage capabilities, whatever. Take us through that transformation, if you will, and not the transition, and what's the paradigm change? What's going on in that space that's requiring people tom ake this dive into the deep end, if you will, and not just tickling the water with their toes. >> Well, I think there's two elements to it. There's a business and kind of a philosophical reorientation around taking advantage of flexible resources and allowing infrastructure to change over time and pay opex-based business models, that sort of stuff, and getting comfortable with that honestly is a journey into and of itself, because many procurement organizations, especially large organizations, they don't know what to do with a monthly bill or an uncommitted reserve amount or things like that. So part of it is being able to walk with the customer as they transform on the business side of things, and then the other side is accepting and going down the path of variable workloads, being able to accommodate large varieties of mixed data environments, and be agile on the technology side so that you can put the data where it needs to be with the performance that it needs to be and with the capabilities that it needs to be. >> All right, so we're pressed for time, so I really want to get a few topics in. For now, I see three main opportunities, broadly. One is on-prem, stealing market share. We talked about that a little bit. Two is this multicloud thing, and we'll talk about that, as well. If you're an on-prem company, you got to have a multicloud strategy, and even if you're a pure cloud company, you got to have a multicloud strategy. And the third is the cloud. You've got to embrace the cloud. If you deny the cloud, you're denying the biggest trend. So let's start with the cloud. What's your cloud strategy? What's your relationship with AWS and how are you taking advantage of that? >> So we're all about delivering our data services in whatever means, whatever physical infrastructure, whatever underlying business model the customer requires. With that in mind, we deliver Neutrix Cloud as a service for use with major public cloud environments, including AWS, and our relationship with AWS, you know, they recognize, I think, they would say that we bring access to large-scale, tier one environments all around the world coming from our base on the on-prem, and they're very interested in obviously working with the customers on cloud transformation at the scale that we operate, as well, so it's a mutually beneficial partnership. We're proud to be an APN member and all of that sort of thing. >> Yeah, I mean, if you can put your stack in the AWS cloud, which is what you're doing, it's going to drive other services, right? It's going to drive ML and SageMakers and backup and all kinds of great things. >> Absolutely. >> So the storage guys at AWS may not love you, but everybody else at AWS is going to be happy because you're driving other services. All right, let's talk about multicloud. It's obviously a controversial topic. We've got, John Furrier every year does a exclusive interview with Andy Jassy, and he's on the record, and I think he's right. He says, look it, multicloud is going to be more complex, less secure, and more expensive. He's right. And he goes, but he also recognizes that there are multiple clouds out there, and so organizations have to participate in multicloud strategies. I've predicted, as have Stu Miniman and John Furrier, Amazon's going to participate in that someday. They're going to do what they're doing in hybrid. So Amazon looks at multicloud as multiple public clouds and on-prem as hybrid. Coming back to Infinidat, what's your multicloud strategy? >> So the great thing about our strategy is that we're able to deliver the same data in whatever public cloud environments the customer wants to deploy. So we actually run our own independent infrastructure that sits just outside the walled gardens of all the major public clouds, and then we can provide network connectivity using their direct connect interfaces or similar private network interconnects, all API-driven, customer doesn't have to think about the underlying infrastructure, and fundamentally it allows them to subscribe to our storage as a service directly in whatever public clouds they choose. >> And now let's talk about the on-prem piece of that, which is the hybrid component, using Jassy's sort of definitional framework. You've got Flex. That extends your on-prem story. Talk about that a little bit. >> Absolutely. So our customers are saying, "Hey, I want the public cloud business model "on the on-prem environment," and Flex is our answer to that kind of question. So we deliver essentially hardware independence, price per gig per month. We maintain title to the asset, all that sort of stuff. And we're in charge of refreshing the infrastructure every three years, and we back it with a more than public cloud level availability guarantee, 100% availability guarantee for the Flex business model. >> We've seen companies, flash-based products as backup targets. Infinidat uses a combination of flash and spinning disks to keep costs down, and you've got math magic to make it as performant. One of the things I like what you're doing is you're partnering with I think most of, if not all the backup software vendors and opening up new market opportunities and expanding your TAM by partnering with those guys. Talk a little bit about, can you give us some specifics there? >> Absolutely. So, for example, we were presenting at the Veeam booth earlier this week about the intersection between InfiniBox and the Veeam backup software suite, and we have similar capabilities with some of the other backup platforms, as well. So two sides to that, one using the on-prem or cloud environments as a source, and there we have integrations with our snapshot technology specifically, and then two, using our InfiniGuard product on the on-prem side as a target, and there we have deep integration at an API level with the various backup platforms. So it's a cohesive universe where customers can take primary data, they can put it on Infinidat, they can use whatever enterprise backup platform. They can also put it as a target on Infinidat technology. >> And we're talking a lot about today. What about tomorrow? I mean, you know, what's the bigger picture down the road? What's your crystal ball telling you in terms of future complexities and challenges and what you see where this is headed? >> I think from a storage standpoint, at least, obviously lots of other complexities beyond that universe, but from a storage standpoint, people want to stop thinking about infrastructure. They want to think about cloud data services. They want to think about essentially going from storage arrays to storage clouds. We're doing that on on-prem, we're doing that in public cloud environments, and we're knitting it all together with our initiative called the Elastic Data Fabric. Our ultimate goal there and what we think customers really want is to be able to get the data services that they want at any given instant through the business model they care about independent of the underlying infrastructure, and that's what we're set up to deliver over the next couple of years at Infinidat. >> Well, Erik, thank you for the time. We appreciate that. By the way, Erik has become a very important Cuber, a VIC. His sixth appearance here on theCUBE. I wish we had a plaque or something to give you, but how about just an attaboy? >> Thanks very much. >> We appreciate that. >> Thanks, Erik. >> Back with more coverage here from AWS re:Invent 2019. You're watching us live. We're here on theCUBE. (techno music)

(jazzy music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE conversation, where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. It's going to be a multi-cloud world. It's going to be a multi-cloud world because enterprises are so diverse, have so many data requirements and application needs that it's going to be serviced by a panoply of players, from public cloud to private cloud and SaaS companies. That begs the question, if data is the centerpiece of a digital strategy, how do we assure that we remain in control of our data even as we exploit this marvelous array of services from a lot of different public and private cloud providers and technology companies? So the question, then, is data sovereignty. How do we stay in control of our data? To have that conversation, we're joined by Erik Kaulberg, who's a vice president at Infinidat. Erik, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thanks, nice to be here. >> So before we get into this, what's a quick update on Infinidat? >> Well, we just crossed the 5.4 exabyte milestone deployed around the world, and for perspective, a lot of people don't appreciate the scale at which Infinidat operates. That's about five and a half Dropboxes worth of content on our systems and on our cloud services deployed around the world today. So it's an exciting time. It's great being able to deliver these kinds of transformations at large enterprises all over the place. Business has been ramping wonderfully, and the other elements of our product portfolio that we announced earlier in the year are really coming to bear for us. >> Well, let's talk about some of those product, or some of those announcements in the product portfolio, because you have traditionally been more of an interestingly and importantly architected box company, but now you're looking at becoming more of a full player, a primary citizen in the cloud world. How has that been going? >> It's been great. So we announced our Elastic Data Fabric program, which is really our vision for how enterprises should deal with data in a multi-cloud world, in May, and that unified several different product silos within our company. You had InfiniBox on the primary storage appliance platform standpoint. You have Neutrix Cloud on the primary storage for public clouds. You have InfiniGuard for the secondary storage environments, and now we've been able to articulate this vision of enterprises should be able to access the data services that they want at scale and consume them in however way they prefer, whether that be on a private cloud environment with an appliance or whether that be in an environment where they're accessing the same data from multiple public clouds. >> So they should be able to get the cloud experience without compromising on the quality and the characteristics of the data service. >> Exactly. And fundamentally, since we deliver our value in the form of software, the customer shouldn't have to really care on what infrastructure it's running. So Elastic Data Fabric really broadens that message so that customers can understand, yes, they can get all the value of Infinidat wherever they'd prefer it. >> Okay, so let's dig into this. So the basic problem that companies face, to kind of lay this up front, the basic problems that companies face is they want to be able to tap into this incredible array of services that you can get out of the cloud, but they don't necessarily want to force their data into a particular cloud vendor or particular cloud silo. So they want the services, but they want to retain control over their data and their data destiny. How do you, in your conversations with customers, how do you see your customers articulating that tension? >> I think when I deal with the typical CIO, and I was in a couple of these conversations literally yesterday, it all comes back to the fundamental idea of do you want to pledge allegiance to a single public cloud provider forever? If the answer to that is no or if there's any hesitation in that answer, then you need to be considering services that go beyond the walled gardens of individual public clouds. And so that's where services like our Neutrix Cloud service can allow customers to keep control, keep sovereignty over their data in order to make the right decisions about where the compute should reside across whichever public cloud might offer the best combination of capabilities for a given workload. >> So it has been historically a quid pro quo where, give me your data, says the public cloud provider, and then I'll make available this range of services to you. And enterprises are saying, well, I want to get access to the services without giving you my data. How are companies generally going to solve this? Because it's not going to be by not working with public cloud or cloud companies, and it's not going to be by wanting to think too hard about which cloud companies to work with for which types of workloads. So what is the solution that folks have to start considering? Not just product level, but just generally speaking. >> Speaking broadly, I would say that there's no single answer for every company, but most large enterprises are going to want some sort of solution that allows their data to transcend the boundaries of public clouds. And there's a couple of different approaches to doing that. Some approaches just take software and then knit together multiple data silos across clouds, but you still have the data physically reside in different cloud environments, and then there are some approaches where they abstract away the data, where the data's physically stored, so that it can be accessed by multiple public clouds. And I think some mix of those approaches, depending on the scale of the company, is probably going to be one element of the solution. Now, data and how you treat the locations of data isn't the whole solution to the problem. There's many things to consider about your application state, about the security, about all that stuff, but-- >> Intellectual property, compliance, you name it. >> Absolutely. But if you don't get the data problem figured out, then everything else becomes a whole lot more complicated and a whole lot more expensive. >> So if we think about that notion of getting the data problem right, that should, we should start thinking in terms of what services does this data with these characteristics, by workload, location, intellectual property controls, whatever else they might be, what service does that data require? Today, the range of services that are available on more traditional approaches to thinking about storage are a little bit more mature. They're a little bit more, the options are a little bit greater, and the performance is often a lot better than you get out of the public cloud. Would you agree with that and can you give us some examples? >> Of course, yeah. And I think that in general, the public cloud providers have a different design point from traditional enterprise environments. You prioritize scale over resilience, for example. And specific features that we see come up a lot in our conversations with large enterprises are snapshots, replication with on-prem environments, and the ability to compress or reduce data as necessary depending on the workload requirements. There's a bunch of other things that get rolled into all of that. >> But those are three big ones. >> But those are big ones, absolutely. >> So how are enterprises thinking about being able to access all that's available in the cloud while also getting access to the data services they need for their data? >> Well, in the early days of public cloud deployments, we saw a lot of people either compromising on the data services and rearchitecting their applications accordingly or choosing to bring in more expensive layers to put on top of the standard hyperscale public cloud storage services and try and amalgamate them into a better solution. And of course we think that those are kind of suboptimal approaches, but if you have the engineering resources to invest or if you're really viewing that as something you can differentiate your business on, you want to make yourself a good storage provider, then by all means have at it. We think most enterprises don't want to go down that path. >> So what's your approach? How does Infinidat and your company provide that capability for customers? >> Well, step one is recognizing that we have a robust data services platform already out there. It's software, and we happen to package it in an appliance format for large enterprises today. That's that 5.4 exabytes, that's mostly the InfiniBox product, which is that software in an appliance. And so we've proven our core capabilities on the InfiniBox platform, and then about two and a half years ago now, we launched a service called Neutrix Cloud. And Neutrix Cloud takes that robust set of capabilities, that set of expectations that enterprises have around how they're going to handle multi-petabyte datasets, and delivers all those software-driven values as a public cloud service. So you can subscribe to the value of Infinidat without having any boxes involved or anything like that. And then you can use it for two things, basically. One is general purpose public cloud storage. So a better alternative or a more enterprise-grad alternative to things like AWS, EBS, or EFS. And another use case that is surprisingly popular for us is customers coming from on-prem environments and using the Neutrix Cloud service as just a replication target to get started. Kind of a bridge to the cloud approach. So we can support any combination of those types of scenarios, and then it gets most interesting when you combine them and add the multi-cloud piece, because then you're really seeing the benefits of eliminating the data silos in each individual public cloud when you can have, say, a file system that can be simultaneously mounted and used by applications in AWS, Azure, and GCP. >> Well, that's where, I would've thought that that would've been a third use case, right? >> Yeah. >> Is that multi-cloud and being able to mount the data wherever it's required is also obviously a very rich and important use case that's not generally available from most suppliers of data-oriented services. So where do you think this goes? Give us a kind of a visibility in where your customers are pointing as they think about incorporating and utilizing more fully this flexibility and new data services, the ability to extend and enhance the data services they get from traditional public cloud players. >> I think it's still early innings in general for the use of enterprise-grade public cloud services. I think NetApp actually just recently said that they're at $74 million annual run rate for their entire cloud data services business. So we have yet to see the full potential in general through the entire market of those capabilities in public clouds. But I think that in the long term, we get to this world where cloud compute providers can compete, truly have to compete for enterprise workloads, where you essentially have a marketplace where the customer gets to say, I have a workload. I need X cores. I need X capabilities. The data's right here in Neutrix or in something like Neutrix. And what will you offer me to run this workload for 35 minutes in Amazon? Same thing to Azure, same thing to GCP. I think that kind of competitive marketplace for public cloud compute is the natural endpoint for a disaggregated storage approach like ours, and that's what frankly gets some of our investors very excited about Infinidat, as well, because we're really the only ones who are making a strong investment in a multi-cloud piece first and foremost. >> So the ability to have greater control over your data means you can apply it in a market competitive way to whatever compute resource you want to utilize. >> Exactly. Spot instance pricing, for example, is only the beginning, because, I assume you're familiar with this, you can basically get Amazon to give you a discounted rate on a block of compute resources, similar to the other public clouds. But if your data happens to be in Amazon but Azure's giving you a lower spot instance rate, you're kind of SOL or you're going to pay egress fees and stuff like that. And I think that just disaggregating the data makes it a more competitive marketplace and better for customers. I think there's even more improvements to be had as the granularity of spot instance pricing becomes higher and higher so that customers can really pick with maximum economic efficiency where they want a workload to go for how long and ultimately drive that value back into the return that IT delivers to the business. >> So, Erik, you mentioned there's this enormous amount of data that's now running on Infinidat's platforms. Can you give us any insight into the patterns, particular industries, size of companies, workloads, that are being featured, or is it just general purpose? >> It's always a tough question for us because it is truly a horizontal platform. The one unifying characteristic of pretty much every Infinidat user is scale. If you're in the petabyte arena, then we're talking. If you're not in the petabyte arena, then you're probably talking to one of the upstart vendors in our space. It's business-critical workloads. It's enterprise-grade, whether you talk about enterprise-grade in the sense of replacing VMAX-type solutions or whether you talk about enterprise-grade in terms of modernizing cloud environments like what I've just described. It's all about scale, enterprise-grade capabilities. >> Erik Kaulberg, Infinidat, thanks again for being on theCUBE. >> Thanks. >> And once again, I want to thank you for joining us for another CUBE conversation. I'm Peter Burris. See you next time. (jazzy music)

>> Narrator: Live from Midtown Manhattan, it's theCUBE, covering BigData New York City 2017 Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem sponsors. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, live in New York, it's theCUBE coverage, day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage of BigData at NYC, in conjunction with Strata Data right around the corner, separate event than ours, we've been covering. It's our eighth year. We're here expanding on our segment we just had with Matt from Deli EMC on, really on the front lines consultant, we've got Jason from BlueData, and Casey from BlueTalon, two separate companies but the blue in the name, team blue. And of course, Matt from Dell EMC, guys, welcome back to theCUBE and let's talk about the partnerships. I know you guys have a partnership, Dell EMC leads the front lines mostly with the customer base you guys come in with the secret sauce to help that solution which I want to get to in a minute, but the big theme here this week is partnerships. And before we get into the relationship that you guys have, I want you to talk about the changes in the ecosystem, because we're seeing a couple key things. Open source, one, and it's winning, continues to grow, but the Linux Foundation pointed out the open source that we cover that exponential growth is going to be in open-source software. You can see from 4 lines of code to billions in the next 10 years. So more onboarding, so clear development path. Ecosystems have work. Now they're coming into the enterprise with suppliers, whether it's consulting, it's front-end, or full stack developers coming together. How do you see ecosystems playing in both the supplier side and also the customer side? >> So we see from the supplier side, right, and from the customer side as well, and it kind of drives both of those conversations together is that you had the early days of I don't want vendor lock-in, right, I want to have a disparate virtual cornucopia of tools in the marketplace, and then they were, each individual shop was trying to develop those and implement those on their own. And what you're now seeing is that companies still want that diversity in the tools that they utilize, and that they work with, but they don't want that, the complication of having to deliver all those tools themselves, and so they're looking more for partners that can actually bring an ecosystem to the table where it's a loose coupling of events, but that one person actually has the forefront, has the customer's best interest in mind, and actually being able to drive through those pieces. And that's what we see from a partnership, why we're driving towards partnerships, 'cause we can be a point solution, we can solve a lot of pieces, but by bringing us as a part of an ecosystem and with a partner that can actually help deliver the customer and business value to the customer, that's where we're starting to see the traction and the movement and the wins for us as an organization. >> BlueData, you guys have had very big successes, big data as a service, docker containers, this is the programmer's nirvana. Infrastructure plus code, that's the DevOps ethos going mainstream. Your thoughts on partnering, 'cause you can't do it alone. >> Yeah, I mean, for us, speaking of DevOps, and we see our software platform provides a solution for bringing a DevOps approach to data science and big data analytics. And it's much more streamlined approached, an elastic and agile approach to big data analytics and data science, but to your point, we're partnered with Dell EMC because they bring together an entire solution that delivers an elastic platform for secure multi-tenant environments for data science teams and analytics teams for a variety of different open source tool sets. So there is a large ecosystem of open source tools out there from Hadoop to Spark to Kafka to a variety of different data science, machine learning and deep learning tool sets out there, and we provide through our platform the ability to dockerize all of those environments, make them available through self-service to the data science community so they can get up and running quickly and start building their models and running their algorithms. And for us, it's on any infrastructure. So, we work closely with Dell EMC to run it on Isilon and their infrastructure, Dell-powered servers, but also you can run it in a hybrid cloud architecture. So you could run it on Azure and now GCP, and AWS. >> So this is the agility piece for the developer. They get a lot of agility, they get their security. Dell EMC has all the infrastructure side, so you got to partner together. Matt, pull this together. The customer doesn't want, they want a single pane of glass, or however you want to look at it, they don't want to deal with the nuances. You guys got to bring it all together. They want it to work. Now the theme I hear at BigData New York is integration is everything, right, so, if it doesn't integrate, the plumbings not working. How important is it for the customer to have this smooth, seamless experience? >> It's critical for them to, they have to be able to believe that it's going to be a seamless experience, and these are just two partners in the ecosystem. When we talk to enterprise customers, they have other vendors. They have half a dozen or a dozen other vendors solving big data problems, right? The Hadoop analytic tools, on and on and on. And when they choose a partner like us, they want to see that we are bringing other partners to the table that are going to complement or enhance capabilities that they have, but they want to see two key things. And we need to see the same things as well when we look at our partnerships. We want to see APIs, we want to see open APIs that are well-documented so that we know these tools can play with each other, and two, these have to be organizations we can work with. At the end of the day, a customer does business with Dell EMC because they know we're going to stand behind whatever we put in front of them. >> John: They get a track record too, you're pretty solid. >> Yep, it is-- >> But I want to push on the ecosystem, not you guys, it's critical, but I mean one thing that I've seen over my 30 years in the enterprise is ecosystems, you see bullshit and you see real deal, right, so. A lot of customers are scared, now with all this FUD and new technology, it's hard to squint through what the BS is in an ecosystem. So how do you do ecosystems right in this new market? 'Cause like you said, it's not API, that's kind of technical, but philosophy-wise you can't do the barney deals, you got Pat Gelsinger standing up on stage at VMworld, basically flew down to stand in front of all the customers of VMworld's customers and said, we're not doing a barney deal. Now, he didn't say barney deals, that's our old term. He said, it's not an optical deal we're doing with VMware. We got your back. He didn't say that, but that's my interpretation, that's what he basically said. The CEO of AWS said that. That's a partner, you know what I'm saying? So, some deals are okay we got a deal on paper, what's the difference, how do you run an ecosystem, in your opinion? >> Yeah, it's not trivial. It's not an easy thing. It takes an executive, at that level, it takes a couple of executives coming together-- >> John: From the top, obviously. >> Committing, it's not just money, it's reputation, right? If you're at that level, it's about reputation which then trickles down to the company's reputation, and so within the ecosystem, we want to sort of crawl, walk, run. Let's do some projects-- >> So you're saying reputation in communities is the number one thing. >> I think so, people are not going to go, so you will always have the bleeding edge. Someone's going to go play with a tool, they're going to see if it works-- >> Wow, reputation's everything. >> Yeah. If it fails, they're going to tell, what is the saying, if something fails, if something bad happens you tell twelve people-- >> All right, so give them a compliment. What's BlueTalon do great for you guys? Explain their talent in the ecosystem. >> So BlueTalon's talent in the ecosystem, other than being just great people, we love Carey, is that they-- >> I'll get you to say something bad about him soon, but give him the compliment first. >> They have simplified the complexity of doing security, policy and role-based security for big data. So regardless of where your data lives, regardless of if it's Hadoop, Spark, Flink, Mongo, AWS, you define a policy once. And so if I am in front of the chief governance officer, my infrastructure doesn't have a value problem to them, but theirs does, right? The legal team, when we have to do proposals, this is what gets us through the legal and compliance for GDPR in this, it's that centralized control that is so critical to the capability we provide for big data. If you sprawl your data everywhere, and we know data sprawls everywhere-- >> So you can rely on them, these guys. >> Absolutely. >> All right, BlueData, give them a compliment, where do they fit? >> So they have solved the problem of deploying containers, big data environments, in any cloud. And the notion of ephemeral clusters for big data workloads is actually really, really hard to solve. We've seen a lot of organizations attempt to do this, we see frameworks out there, like Kupernetes, that people are trying to build on. These guys have fixed it. We have gone through the most rigorous security audits at the biggest banks in the world, and they have signed off because of the network segmentation and the data segmentation, it just works. >> I think I'm running a presidential debate, now you got to say something nice about him. No, I mean, Dell EMC we know what these guys do. But for you guys, I mean, how big is BlueTalon, company-wise? I mean, you guys are not small but you're not massive either. >> We're not small, but we're not massive, right. So, we're probably around 40 resources global, and so from our perspective, we're-- >> John: That's a great deal, working with a big gorilla in Dell EMC, they got a lot of market share, big muscle? >> Exactly, and so for us, like we talked about earlier, right, the big thing for us is ecosystem functions. We do what we do really well, right, we build software that does control unified access across multiple platforms as well as multiple distributions whether it be private cloud, on-prem, or public cloud, and for us, again, it's great that we have the software, it's great that we can do those things, but if we can't actually help customers use that software to deliver value, it's useless. >> Do you guys go to the market together, do you just hold hands in front of the customer, bundle products? >> No, we go to market together, so we actually, we work, a lot of our team in enablement is not enabling our customers, it is enabling Dell EMC on the use of our software and how to do that. So we actually work with Dell EMC to train and work-- >> So you're a tight partner. There's certification involved, close relationships, you're not mailing it in. >> And then we're also involved with the customer side as well, so it's not like we go, okay great, now it's sold, we throw up our hands and walk away. >> John: Well, they're counting on you that. >> They're counting on us for the specific pieces, but we're also working with Dell EMC so that we can get that breadth right in their reach, so that they can actually go confidently to their customers and actually understand where we fit and when we don't fit. Because we're not everything to everybody, right, and so they have to understand those pieces to be able to know when that works right and how the best practices are. And so again, we're 40 people, they're, I forget, there were 80,000 at one point? Maybe even more than that? But even in the services arm, there's several thousands of people in the-- >> What's the whole point of ecosystems you're getting at here? Point at the critical thing. You've got a big piece of the puzzle, it's not just they're bundling you in. You're an active part of that, and it's an integration world right, so he needs to rely on you to integrate with his systems. >> Yeah, we have to integrate with the other parts of the ecosystem too, so it really is a three-way integration on this perspective where they do what they do really well, we do what we do and they're complementary to each other, but without the services and the glue from Dell EMC-- >> So when you bring Dell EMC into the deals too? >> We do, so we bring Dell EMC into deals, and Dell EMC sells us through a reseller agreement with them so we actually help jointly either bring them to a deal we've already found, we'll bring services to them, or we'll actually go out and do joint development of customers. So we actually come out and help with the sales process and cycles to actually understand is there a fit or is there not a fit? So, it's not a one-size-fits-all, it's not just a, yes we got something on paper that we can sell you and we'll sell you every once in a while, it really is a way to develop an ecosystem to deliver value to the customer. >> All right, so let's talk about the customer mindset real quick. When you, are they, how far along on them, I really don't know much 'cause I'm really starting to probe in this area, how savvy are they to the partnership levels? I mean, you disclose it, you're transparent about it, but I mean, are customers getting that the partnering is very key? I mean, are they drilling, asking tough questions, are you kind of getting them educated one way, are they savvy about it? They may have been doing partners in house, but remember the enterprise had a generation of down-to-the-bone cutting, outsource everything, consolidation, and then you know, go back around 2010, the uplift on reinvestment hit, so we're kind of in this renaissance right now. So, thoughts? >> The partnership is actually the secret sauce that's part of our sales cycle. When we talk about big data outcomes and enabling self-service, customers assume oh, okay, you guys built some software, you've got some hardware, and then when we double-click into how we make this capable, we say oh, well we partner with BlueTalon and BlueData, and this other, and they go, wait a minute, that's not your software? No, no, we didn't build that. We have scoured the market and we've found partners that we work with and we trust, and all of a sudden you can see their shoulders relax and they realize that we're not just there to sell them more kit. We're actually there to help them solve their problems. And it is a game changer, because they deal with vendors every day. Software Vendor X, Software Vendor Y, Hardware Vendor Z, and so to have a company that they have good relationships with already bring more capabilities to them, the guard comes down and they say okay, let's talk about how we can make this work. >> All right, so let's get to the meat of the partnership, which I want to get to 'cause I think that's fundamental. Thanks for sharing perspective on the community piece. We're being on it, we've been doing, we're a community brand ourselves. We're not a close guard, we're not about restricting and censoring people at events, that's not what we're about. So you guys know that, so appreciate you commenting on the community there. The Elastic Data Platform you guys are talking about, it's a partnership deal. You provide an EPIC software, you guys providing some great security in there. What is it about, what's the benefit? So it's you're leading them to product, take a minute to explain the product and then the roles. >> Yeah, so the Elastic Data Platform is a capability, a set of capabilities that is meant to help our enterprise customers get to that next level of self-service. Data science as a service, and do that on any cloud with any tools in a security-controlled manner. That's what Elastic Data Platform is. And it's meant to plug in to the customer's existing investments and their existing tools and augment that, and through our services arm, we tie these technologies together using their open APIs, that's why that's so critical for us, and we bring that value back to our customers. >> And you guys are providing the EPIC software? What is EPIC software? I mean, I love epic software, that's an epic, I hope it's not an epic fail, so an epic name, but epic-- >> Elastic Private Instant Clusters, it's actually an acronym for what it stands for, that is what it provides for our customers. >> John: So you're saying that EPIC stands for-- >> Elastic Private Instant Clusters. So it can run in a private cloud environment on your on-prem infrastructure, but as I said before, it can run in a hybrid architecture on the public cloud as well. But yeah, I mean, we're working closely with the Dell EMC team, they're an investor, we work closely with their services organization, with their server organization, the storage organization, but they really are the glue that brings it all together. From services to software to hardware, and provides the complete solution to the customers. So, as I think Matt-- >> John: Multi-tenancy is a huge deal, multi-tenancy's a huge deal. >> Absolutely, yeah. Also the ability to have logical isolation between each of those different tenants for different data science teams, different analyst teams, you know, that's particularly at large financial services organizations like Barclays, you spoke yesterday, Matt alluded to earlier. They talked about the need to support a variety of different business units who each have their own unique use cases, whether it's batch processing with Hadoop or real-time streaming and fast data with Spark, Kafka, and NoSQL Database, or whether it's deep learning, machine learning. Each of those different tenants has different needs, and so you can spin up containers using our solution for each of those tenants. >> John: Yeah, that's been a big theme this week too, and so many little things, this one relates to this one, is the elastic nature of how people want to manage the provisioning of more resource. So, here's what we see. They're using collective intelligence, data, hey, they're data science guys, they figured it out! Whatever the usage is, they can do a virtual layer if you will, and then based upon the use they can then double down. So let the users drive this real collaborative, that seems to the a big theme, so this helps there. The other theme has been the centralized, this is the GDPR hanging over one's head, but the, even though that's more of threat and it's a gun to the head, it's the hammer or the guillotine, however you look at it, there's more of enablement around centralization, so it's not just the threat of that, it's other things that are benefiting. >> Right, it's more than just the threat of the GDPR and being compliant with those perspectives, right? The other big portion of this is, if you want to do, you do want to provide self-service. So the key to self-service is that's great, I can create an environment, but if it takes me a long time to get data to that environment to actually be able to utilize it or protect the data that's in that environment by having to rewrite policies from a different place, then you don't get the benefit right, the acceleration of the self-service. So having centralized policies of distributed enforcements gives you that elastic ability, right? Again, we can deploy the central engines again on-premises, but you can protect data that's in the cloud or protect data that's in a private cloud, so as companies move data for their different workloads, we can put the same protections with them and it goes immediately with them, so you don't have to manage it in multiple places. It's not like, oh, did I remember to put that rule over in this system? Oh, no I didn't, oh and guess what just happened to me? You know, I did get smacked with a big fine because I didn't, I wasn't compliant. So compliance-- >> How about Audit, too? I mean, are you checking the Audit side too? >> Yeah, so Audit's a great portion of that, and we do Audit for a couple of reasons. One is to make sure that you are compliant, but two is to make sure you actually have the right policies defined. Are people accessing the data the way you expect them to access that data? So that's another big portion of us and what we do from an audit perspective is that data usage lineage, and we actually tell you what the customer, what the user was trying to do. So if a customer's trying to access the data you see a large group trying to access a certain set of data but they're being denied access to it, now you can look and say, is that truly correct? Do I want them not being-- >> John: Well, Equifax, that thing was being phished out over months and months and months. Not just four, that thing has been phished over 10 times. In fact, state-sponsored actors were franchises of that organization. So, they were in the VPN, so it's not even, so you, so this is where the issues, okay, let's just say that happened again. You would have flagged it. >> We flag it. >> You would have seen the pattern access and said, okay, a lot of people cleaning us out. >> Yep, while it's happening. Right, so you get to see that usage, the lineage of the usage of the data, right, so you get to see that pattern as well. Not only who's trying to access, all right, 'cause protecting the perimeter is, as we all know, is no longer viable. So we actually get to watch the usage of the, the usage pattern so you can detect an anomaly in that type of system, as well as you can quickly change policies to shut down that gap, and then watch to see what happens, see who's continuing to try to hit it. >> Well, it's been a great conversation. Love that you guys are on and great to see the Elastic Data Platform come together through the partnerships, again. As you know, we're really passionate about highlighting and understanding more about the community dynamic as it becomes more than just socialization, it's a business model to the enterprise, as it was in open source. We'll be covering that. So I'd like to go around the panel here just to end this segment. Share something that someone might not know what's going on in industry that you want to point out, that's an observation, an anecdote that hasn't been covered, hasn't been serviced, it could be a haymaker, it could be something anecdotal, personal observation. In the big data world, BigData NYC this week or beyond, what should people know about that may or may not be covered out there that's happened that they should know about? >> Well, I think this one's, people pretty much should know about this one, right, but four or five years ago Hadoop was going to replace everything in the world. And two, three years ago the RDBMS's groups were like, Hadoop will never make it out of the science fair project. Right, we're in a world now where that's no longer true. It's somewhere in between. Hadoop is going to remain, and they're going to be continued, and the RDBMS is also going to continue. So you need to look at ecosystems that can actually allow you to cover both sides of that coin, which we're talking about here, is those types of tools are going to continue together forward. So you have to look at your entire ecosystem and move away from siloed functions to how you actually look at an entire data protection in data usage on environment. >> Matt? >> I would say that the technology adoption in the enterprise is outstripping the organization's ability to keep up with it. So as we deploy new technologies, tools, and techniques to do all sorts of really amazing things, we see the organization lagging in its ability to keep up. And so policies and procedures, operating models, whatever you want to call that, put it under the data governance umbrella, I suppose. If those don't keep up, you're going to end up with just an organization that is mismatched with the technology that is put into place, and ultimately you can end up in a massive compliance problem. Now, that's worst case. But even in best case, you're going to have a really inefficient use of your resources. My favorite question to ask organizations, so let's say you could put a timer on one of the data science sandboxes. So what happens when the timer goes off and the data science is not done? And you've got a line of people waiting for resources, what do you do? What is, how does the organization respond to that? It's a really simple question, but the answer's going to be very nuanced. So if that's the policy, that's the operating model stuff that we're talking about that we've got to think about when we enable self-service and self-security, those things have to come hand-in-hand. >> That's the operational thinking that needs to come through. >> Okay, Jason? >> Yeah, I think even for us, I mean this has been happening for some time now, but I think there still is this notion that the traditional way to deploy Hadoop and other big data workloads on prem is bare metal, and that's the way it's always been done. Or, you can run it in the cloud. But I think what we're seeing now, what we've seen evolve over the past couple of years is you can run your on-prem workloads using docker containers in a containerized environment. You can have this cloud-like experience on-prem but you can also provide the ability to be able to move those workloads, whether they're on-prem or in the cloud. So you can have this hybrid approach and multi-cloud approach. So I think that's fundamentally changing, it's a new dynamic, a new paradigm for big data, either on-prem or in the cloud. It doesn't have to be on bare metal anymore. And we get the same, we've been able to get-- >> It's on-prem, people want on-prem, that's where the action is, and cloud no doubt, but right now it's the transition. Hybrid cloud's definitely going to be there. I guess my observation is the tool shed problem. You know, I said earlier all day, you don't want to have a tool shed full of tools you don't use anymore or buy a hammer that wants to turn into a lawn mower 'cause the vendor changed, pivoted. You got to be careful what you buy, the tools, so don't think like a tool. Think like a platform. And I think having a platform mentality, understanding the system, or operating environment as you were getting to, I think really is a fundamental exercise that most decision makers think about. 'Cause again, your relationship with the Elastic Data Platform proves that this operating environment's evolving, it's not about the tool. The tool has to be enabled, and if the tool is enabled into the platform it should have a data model that falls into place, no one should have to think about it, you get the compliance, you get the docker container, so don't buy too many tools. If you do, make sure they're clean and in a clean tool shed! You got a lawnmower, I guess that's the platform. Bad analogy, but you know, I think tools has been the rage in this market, and now I think platforming it is something that we're seeing more of. So guys, thanks so much, appreciate it. Elastic Data Platform by Dell EMC, with the EPIC Platform from BlueData, and BlueTalon providing the data governance and compliance, great stuff, I'm certain the GDPR, BlueTalon, you guys got a bright future, congratulations. All right, more CUBE coverage after this short break, live from New York, it's theCUBE. 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